Religious Transformation Research Articles

Religious Transformations and Generalized Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

Prominent versions of social capital theory presume a positive link between voluntary memberships—including religious memberships—and generalized trust in society. Yet this relationship has not been tested in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with low average levels of generalized trust and high levels of religious membership and participation, where the rise of Charismatic Evangelical churches has recently transformed the religious landscape. Contrary hypotheses based in a theory of oppositional subcultures would suggest that memberships in such churches could dampen generalized trust due to their oppositional discourse vis a vis the wider society. In this paper, I use 2008 Afrobarometer survey data from seven countries in the region to test these contrasting hypotheses, analyzing both the pooled data and the separate country datasets. I find mixed evidence for the link between religious membership and generalized trust, and more consistent evidence that affiliating with a Charismatic Evangelical group is negatively associated with generalized trust. The study supports the conclusion that the link between religious membership and generalized trust is dependent on both the context and the content of the discourse circulating in religious settings.

The Unity and Coherence of 4 Ezra: Crisis, Response, and Authorial Intention

Scholarly interpretations of 4 Ezra have very often endeavoured to resolve the issue of the apparent disunity and inconsistency in its form and content. The approaches used are largely divided between the psychological perspective on the one hand, which understands the work as describing Ezra’s religious transformation as a result of his dialogue with Uriel and his visions, and the theological approach on the other, which views it as an intra-Jewish debate, with Uriel and Ezra representing conflicting theological views. While the theological perspective often neglects the significance of the visions and the epilogue for the work as a whole, the psychological perspective often fails to give due consideration to authorial intention. This article argues that the author of 4 Ezra intends to propose a solution to the crisis created by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce and to give scriptural authority to his solution. The key to interpreting his purpose in writing lies in the choice of Ezra as his pseudonymous mouthpiece and in the epilogue. With this authorial intention in mind, the different parts of the book become a coherent whole.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas. Edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 360 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas. Edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 360 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Historicizing Christianity and Profiat Duran’s Kelimat ha-Goyim (1397)

This study of the Hebrew treatise Kelimat ha-Goyim (“Shame of the Gentiles,” 1397) by Profiat Duran exemplifies the stimulating impact medieval religious polemics exerted on the scholarly construction of Christian religious history. Besides explaining Jesus in his Jewish context, this Catalan author outlined in detail the emergence of the fundamental Christian dogmas during the apostolic, patristic, and medieval age and searched for the driving forces behind long-term religious transformation. While a common view holds that Duran’s method of New Testament study mirrored thirteenth-century Christian Talmudism, I underscore his originality as a historian of religion, whose clandestinely transmitted text still inspired early modern and nineteenth century attempts at critical scholarship. Duran’s proper context is the contemporary converso problem. A comparison with a Spanish Renaissance text, the Diálogos en Marruecos, strongly suggests that his historical representation of ex-Jews turned into Christian leaders not only addressed conversos, but actually meant to caricature them.

Technology, ritual and Anglo-Saxon agriculture: the biography of a plough coulter from Lyminge, Kent

Abstract

The Vera Icon (Veronica) in the Verse LegendVeronica II: Medializing Salvation in the Late Middle Ages

This article discusses the converged media enterprise that inextricably links St. Veronica with the vera icon. In order to employ both saint and relic as vehicles to impart concepts of salvation, medieval legendary narratives develop various media strategies, which undergo further differentiation within the contexts of religious transformations and media conversions characteristic of the late Middle Ages. This is specifically relevant with regard to a popular Middle High German adaptation of the Veronica legend generally known as Veronica II. This text presents the comfortless void created by the absence of Christ in the immediate aftermath of his crucifixion, only to suggest a number of practices and procedures designed to alleviate and counteract the effects of this loss. Veronica II deploys the vera icon’s media-reflexive potential and displays a specific late medieval form of media competence, that is, an aptitude in combining and blending strategies of medializing salvation.

Wichtiger und unwichtiger zugleich: Pfarrberuf und religiöser Wandel

More Important and Less Important at the Same Time More Important and Less Important at the Same Time: The Pastoral Profession and Religious Change. The essay argues that current challenges to pastoral ministry represent the culmination of a crisis provoked by social transformations, which has been evident already at the end of the nineteenth century.Various options how to deal with this crisis are offered with special focus on the following aspects: the relationship between the church or pastoral ministry and the public, the changing conditions for professional communication in times of religious transformation, and the question of the pastor’s role in the community.

Cultural Psychology of Religion: Spiritual Transformation

Cultural psychology as a field has emerged over the past 30 years, but little effort has been expended in extrapolating its findings to transformative religious experiences. This essay posits a model of cultural psychology of religion and then uses it to assess Rambo and Farhadian’s (2014) Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. The collection of essays in this handbook provides extensive and diverse perspectives on significant life changes labeled as such by the individuals involved and/or their communities. Instances of alignment with and departure from a cultural psychology of religion perspective are discussed, with careful attention given to the implications of indigenous views of selfhood, community, and religion for the phenomenon of religious transformation. We present cultural psychology of religion as a mutually constellating network of cultural, psychological, and religious phenomena. Spiritual change, then, is a movement, be it subtle or extreme, from one cultural/psychological world to another. In expounding this view, we will refer for support to three exemplars of spiritual change (one each from the Muslim, Protestant, and Jewish traditions), the literature from the handbook, and other studies on the cultural psychology of religion.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas

Rayy and the Religious History of the Seljūq Period

Abstract:Historically, the years between the start of the tenth century AD and the mid-twelfth century witnessed dramatic socio-political and religious convulsions and transformation. This article first adumbrates the political role of Rayy, then gives an overview of the major trends in the religious history of the Seljūq period. These included the promotion and spread of the madrasa, with its accompanying

Jakarta: A Secular City (A Study of Neosecularization of the Middle Class Muslim Community in Metropolitan Jakarta)

Originally, this paper is a summative work of the writer’s research conducted in 2013-2014, entitled “Neo-sekularisasi: Studi Sekularisasi pada Komunitas Muslim Kelas Menengah Metropolitan Jakarta” (Neo-secularization: A Study of Secularization at the Middle Class Muslim Community in Metropolitan Jakarta). This study tries to portray of how the role of Islam as a religion has been treated or internalized by its followers, particularly amongst the middle class Muslim in Jakarta as the metropolitan. In other word, the writer wants to explicate of how the middle class Muslim Jakarta internalized and implemented their religious teachings adhered. Using the mixed methodology, the study highlights a numerous conclusions of the findings. First, at the institutional dimension, secularization appeared in the form of religious decline of the religious institution, decline of religious leaders, and religious transformation. Second, at the normative dimension, secularization manifested in the type of desacralisation, disengagement of religion. While at the cognitive dimension, secularization has been being crystallized as religious segmentation and secularism. But, above all, the type, process, and trend of the secularization occurred amongst the middle class of Muslim community is different for the secularization experienced commonly in the West.

Religious Transformation Among Danish Pentecostals Following Personal Crisis and Group Psychotherapy: A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACTThe aim was to explore transformations of religiosity experienced by Danish Pentecostals following a crisis and religiously integrated group psychotherapy. The study included semistructured interviews with 18 participants. The qualitative method of interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied for generating and analyzing the data-material. The findings suggested that all participants encountered a secondary religious transformation following the personal crisis or religiously integrated group psychotherapy. From a religious development perspective, however, the transformations following the crisis could not all be considered mentally healthy although the religious transformations facilitated by the group therapy were mentally healthy from both developmental and meaning system perspectives.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, and: Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas by Jeanette Favrot Peterson

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, and: Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas by Jeanette Favrot Peterson

Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, eds, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas

Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, eds, <i>Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas</i>

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk and Sara Rivett (review)

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk and Sara Rivett (review)

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk, and Sarah Rivett

LATIN AMERICAN Religious Transformations in Early Modern Americas. Edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. [The Early Modern Americas.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. vi, 352. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4654-4.)The ten contributors to this book edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett achieve their goal of producing cross-disciplinary volume that grasp[s] complexity and variety of [Atlantic] colonial world as it augmented, transformed, and challenged range of Christian beliefs (p. 20). The editors' introduction is followed by chapters in Part I: Comparisons by John H. Elliott, Ralph Bauer, and David A. Boruchoff; Part II: Crossings by David D. Hall and Asuncion Lavrin; Part III: Missions by Matt Cohen, Junia Ferreira Furtado, and Carmen Fernandez-Salvador; and Part IV: Legacies by Teresa A. Toulouse and Sandra M. Gustafson.Elliott's chapter appropriately begins work by differentiating between Indian societies encountered by Spanish and English. He emphasizes imperial projects of these mother countries and concludes that conquerors found it necessary to adapt their ideas and rituals to their new environment . . . [and that] accommodation and selective adaptation were order of day not on one side of religious encounter only, but on both sides (p. 38). Bauer examines Spanish and especially English attitudes about religions of people whom they encountered. If, at beginning of their conquests and colonies, Spaniards were more predisposed than English to view native religions in satanic terms, by late-sixteenth century writers from both countries associate[d] Native American religions not only with paganism but with Satanism (p. 77). Boruchoff focuses on South America to demonstrate early efforts by few priests, mostly Franciscans, to espouse best practices of Christian living in an effort to convince natives to emulate their conduct. He contrasts early example of these good friars by including five wonderful drawings by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala and emphasizing general disrepute and disdain afforded Dominicans, Augustinians, and especially Mercedarians; last became known for their greed, impiety, wantonness, and cruelty (p. 92).Hall's engaging historiographical essay concentrates on New transatlantic politics and analyzes political circumstances and theological and cultural ideas that shaped the Reformed international (sic, p. 111). Lavrin studies unique experience of martyrdom in New Spain. Indigenous peoples in northern frontier proved to be difficult adversaries to crusading priests who viewed conversion of indigenous peoples as part of larger plan of salvation for all humanity (p. 133). Although most missionaries neither expected nor desired martyrdom, some sought glory and a shot at dying for its cause (p. 136).Cohen's historiographical essay examines changing religious forms of Europeans in North America during their first century of residence and calls attention to stumbling blocks to thinking interculturally about religion in early colonial New England (p. …

Race and Religious Transformations in Rome

Contemporaries of Franz Cumont (1868-1947) often applied racial theories to the supposed cultural, spiritual and political decadence of Rome, holding Oriental immigrants and their religions responsible. In his Oriental Religions (1906) Cumont explicitly rejected Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Otto Seeck, arguing instead for spiritual progress in Late Antiquity, under Oriental influence. Our analysis shows certain ambiguities and stereotypes in Cumont’s publications on the Orient. We also present unpublished archive material from the Academia Belgica in Rome, showing Cumont accepted, in the 1920s, racial theories (Tenney Frank). He now explained the religious transformations in Rome by a change in the population.

Reading a History of Writing: heritage, religion and script change in Java

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.

Recalling the ‘Islam of the parents’ liberal and secular Muslims redefining the contours of religious authenticity

ABSTRACTScholarship on Islam in Europe has largely invested in examining the generational dynamics in the lived religious experiences of Muslims. Within this perspective, the idea of a generation gap, which revolves around a distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’, has figured as an important account in assessing some of these religious transformations. Drawing on fieldwork with Belgian Muslims of Moroccan origin, this paper seeks to nuance this perspective by exploring accounts wherein this ‘traditional’ Islam of the parents is actively reclaimed. This was especially the case for respondents who were quite critical of Islamic revivalist trends. In many of these stories, the parents’ Islam was understood as tolerant and open, in a way that was consonant with ‘tradition’. By focusing on these narratives, a first aim of the paper is to understand how genealogy and ancestry figure as distinct criteria in determining the ‘real Islam’. A second aim is to complicate the understanding of the liberal and modern self, and its relationship to the past.