Scholars Of Religion Research Articles

Advancing the Cognitive Science of Religion through Replication and Open Science

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a relatively young but prolific field that has offered compelling insights into religious minds and practices. However, many empirical findings within this field are still preliminary and their reliability remains to be determined. In this paper, we first argue that it is crucial to critically evaluate the CSR literature and adopt open science practices and replication research in particular to move the field forward. Second, we highlight the outcomes of previous replications and make suggestions for future replication studies in the CSR, with a particular focus on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and qualitative research. Finally, we provide a “replication script” with advice on how to select, conduct, and organize replication research. Our approach is illustrated with a “glimpse behind the scenes” of the recently launched Cross-Cultural Religious Replication Project, in the hope of inspiring scholars of religion to embrace open science and replication in their own research.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

AbstractThis is an introduction to the Symposium on “Science, Religion, and the Rise of Biblical Criticism,” which has been designed as a thematic section for Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. The Symposium demonstrates the importance of and need for greater interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, theologians, scholars of religion, and historians in tracing the origins and development of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion. Often neglected is the role biblical criticism played in guiding and constructing narratives of conflict. This series of articles thus attempts to redress this gap in the scholarship by explicitly focusing on the advent of historical‐critical scholarship of the Bible and how it changed perceptions about “science” and “religion.”

The Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources: A Comparative Study From Jordan.

The allocation strategies during challenging situations among the different social groups is based on 9 principles which can be considered either individually: sickest first, waiting list, prognosis, youngest first, instrumental values, lottery, monetary contribution, reciprocity, and individual behavior, or in combination; youngest first and prognosis, for example. In this study, we aim to look into the most important prioritization principles amongst different groups in the Jordanian population, in order to facilitate the decision-making process for any potential medical crisis. We conducted an online survey that tackled how individuals would deal with three different scenarios of medical scarcity: (1) organ donation, (2) limited hospital beds during an influenza epidemic, and (3) allocation of novel therapeutics for lung cancer. In addition, a free-comment option was included at the end of the survey if respondents wished to contribute further. Seven hundred and fifty-four survey responses were gathered, including 372 males (49.3%), and 382 females (50.7%). Five groups of individuals were represented including religion scholars, physicians, medical students, allied health practitioners, and lay people. Of the five surveyed groups, four found “sickest-first” to be the most important prioritization principle in all three scenarios, and only the physicians group documented a disagreement. In the first scenario, physicians regarded “sickest-first” and “combined-criteria” to be of equal importance. In general, no differences were documented between the examined groups in comparison with lay people in the preference of options in all three scenarios; however, physicians were more likely to choose “combination” in both the second and third scenarios (OR 3.70, 95% CI 1.62–8.44, and 2.62, 95% CI 1.48–4.59; p < 0.01), and were less likely to choose “sickest-first” as the single most important prioritization principle (OR 0.57, CI 0.37–0.88, and 0.57; 95% CI 0.36–0.88; p < 0.01). Out of 100 free comments, 27 (27.0%) thought that the “social-value” of patients should also be considered, adding the 10th potential allocation principle. Our findings are concordant with literature in terms of allocating scarce medical resources. However, “social-value” appeared as an important principle that should be addressed when prioritizing scarce medical resources in Jordan.

Reflections on Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation: horizons, hip hop, and hybridity

ABSTRACT Using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s famous discourse on horizons and modern postcolonial theories on black religious pluralism, this article examines Afrika Bambaataa, along with the organization he founded, the Universal Zulu Nation. The emphasis of the analysis is on his overcoming of material borderlands, interventions in cultural knowing, and forming of hybrid identities with reference to the vitality of religion. This methodology not only intimates pragmatic epistemologies that elucidate transmissions of knowledge and ethics across geographic landscapes but also fosters a more general framework of social analysis regarding shared human heritages. An evaluation of how Zulu horizons operate between local communities and global cultures demonstrates how interreligious dialogue and polyethnic belongings that extend across transnational spiritualties and societies signify ways of transgressing difference and sameness within ideological systems. After a discussion of cultural hermeneutics as a mode of interpreting the histories of ontology and Otherness to obtain a basis for understanding peripheral societies and faiths, the article then investigates how the Zulu Nation belongs to an Afrocentric pluralist tradition within those constellations of ideas and ideals, before the conclusion focuses on the way recent allegations of Bambaataa’s sexual assault affect his legacy of social consciousness for scholars of contemporary religion.

Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives ed. by Rotem Kowner et al.

Reviewed by: Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives ed. by Rotem Kowner et al. Brian Lander Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives. Rotem Kowner, Guy Bar-Oz, Michal Biran, Meir Shahar, and Gideon Shelach-Lavi, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. xxxvii, 433 pp., 14 b&w illustrations, 27 colour illustrations. Hardcover US $120, ISBN 978-3-030-24362-3; Softcover US $85, 978-3-030-24365-4; eBook US $89, ISBN 978-3-030-24363-0; 14 individual chapters available for download at US $30 each. Animals have always played central roles in human societies, but most aspects of their histories remain poorly explored. There is a substantial body of English-language scholarship on the history of animals in Western Europe, but the same cannot be said for the rest of Eurasia, so this book is a valuable addition to the literature. Because "animals" is a broad category, "Asia" is a big place, and the book includes work by scholars of archaeology, history, and religion, the book's contents are quite varied. In terms of geography, it is mostly focused on East Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Mongol Empire, the only political entity that ever stretched between the two regions. The work extends even further in time than it does in space, with topics ranging from Stone Age hand axes to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The geographical and temporal spread is so great that few people will read all the chapters, but it seems that the press intended the volume primarily as an ebook from which readers can download specific chapters. This review therefore focuses more on individual chapters than on the volume as a whole. The animals under discussion are mostly large ones of clear importance in human societies. There are three chapters on horses, two on elephants and others on donkeys, cattle, and tuna. Apart from the chapter on the symbolic role of lion and tigers in Buddhism, all of the animals serve humans as beasts of burden or as food. It is currently popular in animal studies to analyse other types of human-animal relations, but this volume breaks little ground in terms of the animals chosen as research topics. It has no pets or pests, nor does it discuss the many other types of animals that live in and around human societies (compare this to the chapters on cats and bees in Sterckx et al. 2018, and to the hundred-odd titles of Reaktion Books' Animals series, which includes peacocks, pigeons, frogs, mice, spiders, and cockroaches.) However, this in no way diminishes the value of this work. All of its chapters present new and engaging interpretations of the histories of animals and make clear that there is plenty of work to be done even on the histories of horses. The introductory chapter provides a succinct but thoughtful overview of the volume's main themes: domestication, animals as food, animals in war, and animals in culture and religion. Although I consider Asia a perfectly appropriate focus for a book, I was nonetheless surprised that the authors seem to uncritically accept the idea that Asia is a continent, since the division of the Eurasian continent into Europe and Asia is a Eurocentric fantasy. But that is a minor point. Let me now discuss the chapters. In the fascinating second chapter, Ran Barkai discusses the role of proboscideans [End Page 444] (elephants and their relatives), especially young ones, in the diets of Palaeolithic peoples across Eurasia. This chapter emphasizes new evidence from China but makes clear that most of what archaeologists know about Eurasia's Palaeolithic peoples comes from the western end of the continent. The chapter demonstrates that people hunted these animals over a very large area for a long time. However, the breadth of coverage leaves the author little space to include anything more about each site than the state of its proboscideans remains. This left me wondering what else these people ate and what role these particular animals played in their diets. In the third chapter, Stephen Rosen examines the changing relationships between humans and ungulates in the...

El neopentecostalismo y sus caracterizaciones en América Látina

This article is the result of the systematization of the different studies on the phenomenon called “neopentecostalism”. We present a kind of matrix of characteristics that allows us to visualize the various manifestations of the neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America based on the characterizations that scholars of religion have made. This in order to identify reductionisms and avoid generalizations based on a single specificity of empirical reality. Thus, we start from the conception of neo-pentecostalism as an obstacle-concept that attempts to explain a diffuse and multiple phenomenon with religious expressions linked to heterogeneous movements within the Christian world.

The Uncertain Good of Overruling Employment Division v. Smith

In this Essay I express my misgivings about the possibility that the Supreme Court may decide this Term to overrule Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 decision on the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. When Smith was handed down, it was enormously unpopular across the political spectrum and among legal scholars, including myself. I continue to believe that Smith’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause should be overruled, but I’m concerned that the Court is apt to replace it with an interpretation that is no better and perhaps even worse. In Smith a 5-4 majority of the Court held that, with limited exception, the Free Exercise Clause does not provide claimants with a means of securing court-ordered exemptions from generally applicable laws that substantially burden their religious liberty. For thirty years, if not longer, the Court had been interpreting the Clause as providing religious liberty claimants with just such a means. The broad disapproval that greeted Smith in 1990 culminated in 1993 with Congress’s virtually unanimous enactment of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Act, which the Court struck down in 1997 as applied to state and local government, explicitly reinstated the pre-Smith approach. Drawing on opinions by the Justices in the past decade, I argue that a majority of the Court seems poised to overrule Smith and put in place a very different conception of religious liberty than the one reflected either in Smith or in the pre-Smith case law. I suggest that the conception reflected in the pre-Smith case law is one the Court would do well to reinstate. The conception that the Court seems ready to put in place, however, takes an overly expansive view of the Free Exercise Clause at the expense of the Establishment Clause and threatens to hobble the government’s ability to pursue effectively many important general welfare objectives. I note that although the Essay appears in a journal published by Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, it is written in a way designed to be accessible not only to law and religion scholars. It doesn’t presuppose that readers are conversant with free exercise law.

Performing Clandestinity: The Religious Underground, the Secret Police and the Media in Communist Eastern Europe

The Cold War was frequently cast in the West as a religious war, a conflict between Christianity and atheism of the Marxist-materialist kind. Propaganda narratives produced by the opposing sides pitted faith against godlessness or science and progress against superstition and exploitation. The religious underground, which was at the centre of much of this propaganda activity, had both a metaphorical and literal meaning. With the opening of the secret police archives in the region, scholars of religions have been presented with important new sources to understand the relationship between anti-religious propaganda, western projections of religious life under communism and the actual clandestine practices of underground religious groups. Whilst the textual materials found in the archives have been the primary focus of attention for both historians and transitional justice projects, the search for ‘truths’ about the past has largely overlooked the visual and material traces of religion produced by and about religious groups. In this article, I explore the complex intersection of the religious underground and the secret police and how this was reflected in the public media and film during communism. Through an exploration of photographic and filmic representations of religious clandestinity produced by or with the help of the secret police, this article illustrates how such imagery, despite its complicity in the construction of a certain image of the religious underground, nevertheless also reveals aspects of the lived reality, creativity and agency of underground communities. This research is based on the findings of the European Research Council Project, Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (project no. 677355).

The management of minority heritage: critical challenges to Vietnamese Catholic heritage seen from the case study of Bui Chu Cathedral

ABSTRACT On 1 August 2020, wrecking balls began to demolish the Catholic cathedral in Bui Chu town, in the Vietnamese province of Nam Dinh, putting an end to more than a decade of lively debate over whether the 1885 cathedral building was to be preserved. The losing camp had favoured retaining the original structure and taking essential steps to enhance its integrity and safety; the prevailing camp argued to demolish the old church and replace it with a (larger) replica built with modern construction methods and materials. The present paper examines the positions and alignments among various actors, including church clergy, state officials at different levels, scholars of religion, heritage experts, journalists, and congregation members. These debates involved complex questions of the continuity and value of colonial heritage, the effectiveness of Vietnam’s legal system for protecting built heritage, and the sensitive historical relations between the state and Vietnam’s Catholic minority.

The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty. Edited by Michael D. Breidenbach and Owen Anderson

This recent volume from the Cambridge Companions to Law offers a provocative and wide-ranging series of essays on the general topic of religious freedom. The essays are divided into three sections: Philosophical Foundations; Historical Interpretations; and Law, Politics, and Economics. They are engaging, well-written, and will serve as a valuable introduction for students as well as being a resource for scholars of law and religion, whether in the United States or abroad. At the outset, a caveat is in order as (with exceptions, including chapters by Zoë Robinson and Vincent Phillip Muñoz) the primary focus of the essays is more on religious liberty than on the First Amendment jurisprudence. Careful historical, originalist analyses of the First Amendment are presented in chapters on its intellectual foundations (Muñoz) and political history (Donald Drakeman, Chris Beneke, and Michael Breidenbach), and the development of the First Amendment doctrine in the U.S. Supreme Court is addressed by Robinson, who argues that the constitution historically has privileged the religious majority over minorities. However, this multidisciplinary project ranges afield into abstract theory in the opening chapters and into social science as well, with an economic model of the development of religious freedom advanced by Anthony Gill in the third section.

Constructing Conscience

American politics and law, like other liberal democracies, couches itself in the protection of the free individual, one who possesses both “beliefs” and the unalienable right to those “beliefs.” The “freedom of religion” guaranteed to U.S. citizens in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment prioritizes this supposedly private and transcendent realm of “sincerity,” “faith,” and “experience,” kept separate from the contextual and temporal world of society and politics. Historians of American religion, and scholars of religion more broadly, have long taken this “interiority” rhetoric to be self-evident, ignoring the prescriptive implications of positing such an interiority at all. Rather than understanding these rhetorics of “interiority” as referencing a non-empirical and apolitical reality of autonomous “selfhood,” this paper will argue that the constitutional protection of the autonomous individual is constitutive of a particular type of political subjectivity, one that allows for those in power to manage dissent by authorizing some differences and marginalizing others. Using different examples from historical and contemporary American politics and law, I will interrogate the function of institutionalizing such an “interiority” in the first place, in order to understand how and why American society works the way that it does.

Pentecostalism and African diaspora : a case study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), in North America

Pentecostalism as a new wave of Christianity became more pronounced in 1970's and beyond in Nigeria. Since then scholars of Religion, History, Sociology and Political Science have shown keen interest in the study of the Churches known as Pentecostals because of the impact they have made on the society. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) was established by Pastor Josiah Akindayomi in Lagos,Nigeria in 1952. After his demise, he was succeeded by Pastor Adeboye Adejare Enock. The problem of study of this research was an examination of the expansion of the Redeemed Christian Church of God to North America, Caribbean and Canada. The missionary activities of the church could be regarded as a reversed mission in the propagation of Christianity by Africans in the Diaspora. The methodology adopted was historical. The primary and secondary sources of information were also germane in the research. The findings of the research indicated that the Redeemed Christian Church of God was founded in North America by Immigrants from Nigeria. Pastor Adeboye Enock Adejare had much influence on the Church within and outside the country because of his charisma. The Church has become a place of refuge for many immigrants. They are also contributing to the economy of the United States of America. However, the members of the Church were faced with some challenges, such as security scrutiny by the security agencies. In conclusion, the RCCGNA was a denomination that had been accepted and embraced by Nigerians and African immigrants in the United States of America.

Whatever Way Love’s Camel Takes: Remembering Baba Ibrahim Farajajé

This essay is a reflection on the life and work of the late Rev. Dr. Ibrahim Farajajé, a renown scholar of religion and eminent queer theologian. Farajajé’s work and vision as a bisexual theologian of color presents a radical intersectionality of race, gender, and desire. His notion of “kweers-in-intersection” speaks of both the fluidity and complexity that queers of color in particular embody. Farajajé spoke for these demonized desires, demonized spiritualities, and demonized bodies. As both a Christian and Sufi Muslim scholar and a spiritual leader, “Baba,” as he was affectionately called by many, was a guide to those seeking to break the bonds and forced silences of hardened, patriarchal religious frameworks. He stood both at the frontier and the margins of many demonized communities. He pioneered a scholarship of performance which sought to reclaim the rich “darkness” of erased lives. He stood in solidarity with those whose HIV, racial, and sexual status kept them marginalized and disenfranchized in the dominant heteropatriarchy. And he was able to call out liberating ancestors and divine powers by name for the sake of those who suffered from the dominating metanarrative of a heteronormative, patriarchal “God.”Introduction: how I met my Baba.

The costs of religious ‘cheap talk’: the semiotics of interpretant driven costly signaling within contested communicative environments

ABSTRACT In recent decades scholars of religion have used costly signaling theory to advance our understanding of seemingly wasteful behaviors by showing how they may function as in-group signals, enhancing social solidarity and cooperation. However, most analyses have assumed that speech and other forms of ‘cheap talk’ like common adornments are too cheap to function as costly signals. This article argues that integrating recent work on the multiple mechanisms of honest signaling and paying closer attention to the semiotic analyses of Charles Peirce, especially his focus on interpretants, allows us better to assess the relationships between signal costs and culturally heterogeneous communicative environments. In religiously contested communicative environments ostensibly cheap signs may function as costly signals. The article develops a theory of interpretant driven costly signaling and lays out the conditions for religious ‘cheap talk’ and inexpensive adornment to function as costly signals in religiously plural communicative environments.

Between Islam and Islamophobia

AbstractWe use data from qualitative interviews with forty atheist activists in two Canadian cities to analyze the politics of critiquing Islam in the contemporary political environment. We show that atheist activists struggle to navigate between their criticisms of Islam, their fears of being labeled “Islamophobic” (taken as a synonym for “racist” or “xenophobic”), and their concerns about contributing to anti-Muslim rhetoric. To manage this struggle, atheists rely on stigma management tactics that allow them to hold or express criticisms of Islam without earning racially charged stigmatizing labels. Using these stigma management techniques speaks to the precarious positions of many atheists today as they try to critique Islam without expressing or contributing to prejudicial views against Muslims. This article will interest scholars of religion and nonreligion, especially those interested in the perceived stigmas associated with atheism and stigma management among members of secular movement organizations.

On Genealogy Critique of Secularized Christianity

ABSTRACT Genealogy critique has furthered the debate about how theological ideas continue to inform secular claims in modernity. At the same time, there are arguments suggesting that genealogy critique tends to locate secular modernity inside theological self-descriptions of the world-historical and eschatological orientation of Christianity. This article sheds light on theological debates that directly or indirectly informed notions of rupture and continuity in the older secularization debate by pointing to similarities in the works of Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. If the secularization narrative was framed with a view to contemporary theological discussions about history and eschatology, as well as the problem of specifying the apocalyptical orientation of early Christianity as it intersects with or separates itself from “late Judaism,” then the question arises how scholars of religion, who engage in genealogy critique today, respond to these theological legacies.

Clinging to Guns and Religion? A Research Note Testing the Role of Protestantism in Shaping Gun Identity in the United States

AbstractHow does social identity shape Protestant attitudes about guns in the United States? Numerous studies show that religion shapes attitudes about guns, but the role of Protestantism in forming those attitudes is undertheorized and undertested. We draw from the extensive literature on religion-as-identity and the burgeoning literature of gun-ownership-as-identity to test the theory about the role of Protestant religion in cultivating a gun identity. We argue that for many Protestants, gun ownership has taken on the characteristics of a distinctive social identity, but that there are clear differences between different types of Protestants—notably, evangelicals and mainliners—that render the expansive category of “Protestant” largely irrelevant as an explanatory variable. While that finding might seem straightforward to scholars of religion and politics, the broad categorical approach—that is, treating “Protestant” as explanatory—has proven surprisingly durable in studies of gun ownership and attitudes about gun control. The analysis uses a recent Pew survey with batteries of questions about gun identity, gun policy, and religion. While this research note does not fully testwhythis relationship between Protestantism and gun identity exists, we do show that the relationship not only exists but also affects gun policy attitudes.

Congregation(s) in Digital Culture

Abstract This essay draws on a particular example of Christian community in the urban American West to ask how digital culture is shifting the way religious identity, community, and leadership are being performed in cultures shaped by digital communication. It suggests more attention is needed to the complexity of organized religion and to the ways religious communities respond to media change. Further, that scholars of media, religion, and culture can help practitioners better understand their media-context and strategize within it.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: MOVING BEYOND THE CREDIBILITY STRATEGY

AbstractReeves condemns the recruitment of scientific methods by representative theologians to lend credibility to their theological claims. His treatment of Nancey Murphy's use of Lakatosian research programme methodology is focused on here, and his proposal that science and religion scholars might act as “historians of the present” to advance the field is explored. The “credibility strategy” is set in historical context with an exploration of some of the science and religion field's original commitments and goals, particularly in terms of the emphasis on rationalism and corresponding neglect of the imagination, and the value of more creative input in promoting better dialogue between science and religion is highlighted.

Comparative Secularities: Tracing Social and Epistemic Structures beyond the Modern West

Abstract In view of the questionability of the concept “religion” as an analytical category for the investigation of pre-modern, non-Western cultures, how can one still pursue the history of religion or historical sociology of religion? Roughly speaking, scholars of religion can be placed between two poles with regard to this question: (1) those who reject the cross-cultural use of “religion” as a comparative concept and (2) those who believe they cannot do without it. We propose an approach that acknowledges the cultural dependence and historicity of concepts such as “religion” and the “secular,” while still conducting historical research on pre-colonial non-Western societies relevant to the study of both. Our approach aims to investigate the emergence of social and epistemic structures in various cultures—forms of differentiation and distinction—that have enabled the reorganisation of socio-cultural formations into religions and thus facilitated the formation of “multiple secularities” in global modernity.