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The first major study of the famous Reclaiming community of witches, founded in 1979 in San Francisco. Examines gendered and religious identites and the communal and ritual processes of Reclaiming.
What roles do queer and transgender people play in the African diasporic religions? Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas is a groundbreaking scholarly exploration of this long-neglected subject. It offers clear insight into the complex dynamics of gender and sexual orientation, humans and deities, and race and ethnicity, within these richly nuanced spiritual practices. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions explores the ways in which gender complexity and same-sex intimacy are integral to the primary beliefs and practices of these faiths. It begins with a comprehensive overview of Vodou, Sante...
New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements is the most extensive study to date of modern American alternative spiritual currents. Hugh B. Urban covers a range of emerging religions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Nation of Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, ISKCON, Wicca, the Church of Satan, Peoples Temple, and the Branch Davidians. This essential text engages students by addressing major theoretical and methodological issues in the study of new religions and is organized to guide students in their learning. Each chapter focuses on one important issue involving a particular faith group, providing readers with examples that illustrate larger issues in the study ...
Taking up the challenge of Saba Mahmood to feminist studies in religion, that there is a liberalist understanding of agency and a tendency to mix the feminist political project with the analytical, the authors of this anthology discuss the relations between pieties and politics, pieties and methodologies, virtuous masculinities, and symbolic gender representations. Several articles discuss highly controversial questions: Muslim piety, religion in the European Union between the Vatican and the Muslim populations, the religiously motivated abstinence policies of the US. Furthermore, there is an interesting section about religious masculinities in a historical and contemporary perspective.
Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"
The Handbook of New Age is a comprehensive survey of alternative spiritualities: their history, their global impact, their cultural influence and how they are understood by scholars. Chapters by many of the leading scholars of the movement give the latest analysis of contemporary spiritual trends, and present up-to-date observations of the interaction between the New Age movement and many different fields of knowledge and research.
Researchers of Paganism from a variety of disciplines examine how they have been affected by their contact with this nontraditional religion, how this religion has been affected by academic researchers and what this reveals about participative research methods.
The past century has born witness to a growing interest in the belief systems of ancient Europe, with an array of contemporary Pagan groups claiming to revive these old ways for the needs of the modern world. By far the largest and best known of these Paganisms has been Wicca, a new religious movement that can now count hundreds of thousands of adherents worldwide. Emerging from the occult milieu of mid twentieth-century Britain, Wicca was first presented as the survival of an ancient pre-Christian Witch-Cult, whose participants assembled in covens to venerate their Horned God and Mother Goddess, to celebrate seasonal festivities, and to cast spells by the light of the full moon. Spreading t...
A popular new image of Witches has arisen in recent years, due largely to movies like The Craft, Practical Magic, and Simply Irresistible and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Charmed. Here, young sexy Witches use magic and Witchcraft to gain control over their lives and fight evil. Then there is the depiction in the Harry Potter books: Witchcraft is a gift that unenlightened Muggles (everyday people) lack. In both types of portrayals, being a Witch is akin to being a superhero. At the other end of the spectrum, wary adults assume that Witches engage in evil practices that are misguided at best and dangerous at worst. Yet, as Helen A. Berger an...
Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many c...