Obecność sacrum w przestrzeni domowej – na przykładzie Ruchu Szensztackiego w gminie Suszec

This article will argue that Religious Studies is not a narrowly defined discipline with a single methodology but is an area or field of study that is interdisciplinary in nature. From the beginning, Religious Studies as a scholarly field has engaged a variety of disciplinary approaches including: literary analysis of scriptural texts, history of religions, comparative religion, philosophy of religions, psychology of religions, sociology of religions and anthropology of religions. This has been its strength in the past, providing ways to reach out to other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Taking its interdisciplinary heritage seriously today gives Religious Studies a strong basis from which to move forward into the future. It enables Religious Studies departments to build bridges to cognate departments resulting in joint appointments and enriched programs for students. It widens Religious Studies' base of support and regard within the academic community. It fosters research projects with interdisciplinary team approaches to contemporary problems in areas such as biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, religion and peace-building, pluralism and public policy—global issues that transcend the ability of any one discipline to provide answers. This approach ensures that the knowledge developed by Religious Studies "has a place at the table" alongside the other disciplines and is engaged in the solving of major problems and the formation of policy recommendations.

Cognitive approaches to religion in religious studies and anthropology are proving increasingly fashionable of late. The focus of this essay is on “cognitivism” in the anthropology of religion, and in particular the writings of E. B. Tylor, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harvey Whitehouse. I define cognitivism in the anthropology of religion as an approach to religion that appeals to the mind and to processes of cognition as universals from which theories of — and explanations for — religion, can be generated. The essay engages in a detailed analysis of three cognitive theories of religion. Each theory takes the mind to be an enduring and stable foundation upon which an explanation for religion can be erected. Yet the mind — the foundation — is disclosed through each theory as unstable; it actually changes under different kinds of enquiry into religion. I then sketch two possible alternative theories of the mind before concluding by arguing that the cognizing mind might productively be treated not as a given and natural fact but rather as the product of discourse.

Background: According to Eurostat data, at the end of October 2023, there were over 960,000 Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Most of them started learning Polish, thanks to which they could adapt to the new linguistic and cultural reality. During classes, students not only practice their language skills, but also gain knowledge of history, literature and culture. Purpose: The aim of the article is to show the potential of the map as a teaching tool in teaching Polish as a foreign language. The teaching of Polish can also be enriched with a regional context, because students should be made aware that Poland is not a culturally homogeneous country, and one of the places that can be found on its map is Upper Silesia. For this purpose, the article presents ways of using the map and local knowledge in a Polish language course as a foreign language for Ukrainians, using the example of the Górny Śląsk. Atlas dla dzieci by Monika and Sebastian Rosenbaum with illustrations by Mikołaj Ratko, in which the authors present characters and places related to Upper Silesia. All the maps included in the atlas can be an accessible source of knowledge about the region for those who are just starting to learn Polish. Results: A map is a medium that presents the territory of actually existing places in a graphic and verbal message. For a student, especially one who has recently been living and working in Upper Silesia, it is extremely important to get to know the space in terms of its usefulness in everyday life. Perceiving reality using a graphic and verbal code is one of the factors that allows a person to consciously participate in the world around them. Using additional materials during practical classes, such as the publication Górny Śląsk. Atlas dla dzieci, combines learning with gaining knowledge about the place of residence. Keywords: literature, glottodidactics, Upper Silesia, map, Polish as a foreign language.

In this article, I analyze the under-citation of Black and/or Latine scholars—especially those located disciplinarily within religious studies—in the anthropology of religion. I draw from my own experience as an editorial assistant at History of Religions, manuscript reviewer, and Latine ethnographer of religion to speculate on the reasons why researchers might refuse to cite them, preferring either to neglect their contributions or to “plagnore” them, to borrow a term coined by legal scholar, law professor, and activist Lolita Buckner Inniss. I then expand on Chicana and Boricua feminist and race scholar Nichole Margarita Garcia’s theorization of under-citation as “spirit-murdering.” I invoke philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics to make the case that citation is a matter of life and death for Black and Latine women scholars in particular. In the absence of institutional accountability for editors and authors, I conclude with recommendations for the diversification of our scholarship and syllabi.

Do chimpanzees engage in religious behaviors? To date this question remains unanswered. I use methods from religious studies and anthropology of religion that demonstrate an answer in the af?rmative. A comprehensive review of primatology reports reveals that chimpanzees do perform ritualized patterns of behavior in response to birth, death, consortship, and elemental natural phenomena. A structuralist analysis of these patterns shows that chimpanzees deploy similar formulaic action schemas involving recombination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic behaviors across all four of these life-situations. In the course of these performances, chimpanzees decontextualize and convert everyday communicative signals to express non-ordinary emotions of wonder and awe. The patterning of chimpanzee ritual behaviors evidences all the components of a prototypical trans-species de?nition of religion. These ?ndings support hypotheses that propose religious behaviors for other species, including hominins prior to Homo sapiens sapiens.

The relevance of addressing the understanding of the geography of religion as a section of religious studies is on the one hand due to the growing popularity of this discipline in the modern scientific space, and on the other its insufficient conceptualisation. The high interest in the geography of religion on the part of the scientific community is caused by its focus on the comprehension of theoretical and practical problems related to the spatial characteristics of religious life. Nowadays, the study of territorial aspects of the coexistence of different religious traditions acquires a special urgency due to the combination of globalisation trends and the desire to preserve authentic identity. Historically, the problem field and scientific apparatus of the geography of religion has been formed with reliance on theoretical developments and methodological tools of philosophy and various scientific disciplines, which supports terminological and methodological polyphony within this discipline and hinders its conceptualisation. The aim of this work is to identify possible grounds for attributing the geography of religion to the sections of religious studies. To achieve this goal the following tasks were solved: the origins of the formation of geography of religion were revealed; the approach to the formation of geography of religion from the perspective of geographical science was analysed; the influence of philosophy of religion on the methodological foundations of geography of religion was shown; the main vectors of interrelation between geography of religion and religious studies were determined. The research is limited to the European tradition of studying the relationship between religion and geography. The study is based on the texts of the classics of philosophical thought, as well as the works of Russian and foreign scholars devoted to the comprehension of the geography of religion as a scientific discipline. To reconstruct the thinkers' position on the issues raised, to identify their dependence on the intellectual context and to compare them, such methods as historical and philosophical analysis of the text, discourse analysis and comparative analysis were used. The result of the study was the substantiation of the conclusion about the possibility and expediency of attributing the geography of religion to the branches of religious studies. Such positioning of geography of religion does not contradict the modern understanding of the problem field and tasks of this discipline as they are formulated within the framework of geographical science, and at the same time allows us to identify promising research strategies in interaction with various religious studies disciplines such as: philosophy of religion, history of religion, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion and psychology of religion.

This chapter examines the contours of the religious and spiritual information experiences subfield through a review and content analysis of selected contributions from the past two decades in both information science and related fields. The research question that guides this review is: How have spirituality and religion been conceptualized in information science? Our focus has been on the LIS literature along with the fields of information behavior/practice/literacy, as well as related fields such as human–computer interaction (HCI), media and digital studies, religious studies (including sociology and anthropology of religion or religious tourism). Our aim was to highlight the ways in which the information science literature has contributed to advancing these conversations (using a collections/service/user experience or practice lens), but also how the discussions around the sacred, lived religion, contemplation, conversion or techno‐spiritual practices (to name a few) have provided insights into information phenomena and processes. We also discuss the evolution of, and practices associated with, social media and digital practices as well as a discussion of representation (or the lack thereof) of less mainstream religious and spiritual traditions in the literature reviewed. We end with suggestions for future research directions.

Miracles, Temporality, and Unfulfillment in A Diagram for Fire Bruno Reinhardt Jon Bialecki, Vineyard Movement, charismatic, Pentecostalism, Gilles Deleuze, Holy Spirit, necromancy, exorcism, Bruno Reinhardt Miracles are one of the most widely acknowledged indexes of "religion" in secular scholarship and common sense. Yet, their theoretical role remains paradoxically residual, as if miracles were good to recognize but not to account for religious lifeworlds. The fundamental pressures imposed by the miraculous upon secular knowledges justify such opaqueness. By following empathetically miraculous veridiction, scholars can be led astray from basic epistemological principles such as neutrality and critical reflexivity, becoming theologians. A possible solution has been to circumvent miracles by sticking to their human co-participants, proposing theories of recognition that bracket their existence while focusing on their institutional, sociocultural, historical, ethical, or cognitive conditions of receptivity or construction. From this angle, the ultimate object of study of disciplines like the anthropology of religion or religious studies would not be miracles, but the media whereby miraculous truth is relayed, from social structures, symbolic systems, and semiotic ideologies to culturally embodied schema and the nervous system. Scholars might also import miracles into social theory through analogy and substitution. A classic example is Max Weber's secularized notion of charisma, borrowed from Pauline Christianity through theologian Rudolf Sohm and converted into a type of legitimate authority. What Weber calls pure charisma is explicitly residual, existing "only in the process of originating."1 Pure charisma nevertheless introduces a strategic dose of freedom and unexpectedness into Weber's otherwise bleak theory of modern rationalization, becoming a deterrent for determinism. Carl Schmitt's political theology performs similar work through the analogy between miracles and sovereignty: it selects a particular property of miracles—their extra-normative givenness— [End Page 456] and imports it to political philosophy as a critique of liberal democracy. 2 A more recent example of such procedure is Hent de Vries's argument about the "structural resemblances" between miracles and special effects, which—like the arguments of Weber and Schmitt—establishes parallels between religious and secular phenomena (leadership, sovereignty, mediation) and oscillates between analogy and substitution.3 Miracles for these authors operate primarily as tools for reading secular modernity otherwise, often against its self-image. Is it possible to propose a theoretical approach to religion that does not dilute the originary force of the miraculous through either constructivism or analogical thinking? Moreover, can we do that while still recognizing the otherness of social theory vis-à-vis theology or religious experience? Jon Bialecki's A Diagram for Fire faces bravely these major ethical and theoretical challenges through a rich ethnographic engagement with the evangelical Charismatic Vineyard Church. Bialecki's initial research problem was how to account for the dazzling plurality as well as the inchoate family resemblances he encountered in the field under the umbrella "Vineyard Church." How to recognize such inner difference without reifying the Vineyard in terms of stable doctrines, identities, or centralized organization, which ultimately do not empirically exist? This initial problematic expands in the book two ways: it scales up to wider objects that share similar qualities, such as "actually existing Christianity" and "religion" itself, and it scales down ethnographically from the Vineyard movement (they avoid denomination) to particular churches at different locations, small meetings, practices, and experiences. The resulting argument has a fractal design, which oscillates recursively between what we conventionally understand as "micro" and "macro" levels of analysis while showing these terms' inappropriateness. Such design reflects Bialecki's attempt to avoid both nominalism and essentialism. If there is a religious atom or lowest common denominator in the book, it is not substantial, but an iterable pattern of differentiation traceable across various scales, a "type of recurrent event" (xviii), which is best accessed through what Vineyard members call miracles. This spreadable but aggregating, elusive but affective force is diagrammatic: "a diagram for fire." According to Bialecki, diagrams are "abstract maps of how forces play out that point as much toward [End Page 457] the different potentials in outcomes as they do toward a similarity in relations or constitution" (69). Such focus on a set of fundamental relations reminded me of classic structural analysis, with the exception that the stuff of diagrams is...

Brings together in one volume a number of key theoretical and methodological advances in the anthropological study of religion. Chapters cover important topics not ordinarily included in books dealing with the anthropology of religion (e.g., bipedalism, the study of alcohol, film and video images, notions of religious agency). In addition, this collection is intended to build bridges between anthropologists of religion and religious studies scholars. Over the last four decades, anthropologists have grappled with the dialectical relationship between the examination of cultures from the emic, or insider, perspective, and the etic, or outsider, perspective. Nowhere is this creative tension more evident than in the anthropological study of religion. In this volume, anthropologists and religious studies scholars come to terms not only with a landscape that has shifted fundamentally, but a landscape that is still shifting. Essays in this collection raise new and important issues for the anthropological study of religion in new and important ways. In intensely personal essays, a number of contributors address two fundamental concerns in the study of religion: (1) how should anthropologists deal with the beliefs and practices of others?, and (2) how should anthropologists deal with their own religious backgrounds and beliefs as these may affect their understanding of the beliefs and practices of others? A partial resolution to both questions is necessary before the anthropological study of religion can advance to a higher level.

We have long recognized that many objects in museums were originally on display in temples, shrines, or monasteries, and were religiously significant to the communities that created and used them. How, though, are such objects to be understood, described, exhibited, and handled now that they are in museums? Are they still sacred objects, or formerly sacred objects that are now art objects, or are they simultaneously objects of religious and artistic significance, depending on who is viewing the object? These objects not only raise questions about their own identities, but also about the ways we understand the religious traditions in which these objects were created and which they represent in museums today. Bringing together religious studies scholars and museum curators, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces is the first volume to focus on Asian religions in relation to these questions. The contributors analyze an array of issues related to the exhibition in museums of objects of religious significance from Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions. The “lives” of objects are considered, along with the categories of “sacred” and “profane”, “religious” and “secular”. As interest in material manifestations of religious ideas and practices continues to grow, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces is a much-needed contribution to religious and Asian studies, anthropology of religion and museums studies.

Religious experience and the experiential dimension of religious practice have come to constitute a fruitful area of enquiry for anthropology. This entry discusses the phenomenological school of philosophy as a source for the anthropology of religion. Concepts from this school that have been taken up within the anthropology of religion, such as bracketing, intentionality, embodiment, and lifeworld, are explained. The work of anthropologists who have pioneered the application of phenomenological approaches in the anthropology of religion is discussed. The entry briefly indicates how anthropological applications of phenomenology differ from phenomenological approaches in the field of religious studies. Finally, some new developments in the study of religious experience are outlined.

Delimiting Religion

This research aims to describe the use of forms of religiosity in the film Air Mata di Ujung Sajadah. The research method employed to collect and analyze the data is a qualitative descriptive method. The data in this study consist of dialogue utterances containing the dimensions of belief, religious practices or rituals, religious feeling or experience, religious knowledge, and the dimension of effect or application found in the film Air Mata di Ujung Sajadah. The findings of this research indicate that there are utterances related to five forms of religiosity in the film. These five forms are: (1) the dimension of belief, (2) the dimension of religious practices or rituals, (3) the dimension of religious feeling or experience, (4) the dimension of religious knowledge, and (5) the dimension of effect or application. From these five forms of religiosity, a total of 136 utterances containing elements of religiosity were identified. The most dominant aspect found in the film is the religiosity dimension of feeling or experience, with 71 utterances, while the least dominant is the dimension of belief, with only 6 utterances.

ABSTRACT: This special issue on new religions and second-generation members brings together three articles, two Field Notes essays, and one Perspective essay. The authors draw on a variety of methodologies and disciplines, including history, religious studies, sociology, and psychoanalysis. Particular attention is paid to Unificationism and the Church of Scientology, but also to larger historiographical, methodological, and ethical concerns germane to the study of both children and second-generation adults (SGAs). Many groups classified as “new religions,” even those originating in the early or mid-twentieth century, now have third, fourth, or more generational bases of membership, underscoring the contested and nebulous nature of “newer” versus “older” forms of religiosity. After situating the state of scholarship and summarizing the issue’s articles, this introduction concludes with an interdisciplinary call for further research into second-generation members, arguing that this line of research should include current and former members as well as both adults and, when possible, children.

Cognitivism in the anthropology of religion and religious studies is an approach to religion that appeals to evolved or selected architectures of cognition from which theories of—and explanations for—religion, can be generated. Cognitive approaches to religion are hardly new, though today, cognitive theory draws upon an evidence base heavily influenced by the insights of evolutionary psychology. The writings of scholars such as Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer and Ilkka Pyysiainen are defining this new field of research into religion. In this essay I want to consider the place of Claude Levi-Strauss in relation to this “cognitive turn” in the study of religion (Jensen 2009: 145). Levi-Strauss’ work has been described as an approach that “we could call cognitivist today” (Henaff 1998: 119) but I will argue that his cognitively oriented writings on religion lead—though not unequivocally—to an alternative theory of the mind to that posed by evolutionary psychology.