Religious Studies Scholars Research Articles

“We Got Tired”

In this commentary, I raise the issue of how well we can distinguish between religious systems and those presided over by messianic “quasi-divine” leaders. This problematizes the degree to which all such systems can be described as ecologically functional when they can also be directed by the idiosyncratic whims of unstable charismatic individuals. Aside from such issues, I also raise the issue of how we can be sure that the “religious system” is reliably adaptive, if we may not have an accurate tally of such systems in the first place, particularly given the fact that religious studies scholars are incapable of providing a distinction between a “cult” that may contain but a few individuals and quickly “fail” due to its esoteric demands, and millennia-old traditions commanding millions of adherents and enforcing prosocial norms. I also raise two issues that have long bedevilled functionalist approaches but that do not make much of an appearance in Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (Purzycki & Sosis 2022): the boundary problem and the Pangloss problem. Despite these reservations, I applaud the book both for its rigour and for providing a sorely needed template for analyzing religious systems within the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion (CESR). I close by tentatively suggesting that religion’s ubiquity lies not with its adaptiveness per se, but with its capacity to accelerate cultural evolution by causing societies to lock in values that may either be adaptive or maladaptive, making sacralization ubiquitous even when its outcomes can be destructive.

Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, written by Joshua Iyadurai

Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, written by Joshua Iyadurai

Reincarnation and Identity: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Druze Narratives

The book Druze Reincarnation Narratives: Previous Life Memories Discourses and the Construction of Identities, edited by Gebhard Fartacek, offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the Druze belief in reincarnation (taqammuṣ) and the phenomenon of Nutq, where individuals recall previous lives. Scholars in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields contribute to understanding how these beliefs shape Druze social structures, personal identities, and community cohesion. The forum includes reviews by Maha Natoor, Dmitry Sevruk, and Jens Kreinath. Natoor appreciates the book's accessibility and balanced presentation of Druze reincarnation narratives while raising ethical concerns about anonymity and the use of religious texts. Sevruk commends the clear scientific language and interdisciplinary approach, emphasizing the book's contributions to Druze history and culture and suggesting further exploration of the psychological mechanisms behind reincarnation beliefs. Kreinath praises the detailed ethnographic insights and methodological rigor, noting researchers' challenges in engaging with the Druze community. He also critiques that some contributions focus on broader social, cultural, and political contexts rather than directly addressing reincarnation. Overall, the book provides valuable insights into the resilience and adaptability of the Druze in preserving their unique religious identity amidst broader societal changes.

Research Methods – For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, written by Joshua Iyadurai

Research Methods – For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, written by Joshua Iyadurai

Irritating the secular: on Peter Berger and Charles Taylor’s theological projects

ABSTRACT The literature that discusses the secularization paradigm is extensive. However, we still know little about revisionist accounts of secularization theory utilized as a proxy for theological projects. Through close reading, I zoom in on two prominent scholars of religious studies and beyond, Peter L. Berger and Charles Taylor, who represent stellar examples of the religiously grounded critique of the secularization paradigm. Berger and Taylor attempted to reconcile contemporary social theory and theology by injecting constitutive theological notions into their alternative constructions of the secular and religious to re-claim the relevance of Christianity in the present. My central proposition is that the gist of their empirical and normative rebuttal of secularization hinges not on sociological or genealogical explanations but on theologically anchored claims. The conceptual comparison of Berger and Taylor’s revisionist works, well-established in the canon of religious studies, reveals parallel strategies and three mutually intertwined theological assertions set to fracture the secularization paradigm: two-tiered ontology, the notion of personhood, and reconceptualization of religion.

Book review: Joshua Iyadurai, Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies

Book review: Joshua Iyadurai, <i>Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies</i>

“Now you know”: Reception of the religious studies scholar

This article interrogates the premises of the question “Does the scholar of religion have a particular role in promoting public and political knowledge and understanding of religion(s)?” by first asking, “In what contexts is the scholar of religion asked to have a role in promoting public and political knowledge and understanding of religion(s)?” Rebekka King argues that there are two hidden assumptions underlying the question. First is the idea that somewhere buried in the request for scholarly input is a public perception of scholars as receptacles of knowledge (i.e. they are the ones who know). Second, this special issue’s larger question betrays assumptions about scholars’ abilities and (perhaps more interestingly) what scholars think about their colleagues’ abilities to promote public and political knowledge and understanding of religion(s). In both cases, it is possible to learn a lot about the role religious studies scholars might play by first considering the roles they are expected to play. In this vein, one might ask how the scholar of religion is classified and categorized in the minds of those who might invite them to play a role in public and political discourses, and how this classification resembles and departs from how scholars of religion classify themselves.

Book Review: Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies

Book Review: Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Theology and Religious Studies

The dubious anxiety of scholarly relevance

Based on comments made as part of a plenary roundtable at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, this brief essay examines the discourse on the public relevance of religious studies scholarship. Specifically, it identifies the anxieties present in such discussions and the false theory–praxis binary on which they rely.

Economic Democracy as the The Third Way: History of Cooperativism and Mondragón

The topic of this essay is the perennial problem of the relationship between religion and economics. However, many scholars in religious studies often fail to properly connect religious values and economics. In addition, modern sociological and economic theories that focus on particular abstract aspects of human society exaggerate these abstractions as critical or central features of human existence, but ignore other equally important features. In this context, many communities and groups have been formed to promote grassroots economic interaction and to protect people from an asymmetrical global economy. Among them, the Mondragón Cooperative Corporations in Spain has sought to provide an alternative economic community. The primary purpose of this study is to articulate and analyze the economic ethics underlying the practice of the Mondragón Corporacion Cooperativa, which is owned and governed by workers. Cooperatives such as Mondragón are governed by “Cooperative Principles” that differentiate them from traditional capitalist enterprises. This article examines the worker-owned cooperative movement as an alternative to both monopolistic capitalism and socialism for economic democracy. It examines how Mondragón’s workers and their leader can and should develop their own ways of coping with, confronting, and potentially resisting capitalism in their own local community. It attempts to demystify the dominant, global capitalist economy. This study aims to develop a set of practical strategies for achieving alternative economic ethics.

The power of exemplarity in religious education

ABSTRACT Calls for reframing the subject matter of Religious Education in schools include the tricky question of how to select from a world of potentially interesting and relevant material. Pedagogues have long questioned the educational logic that takes so-called substantive knowledge as its starting point and imagines education to follow a linear path from simple to complex. Scholars of Religious Studies have addressed similar questions of how to bring the subject matter to life through taking a more disciplinary orientation , though this approach is problematized by RE’s multi-disciplinary foundations This paper brings together pedagogical and disciplinary perspectives to the question of exemplification in the production of curricular subject matter. Taking as its context RE in schools, the paper assumes the didactic principle that there is considerable difference between putative disciplinary knowledge and school subject matter and that the production of school subject matter requires considered processes of pedagogical transformation and reduction. The paper explores the logic governing this transformation by drawing on the pedagogical analysis of exemplarity offered by Martin Wagenschein alongside the more disciplinary analyses of the place of examples from Jonathan Z. Smith.

The Nones of Mombasa: Religious Disbelief and Disaffiliation on the East African Coast

Abstract Religious disbelief (RDb) and religious disaffiliation (RDa), which describe the intellectual, cultural, and social lives of contemporary citizens referred to as “Nones” (i.e., “none of the above” as a respondent’s choice among religious options), are emerging as sociological categories of increasing interest to religious studies scholars. Much of the research done thus far focuses on Western nations and religions. This study and the observations herein apply some of these same interests and methods to the African nonreligious scene. As a field site, the cosmopolitan city of Mombasa (pop. 1.2 million) on the Kenyan coast has for many recent generations been home to a variety of African, Arab, Indian-Asian, and European races, cultures, and religions. African Traditional Religions (ATRs), Islam(s), Indian religions, and Christianities all have a presence in this religiously pluralistic milieu. In this cosmopolitan context, we should expect to find among urban Africans some representation of trends found across the world, one of which is a potentially growing, if silent and low-profile, population called “Nones.”

Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century

This article discusses the major factors behind an oddity in the development of Western Qur’anic studies, the lack of attention to the relationship between the Qur’an and Biblical tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century. This topic represented an important focus in the field up until the 1930s, after which it was relatively neglected throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. It has been taken up again with renewed energy in the present century. Several factors contributed to this development, including the historical configuration of the field of Qur’anic studies into separate research silos, the dispersion of the nucleus of the field in Germany after the National Socialist Party gained power in 1933, the desire to carry on Christian–Muslim dialogue, and the decrial on the part of religious studies scholars of philological obsession with origins and facile theories of influence along with a concomitant move to focus on Muslim commentaries on the Qur’an.

Ethno-Apophasis: An Ethnographic Theology of Thinness and Refusal

Abstract The critical onboarding of ethnography evinced by scholars in theology, religious studies and Christian ethics compellingly generates ecclesiologies and other theologies inclusive of non-academic life. Yet, in a critical reflection on methodologies in ecclesiological research, this paper questions the growing predominance of ethnography, specifically ethnographic thickness. Drawing upon the work of anthropologist Audra Simpson, this paper argues that the ethnographic turn in religious ethics and theology and religious studies misses (at best) or ignores (at worst) the epistemological violence lurking at the root of this method. By looking into practices of ethnographic thinness and refusal, this paper highlights apophasis as the best theological grounding for scholars engaging with ethnography. Ethnographic apophasis requires practitioners to heed the colonial and settler colonial realities inherent in the method of ethnography itself; ethically pushing notions of solidarity into anticolonial practice.

The Feeling of Believing

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion

Negative Capabilities: Investigating Apophasis in AI Text-to-Image Models

Through a case study of images generated by Swedish artist Steph Maj Swanson using an AI text-to-image (T2I) model, this article explores the strategy of negative weight prompting in T2I models as a phenomenon of apophasis. Apophasis is a linguistic strategy commonly deployed in texts of mystical theology to express the ineffability of God through negative concepts. In this article, a comparison of apophatic strategies in mystical texts and T2I models is engaged to highlight the mutual benefit of theorising AI with the help of religious theory and concepts. With this, the article builds on previous work on the New Visibility of Religion, enchantment, and post-secularism—especially the research of Beth Singler on religious continuities in representations of AI. Recent work on AI prompt engineering, computational linguistics, and computational geometry is invoked to explain the linguistic processes of T2I models. Poststructuralist semiotics is then employed to theorise the search for the Transcendental Signified in apophatic theology. The article concludes that linguistic theology can help to elucidate technological use cases, subsequently arguing for further dialogue between scholars in artificial intelligence and religious studies, and for a revaluation of religion in the technological sphere.

Original Copies: the Newest Reproductions of the Shroud of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is one of Christianity’s most famous, and controversial, sacred artifacts. A large part of its fame is due to the manufacture of reproductions which for five centuries have provided the means to worship the Shroud in absentia. The newest of these, from a project titled Lino Val Gandino, interweave the legacies of centuries of copying up through and including modern digital renderings, multimedia broadcasts, and mass-produced pilgrimage souvenirs that today sustain devotion to the original Shroud. But they stand apart by the unprecedented attention to recreating the original through novel forms of production to achieve enhanced material and mimetic exactness. This paper argues that the Lino Val Gandino reproductions of the Shroud of Turin become “original copies” that make claims to their own authenticity and originality. In so doing, these copies constitute mediative and material means of religious devotion not recognized in the types of artistic images and popular objects hitherto studied by scholars in art history and religious studies.

Religious Authority, Digitality, and Islam: The Stakes and Background

Abstract: The study of religious authority and its vacillating ideations is hardly a recent trend. The field has been well established by works of scholars of religious studies, history, and literature, among others. One reason for this sustained interest is that religious power structures that influence individuals, societies, and politics are formidable and, at times, indivisible. However, there has been new interest in religious authority in recent years because of its close and symbiotic relationship with digital media and their unprecedented affordances in knowledge production, distribution, and access. The disruptions of digitality have had profound effects on religion, religious authority, in particular, such as the decentralization of religious messaging, the emergence of unchurched and unmosqued discourses, the acceleration of the formation of new religions, private forums outside the reach of traditional authorities, identity construction, sectarian movements, ideological scriptural interpretation, religious contestations, and more. This essay discusses the background of religious authority, digital media, and Islam, and seeks to unpack the destabilization of traditional authority in our media-saturated age. It also speaks to disciplinary concerns and the need for multidisciplinary competencies to understand more fully religious texts in digital spaces, guided by conversations and considerations that connect online content with historical Muslim intellectual traditions, contemporary pressures and movements, and intra-Islamic ideological contestations.

A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Audit of the American Families of Faith Project: Exploring Lifespan Spiritual Development in Religiously and Racially Diverse Families

Social science and religious studies scholars should endeavor to broaden theories, methods, and samples to be more inclusive. Therefore, we have conducted an “equity audit” of the American Families of Faith (AFF) project. We evaluated the diversity, equity, and inclusion of the AFF project’s (a) research team, (b) products, and (c) samples. We then discuss the reasoning behind the decisions that resulted in the existing strengths and limitations of the project, the fruits of this and previous evaluations (including a presentation of some narrative accounts from parents and youths across several religious-ethnic communities across the US), opportunities for growth, and future directions for the AFF project and conclude with some thoughts on what other researchers might gain from this audit. Previous reviews have found a lack of diversity among scholars and samples in the field of psychology. Much needs to be done to create truly representative science. We subsequently conducted a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit.

Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule by Christina H. Lee

Reviewed by: Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule by Christina H. Lee Florina H. Capistrano-Baker Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule. By Christina H. Lee. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,. 2021. Pp. xii, 216. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-190-91614-5.) A small statue of the Christ Child with a darkened face towers above the blurred images of devotees’ hands holding the divine image aloft. The main title (Saints of Resistance) in large white font against an orange background anchors the eyes as they travel below to the secondary title and author’s name. The evocative title and book jacket design entice the reader to explore the contents within. The book is organized in six chapters including the introduction (chapter 1) and conclusion [End Page 202] (chapter 6). Each of the four main chapters focuses on a particular Philippine devotion: Santo Niño de Cebu (chapter 2), Our Lady of Caysasay (chapter 3), Our Lady of the Rosary (chapter 4), and Our Lady of Antipolo (chapter 5). The font is reader-friendly, and the photographs, though black and white, are well chosen. The author, Christina Hyo-Jung Lee, is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work addresses cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Pacific. Born in South Korea and raised in Argentina, she immediately engages the reader with her introductory statements: My first visit to the Philippines was laced with simultaneous feelings of eerie familiarity and strangeness. I encountered reverberations of my Hispanic and Asian upbringing wherever I went (p. 1). The introduction includes a useful review of studies on iconographic devotions in the Spanish world in general, and in Spanish colonial Philippines in particular. Lee’s transpacific background, native fluency in the Spanish language, and meticulous scholarship generate important new interpretations and insights into popular Philippine devotions heretofore unexplored. For example, her careful rereading of primary sources interrogates conflicting translations of sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s original account of their encounter with the ruler Humabon and his wife on the Philippine island of Cebu. An important point of contention is whether the image now venerated as the Santo Niño de Cebu is indeed the icon that Magellan had gifted Humabon’s wife in 1521 (pp. 19–21). Combining contemporary field research in Cebu with critical re-reading of early Spanish accounts, Lee calls attention to competing narratives where local inhabitants claim the statue as their own, all versions claiming that the Spanish usurped a pre-existing local devotion by snatching the image away. The next three chapters on Our Lady of Caysasay, Our Lady of the Rosary, and Our Lady of Antipolo similarly explore how foreign icons and narratives are purposely appropriated as autochthonous phenomena and subsumed into the corpus of Filipino culture. Closely reading primary sources, Lee points to mechanisms that transform the narrative of European images into counter-hegemonic narratives and strategies of resistance. Lee concludes with the general observation that the santos discussed “were widely embraced by their followers . . . because their devotions embedded narratives that memorialized their communities’ survival and resistance amid impossible situations” (p. 132). Lee’s intriguing interpretations and engaging writing style, free of jargon that often plagues academic writing, encourage the reader to read the entire book in one sitting; and to re-read and ponder the ideas presented anew. I have advocated in previous publications for scholarly dialogue between “cultural insiders” and “cultural outsiders” to de-colonize and move forward the discourse [End Page 203] on global history. In studying Spanish colonial Philippine iconographic devotions, Lee occupies a liminal space between cultural insider and outsider, creating an intellectual bridge for both to meet. This book is useful for students and scholars of cultural history, art history, religious studies, and material religion. It is a must read for scholars of the sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century Spanish colonial period in the Philippines. Florina H. Capistrano-Baker Ayala Museum Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...