In the West we are accustomed to think of religion as centered in the personal quest for salvation or the longing for unchanging Being. Perhaps this is why we have found it so difficult to understand the religions of Africa. These religions are oriented to very different goals: fecundity, prosperity, health, social harmony. These seemingly trivial and specific goals are not the expressions of inauthentic or undeveloped religion, as we tend to think, but of a distinctive and profound spiritual perspective from which, in fact, we may have much to learn. African religions, as this study concludes from its close examination of a number of specific African universes, are religions devoted to the sanctification and constant renewal of life. They are dedicated to Becoming rather than to Being, and seek to sustain a flourishing divine order rather than save the isolated self from it. But these religions do not comfortably express themselves in metaphysical abstractions; instead, they use a ritual idiom more effective than any philosophical disquisition. Ritual Cosmos analyzes the logic and inner meaning of such ritual structures as sacrifice and taboo, harvest festivals and rites of divine kingship, millenary movements, witchcraft, and much else. In the course of the discussion, many of the basic assumptions of the scientists and theologians who have concerned themselves with the role of religion in human society are reexamined; the distinctions often made between the sacred and the secular, or religion and magic, for example, are questioned.

'Hultkrantz treads where other angels fear to with this audacious and clear overall survey. He leaves the room for specialists to debate and generalists to quicken curiosity.'--Christian Century

Crow Christianity speaks in many voices, and in the pages of Crow Jesus, these voices tell a complex story of Christian faith and Native tradition combining and reshaping each other to create a new and richly varied religious identity. In this collection of narratives, fifteen members of the Apsaalooke (Crow) Nation in southeastern Montana and three non-Native missionaries to the reservation describe how Christianity has shaped their lives, their families, and their community through the years. Among the speakers are elders and young people, women and men, pastors and laypeople, devout traditionalists and skeptics of the indigenous cultural way. Taken together, the narratives reveal the startling variety and sharp contradictions that exist in Native Christian devotion among Crows today, from Pentecostal Peyotists to Sun-Dancing Catholics to tongues-speaking Baptists in the sweat lodge. Editor Mark Clatterbuck also offers a historical overview of Christianity's arrival, growth, and ongoing influence in Crow Country, with special attention to Christianity's relationship to traditional ceremonies and indigenous ways of seeing the world. In Crow Jesus, Clatterbuck explores contemporary Native Christianity by listening as indigenous voices narrate their own stories on their own terms. His collection tells the larger story of a tribe that has adopted Christian beliefs and practices in such a way that simple, unqualified designations of religious belonging - whether ""Christian"" or ""Sun Dancer"" or ""Peyotist"" - are seldom, if ever, adequate.

From first-hand experience, the author tells of daily life among the Hopi Indians in Northern Arizona--their beliefs, rituals and Catcina (Kachina) ceremonies. The interaction and conflict between the Anglo and Indian cultures are presented from the viewpoint of the Hopi family. Robert Boissiere, born in Paris, France, came to the United States after World War II. A member of the French army, he was imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp from which he managed to escape and join a group of Basques in the Pyrenees. After moving to California, Boissiere found himself on an artistic and spiritual pilgrimage to the Hopi villages. There he was adopted by a Hopi family and became a participant in their cultural life. "The Hopi Way" is based on his experiences living as a Hopi. He is also the author of "Po Pai Mo," also from Sunstone Press.

Frances Henry's book explores various African religions as part of a cultural system, relevant to national identity in the island of Trinidad The book deals with the dynamic doctrinal and ideological changes that have taken place within the religions, and documents both the legislative and social acceptance of African religion today. This study is an important documentation of contemporary history and religious debate. It analyzes the process by which marginalized religions move toward the mainstream and the various internal and external tensions such movements engender. It makes a particularly strong contribution in its discussions of ritual authenticity. The work is based on a three-year period of fieldwork in Trinidad. Of interest to students and scholars interested in Caribbean Studies, especially African-oriented studies.

"You shall have no other gods besides Me." This injunction, handed down through Moses three thousand years ago, marks one of the most decisive shifts in Western culture: away from polytheism toward monotheism. Despite the momentous implications of such a turn, the role of idolatry in giving it direction and impetus is little understood. This book examines the meaning and nature of idolatry--and, in doing so, reveals much about the monotheistic tradition that defines itself against this sin.

The authors consider Christianity and Islam, but focus primarily on Judaism. They explore competing claims about the concept of idolatry that emerges in the Hebrew Bible, as a "whoring after false gods." Does such a description, grounded in an analogy of sexual relations, presuppose the actual existence of other gods with whom someone might sin? Or are false gods the product of "men's hands," simply a matter of misguided belief? The authors show how this debate, over idolatry as practice or error, has taken shape and has in turn shaped the course of Western thought--from the differentiation between Jewish and Christian conceptions of God to the distinctions between true and false belief that inform the tradition of religious enlightenment.

Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G. E. Moore, this brilliant account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities. Its insights into pluralism and intolerance, into the logic and illogic of the arguments religions aim at each other, make "Idolatry" especially timely and valuable inthese days of dark and implacable religious difference.

This enthnographic study describes and analyzes the ritual cycle celebrated by Zulu kinship groups at birth, maturity, marriage, sickness and death as understood and interpreted by the Zulus themselves. The Zulu world view emerges as a logical and coherent system of thought, expressed primariliy through rites, rituals and symbols Axel-Ivar Berglund spent his childhood in Zululand as the son of Swedish missionaries serving there.