Concrete holiness and place attachment: Christian Zionist agricultural volunteers in Samaria

Christian Zionism is a Protestant theology rooted in nineteenth-century Britain, advocating the return of Jews to the land of Israel as the fulfilment of God’s will and plan for the salvation of humanity. This article deals with the unique theology of the Christian Zionist group Hayovel, an organization dedicated to bringing Christian volunteers for agricultural work in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Based on fieldwork conducted among Hayovel volunteers, this article offers an analysis of Hayovel’s theology of rootedness and faith in the religious significance of the land. In contrast to mainstream Evangelical Christianity, Hayovel emphasizes the importance of sacred space and attempts to construct an experience of concrete holiness through agricultural work and touring the region’s Biblical sites. Hayovel’s activity is described here as the construction and cultivation of the Israel as a spatial and spiritual core and as a place of potential refuge and as a reaction to the increasing detachment from space in the global era.

The effect of social capital on organizational repertoires of American Protestant missions

A religious organization’s choice of activities is shaped not only by theological goals but also the capital available to it. Prior research has shown how economic and religious capital influence Protestant missionary organizations’ repertoires of activism but has largely ignored the role of social capital. Using the most recent data on transnational American Protestant mission agencies, this study aims to fill this gap. Using a Bourdieuian field approach and multiple correspondence analysis, the study finds that linking and bonding social capital both shape whether an agency generalizes rather than specializes in specific ministry activities. Both bonding and bridging social capital, in turn, prompt a more other-worldly than this-worldly ministry orientation, but this is a pattern most characteristic of Evangelical agencies, suggesting an intersection between religious identity and organizational network size. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for interorganizational collaboration and resource use.

Keeping life going: Plants and people today, yesterday and tomorrow

I review the contributions to this special issue by focusing on the relational qualities that bind people and plants together through religious ritualization of economic activities such as crop cultivation or plant gathering in the wild. I show how an attention to plants as teachers facilitates cross-cultural comparative analysis.

‘My dream is that I share the bed with only one man’: Perceptions and practices of premarital sex among Catholic women in Belgium

Drawing on qualitative research with Catholic women who are active in the Church in Belgium, this article sets out to analyse how these women negotiate and manage premarital sexuality. I map their practices, experiences, and strategies, and explore how they make sense of religious and secular norms regarding premarital sexuality. By using two notions as theoretical frameworks, namely religious agency and growth ethics, I argue that combining both can lead to a fertile approach to yielding new insights into the field of religion and sexuality. In so doing, I demonstrate that although not all my interlocutors refrain from sexual relations before marriage, they develop personal sexual ethics, which are distinctly informed by Catholic understandings.

Plant-women, senses, and ecological considerations: Rethinking ritual plants and their taboos among the Pangcah of Taiwan (1920–2020)

Anthropologists have made strides in theorizing non-human subjectivity in cosmologies but, emphasizing animals, they underestimate the importance of botanical beings. Pangcah rituals and taboos cannot be separated from plants. Through ritual action, they divide plants into three categories: the first is cereals that have deities and soul, which are the center of animistic and shamanic rituals. These spirits will stick to people (like the substance of cereals) asking for food or aggressively make people ill. The second type is leaf vegetables forbidden to eat before and during rituals. They are regarded as unmarried females and have sexual connotations. The third includes ‘enveloped’ plants (beans and bamboo shoots) that are eaten only during rituals. From the important position of plants in the Pangcah lifeway and cosmology, this article explores the Pangcah ontology and analyzes the mediating role of sensory experience played in the people–plants–spirits encounter.

Seeing the tundra for the plants, on the eco-spiritual wholeness of arctic vegetation

Drawing on ethnographic field research in Chukotka, Russia, this article explores ideas and practices connected with the Arctic tundra vegetation that speak to its place in Chukchi spirituality and cultural milieu. The ethnographic focus is on a Chukchi remembrance ceremony with other social contexts of human–plant interaction offered as comparative examples. Contributing novel insight for the considerations of sentient landscapes and ceremonial engagements with plants, the article turns to the Chukchi eco-spiritual relationships in the beyond-the-human world. It suggests that the vegetation cover is not merely an assemblage of fungi and plants, but an organismal membrane through which the tundra communicates and acts, while also facilitating integrations between the human and beyond-the-human worlds.

Reforming the Israeli–Arab conflict? Interreligious hospitality in Jaffa and its discontents

This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious hospitality. The Daniel Reform congregation invites Muslim residents of Jaffa to participate in rituals incorporating Arabic and Muslim clergy and prayers. The egalitarian and pluralistic Jewish symbols and narratives promote neighborly relationships. Nevertheless, some participants’ responses reaffirm popular suspicions and prejudices, which the ceremony seeks to overcome. Interreligious hospitality here is not so much an act of theological reconciliation, but a political act also directed toward other actors – like the Israeli right-wing and Israeli society, which grant the Orthodox a monopoly on Judaism. While the shared ritual practice offers a dialogical model that engages broader publics through doing, the analytic frame of hospitality sensitizes us to the importance of space and language in the power relationships of hosts and guests. It helps explain the challenges to the messages of coexistence, which the rituals are designed to confirm.

Pentecostal exorcism and Afro-Cuban endorcism: ‘Radical participation’ and the proliferation of symmetries

In this article, we discuss personal moments of our respective ethnographic research on Guatemalan Pentecostalism and Afro-Cuban religiosity. Through our own involvement, we expose the approaches of the two religious forms, the former working by way of exorcism and the latter by way of endorcism. Guatemalan Pentecostal exorcism works by a radical expulsion of the previous non-Pentecostal past to strictly convert the person. Afro-Cuban endorcism, on the other hand, endorses the past, present, and future, as it accepts a simultaneity and multiplicity of ‘influences’. No ‘demon’ is perceived, as in the case of Pentecostalism, no ‘idolatry’ is detected and, instead of conversion, what occurs is a cumulative incorporation of multiple initiations. Our approach, we argue, as also inspired by theories of ‘radical participation’ and ‘symmetrisation’, affords a useful vantage point to engage with fine ethnographic nuances of a proliferation of comparative symmetries in the study of religiosity.