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New Age Spirituality
New Age and holistic beliefs and practices - sometimes called the "new spirituality" - are widely distributed across modern global society. The fluid and popular nature of new age makes these movements a very challenging field to understand using traditional models of religious analysis. Rather than treating new age as an exotic specimen on the margins of 'proper' religion, "New Age Spirituality" examines these movements as a form of everyday or lived religion. The book brings together an international range of scholars to explore the key issues: insight, healing, divination, meditation, gnosis, extraordinary experiences, and interactions with gods, spirits and superhuman powers. Combining discussion of contemporary beliefs and practices with cutting-edge theoretical analysis, the book repositions new age spirituality at the forefront of the contemporary study of religion.
Animals, Gods and Humans
Consulting a wide range of key texts and source material, Animals, Gods and Humans covers 800 years and provides a detailed analysis of early Christian attitudes to, and the position of, animals in Greek and Roman life and thought. Both the pagan and Christian conceptions of animals are rich and multilayered, and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus expertly examines the dominant themes and developments in the conception of animals. Including study of: biographies of figures such as Apollonus of Tyana; natural history; the New Testament via Gnostic texts; the church fathers; and from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice, to the acts of martyrs, the source material and detailed analysis included in this volume make it a veritable feast of information for all classicists.
The Archangel Michael in Africa
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand angels, focusing on Africa and the cult and persona of the Archangel Michael. Traditional methods in the study of religion including philology, papyrology, art and iconography, anthropology, history, and psychology are combined with methodologies deriving from memory studies, graphic design, art education, and semiotics. Chapters explore both historical and contemporary case studies from Coptic Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and South Africa, providing a comparative perspective on the Archangel Michael, alongside 25 images. Innovative in both its methodologies and geographical focus, this book is an important contribution to the study of religion and art, Christianity in Africa, and Coptic studies.
Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins
Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins analyses how laughter has been used as a symbol in myths, rituals and festivals of Western religions, and has thus been inscribed in religious discourse. The Mesopotamian Anu, the Israelite Jahweh, the Greek Dionysos, the Gnostic Christ and the late modern Jesus were all laughing gods. Through their laughter, gods prove both their superiority and their proximity to humans. In this comprehensive study, Professor Gilhus examines the relationship between corporeal human laughter and spiritual divine laughter from c`ussical antiquity, to the Christian West and the modern era. She combines the study of the history of religion with social-scientific approaches, to provide an original and pertinent exploration of a universal human phenomenon, and its significance for the development of religions.
New Age in Norway
This volume investigates "alternative" spiritualities that increasingly cater for the mainstream within the secularized society of Norway, making Norwegian-based research available to international scholarship. It looks at New Age both in a restricted (sensu stricto) and a wide sense (sensu lato), focusing mainly on the period from the mid 1990s and onwards, with a particular emphasis on developments after the turn of the century. Few, if any, of the ideas and practices discussed in this book are homegrown or uniquely Norwegian, but local soil and climate still matters, as habitats for particular growths and developments. Globalizing currents are here shaped and molded by local religious history and contemporary religio-political systems, along with random incidences, such as the setting up of an angel-business by the princess Märtha Louise. The position of Lutheran Protestantism as "national religion" particularly impacts on the development and perception of religious competitors.
The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion
This is the first comprehensive survey in English of research methods in the field of religious studies. It is designed to enable non-specialists and students at upper undergraduate and graduate levels to understand the variety of research methods used in the field. The aim is to create awareness of the relevant methods currently available and to stimulate an active interest in exploring unfamiliar methods, encouraging their use in research and enabling students and scholars to evaluate academic work with reference to methodological issues. A distinguished team of contributors cover a broad spectrum of topics, from research ethics, hermeneutics and interviewing, to Internet research and video-analysis. Each chapter covers practical issues and challenges, the theoretical basis of the respective method, and the way it has been used in religious studies, illustrated by case studies.
Enjoying Religion
“Enjoying religion” seems to be a contradiction because religion is generally perceived as a serious or even suppressive phenomenon. This volume is the first to study the increase of enjoying religion systematically by presenting eleven new case studies, occurring on four continents. The volume concludes that in our late modern secular societies the enjoyment of religion or of its loose elements is growing. In particular when scholars concentrate on “lived religion” of ordinary people, the cheerful experiences appear to prevail. Many people use pleasant (elements of) religion to add meaning to their lives, to find spiritual fulfillment or a way to salvation, and to experience belonging to a larger unity. At the same time, diverse cultural dynamics of late modern society such as popular culture, commercialization, re-enchantment, and feminization influence this trend of enjoying religion. In spite of secularization, playing with religion appears to be attractive.
Handbook of Nordic New Religions
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.
Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion
The chapters explore the possible development of a new scholarly synthesis for the study of religion, founded on the triadic space constituted by evolution, cognition, cultural and ecological environment. Chapters focus on either evolution, cognition, and/or the history of religion.
Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life
Vernacular religion is religion as people experience, understand, and practice it. It shapes everyday culture and disrupts the traditional boundaries between 'official' and 'folk' religion. The book analyses vernacular religion in a range of Christian denominations as well as in indigenous and New Age religion from the nineteenth century to today. How these differing expressions of belief are shaped by their individual, communal and national contexts is also explored. What is revealed is the consistency of genres, the persistence of certain key issues, and how globalization in all its cultural and technological forms is shaping contemporary faith practice. The book will be valuable to students of ethnology, folklore, religious studies, and anthropology.
