This study sheds new light on identity formation and maintenance in the world of the early Christians by drawing on neglected archaeological and epigraphic evidence concerning associations and immigrant groups and by incorporating insights from the social sciences. The study's unique contribution relates, in part, to its interdisciplinary character, standing at the intersection of Christian Origins, Jewish Studies, Classical Studies, and the Social Sciences. It also breaks new ground in its thoroughly comparative framework, giving the Greek and Roman evidence its due, not as mere background but as an integral factor in understanding dynamics of identity among early Christians. This makes the work particularly well suited as a text for courses that aim to understand early Christian groups and literature, including the New Testament, in relation to their Greek, Roman, and Judean contexts.
Inscriptions pertaining to associations provide a new angle of vision on the ways in which members in Christian congregations and Jewish synagogues experienced belonging and expressed their identities within the Greco-Roman world. The many other groups of immigrants throughout the cities of the empire provide a particularly appropriate framework for understanding both synagogues of Judeans and groups of Jesus-followers as minority cultural groups in these same contexts. Moreover, there were both shared means of expressing identity (including fictive familial metaphors) and peculiarities in the case of both Jews and Christians as minority cultural groups, who (like other "foreigners") were sometimes characterized as dangerous, alien "anti-associations." By paying close attention to dynamics of identity and belonging within associations and cultural minority groups, we can gain new insights into Pauline, Johannine, and other early Christian communities.

Social scientists and philosophers confronted with religious phenomena have always been challenged to find a proper way to describe the spiritual experiences of the social group they were studying. The influence of the Cartesian dualism of body and mind (or soul) led to a distinction between non-material, spiritual experiences (i.e., related to the soul) and physical, mechanical experiences (i.e., related to the body). However, recent developments in medical science on the one hand and challenges to universalist conceptions of belief and spirituality on the other have resulted in "body" and "soul" losing the reassuring solid contours they had in the past. Yet, in "Western culture," the body-soul duality is alive, not least in academic and media discourses. This volume pursues the ongoing debates and discusses the importance of the body and how it is perceived in contemporary religious faith: what happens when "body" and "soul" are un-separated entities? Is it possible, even for anthropologists and ethnographers, to escape from "natural dualism"? The contributors here present research in novel empirical contexts, the benefits and limits of the old dichotomy are discussed, and new theoretical strategies proposed.

In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition - more commonly known in the United States as Santeria - entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices - called iyawo - endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing.A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation. In her intimate investigation of the ""year in white"", Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate's identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as ""iyawo"" by family and friends. Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual - which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life - offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school. Offering insight not only into Santeria but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.

This edited collection addresses the relationship between diaspora, religion and the politics of identity in the modern world. It illuminates religious understandings of citizenship, association and civil society, and situates them historically within diverse cultures of memory and state traditions.

Undocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary, and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith. The book looks at five vernacular saints that have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the US in the last one hundred years: Jesus Malverde, a popular bandido turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women's experiences of sexual violence; Juan Soldado, a murder-rapist soldier who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants and the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the US since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of death who is particularly popular among LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particular popular saint within broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and as US and Mexican investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration.

As we enter the 21st century, it becomes increasingly difficult to envisage a world detached from religion or an anthropology blind to its study. Yet, how people become religious is still poorly studied. This volume gathers some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to offer a new perspective for the study of religion, one that examines the works of transmission and innovation through the prism of learning. They argue that religious culture is socially and dynamically constructed by agents who are not mere passive recipients but engaged in active learning processes. Finding a middle way between the social and the cognitive, they see learning religions not as a mechanism of downloading but also as a social process with its relational dimension. David Berliner is an Assistant Professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He received his PhD from University of Brussels (2002). In 2001 he was a visiting PhD student at Saint Cross College, Oxford, and in 2003-2005 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. Ramon Sarro is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon. He read anthropology in London (PhD 1999). In 2000-2002 he was the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Junior Research Fellow at Saint Anne's College, Oxford. His publications include Surviving Iconoclasm: Religious and Political Transformation on the Upper Guinea Coast (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)."

When conflicts arise between claims to human rights for women and claims for religious integrity and authority, which perspective should prevail? The author investigates the criteria for assessing such situations, including family religious ideology and the questions of relativism, privacy, and agency. The study concludes that theological resistance and certain political and social inhibitors sometimes, ironically, render the human rights concept inappropriate for achieving the rights of religious women.

In this investigation of Presbyterians and identity in modern Ireland, Baillie explores a wide range of contemporary topics based on over 115 interviews with Ministers and individuals from 25 congregations. Among other issues, she explores politics and culture; social and moral issues; roles of women; the influence of life history and geographical location; education; inter church relations; the Orange Order; Freemasonry; the ministry and the future. Do the institutions of the Presbyterian church help or hinder individuals in their lives? Baillie helps to demonstrate that identity is a key concept within the context of postmodernity.

America today is a hypersexual society. Sexual discourse, erotica, and pornography are pervasive in the culture. Sexual materials, many times extending into erotica and pornography, are found in the consumer world, academia, sex therapy, the publishing world, mass media (especially radio, television and movies) and the Internet. The sexual materials found in all these areas of American society provoke relentless opposition by groups and individuals who want to repress or censor sexual materials. The combined effects of those who promote and produce sexual materials, and those who try to supress them, add up to a cacophony of sexual discourse.

Inspired by Charles Mackay's 19th-century classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, William Bernstein engages with mass delusion with the same curiosity and passion, but armed with the latest scientific research that explains the biological, evolutionary and psychosocial roots of human irrationality. Bernstein tells the stories of dramatic religious and financial mania in Western society over the last 500 years - from the Anabaptist Madness that afflicted the Low Countries in the 1530s to the dangerous end-times beliefs that animate ISIS and pervade today's polarised nations; and from the South Sea Bubble to the Enron scandal and dot com bubbles of recent years. Through Bernstein's supple prose, the participants are as colourful as their motivation, invariably 'the desire to improve one's well-being in this life or the next.' As revealing about human nature as they are historically significant, Bernstein's chronicles reveal the huge cost and alarming implications of mass mania as he observes that if we can absorb the history and biology of mass delusion, we can recognise it more readily in our own time and avoid its frequently dire impact.

Many Catholic priests, nuns, and brothers in the United States take a strong interest in US policies that affect their "brothers and sisters" abroad. In fact, when the policies of their native government pose significant dangers to their people internationally, these US citizens engage actively in a variety of political processes in order to protect and advance the interests of the transnational religious communities to which they belong. In this provocative examination of the place of religion in world politics, Timothy A. Byrnes focuses on three Catholic communities -- Jesuit, Maryknoll, and Benedictine -- and how they seek to shape US policy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Based on years of fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews, "Reverse Mission" details the transnational bonds that drive the political activities of these Catholic orders.

This fascinating book reveals how the men and women of these orders became politically active in complex and sometimes controversial causes and how, ultimately, they exert a unique influence on foreign policy that is derived from their communal loyalties rather than any ethnic or national origin.

This book examines evangelical dieting and fitness programs and provides a systematic approach of this diverse field with its wide variety of programs. When evangelical Christians engage in fitness and dieting classes in order to "glorify God," they often face skepticism. This book approaches devotional fitness culture in North America from a religious studies perspective, outlining the basic structures, ideas, and practices of the field. Starting with the historical backgrounds of this current, the book approaches both practice and ideology, highlighting how devotional fitness programs construe their identity in the face of various competing offers in religious and non-religious sectors of society. The book suggests a nuanced and complex understanding of the relationship between sports and religion, beyond 'simple' functional equivalency. It provides insights into the formation of secular and religious body ideals and the way these body ideals are sacralized in the frame of an evangelical worldview.

This book explores the role of evangelicalism in the conflict in Northern Ireland and discusses how it may contribute to a peaceful political transition. Ganiel analyzes the 'traditional' evangelicals who are associated with the Reverend Ian Paisley, as well as a new breed of 'mediating' evangelicals who have broken with the traditions of the past. Comparing evangelical politics in Northern Ireland to the U.S. and Canada, this book sheds light on future directions for Northern Irish evangelicalism. The conclusion has global reverberations as it reflects on the place of 'strong' religions-such as evangelicalism and other forms of fundamentalism-in contemporary world politics.

This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.

First published in 1979, The Second Coming is an experiment in the writing of popular history - a contribution to the history of the people who have no history and an exploration of some of the ideas, beliefs and ways of thinking of ordinary men and women in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Millenarianism is a conceptual tool with which to explore some aspects of popular thought and culture. It is also seen as an ideology of social change and as a continuing tradition, traced from the end of the seventeenth century to the 1790s, and is shown to be embedded in folk culture. Abundant in rich and lively descriptions of such colourful characters as Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, John Wroe, Zion Ward and Sir William Courtenay, as well as studies of the Shakers, early Mormons and Millerites, the result is a window into the world of ordinary people in the Age of Romanticism.

During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were both suppressed and secularized. Temples were closed down by the secular regime and their activities classified as feudal superstition and this process only intensified during the Cultural Revolution when even the surviving secular fairs, devoted exclusively to trade with no religious content of any kind, were suppressed. However, once China embarked on its path of free market reform and openness, secular commodity exchange fairs were again authorized, and sometimes encouraged in the name of political economy as a means of stimulating rural commodity circulation and commerce.

This book reveals how once these secular "temple-less temple fairs" were in place, they came to serve not only as venues for the proliferation of a great variety of popular cultural performance genres, but also as sites where a revival or recycling of popular religious symbols, already underway in many parts of China, found familiar and fertile ground in which to spread. Taking this shift in the Chinese state s attitudes and policy towards temple fairs as its starting point, The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China shows how state-led economic reforms in the early 1980s created a revival in secular commodity exchange fairs, which were granted both the geographic and metaphoric space to function. In turn, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the temple fair phenomenon, examining its economic, popular cultural, popular religious and political dimensions and demonstrates the multifaceted significance of the fairs which have played a crucial role in expanding the boundaries of contemporary acceptable popular discourse and expression.

Based upon extensive fieldwork, this unique book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese religion, Chinese culture, Chinese history and anthropology.

Few studies of Middle East wars go beyond a narrative of events and most tend to impose on this subject the rigid scheme of superpower competition. The Gulf War of 1991, however, challenges this view of the Middle East as an extension of the global conflict. The failure of the accord of both superpowers to avoid war even once regional superpower competition in the Middle East had ceased must give rise to the question: Do regional conflicts have their own dynamic? Working from this assumption, the book examines local-regional constraints of Middle East conflict and how, through escalation and the involvement of extra-regional powers, such conflicts acquire an international dimension. The theory of a regional subsystem is employed as a framework for conceptualising this interplay between regional and international factors in Tibi's examination of the Middle East wars in the period 1967-91. Tibi also provides an outlook into the future of conflict in the Middle East in the aftermath of the most recent Gulf War.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the ethical parameters of paganism when considered as a world religion alongside Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. The issues of evil, value and idolatry from a pagan perspective are analyzed as part of the Western ethical tradition from the Sophists and Platonic schools through the philosophers Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to such contemporary thinkers as Grayling, Mackie, MacIntyre, Habermas, Levinas, Santayana, etc. From a more practical viewpoint, a delineation of applied pagan ethics is then presented in connection with current moral issues such as same-sex union, recreational drugs, environmental awareness, abortion and terrorism. Finally, overviews of sectarian pagan ethics (Shinto, Santeria, Heathenism, Druidry, Romuva, Slavic, Kemeticism, Classical and Wicca) provide both the general and pagan reader with an understanding of the provocative range and differentiation of pagan ethical thought. The book approaches the Western ethical tradition as an historical development and a continuing dialogue. The novelty of this approach lies in its consideration of paganism as a legitimate voice of religious spirituality rather than a satanic aberration or ridiculous childish behavior. The book is aimed at both the contemporary Western pagan and anyone with an interest in the moral dilemmas of our times and the desire to engage in the global ethical discussion. Among the more important features of the book are its presentation of a re-evaluation of idolatry, the notion of the virtue value, the richness of the pagan tradition, and the expansion of Western ethics beyond its Christian heritage.

Here is a critique of religion and a random composite of fanciful tales. (World Religions))

This book presents an anthology of English-language archaeological and anthropological writings by Li Chi, the founding father of modern archaeology in China. It is divided into 15 chapters; in the first two, Dr. Li sets the stage by introducing the principal characters involved in the first "act" of this modern archaeological drama; in the third and fourth chapters, he describes the status of Chinese archaeology during the early years of the twentieth century and highlights the contributions of prominent foreigners. Starting with the fifth chapter, Dr. Li begins detailing the excavations and describes the principle finds of the Anyang expedition. In turn, the book's closing chapters present a summary of the findings and descriptions of some of the major publications that this monumental project has yielded. For readers who are interested in Chinese civilization, what will appeal to them most are the details of the excavations of Yin Hsu (the ruins of the Yin Dynasty), including building foundations, bronzes, chariots, pottery, stone and jade, and thousands of oracle bones, which are vividly shown in historical pictures. These findings transformed the Yin Shang culture from legend into history and thus moved China's history forward by hundreds of years, shocking the world. The anthology also includes Li Chi's reflections on central problems in Chinese anthropology, which are both enlightening and thought-provoking.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

Faith stories explains systems of cultural value that are articulated through faith. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, focus groups for adults and arts workshops for their children, Anna Hickey-Moody examines belonging, attachment, faith, belief and 'what really matters' in diverse areas in England and Australia. Her research finds surprising similarities in how people are connected to daily life through faith, and how others postpone their involvement in the everyday with the hope of being rewarded after death. Children bring together their religious worlds with imagined solutions to everyday problems. Indeed, in their artwork they save the planet from threats of war, climate change and recuperate their geographically divided families, suggesting that other worlds are possible. Their parent's faith shows this too. In such increasingly divided times, work like this is needed now more than ever. -- .

Practical theology has outgrown its traditional pastoral paradigm. The articles in this handbook recognize that faith, spirituality, and lived religion, within and beyond institutional communities, refer to realms of cultures, ritual practices, and symbolic orders, whose boundaries are not clearly defined and whose contents are shifting. The International Handbook of Practical Theology offers insightful transcultural conceptions of religion and religious matters gathered from various cultures and traditions of faith. The first section presents 'concepts of religion'. Chapters have to do with considerations of the conceptualizing of religion in the fields of 'anthropology', 'community', 'family', 'institution', 'law', 'media', and 'politics' among others. The second section is dedicated to case studies of 'religious practices' from the perspective of their actors. The third section presents major theoretical discourses that explore the globally significant diversity and multiplicity of religion. Altogether, sixty-one authors from different parts of the world encourage a rethinking of religious practice in an expanded, transcultural, globalized, and postcolonial world.