This is a reference for understanding world religious societies in their contemporary global diversity. Comprising 60 essays, the volume focuses on communities rather than beliefs, symbols, or rites. It is organized into six sections corresponding to the major living religious traditions: the Indic cultural region, the Buddhist/Confucian, the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim regions, and the African cultural region. In each section an introductory essay discusses the social development of that religious tradition historically. The other essays cover the basic social factsthe communitys size, location, organizational and pilgrimage centers, authority figures, patterns of governance, major subgroups and schismsas well as issues regarding boundary maintenance, political involvement, role in providing cultural identity, and encounters with modernity. Communities in the diaspora and at the periphery are covered, as well as the central geographic regions of the religious traditions. Thus, for example, Islamic communities in Asia and the United States are included along with Islamic societies in the Middle East. The contributors are leading scholars of world religions, many of whom are also members of the communities they study. The essays are written to be informative and accessible to the educated public, and to be respectful of the viewpoints of the communities analyzed.

Anthropologist David Jordan and Daniel Overmyer, a historian of religions, present a joint analysis of the most important group of sectarian religious societies in contemporary Taiwan: those that engage in automatic writing seances, or worship by means of the phoenix" writing implement. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What constitutes the field of religious studies? The 29 chapters in this introductory text offer an incisive look at the key approaches, methods, problems, and subjects that define contemporary academic research in the field of religious studies at universities in the German-speaking world. It provides a unique and polyphonic portrait of contemporary religious studies. The contributions are written in a clear, accessible style; an appendix with supplemental reading aids helps one to navigate the individual contributions.

Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santeria (or Lucumi) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. Originally published in 2003 Santeria Enthroned combines art, history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression. Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santeria belief and practice it shows how negotiations among ideologically competing interests have shaped the religion's symbols, rituals, and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Rich case studies of change in Cuba and the United States, including a New Jersey temple and South Carolina's Oyotunji Village, reveal patterns of innovation similar to those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria. Throughout, the book argues for a theoretical perspective on culture as a field of potential strategies and "usuable pasts" that actors draw upon to craft new forms and identities - a perspective that will be invaluable to all students of the African Diaspora.

Santeria is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesus introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santeria, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesus traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santeria practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santeria's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santeria as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past," this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

Theosophy is a key work for anyone seeking a solid grounding in spiritual reality as described by Rudolf Steiner. The book is organized in four parts. First, Steiner builds up a comprehensive understanding of human nature, beginning with the physical bodily nature and moving up through the soul nature to our spiritual being: the I and the higher spiritual aspects of our being.This then leads to the experience of the human being as a sevenfold interpenetrated being of body, soul, and spirit. In the next section Steiner gives an extraordinary overview of the laws of reincarnation and the workings of karma as we pass from one life to the next. This prepares us for the third section where Steiner shows the different ways in which we live, during this life on earth and after death, in the three worlds of body, soul, and spirit, as well as the ways in which these worlds in turn live into us.Finally, a succinct description is given of the path of knowledge by which each one of us can begin to understand the marvelous and harmonious complexity of the psycho-spiritual worlds in their fullness.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled "lost tribes of Israel"-Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE-took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America. Some white Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed nationalist narratives around the then-popular idea of "Israelite Indians." Although these were minority viewpoints, they reveal that the story of religion and nationalism in the early United States was more complicated and wide-ranging than studies of American "chosen-ness" or "manifest destiny" suggest. Telling stories about Israelite Indians, Dougherty argues, allowed members of specific communities to understand the expanding United States, to envision its transformation, and to propose competing forms of sovereignty. In these stories both settler and Indigenous intellectuals found biblical explanations for the American empire and its stark racial hierarchy. Lost Tribes Found goes beyond the legal and political structure of the nineteenth-century U.S. empire. In showing how the trope of the Israelite Indian appealed to the emotions that bound together both nations and religious groups, the book adds a new dimension and complexity to our understanding of the history and underlying narratives of early America.

While Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church's history - for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson's Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler's regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance. The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism's equivalent of the biblical admonition to ""render unto Caesar,"" a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons' courage and travails during the war. Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century - and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.

The publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 began a new scriptural tradition. Resisting the long-established closed biblical canon, the Book of Mormon posited that the Bible was incomplete and corrupted. With a commitment to an open canon, a variety of Latter Day Saint denominations have emerged, each offering their own scriptural works to accompany the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and other revelations of Joseph Smith. Open Canon breaks new ground as the first volume to examine these writings as a single spiritual heritage. Chapters cover both well-studied and lesser-studied works, introducing readers to scripture dictated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century revelators such as James Strang, Lucy Mack Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Harry Edgar Baker, and Charles B. Thompson, among others. Contributors detail how various Latter Day Saint denominations responded to scriptures introduced during the ministry of Joseph Smith and how churches have employed the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Lectures of Faith over time. Bringing together studies from across denominational boundaries, this book considers what we can learn about Latter Day Saint resistance to the closed canon and the nature of a new American scriptural tradition.

The publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 began a new scriptural tradition. Resisting the long-established closed biblical canon, the Book of Mormon posited that the Bible was incomplete and corrupted. With a commitment to an open canon, a variety of Latter Day Saint denominations have emerged, each offering their own scriptural works to accompany the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and other revelations of Joseph Smith. Open Canon breaks new ground as the first volume to examine these writings as a single spiritual heritage. Chapters cover both well-studied and lesser-studied works, introducing readers to scripture dictated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century revelators such as James Strang, Lucy Mack Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Harry Edgar Baker, and Charles B. Thompson, among others. Contributors detail how various Latter Day Saint denominations responded to scriptures introduced during the ministry of Joseph Smith and how churches have employed the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Lectures of Faith over time. Bringing together studies from across denominational boundaries, this book considers what we can learn about Latter Day Saint resistance to the closed canon and the nature of a new American scriptural tradition.

In Faith and Politics in the Public Sphere, Ugur explores the politics of religious engagement in the public sphere by comparing two modernist conservative movements: the Mormon Church in the United States and the Gulen movement in Turkey. The book traces the public activities and activism of these two influential and controversial actors at the state, political society, and civil society domains, discerning their divergent strategies and positioning on public matters, including moral issues, religious freedoms, democracy, patriotism, education, social justice, and immigration. Despite being strikingly similar in their strong fellowship ties, emphasis on conservative social values, and their doctrines concerning political neutrality, these two religious entities have employed different political strategies to promote their goals of survival, growth, and the collective interests of their communities. In contrast to the Mormon Church's more assertive approach and emphasis on its autonomy and distinctiveness, the Gulen movement has been rather cautious with its engagement in the public sphere, with preference for coalition building and ambiguity. To explain such different strategies, Ugur examines how the liberal and republican models of the public sphere have shaped the norms and practices of public activism for religious groups in Turkey and the United States. Ugur's deft and nuanced exploration of these movements' adaptation and engagement is essential to help us better understand the dynamic role of religious involvement in the public sphere.

An Akan proverb says, "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." This belief underlies historian Amy Tanner Thiriot's work in Slavery in Zion. The total number of those enslaved during Utah's past has remained an open question for many years. Due to the nature of nineteenth-century records, particularly those about enslaved peoples, an exact number will never be known, but while writing this book, Thiriot documented around one hundred enslaved or indentured Black men, women, and children in Utah Territory. Using a combination of genealogical and historical research, the book brings to light events and relationships misunderstood for well over a century. Section One provides an introductory history, chapters on southern and western experiences, and information on life after emancipation. Section Two is a biographical encyclopedia with names, relationships, and experiences. Although this book contains material applicable to legal history and the history of race and Mormonism, its most important goal is to be a treasury of the experiences of Utah's enslaved Black people so their stories can become an integral part of the history of Utah and the American West, no longer forgotten or written out of history.