When James R. Lewis, one of the editors of the current collection, first moved to Norway in late 2009, he was unprepared to discover that so many researchers in Nordic countries were producing ...innovative scholarship on new religions and on the new age subculture. In fact, over the past dozen years or so, an increasingly disproportionate percentage of new religions scholars have arisen in Nordic countries and teach at universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Baltic countries. Nordic New Religions, co-edited with Inga B. Tøllefsen, surveys this rich field of study in this area of the world, focusing on the scholarship being produced by scholars in this region of northern Europe.
An illuminating account of the steadfast resilience of rural popular culture in post-Mao China
Lin Zhao’en (1517–1598) set out to popularize Confucianism by combining Confucian studies ...with Daoist inner alchemical techniques and Buddhist Chan philosophy into something he called the Three in One Teachings. Despite periods of clandestine activity since its inception, the Three in One cult has undergone a remarkable revival in post-Mao China. Today, in more than a thousand temples by tens of thousands of cult initiates, Lin is worshipped throughout Southeast China and Southeast Asia as Lord of the Three in One. Many of the temples have been restored since the late 1970s, when China began to experience an explosive resurgence of popular culture and religion. In this book, Kenneth Dean draws on a decade of field work to document the reemergence of this cult, which seeks to transmit a universal vision of truth yet retains a strong local appeal through its healing rituals and spirit mediumism. Although the Chinese government still tries to suppress these resurgences in the interest of modernization, the cult’s locally based networks are unstoppable social forces.
Dean explores the organization and transmission of the Three in One’s unique cultural vision, the reception of this vision, and the construction of subjectivity within a vibrant ritual tradition. Outlining such features as inner alchemical meditation, scripture and iconography, ritual practice, and spirit mediumism, he demonstrates the cult’s transformative potential as well as its contemporaneity and dynamism. Rural Chinese popular culture emerges here as resilient, highly complex, and always evolving.
Society of the dead Ochoa, Todd Ramón
2010., 20100918, 2010, 2010-10-28, 20100101
eBook
In a riveting first-person account, Todd Ramón Ochoa explores Palo, a Kongo-inspired "society of affliction" that is poorly understood at the margins of Cuban popular religion. Narrated as an ...encounter with two teachers of Palo, the book unfolds on the outskirts of Havana as it recounts Ochoa's attempts to assimilate Palo praise of the dead. As he comes to terms with a world in which everyday events and materials are composed of the dead, Ochoa discovers in Palo unexpected resources for understanding the relationship between matter and spirit, for rethinking anthropology's rendering of sorcery, and for representing the play of power in Cuban society. The first fully detailed treatment of the world of Palo, Society of the Dead draws upon recent critiques of Western metaphysics as it reveals what this little known practice can tell us about sensation, transformation, and redemption in the Black Atlantic.
Religion is alive and well in the modern world, and the social-scientific study of religion is undergoing a renaissance. For much of this century, respected social theorists predicted the death of ...religion as inevitable consequence of science, education, and modern economics. But they were wrong.
Stark and Bainbridge set out to explain the survival of religion. Using information derived from numerous surveys, censuses, historical case studies, and ethnographic field expeditions, they chart the full sweep of contemporary religion from the traditional denominations to the most fervent cults. This wealth of information is located within a coherent theoretical framework that examines religion as a social response to human needs, both the general needs shared by all and the desires specific to those who are denied the economic rewards or prestige enjoyed by the privileged. By explaining the forms taken by religions today, Stark and Bainbridge allow us to understand its persistence in a secular age and its prospects for the future,
La religione sociniana Imbruglia, Girolamo
Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken,
11/2022, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Abstract The argument of this article is twofold: first, it defines Socinianism as neither a kind of Deism nor a Christian heresy but as a new modern religion of the Renaissance; second, and ...consequently, treating Socinianism as a religion, this article inquires into the nature of Socinian cult and community. This latter point has been largely neglected by the scholarship. In the century between Faustus Socinus’s „De Christo Servatore“ (1584) and Wissowatius’ catechism (1684), the Socinians changed some of the major tenets of their theory of religio , in particular Socinus’s refutation of the idea of religious sacrifice. This article shows that this theoretical shift, caused by the disputes between Grotius and Crell, was reflected in the different editions of the Socinian catechism. The catechism of 1609, still faithful to Socinus’s ideas, in the 1659 and 1684 editions saw radical changes, accepting the Grotian theory of satisfactio though Faustus Socinus himself had defended the need for a form of cultus , Socinianism was unable to define it and thus did not become a sect, as the Socinians aimed to do but failed to achieve.
New religious movements—commonly known as cults—are defined as organizations that have arisen within the last 200 years. Most treatments of these movements have typically resorted to sensationalism ...rather than objectivity, and New religious movements tend to receive negative media publicity. Despite their unfavorable portrayal in popular culture, however, new religious movements are a global phenomenon and much remains to be studied about these movements. In this newly updated second edition of the Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements, George D. Chryssides traces the rise and development of new religious movements throughout the world. An updated introduction summarizes the phenomenon of new religious movements and lays out the changes to the dictionary since the 2001 edition, while the main body of the dictionary consists of close to 600 cross-referenced entries on key figures, ideas, themes, and places related to various new religious movements. An index organizes the information in the dictionary, and a comprehensive bibliography leads the researcher to further sources. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about new religious movements.
This volume brings together the insights of theories of management and marketing to give an original, alternative view of the organizational dynamics of globalizing Asian New Religious Movements ...(NRMs) and established religions. It also provides insights into the way the traditional religions are fighting back as they lose numbers to NRMs and are forced to adopt innovative proselytizing strategies and a new global mindset. In order to develop this path-breaking theoretical perspective on globalizing Asian religions, eleven authors in this collection have recast their original empirical data on individual Asian religions to focus on the way these organizations are managed in an overseas or global context, by examining the structure, organizational culture, management style, leadership principles and marketing strategies of the religious movements they had hitherto studied from the perspective of the sociology of religion, or religious studies. Others have adopted a national, regional or global focus in relation to the transnational reach of specifically Japanese religions in North and South America, the EU and Africa. The book examines strategies for global proselytization in a variety of local ethnographic contexts, and thus contributes to the scholarly work on the "glocalisation" of religions.
In The Impact of the Roman Empire on The Cult of Asclepius Ghislaine van der Ploeg offers an analysis of the cult of Asclepius during the Roman imperial period and how worship was adapted and ...disseminated at this time.
