Project MUSE®: Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of the American Academy of Religion.daily12024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 74 (2006) - vol. 75 (2007)Latest Articles: Journal of the American Academy of ReligionTWOProject MUSE®Journal of the American Academy of Religion1477-45850002-7189Latest articles in Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Theology and Modern Physics (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228400
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The sixth in the Ashgate series on Science and Religion, edited by such notables as Roger Trigg (UK) and J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen (United States), Peter E. Hodgson’s surveys the historical interactions between Christian theology and modern science in Western culture. The West signifies Europe, North America, Japan, and other developed countries (221). The genealogy follows the advancement of Christian theology and modern science as developments of Jewish–Christian sources and Greek philosophy and natural philosophy. Christian theology and modern science characterize the unique cultural identity of Western civilization, making possible its highest achievement, namely, modern physics. The twelve chapters of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallTheology and Modern Physics (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USTheology and Modern Physics (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®160902024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228401
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This volume, in memory of Gilles Quispel (1916–2006), contains a Preface and an introductory essay by the editor, seventeen essays divided into five parts (Hermeneutics and Experience, Communal Identities, Cosmology, Apocalypticism, and Practices), a bibliography, a list of contributors, and two indices. An overview of the work by a group of scholars, the book marks the tenth anniversary of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. April D. DeConick’s introductory essay suggests that the Christian mysticism of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods is really “Jewish,” which seems justified in terms of the book’s contents (2). On the same page, the first—and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallParadise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USParadise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®120472024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228402
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Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds attempts to offer a comprehensive linear history of Jewish martyrdom, beginning in the Hellenistic period and extending through the European High Middle Ages. Shmuel Shepkaru, following Bowersock and others, argues that the concept of martyrdom is not indigenous to Hellenistic Judaism but is rather a Christian notion germinated in the soil of Roman culture and later transplanted into Judaism. From this account of conceptual origins, Shepkaru structures his chapters around traditional periodization [Hellenistic Judaism (represented by Philo, Josephus, 4 Macc.), the era of the rabbis, and the Byzantine period], coming to focus more intensively in the subsequent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallJewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USJewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®59612024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Prospects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228403
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THE PAST DECADES have been challenging for the study of religion. I would sum up two of those challenges written in neon: religious extremism and religious pluralism. The first great challenge that has reshaped our field is the increasing visibility and violence of many radical religious and political-religious movements around the globe. The word “fundamentalist” is sometimes used as shorthand for the energies of these movements, but we know that “fundamentalism” is inadequate to the analytic task, and this is the first thing scholars who study these movements will say. Powerful extremist movements of various kinds have seized the headlines, to be sure; they have created the polarizations, the turbulence
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallProspects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion2008-01-02text/htmlen-USProspects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1289722024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Erratum: Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228404
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Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism
On page 615 of volume 75
, in the Abstract, the third sentence should read as follows. Before their embrace of spiritualism in the early 1850s both John Edmonds, the President of the Prison Association of New York, and Eliza Farnham, an advocate of phrenology, modified Sing Sing’s evangelical approach to penology.
On page 625, first word of first sentence of first full graph should be Gustave.
The publisher regrets these errors.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallErratum: Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism2008-01-02text/htmlen-USErratum: Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®19212024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228405
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This volume arose in the context of a conference on religions and animals at Harvard University in 1999. It contains nearly fifty articles, including two interviews. The authors are specialists in a wide range of fields: religion, theology, philosophy, cultural studies, ethics, biology, zoology, veterinary science, psychology, and law. The editors of the volume are Paul Waldau, who is director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and Kimberley Patton, who is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.
The volume is divided into eleven main parts. They include articles about animals in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallA Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USA Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®112832024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 859–1150 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228406
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Valerie Ramseyer has written an excellent and, in many ways, exemplary study of the religious communities of the Principality of Salerno that will be of value to all historians of premodern Christianity. Transformation is a careful analysis of the process of social change and ecclesial reform in Salerno within the context of these same processes in southern Italy in general. The work is divided into two halves. The first considers “the decentralized ecclesiastical system in the Lombard Principality of Salerno up through the mid-eleventh century” (3). The second centers on the abbey of the Holy Trinity in Cava, just north of Salerno, and on the archbishopric of Salerno itself during this period of both Norman
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallThe Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 859–1150 (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USThe Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 859–1150 (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®103922024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228407
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With a noble goal to be accessible to an average undergraduate student, the introductory volumes to any field often end up being too basic in content and bland in conceptual framework. Staying on the level of fundamentals, most authors of such volumes reveal precious little of their own views about the theories, methods, and debates of the field they discuss. As a result, the reading of “Introductions to…” is usually a rather painful task for anyone, but particularly for the more educated reader.
Inger Furseth and Pål Repstad’s Introduction to the Sociology of Religion saves us from all of the above. In addition to providing a clear overview of the sociological study of religion, past and present
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallAn Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USAn Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®107912024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228408
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This impressive text offers a fresh look at nineteenth-century Protestant theology. Quietly challenging a model of intellectual history that fixates on the signal contributions of “great minds,” Thomas Albert Howard proposes that modern Protestant thought be understood in terms of the modern German university. He argues, more specifically, that state superintendence of German universities played a decisive role in shaping a theology beholden to the rigors of Wissenschaft. As a consequence, by around 1900 there had arisen a “theology truly remarkable in the history of Christian thought for its detachment from creedal and ecclesial interests” (27), the international renown of which coincided, ironically, with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallProtestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USProtestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®129342024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228409
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In recent years, the daily news has demanded analysis of religious rhetoric. So too have American electoral realities. Advocacy groups that once kept their fastidious distance from religion now assign staff to figure out how religious rhetoric might work for them. Frequently, though not as frequently as we might like, journalists and advocates turn to scholars of religion for help. We cannot often give them what they want—at least not with a clear conscience. Many scholars of religion have no account of rhetoric to give. They have never thought of it except dismissively. ‘Rhetoric’ remains for many of us too a pejorative term.
It follows that a scholarly book on religious rhetoric has to begin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallGod Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USGod Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®111942024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Blasphemy: Art that Offends (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228410
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Blasphemy: Art that Offends is a magnificent book—“magnificent” in the etymological sense of “greatly made” (magnus+facere) and splendid in appearance. The text—informative and presented with essayistic eloquence—is lavishly illustrated with high-quality reproductions of pictures, ranging in display size from full double pages to smaller insets surrounding the text. Each page is designed particularly to the needs of the illustrations and text segments, yet the visual cohesion is not lost throughout the book. It makes for a pleasurable act of reading/viewing.
Blasphemy aims at bringing to attention the contracted issue of blasphemy—the kind of art that has been perceived as violating religious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallBlasphemy: Art that Offends (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USBlasphemy: Art that Offends (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®141912024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228411
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In this important book, Andrew T. Crislip draws on a wide range of documentary and narrative sources to explore the ways in which health care was an integral component of monastic life. He argues that the monastic innovation of a “structured health care system was not only important for the growth of the early monastic movement, it was fundamentally transformative of Late Ancient health care as a whole” (8). Acknowledging the varieties of monasticism that characterize this early period, Crislip focuses his own inquiry on the Egyptian desert. He concludes that the recognizable infirmaries of an early monastic frame were “the template for the late antique hospital, which emerged in the 370s” (8). Health care
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallFrom Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USFrom Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®112552024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, and: Thinking about Religion: A Reader (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228412
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One could do a lot worse with one’s scholarly time than spend several days immersed in Ivan Strenski’s Thinking About Religion. Aimed at an introductory course in the study of religion, Strenski’s two volumes—An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion and A Reader—provide engaging commentary for anyone in the field who would like a quick refresher on the epic modern European conversations on nature, gods, Bibles, and primitives; on Semites and Indo-Europeans, totems, and taboos; on Bronislaw Malinowski’s critique of James Frazer, Robertson Smith’s commitment to ethnography, and the historical and phenomenological influences at work in the writings of Max Weber. Both volumes revolve around the motif
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallThinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, and: Thinking about Religion: A Reader (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USThinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, and: Thinking about Religion: A Reader (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®199402024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02For Church or Nation? Islamism, Secular-Nationalism, and the Transformation of Christian Identities in Palestine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228413
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SINCE THE STATE OF ISRAEL’S establishment in 1948, the Palestinian Christian minority has suffered sharp numerical losses. The hemorrhaging, which intensified after the Six-Day War of June 1967, has remained unstaunched during the past two decades of mass uprisings and failed peace negotiations aimed at ending Israeli domination. Many Christians now openly fear the death of their communities as whole families depart for Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Those who remain must contend not only with the entrenched violence of the forty-year-old Israeli occupation but also a resurgent Islamist politics, which has shattered the once-dominant secular-nationalist consensus and transformed for many the content
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallFor Church or Nation? Islamism, Secular-Nationalism, and the Transformation of Christian Identities in Palestine2008-01-02text/htmlen-USFor Church or Nation? Islamism, Secular-Nationalism, and the Transformation of Christian Identities in Palestine2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1531942024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228414
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Francis Ambrosio’s remarkable study of Dante/Derrida follows Derrida in order to read Dante better and follows Dante in order to recognize Derrida as our contemporary Virgil (13). Dante and Derrida criss-cross each other, converging at the end in the Forgiveness, which is before but from the “Gift of Death.” Ambrosio’s book contributes much brilliance to what is fast becoming the stylish turn among Catholic philosophers numbered among those whom some name all too simply the “right-wing” Derrideans (see Geoffrey Bennington’s discussion, Interrupting Derrida, 2000, pp. 225, 226). I have objections to the modish turn Ambrosio takes, and these I shall indicate later, but that he knows his Dante well, and his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallDante and Derrida: Face to Face (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USDante and Derrida: Face to Face (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®127612024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Retheorizing Religion in Nepal (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228415
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This short, elegant, theoretically dense book provides an excellent challenge for students in religious studies. Gregory Price Grieve demonstrates that ethnographically informed studies of religion must supplement, if not displace, scriptural studies, otherwise history, individual experience, agency, and everyday practice are all lost, yet all are required if we wish to unpack multivalued concepts such as “dharma,” or, for that matter, “religion” itself. The discipline’s traditionally top-heavy reliance on texts must be counterbalanced by participant observation and committed fieldwork, both of which fully inform this study, done in Bhaktapur, one of the three major cities of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallRetheorizing Religion in Nepal (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USRetheorizing Religion in Nepal (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®104652024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Editor's Note: JAAR Letter of Apology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228416
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IN THE MARCH 2007 issue (75[1]) of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, we published a review of two books, The Hindu World and The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, which did not meet the criteria by which we at the JAAR seek to hold ourselves accountable.
Apart from poor editorial control of the review itself, what is crucial is that the review was done by a person with no recognized scholarly competency in the field of religious studies, let alone in the area of South Asian religions.
This review, written by a non-specialist, should not have passed muster with us, nor should it have gone through our review processes without its inadequacies being caught. That it did—that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallEditor's Note: JAAR Letter of Apology2008-01-02text/htmlen-USEditor's Note: JAAR Letter of Apology2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®29602024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Putting Some Class into Religious Studies: Resurrecting an Important Concept
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228417
<p></p>
After the 2004 american presidential election, print and television media touted the importance of “moral values” in giving the Republican George Bush a second term. Those religious conservatives known as Evangelicals, the much-repeated story went, overwhelmingly backed Bush over the Democrat John Kerry because they perceived him as sharing their conservative Christian values (Seelye 2004: P4). While this claim made the news cycle for months, polling data suggested a more complex story. Researchers found that “moral values” actually ranked low on the list of items predicting the vote (Langer and Cohen 2005). Individual votes were instead correlated with a familiar selection of demographic factors: race
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallPutting Some Class into Religious Studies: Resurrecting an Important Concept2008-01-02text/htmlen-USPutting Some Class into Religious Studies: Resurrecting an Important Concept2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1113442024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Words, Words, Words
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228418
<p></p>
What do you read, my lord?
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the arrival of a new generation of handbooks—as opposed to dictionaries (e.g., von Stuckrad 2005), encyclopedias (e.g., Jones 2005; Betz et al., 2006), and even essay collections on the field (e.g., Antes et al., 2004). These handbooks owe something to Critical Terms for Literary Study (Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1990; 2nd ed. 1995), a hard-hitting (though, admittedly, still largely “Western” in its focus) source for essays on such common lit crit topics as author, canon, discourse, text, etc. In turn, it is likely Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published just over thirty years ago ([1976] 1983;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallWords, Words, Words2008-01-02text/htmlen-USWords, Words, Words2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1446542024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228419
<p></p>
The exponential growth of the Latino/a population in the United States as well as the heated public debate surrounding immigration reform make the topic of this book timely and worthy of scholarly exploration. The focus on Catholicism is particularly appropriate inasmuch as Latinos/as—approximately 70% of whom identify as Catholic—now constitute a new cultural, linguistic, and ethnic plurality within the U.S. Catholic Church. David Badillo addresses this reality primarily through the lenses of four cities: San Antonio, New York, Chicago, and Miami. Through focused interdisciplinary attention to these urban areas, he seeks to trace developments in U.S. Latino Catholicism by telling the stories of Mexican
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallLatinos and the New Immigrant Church (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USLatinos and the New Immigrant Church (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®124322024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228420
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This volume provides a solid and accessible introduction to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s thought and to the newest research on his work by established scholars in the field. These new readings offer the non-specialist a chance to move beyond outdated interpretations and caricatures of Schleiermacher and to gain a more solid and sophisticated grasp of his work on its own terms. The volume yields a set of insights that challenge, for example, common criticisms of his conception of religion: namely, that it is rooted in an essentialist appeal to a private, individual, and non-conceptual experience. In addition to problematizing this accusation, the contributors give a more rounded portrait of Schleiermacher’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallThe Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USThe Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®156782024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228421
<p></p>
The study of confraternities and sodalities is a deeply furrowed field in European history. With foundational studies by Louis Châtellier and Christopher Black, and more specialized studies of Nicholas Terpstra, Brian Pullan, Richard Trexler, Edward Muir, and Ronald Weissman, one wonders whether another work on such institutions is necessary, but this solid, informative work by Lance Gabriel Lazar manages to be a welcome contribution to the increasing studies of civic ritual and early modern “confessionalization” (confessionalisierung). Although he focuses on Jesuit confraternities like many other researchers, Lazar studies the Jesuits’ earliest confraternities rather than the Marian congregations and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallWorking in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USWorking in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®102652024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Pinned on Karma Rock: Whitewater Kayaking as Religious Experience
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228422
<p></p>
DEDICATED WHITEWATER KAYAKERS spend most weekends—if not every available moment—seeking out fast water and big drops, “running the gnar.”1 Many boaters specifically understand their experiences as religious, or perhaps, spiritual: responding to my query on this topic, a friend answered, “well, of course it is.”2 For most of my life, I have intuitively considered outdoor recreation to be a form of religious practice. However, the recognition that many paddlers used language and concepts from Asian (and sometimes indigenous) traditions to describe their experience encouraged me to seriously consider how whitewater kayaking functioned as religious experience—and how kayaking as religious experience differed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallPinned on Karma Rock: Whitewater Kayaking as Religious Experience2008-01-02text/htmlen-USPinned on Karma Rock: Whitewater Kayaking as Religious Experience2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®765182024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228423
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“A little band of dedicated Thoreauvians,” E. B. White once remarked, “would be a sorry sight indeed.” Thoreau is an unusual figure because even his admirers find him an uncomfortable presence—a regular hairshirt of a man, White dubbed him. Thoreau is that pang in your conscience reminding you that your barn, or house, or car is far bigger than it needs to be. Yet readers of Walden often close the book wondering what, if anything, Thoreau would have us do. Are we to emulate his trek into the woods? He clearly discourages conformity. And if somehow we all followed his lead, what would become of community? Perhaps it is enough to heed, in a more tempered way, the Thoreauvian mantra, “Simplicity, simplicity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallAt Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USAt Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®138062024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02New Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228424
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Reflecting on religion and fly fishing, Tom McGuane wrote that “humans have suspected” their connection “for thousands of years” (McGuane 1999: xiv). In the book A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean’s family held that very suspicion, believing there existed “no clear line between fishing and religion” (Maclean 1976: 1). Although Maclean connected fly fishing to Christianity, other fly fishers often perceive fly fishing itself as a religious or spiritual activity John Randolph, the long-time editor of Fly Fisherman, fly fishing’s premier magazine, does not hesitate to call fly fishing a religion and in doing so, he cites a popular statistic that not only is it a sport practiced by several million people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallNew Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature2008-01-02text/htmlen-USNew Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1150072024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Zero Tolerance? Sikh Swords, School Safety, and Secularism in Québec
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228425
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ON 18 NOVEMBER 2001, 12-year-old Sikh student Gurbaj Singh Multani was playing outside his Montreal school, when his kirpān or ceremonial dagger dislodged from its sheath and fell to the ground. Unaware that the kirpān is an article of faith that all amritdhāri or “baptized” Sikhs must wear as a perpetual marker of religious identity, a concerned parent reported the incident to the school principal. The principal, in turn, invoked the school’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons and sent Gurbaj home. Yet even as awareness of the kirpān’s religious significance spread, opposition to Gurbaj’s wearing it mounted. Although the controversy over kirpāns in Québec public schools was unanimously resolved by the Supreme
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallZero Tolerance? Sikh Swords, School Safety, and Secularism in Québec2008-01-02text/htmlen-USZero Tolerance? Sikh Swords, School Safety, and Secularism in Québec2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1036612024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Focus Introduction: Aquatic Nature Religion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228426
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THE FOLLOWING THREE ESSAYS are studies of what we can call “Aquatic Nature Religion.”
That water is an important physical and conceptual resource in religious life should be unsurprising, for only air is more critical to the sustaining of life. Water may be perceived as sacred or defiled, either intrinsically or at the hands of either mortal or mortal beings, as when a Priest, through the power of God, consecrates water for purifying rituals. Whether water is scarce or plentiful, pristine or polluted, the places where it is accessed are often considered sacred. Pilgrimages to such places, and practices undertaken there, are often religiously meaningful and sometimes obligatory.
Some
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallFocus Introduction: Aquatic Nature Religion2008-01-02text/htmlen-USFocus Introduction: Aquatic Nature Religion2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®731912024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228427
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I am the ocean
And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the Waters
ON A SUNNY NOVEMBER DAY in 1997, I played hooky from the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting in San Diego, California. The surf was up and I was soon chatting with a young woman at a surf shop, deciding which board to rent. When she learned I was formerly an ocean lifeguard from the region, transplanted to Wisconsin, she exclaimed, “Whoa dude, no amount of money is worth living away from Mother Ocean.”
As anyone experienced with surfing cultures can attest, including surfers themselves, “Surfing isn’t easily categorized. It is based in sport, but can drift into art, vocation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallSurfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion2008-01-02text/htmlen-USSurfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®1285182024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Habermas and Theology (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228428
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At the beginning of Habermas and Theology, Nicholas Adams asks, “How can there be argument between members of different traditions?” and notes that “this is arguably the most important question in contemporary moral philosophy and theology” (1). With that question in mind, Adams pursues an engagement with Jürgen Habermas, possibly the most significant contributor to a theory of public argument in modern times. The book offers a critical treatment of Habermas that aims, finally, to present an alternative picture of argument across traditions using the model of “scriptural reasoning,” a fairly recent development among representatives of the three Abrahamic religions. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallHabermas and Theology (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USHabermas and Theology (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®128622024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/228429
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In Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China, Gray Tuttle approaches the issue of the relationship between China and Tibet from two innovative perspectives. First, relying on both Tibetan and Chinese sources, he focuses on the interaction between Chinese governments (from the Qing to the end of the republican period) and Tibet rather than on the theme of independence. By shifting the focus from oppression and resistance, he offers a view of Sino-Tibetan interactions that highlights goals pursued and strategies deployed by the two parties in negotiating terms of coexistence in the changing regional context of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Second, Tuttle widens the debate on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/350/image/coversmallTibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (review)2008-01-02text/htmlen-USTibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (review)2008-01-022008TWOProject MUSE®119152024-03-29T00:00:00-05:002008-01-02