Vernacular Religion Research Articles

Koniec historii jako perspektywa hermeneutyczna w Księgach Królewskich

Because of its narrative-rhetorical character the Book of Kings is composed not as a history in modern sense, but as a text to read in such a way as to manifest its power to make deep impact on its readers. The hermeneutics of the end of history puts the question, what kind of events launch cause-effect chain which culminates in this end. Applied to the Book of Kings it shows a failure of a project to create a religious community in terms of political institution of monarchy. After the Babylonian exile Jewish religion has turned out to be separated from any political framework. In its narrative shape it moved from a vernacular religion into the specific religion of diaspora.

Agrarian rituals giving way to Romantic motifs: Sacred natural sites in Estonia

Semiotic mechanisms involving sacred natural sites – or areas of land or water with special spiritual significance – that have been focal points in agrarian vernacular religion have been transformed in modern Estonian culture. Some sites have accrued new significance as national monuments or tourist attractions and the dominant way of conceptualizing these sites has changed.Sacred natural sites should not be presumed to represent pristine nature. Rather, they are products of complex culture-nature interactions as they have been formed in the course of traditional land management as well as different semiotic practices, including ritual and conservationist ones. The existence of sites encompassed by the term defies and blurs the rigid distinction between nature and culture.Individual sacred natural sites and categories of such sites can act as signifiers for a variety of different signifieds concurrently, acting as confluences of different sign systems and thus exemplifying the creolization of these systems as well as bringing about the hybridization of different landscape traditions in certain loci.Estonian literary culture has adopted motifs and narratives that define sacred natural sites more readily from other literary traditions than from the Estonian vernacular tradition; in turn, the vernacular tradition has also adopted and assimilated literary Romantic motifs.

Review of: Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli, "Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan"

Review of: Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli, "Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan"

Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan. By Antoinette ElizabethDeNapoli. AAR Religion, Culture, and History Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 369; figures. Cloth $99.00, paper $35.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 41, Issue 4 p. 209-209 South Asia Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan. By Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli. AAR Religion, Culture, and History Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 369; figures. Cloth $99.00, paper $35.00. John E. Cort, John E. Cort Denison UniversitySearch for more papers by this author John E. Cort, John E. Cort Denison UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 December 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12265_5Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume41, Issue4December 2015Pages 209-209 RelatedInformation

Religion, Archaeology and Modern Calendar Buildings: A Study of Avon Tyrrell House in England

This paper will explore a modern example of the tradition of constructing cities and sacred sites as re?ections or embodiments of the sky. By creating spaces which were connected to the celestial bodies it was possible to create human communities which were linked to celestial ones, encouraging social stability and harmony. Such ideas underpinned traditions of the foundation of cities from China, through India, the Middle East and Mesoamerica. The paper focuses on Avon Tyrrell House, a substantial private residence which was designed and built in 1891–93. The architect, William Lethaby (1857–1931), was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and one of England’s leading modernists. The paper will frame discussion of the building within notions of the continuity of ancient traditions of solar symbolism in architecture, the consideration of function in the archaeology of the present and immediate past, and will refer to the theory of vernacular and material religion.

The Dead Who Become Angels

Some 21st-century mourners describe the deceased as becoming an angel. Using published research, along with opportunist and anecdotal sources, the following questions are explored: who becomes an angel? Who addresses them as angels? What do once-human angels do? What are they? Where and when are they encountered? And in what sense are they believed in? Once-human angels are found in cemeteries, in memorial tattoos, at the deathbed, but mainly online—both internet and angel are mediums or messengers linking this world and the next. Unlike passive souls cut off in heaven from the living, angels have agency, (a) continuing their earthly activities in heaven and (b) looking after those on earth who still need their care and guidance. The once-human angel thus expresses a continuing bond between the living and the dead, particularly important for younger mourners who may live many decades before joining the deceased in heaven. This notion is taught by neither churches nor popular culture; it is not a creedal belief, but an idea, a meme, that some mourners use—and creatively develop—in particular contexts and may be understood as vernacular religion.

DeNapoli, Antoinette Elizabeth: Real Sadhus Sing to God. Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan

Anthropos , Seite 612 - 613

Christianity, Plurality and Vernacular Religion in early Twentieth-Century Glastonbury: A Sign of Things to Come?

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.

Vernacular miracles: blood and bones in neapolitan religion

ABSTRACTNaples is a city run by miracles. Canonical miracles like the thrice-annual liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood, and vernacular miracles, like those effected by the capozzelle, anonymous skulls venerated at Fontanelle, the largest ossuary in Europe. Devotees visited these “little skulls” at the cemetery, cleaned them, adopted them into their families, even had them rebaptized. In return for these favors, the anime pezzentelle (vagabond souls) conjured by the skulls were expected to be conduits for divine favors or to provide more concrete benefits, like revealing winning lotto numbers in dreams. In the wake of Vatican II reforms, the Neapolitan archbishop denounced the anime pezzentelle cult as fetishism, and ordered the closure of Fontanelle, along with public access to the last two churches which still housed capozzelle. Based on field research in 1999, 2002, 2006, and 2013, I have documented the contest between the official church and partisans of the vernacular cult over the stewardship of the capozzelle, as well as the significance of this struggle for the practice of vernacular religion in Naples.

Eknāth in context: the literary, social, and political milieus of an early modern saint-poet1

This article attempts to envision the sixteenth-century brahman saint-poet, Eknāth of Paiṭhaṇ, in his historical context by plotting what is known about him over against recent scholarship on early modern India. Conventional scholarship classifies Eknāth as a bhakti poet. This label actually conceals more than it reveals, because the definition of bhakti is deceptively familiar, uncritically understood, and historiographically overburdened. Avoiding the term forces us to conceptualize Eknāth’s activities and significance in new ways. Exploration of his literary milieu shows how his Marathi compositions position themselves over against Sanskrit and reveals the disputed status of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a religious authority. Within his social milieu, stories of Eknāth’s caste boundary transgression are considered alongside recent scholarship on dharmasabhās and brahman migration patterns from the Deccan to Banaras. The political milieu section envisions Eknāth and his vernacular commitment in relation to the employment of Marathi-speaking brahmans by Deccan sultanate courts, which indirectly supported the development of Marathi vernacular culture. By considering Eknāth in his historical context, this article contributes to our understanding of vernacular religion, non-elite society, and the social location of brahmans in the Deccan sultanate, thereby offering a richer background and the means to a more critical examination of early modern devotional traditions.

Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief

Book Review| July 01 2014 Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief. Ed. Marion Bowman and Ülo Valk. (Bristol, CT: Equinox Press, 2012. Pp. 394, notes, photo illustrations, bibliography, index.). Cory Hutcheson Cory Hutcheson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2014) 127 (505): 357–359. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.127.505.0357 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cory Hutcheson; Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2014; 127 (505): 357–359. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.127.505.0357 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reintroducing the English Books of Hours, or “English Primers”

In 1956 Henry Hargreaves wrote a short notice that drew scholarly attention to a group of English translations of the Book of Hours: although he identified the translation of some of them as being drawn from the Wycliffite Bible, they have not been added to the lists of Wycliffite Bible manuscripts and no further research has been done on them. Scholarly acknowledgment of these books, and hesitation to study them, may be due to their troubling complexity. The English Hours pose a serious puzzle to modern scholarship on late medieval England. On one hand, the English Hours are an excellent introduction to the process through which a traditionally Latin text was transformed into an English one. On the other hand, they challenge our understanding of audiences for vernacular scripture in general and the Wycliffite Bible's text in particular and seem to contradict our understanding of the religious practices of people scholars call “Wycliffites” or “Lollards.” These are all reasons to reconsider this group of seventeen manuscripts as a key towards a more nuanced understanding of vernacular religion in fifteenth-century England.

Vernacular Religion, Contemporary Spirituality and Emergent Identities: Lessons from Lauri Honko

This article examines lessons which can still be learned from Professor Lauri Honko’s research and writings, particularly for those working at the interstices of folklore and religious studies who appreciate the mutually enriching relationship between the two fields which has been the hallmark of modern Finnish and Nordic scholarship. Three broad areas are considered here by way of illustration: the importance of studying belief and the continuing utility of genre as a tool of research; the use of folklore and material culture in the formation of cultural and spiritual identities in the contemporary milieu; and tradition ecology in relation to Celtic spirituality.

Vernacular Beliefs and Official Traditional Religion: The position and meaning of Mari worldview in the current context

Vernacular religion connected with the clan was expected to adapt in the context of globalisation and the vanishing ideals of traditional (tribal) societies. But at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a revival of European ‘paganism’ has appeared. A return to vernacular beliefs is not only happening in the mass religious mind of some Eastern European and Asian people, but also in the romantic mythologemes which are being created by national elites. Lithuanians, who were Christianised in the fourteenth century – the last nation in the Baltic region to undergo this process – recall their heathen roots; Ukrainians revive their rodnoverie – indigenous beliefs – in an attempt to resist the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Apart from this there are other pre-Christian faith organisations in Latvia, Estonia, Germany and England. The traditions of the pre-Christian societies attract people through their apparent proximity to communal peasant culture. Followers of some of these beliefs are interested in popularising Viking mythology. The activities of druids and adherents of the Northern European Asatru religion revive ancient festivals and ceremonies. The popularisation of these movements can be seen as an attempt to resist an encroachment of the modern, globalised, urbane society.

The Medieval Fate of Apocrypha Stories of First Century Women–the Marys

The Medieval Fate of Apocrypha Stories of First Century Women–the Marys Prof. Colleen Donnelly Abstract This article discusses evidence of the survival and transmission of non-canonical stories about the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene from the first centuries of Christianity (C.E.) to the Late Middle Agesand endeavors to illuminate the writtenoral textual tradition surrounding them, considering their appeal to a contemporary mediveal audience and the heretical challenges their stories presented to canonical Scripture. In looking at the plays available to lay Christian English audiences between 1350-1500, we not only see what materials were passed down through the centuries, we also have a window into the vernacular religion practices and beliefs at that time, as reflected in these texts. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v2n3a1

Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan by Jolyon Baraka Thomas (review)

Reviewed by: Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan by Jolyon Baraka Thomas Mark MacWilliams Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. By Jolyon Baraka Thomas. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. 216 pages. Hard-cover $60.00; softcover $25.00. The study of religion and American popular culture has blossomed in recent years, with a flood of fascinating scholarly publications on the presence of the sacred in pop music, media and celebrity culture, sports, comic books, film, and so on. In the case of Western studies of Japan, however, we find only a trickle of such works on Japanese popular culture, despite the fact that it is a potent form of “soft power” today throughout the world. Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s new book is a welcome contribution [End Page 156] to an area of study that, as he correctly notes, is still in its infancy. This short book explores how manga and anime authors, artists, directors, and the consuming public treat religion in ways ranging from “piety to playfulness” (p. 155). Thomas is absolutely correct to challenge scholars who would dismiss manga and anime as evidence of religious degeneration or decline. Rather, his key premise is that entertainment media like manga and anime can make religion relevant to a modern mass audience—at the very least to entertain, but also, at their best, to express artists’ deeply meaningful spiritual or religious ideas. Thomas sets out to answer what initially seemed to him a simple question: “Why—in light of Japan’s evident and often fervent secularism—were manga and anime with apparently religious themes so numerous and so popular?” (p. viii). It is an excellent question, and, as Thomas realized during the course of his research, a daunting one, not only because of the vast number of works requiring analysis but because of the amorphous character of what he calls contemporary Japanese “vernacular religion” (p. 13–14). This term usually refers to the way religion is lived and experienced in daily life apart from its more institutionalized and formalized aspects. Thomas argues that the term avoids applying the problematic categories of “folk” and “popular” religion to what goes on in manga and anime. However, exactly what Thomas means by “vernacular religion” remains obscure.1 Is he referring to something like Peter Brown’s “cult of the saints” in late Christian antiquity? Brown makes a persuasive case that the high festivals of the Christian martyrs served as a common religious framework for both rich and poor, and for ecclesiastics and laypeople alike. They all enjoyed these occasions—singing, dancing, and getting drunk—without feeling the need to imitate the austere moral way of those martyrs of God.2 These festivals, while not “religious” according to their ecclesiastical detractors, pointed to a new religiousness tied to a particular notion of the sacred; the participants experienced the saints as holy figures who, through God’s miracles, not only triumphed over suffering but transformed pain into its opposite. Ordinary Christians in late antiquity experienced the sanctification of pleasure as they enjoyed the spectacle of the saints’ festivals.3 That said, is Thomas arguing that one locus of the religious in modern Japanese culture is to be found in modern mass entertainment media like manga or anime? The answer is yes. When ecclesiastical authorities and lay entertainers create and use “media written in accessible language (and frequently augmented with images) to [End Page 157] encourage familiarity with religious vocabulary, imagery, and concepts,” they are, in his view, creating religion. Thomas notes that manga and anime, as forms of modern mass art, are powerful today because they can translate “formal religious ideas to quotidian (but not necessarily plebian) contexts” (p. 14). Here the comparison to Christian saints’ festivals becomes intriguing. The religious experience of watching anime and reading manga can move beyond traditional views to new notions of the sacred. Like saints’ festivals, manga and anime, while greatly entertaining, thereby provide meaningful religious content for their audiences. However, unlike saints’ festivals, there is no unitary cultic core to which manga and anime works are connected. So, what does Thomas mean by “vernacular religion”?4 In his introduction, “Religious Frames...

Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel (review)

Reviewed by: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Bradley Carter Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. By Jonathan H. Ebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. The paucity of scholarship addressing the role of U.S. religion in the First World War underscores that conflict’s secondary status in the American imagination, both popular and academic. As the centennial of the start of what was the twentieth century’s defining (and at the time humanity’s deadliest) conflict approaches, “the Great War” is garnering renewed attention. Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight is an important and welcome addition to a subject too long neglected. Faith in the Fight examines how various groups of Americans used religious “ideas, images, and beliefs” to make sense of the war, their involvement in it, and its inevitable life-changing and life-ending consequences (3). Noting that traditional studies “of America’s wars tend to ignore religion” and those of “religion tend to ignore war,” Ebel proposes to study the “religious thoughts and lives of soldiers and war workers” (both men and women) in order to “make more intelligible both . . . the appeal of war and memories of war, and the more specific religious and political events and movements in twentieth-century America” (3). This interdisciplinary approach, taking seriously the role of vernacular religion in wartime meaning-making, [End Page 73] is the work’s greatest strength. In eschewing an older “history of theology” approach, and an excessive focus on official, institutional religion in favor of a close reading of the “letters, diaries, and memoirs” of combatants and non-combatants alike—alongside popular wartime publications and other “public literature” such as “The Stars and Stripes”—and coupled with post war surveys, most notably one of “14,000 former soldiers, 2,400 of whom were African American,” Ebel demonstrates how religion “provided a vocabulary to help render the war experiences meaningful” (12, 16). Indeed, he illustrates how the “war provided an arena in which faith could be lived out” with religion simultaneously doing “a great deal of the work needed to romanticize war,” allowing “many soldiers to ignore or glorify war’s horrors” (16). Ebel’s work is at its best when limning the cultural contexts and constraints of sense-making. When exploring how notions of Progressive-era “muscular Christianity” informed notions of the Great War’s moral goodness, or how wartime ideas of redemptive violence were more problematic (and complex) for African Americans in Jim Crow America, Faith in the Fight excels. Ebel’s attention to racial differences in appropriating and applying a shared religious vocabulary within a DuBoisian “double consciousness” is illuminating. He notes how the “Christ imagined by black soldiers and war workers offered salvation in the midst of struggle, suffering and sorrow, but unlike the Christ proclaimed by many white soldiers did not require sanctification of the Pharaoh nation” (126). Indeed, the ability of vernacular religion to simultaneously enable wartime disappointment, disillusionment, and re-illusionment within and across differing racial and cultural-historical contexts represents the book’s greatest achievements. So too is Ebel’s chapter on the “Soldierly heaven,” “There Are No Dead” (145). Religion—institutional, as well as the popular, “lived” expressions at the heart of Ebel’s book—are understandably central to both contemporary and ex post facto endeavors to render sensible “the industrialized depersonalized violence” of the Great War (54). While Ebel is to be commended for going beyond the basic theological questions of theodicy (“why does God permit suffering?”) to show how “soldiers and war workers” made “sense of death and survival” (56), his appropriation of Rudolf Otto’s theology of the “Numinous” in the second chapter is perhaps the book’s weak point. That war’s horrific realities are often simultaneously “awful” and “awe-full” while (seemingly) resistant to ordinary sense-making—better suited to the deployment of religious vocabularies of transcendence and mysterium—should be obvious enough. Ebel’s otherwise thoughtful and provocative discussion is only slightly bogged down by this theological contextualization amidst an otherwise informative historical and cultural framework. Nevertheless, Faith in the Fight is a...

Women's ‘popular’ practices as critique: Vernacular religion in Indian and Pakistani Punjab

This article highlights women's popular spiritual practices in Punjab and examines how spiritual rituals and events performed, largely by women are either conveniently overlooked by religious authorities or seen as contentious by more rigid perspectives on religious belonging. By focusing upon women's participation and worship at spiritual sites and functions, attention is drawn to the continuum of practices that run between life-course rituals and acts of spiritual embodiment and worship, making it difficult to maintain such firm distinctions between cultural and religious practices. By focusing upon examples in Punjab, across India and Pakistan, the article suggests that there is an underlying vernacular spiritual culture in the region within which a cosmology of spiritual acts of belief occupies a central space. The article will draw upon secondary ethnographic studies as well as upon fieldwork conducted by the authors in developing a picture of women's ‘popular’ practices.

Enacting a virtual ‘ekklesia’: online Christian fundamentalism as vernacular religion

Based on the interactive features of websites, researchers have distinguished between ‘religion online’ and ‘online religion’.Approaching online religious expression as ‘vernacular religion’ can transcend the distinction by focussing on the lived experience of believers. In this study, qualitative interviews and close textual analysis are deployed to locate four traits that define the ‘vernacular ideology of Christian fundamentalism’. Tracing these traits in public discourse, they are seen to emerge as a set in the early 20th century. Collecting a sample of 40 sites, the traits are located in association with biblical prophecy. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with four individuals in the sample, linked websites connect individuals in a virtual ‘ekklesia’ based on their shared interest. Locating religion in lived experience instead of media artifacts, this research suggests that a limiting tendency found in this form of fundamentalism is the result of individual choices facilitated by network media.

The Dichotomy in Romano-Celtic Syncretism: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Vernacular Religion

The Dichotomy in Romano-Celtic Syncretism: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Vernacular Religion