Survey of Religious Movements, Communities and Churches in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is an heterogeneous country wherein ethnicity and religious adherence overlap. The scope of this work is based on the study of religious communities of various religious and cultural backgrounds that exist and function in post-war BiH. As there are insufficient comprehensive studies on this complex subject, this article examines the role religion plays in social and political life in post-war BiH by focusing on the way it is employed by the religious communities that have been working actively in this field. A diversification of BiH’s religious scene emerged with the collapse of Communism and dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially during the 1992–1995 war and in the first couple of years after signing the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. Hence, this research primarily addresses the questions regarding the formation of new religious communities, their roles within society, the overall impact on the religious market as well as the citizens’ and experts’ perceptions of this. This article is based on analysis of the data collected using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Quantitative data was collected using a close-ended questionnaire that consisted of 38 questions based on dichotomous scales (e.g., yes/no) and Likert five-point scales, conducted with experts in the field and religious officials (clerks, priests and imams) from the different religious communities that exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The qualitative research approach is based on grounded theory using secondary and primary data collection tools.

Tamimi Arab, Pooyan. 2017. Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands

Tamimi Arab, Pooyan. 2017. Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands. London: Bloomsbury Academic. x + 216 pp. ISBN: 978- 14742-9143-9 £90.00 (hbk); 978-13500-8118-5 £28.99 (pbk).

Exploring the Use of Machine Learning to Automate the Qualitative Coding of Church-related Tweets

This article builds on previous research around the exploration of the content of church-related tweets. It does so by exploring whether the qualitative thematic coding of such tweets can, in part, be automated by the use of machine learning. It compares three supervised machine learning algorithms to understand how useful each algorithm is at a classification task, based on a dataset of human-coded church-related tweets. The study finds that one such algorithm, Naïve-Bayes, performs better than the other algorithms considered, returning Precision, Recall and F-measure values which each exceed an acceptable threshold of 70%. This has far-reaching consequences at a time where the high volume of social media data, in this case, Twitter data, means that the resource-intensity of manual coding approaches can act as a barrier to understanding how the online community interacts with, and talks about, church. The findings presented in this article offer a way forward for scholars of digital theology to better understand the content of online church discourse.

Navigating through Space Butterflies

This article seeks to query the typical way research in novel fields are expressed in academic writing. The high structured presentation assumes a high structured field, which is often conceived of as necessary for new sites to assert their academic validity. However, many times, as is the situation for the case study presented here, what is considered new and novel is simply a new medium through which already properly understood concepts thrive. This misunderstanding often leaves scholars in new fields defending their field site more than analysing it, and a higher scrutiny is placed on these locations. This article hopes to demonstrate just one example of this, the fan convention, and demonstrate how this field site is not as new as typically considered, and arguing, therefore, for a more open representation of the improvised and fluid conception of research on contemporary religion.

Psychogeography

The way that humanity both inhabits and views its surroundings directly influences individual and collective thoughts and emotions. Yet in a society that is constantly over-stimulated, taking in the surroundings becomes secondary to consumerism, and the distractions inherent within the spectacle. The spectacle, according to Guy Debord and the European revolutionary organization Situationist International (SI), diverted the populace from the reality that surrounds it, and the SI deemed themselves the correct ones to re-envision reality. Fifty years after the 1968 Paris riots, the Situationists no longer exist, but new groups have risen from their ashes to explore and view the world in new ways, groups such as those involved in Urban Exploration (UrbEx). UrbEx involves small, often self-guided groups that investigate the ghosts of modernity, and the detritus of capital that remains in the wake of the spectacle. Utilizing the Situationist International's concept of the dérive, the ideas that fuel urban exploration, and conspiracist ideologies, this article explores the urban world viewed through psychogeography: those who seek the new sacred in a gnostic quest to gain a greater insight into what lurks in the shadows of the myth of modernity.

Martin, Luther H. and Donald Wiebe (eds) 2017. Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-five Years

Martin, Luther H. and Donald Wiebe (eds) 2017. Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-five Years. xi + 260 pp. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN: 978-1 350-03246-0 £85.00 (hbk); 978-13501-0592-8 £28.99 (pbk); 978-13500-3247-7 £31.30 (e book).

Garbin, David and Anna Strhan (eds) 2017. Religion and the Global City

Garbin, David and Anna Strhan (eds) 2017. Religion and the Global City. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 270 pp. ISBN: 978-14742-7242-1 £90.00 (hbk); 978-13500-9463-5 £28.99 (pbk); 978- 14742-7244-5 £31.30 (e-book).

Lost Saints

Mushrooms containing psilocybin have been used in Indigenous healing ceremonies in Mesoamerica since at least the sixteenth century. However, the sacramental use of mushrooms was only discovered by Westerners in the early to mid-twentieth century. Most notably, the meeting between amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson and Mazatec curandera María Sabina in 1955 resulted in the widespread popularization of ingesting “magic mushrooms” in the West. To Sabina and the Mazatec people, psilocybin mushrooms were sacred and only to be used for healing. However, Western “hippies” viewed mushrooms as psychedelic drugs which they consumed with little regard for cultural sensitivities, rendering the mushrooms desacralized. This article argues that the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms constitutes a form of spiritual abuse that has had far-reaching and long-lasting consequences at individual, local and global levels. Further, acknowledging and understanding the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms as spiritual abuse has important implications for restorative justice and the understanding of psilocybin as a sacred medicine.

Nita, Maria. 2016. Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Environmental Movement

Nita, Maria. 2016. Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Environmental Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan. xi + 261 pp. ISBN: 978-1-137-60034-9 £99.99 (hbk); 978-1-349-95608-1 £99.99 (pbk); 978-1-137-60035-6 £79.50 (e-book).