Ancient authors debated proper verbal and non-verbal signs as representations of divinity. These understanding of signs were based on ideas drawn from language and thus limited due to a their partial understanding of the multi-functionality of signs. Charles S. Peirce's semiotics, as adapted by anthropological linguists including Michael Silverstein, better explains the contextual linkages ("performativity") of ancient religious signs such as divine names. Sign meaning is always dependent on processes of interpretation and is always open to reinterpretation. Focusing on these processes permits a more detailed analysis of the ancient evidence. Examples are drawn from ancient Israelite verbal and non-verbal divine representation, the apostle Paul's linguistic letter/spirit model, Christian debates about the limits of language to best represent the deity, Josephus' aniconic advertisement of Jewish rites, the multi-layered divine representations in the Dura-Europos synagogue, the diverse "performativity" of Jewish ascent liturgies, and-the single modern example-the role of art at Burning Man. Divine representation is the basis for ritual efficacy even as sign meaning is a constant source of contention.

Once relegated to the private sphere, or confined to its own section of the newspaper, religion is now a major part of daily news coverage. Every journalist needs a basic knowledge of religion to cover everything from presidential elections to the war in Iraq to the ethical issues raised by latest developments in medical research. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media will be the go-to volume for both secular and religious journalists and journalism educators, scholars in media studies, journalism studies, religious studies, and American studies. Comprised of six sections, the first examines how the history of the mass media and the role religion played in its growth. The second looks at how the major media formats - print, broadcast, and online - deal with religion. The next two examines how journalists cover major religious traditions and particular issues that have religion angles. The fifth examines the religious press, from the Christian Broadcasting Network to The Forward. The final section looks at how the American press covers the rest of the world.

In this book, Munyaradzi Felix Murove explores African traditional ethical resources for African politics. Arguing that African ethics is integral to African post-colonial political contentious discourse, Murove invites the reader to reflect on various problematic political issues in post-colonial Africa and how African ethics has been applied in these situations. Starting with a succinct discussion of the scope of African ethics, he discusses how African ethical values have been applied by post-colonial politicians in the reconstruction of their societies. Further, Murove looks critically at the issue of African poverty and how the ethic of regional integration and economic cooperation among post-colonial African nation-states has been instrumental to efforts aimed at overcoming the scourge of poverty. The main question this book seeks to answer is: Are African traditional ethical values a panacea to modern African political problems?

In times of crises, be it about climate change, the pandemic corona virus, or democratic struggles, there is an unwaning interest worldwide in the end of times and related themes such as apocalypticism, messianism, and utopianism. This concerns scholarship and society alike, and is by no means limited to the religious field. The present volume collates essays from specialists in the study of apocalyptic and eschatological subjects. With its interdisciplinary approach, it is designed to overcome the existing Euro-centrism and incorporate a broader perspective to the topic of end time expectations in the Christian Middle Ages as well as in East Asia and Africa. Contributors include: Gaelle Bosseman, Wolfram Brandes, Matthias Gebauer, Jurgen Gebhardt, Vincent Goossaert, Klaus Herbers, Matthias Kaup, Bernardo Bertholin Kerr, Thomas Krumpel, Richard Landes, Zhao Lu, Rolf Scheuermann, and Julia Eva Wannenmacher.

Is there such a thing as natural knowledge of God? C. Stephen Evans presents the case for understanding theistic arguments as expressions of natural signs in order to gain a new perspective both on their strengths and weaknesses. Three classical, much-discussed theistic arguments - cosmological, teleological, and moral - are examined for the natural signs they embody. At the heart of this book lie several relatively simple ideas. One is that if there is a God of the kind accepted by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, then it is likely that a 'natural' knowledge of God is possible. Another is that this knowledge will have two characteristics: it will be both widely available to humans and yet easy to resist. If these principles are right, a new perspective on many of the classical arguments for God's existence becomes possible. We understand why these arguments have for many people a continued appeal but also why they do not constitute conclusive 'proofs' that settle the debate once and for all. Touching on the interplay between these ideas and contemporary scientific theories about the origins of religious belief, particularly the role of natural selection in predisposing humans to form beliefs in God or gods, Evans concludes that these scientific accounts of religious belief are fully consistent, even supportive, of the truth of religious convictions.

In this study of the ritual of animal sacrifice in ancient Greek religion, Judaism, and Christianity in the period between 100 BC and AD 200, Maria-Zoe Petropoulou explores the attitudes of early Christians towards the realities of sacrifice in the Greek East and in the Jerusalem Temple (up to AD 70). Contrary to other studies in this area, she demonstrates that the process by which Christianity finally separated its own cultic code from the strong tradition of animal sacrifice was a slow and difficult one. Petropoulou places special emphasis on the fact that Christians gave completely new meanings to the term sacrifice'. She also explores the question why, if animal sacrifice was of prime importance in the eastern Mediterranean at this time, Christians should ultimately have rejected it.

This timely book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, and communities and sacred symbols. It presents parallels and contrasts between religious emotions in European and American history, in other cultures, and in contemporary western societies. By taking emotions seriously, A Sociology of Religious Emotion sheds new light on the power of religion to shape fundamental human orientations and motivations: hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds.

This book explores the fascinating world of religious hair observances within six religious traditions that account for 77% of the world's adherents: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Symbolic use of hair has been, and remains, prevalent in all six and carries significant amounts of religious and social meaning. Hair is a unique body substance. It can be shaped and colored, removed from us without pain but still retain an individual's essence, signal our age, sex, and sexual maturity, and much, much more. The book's approach is to situate each practice within its tradition. That requires a study of its foundational leaders and their teachings, sacred texts (where they mention hair), its rites and rituals, ideas of religious power and subsequent historical development. Contemporary practitioners are interviewed for their motivations. Even more insight can be gleaned by searching beyond an overt religious purpose. Social scientists from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related fields bring their research to deliver added perceptions. The author reveals how hair practices are created from ancient psychological and cultural impulses, become modified by time, culture and religious intent, and are adopted by adherents for reasons ranging from personal religious expression to group identity. This book is written for the interested observer of our increasingly diverse society and for the student of comparative religion and sociology. It will change forever how you see hair.

The term ''mysticism'' has never been consistently defined or employed, either in religious traditions or in academic discourse. The essays in this volume offer ways of defining what mysticism is, as well as methods for grappling with its complexity in a classroom.
This volume addresses the diverse literature surrounding mysticism in four interrelated parts. The first part includes essays on the tradition and context of mysticism, devoted to drawing out and examining the mystical element in many religious traditions. The second part engages traditions and religio-cultural strands in which ''mysticism'' is linked to other terms, such as shamanism, esotericism, and Gnosticism. The volume's third part focuses on methodological strategies for defining ''mysticism, '' with respect to varying social spaces. The final essays show how contemporary social issues and movements have impacted the meaning, study, and pedagogy of mysticism.
Teaching Mysticism presents pedagogical reflections on how best to communicate mysticism from a variety of institutional spaces. It surveys the broad range of meanings of mysticism, its utilization in the traditions, the theories and methods that have been used to understand it, and provides critical insight into the resulting controversies.

The late antique and early medieval Mediterranean was characterized by wide-ranging cultural and linguistic diversity. Yet, under the influence of Christianity, communities in the Mediterranean world were bound together by common concepts of good rulership, which were also shaped by Greco-Roman, Persian, Caucasian, and other traditions. This collection of essays examines ideas of good Christian rulership and the debates surrounding them in diverse cultures and linguistic communities. It grants special attention to communities on the periphery, such as the Caucasus and Nubia, and some essays examine non-Christian concepts of good rulership to offer a comparative perspective. As a whole, the studies in this volume reveal not only the entanglement and affinity of communities around the Mediterranean but also areas of conflict among Christians and between Christians and other cultural traditions. By gathering various specialized studies on the overarching question of good rulership, this volume highlights the possibilities of placing research on classical antiquity and early medieval Europe into conversation with the study of eastern Christianity.

In Sacred High City, Sacred Low City, Steven Heine argues that lived religion in Japan functions as an integral part of daily life; any apparent lack of interest masks a fundamental commitment to participating regularly in diverse, though diffused, religious practices. The book uses case studies of religious sites at two representative but contrasting Tokyo neighborhoods as a basis for reflecting on this apparently contradictory quality. In what ways does Japan continue to carry on and adapt tradition, and to what extent has modern secular society lost touch with the traditional elements of religion? Or does Japanese religiosity reflect another, possibly postmodern, alternative beyond the dichotomy of sacred and secular, in which religious differences as well as a seeming indifference to religion are encompassed as part of a contemporary lifestyle?

In this groundbreaking study, Anthony B. Pinn challenges the long held assumption that African American theology is solely theist, arguing that this assumption has stunted African American theological discourse and excluded a rapidly growing segment of the African American population - non-theists. Rejecting the assumption of theism as the African American orientation, Pinn poses a crucial question: What is a non-theistic theology? The End of God-Talk outlines the first systematic African American non-theistic theology. Pinn offers a new center for theological inquiry, grounded in a more scientific notion of the human than the imago Dei ideas that dominates African American theistic theologies. He proposes a turn to Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Alice Walker in order to effect a sense of ethical conduct consistent with African American non-theistic humanism. The End of God-Talk ends with an exploration of the religious significance of ordinary spaces and activities as settings for humanist theological engagement. Through a turn to embodied human life as the proper arena and content of theologizing, Pinn opens up a new theological path with important implications for ongoing work in African American religious studies.

This text is the product of dialogue between a group of leading British Muslim and Christian scholars concerned about the alleged danger to the West of Islamic fundamentalism. It analyzes the ethical and legal principles, rooted in both traditions, underlying any use of armed force in the modern world. After chapters on the history, theology and laws of war as seen from both sides, the book applies its conclusions to firstly, the 1990-91 Gulf War and secondly, the Bosnian conflict. It concludes that Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a myth.

Like taxes, death is inevitable. Everyone experiences it sooner or later. This book offers perspectives on death and dying from all major religions, written by experts in each of those religions. Focusing on the major world traditions, it offers important information about what death and dying means to those practicing these faiths. The second part of the book adds a necessary and truly unique perspective - a personal look at how people actually die in the various world religions, as told by a hospital chaplain, with anecdotes and experiences that bring the death process to life, so to speak.

Each chapter engages the theology of each religion, giving quotes from the literature of their respective scriptural traditions, to explain the process of dying, death, and the afterlife. In doing so, each author draws on the history of his respective tradition and looks at real-life figures, exemplars of the tradition, showing how practitioners view death and hope to one day engage the death process themselves.

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

Zimbabwe has invested in women’s emancipation and leadership while articulating a strong Pan-Africanist ideology, providing a valuable entry point into understanding the dynamics relating to women’s leadership in Africa. It is also characterised by radical religious pluralism, thereby facilitating an appreciation of the impact of religion on women’s leadership in Africa more generally.  This volume reflects on the role of Zimbabwean women in religio-cultural leadership, with a specific focus on roles within religious organizations. It begins by examining Zimbabwean church women’s leadership roles in long established faith communities. The chapters then hone in on the emergence of churches or ministries founded by women in Zimbabwe, starting from the pre-colonial era and advancing through the last forty years of independence. Hence, the book offers a comprehensive assessment of the challenges and opportunities women in leadership face in religious institutions in the country, before exploring the impact of the pandemic on the ability of women to lead. It will make a major contribution to the advancement of scholarship of gender and leadership in emerging markets.

This book examines and compares the religious experience of an African group with a European one. It offers an ethnographical investigation of the Jukun of north central Nigeria. The author also organically weaves into the narrative the Christianization of the Irish in a comparative fashion. Throughout, he makes the case for an African Christianity connected to a Celtic Irish Christianity and vice-versa -- as different threads in a tapestry. This work is a product of a synthesis of archival research in three continents, interviews with surviving first-generation Christians who were active practitioners of the Jukun indigenous religion, and with former missionaries to the Jukun. On the Irish side, it draws from extant primary sources and interviews with scholars in Celtic Irish studies. In addition, pictures, diagrams, and excerpts from British colonial and missionary journals provide a rich contextual understanding of Jukun religious life and practices. The author is among the emerging voices in the study of World Christianity who advocate for the reality of "poly-centres" for Christianity. This perspective recognizes voices from the Global South in the expansion of Christianity. This book serves as a valuable resource for historians, anthropologists, theologians, and those interested in missions studies, both scholars and lay readers seeking to deepen their understanding of World Christianity.

Peace and War: Historical, Philosophical, and Anthropological Perspectives is an accessible, higher-level critical discussion of philosophical commentaries on the nature of peace and war. It introduces and analyses various philosophies of peace and war, and their continuing theoretical and practical relevance for peace studies and conflict resolution. Using a combination of both historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives, the book is at once eclectic in its approach and broad in its inquiry of these enduring phenomena of human existence.

This book explores the way in which the study and practice of love creates a common ground for different faiths and different traditions within the same faith. For the contributors, "common ground" in this context is not a minimal core of belief or a lowest common denominator of faith, but a space or area in which to live together, consider together the meaning of the love to which various faiths witness, and work together to enable human flourishing. Such a space, the contributors believe, is possible because it is the place of encounter with the divine. This book is the fruit of a Project for the Study of Love in Religion which aims to create this space in which different traditions of love converge, from Islam, Judaism, and the Christianity of both East and West. Tools employed by the contributors in exploring this space of love include exegesis of ancient texts, theology, accounts of mystical experience, philosophy, and evolutionary science of the human. Insights about human and divine love that emerge include its nature as a form of knowing, its sacrificial and erotic dimensions, its inclination towards beauty, its making of community and its importance for a just political and economic life.

Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Josephin Peladan and the artist Jan Svankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of "healing cultures," the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretation-namely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

Bisk and Dror assert that the 21st Century can be the Jewish Century, that no other people is better prepared to face its challenges. However, to do so, a stress on the Jewish Future must replace a preoccupation with the Jewish Past. They offer a neo-Zionist ideological analysis of modern Jewish life as an alternative to both classical Zionism and post-Zionism. They conceptualize a Jewish Grand Strategy by clearly defining and delineating between ideology, policy, grand strategy, strategy and tactics, with compelling proposals for what such a revised Grand Straegy might entail. They suggest a concept of reinvigorated Israel-Diaspora relations based on this new Grand Strategy and the potential of the Information Technology Revolution. They also offer a conception of Jewish spirituality that could be as appealing to secular as to religious Jews. They reject the concept of a "Nation that Dwells Alone." Throughout the ages, Jews have affected and been affected by the world more than any other People they assert. They also reject the view that suffering is the dominant feature of Jewish history as this lachrymose perception cannot inspire needed Jewish ambitions in the young. They stress the needs of the Jewish person and insist that there can be no real significance to the continued existence of the Jewish People unless the real life, concrete needs of the individual are addressed. As former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations and former Cabinent Minister Gad Yaacobi asserts in his foreword, "The book is original, iconoclastic and in some ways revolutionary....It challenges inherited assumptions and calls for positive action. I believe we have before us a book that must become areference point for Jewish policy makers as quickly as possible."