This book argues that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches, it is a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, and its inextricable interdependence with language. It is also a detailed study of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions that we take to be religious and therefore central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from a range of disciplines.

Central to both biblical narrative and rabbinic commentary, circumcision has remained a defining rite of Jewish identity, a symbol so powerful that challenges to it have always been considered taboo. Lawrence Hoffman seeks to find out why circumcision holds such an important place in the Jewish psyche. He traces the symbolism of circumcision through Jewish history, examining its evolution as a symbol of the covenant in the post-exilic period of the Bible and its subsequent meaning in the formative era of Mishnah and Talmud. In the rabbinic system, Hoffman argues, circumcision was neither a birth ritual nor the beginning of the human life cycle, but a rite of covenantal initiation into a male "life line." Although the evolution of the rite was shaped by rabbinic debates with early Christianity, the Rabbis shared with the church a view of blood as providing salvation. Hoffman examines the particular significance of circumcision blood, which, in addition to its salvific role, contrasted with menstrual blood to symbolize the gender dichotomy within the rabbinic system. His analysis of the Rabbis' views of circumcision and menstrual blood sheds light on the marginalization of women in rabbinic law. Differentiating official mores about gender from actual practice, Hoffman surveys women's spirituality within rabbinic society and examines the roles mothers played in their sons' circumcisions until the medieval period, when they were finally excluded.

This photographic picture book shows how Hanukkah menorahs are made step-by-step.

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self- expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

Each year, in a solemn Sunni Muslim feast, the Ait Mazine of northern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual sacrifice, a symbolic observance of submission to the divine. After comes a bacchanalian masquerade which seems to violate every principle the sacrifice affirmed. Costumed men sing and dance and torment villagers, their wild activities centering around a mute figure sewn into the skins of sacrificed animals. This character is attended by several others who keep up a constant patter that mocks the social order, especially marriage, women, older men, and the Qu'ran. Because of the apparent contradiction between sacrifice and masquerade, observers have described the two as entirely separate events. Abdellah Hammoudi's study reunites them as a single ritual process within Islamic tradition. Working with metaphors of stage and play, Hammoudi details the festival from the rituals of makeup and costume through the final spectacle. Each part of the ceremony denies and at the same time conjures up the other. The contradictions inherent in social and religious life are vividly enacted; sacrifice and masquerade appear.

In Sri Lanka galt uber Jahrhunderte das in buddhistischen Chroniken festgelegte Verhaltnis zwischen Koenig und Moenchsorden. Mit dem Wegfall des Koenigs im 19. Jh. wird die Verbindung von Buddhismus und Politik neu verhandelt. Einfuhrend in die Diskussion zur Konstruktion von Tradition illustriert die Autorin, wie vor dem Hintergrund kolonialer Einflusse und postkolonialer Umbruche vorkoloniale Ordnungen, wie etwa die Verbindung von Koenig - Moenchsorden - Volk, neuen Aushandlungsprozessen unterliegen. Im Fokus stehen religionspolitische Debatten, die seit der Unabhangigkeit 1948 bis zu den Prasidentschaftswahlen 2015 zwischen politisch aktiven Moenchen und den jeweiligen Regierungen oder Prasidenten gefuhrt wurden. Die Autorin zeigt auf, wie Fragen nach den Aufgabenbereichen und Verantwortungen des Staates gegenuber dem Buddha Sasana sowie den Zustandigkeiten und Pflichten der Moenche debattiert werden.

The author of "The Death of Death, " a "Publishers Weekly" "Best Book of the Year, " explains how Jews have encountered God throughout Jewish history--and today--by exploring the many metaphors for God in the Jewish tradition, how they originated, and what they mean.

A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the living Dust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

Winner, Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award in Theology and Religious StudiesWinner, 2006 Salo Baron Prize for the Best First Book in Judaic Studies, American Academy of Jewish Research

This provocative study of Jerusalem's Temple Mount unravels popular scholarly paradigms about the origins of this contested sacred site and its significance in Jewish and Christian traditions. In God's Mountain, Yaron Z. Eliav reconstructs the early story of the Temple Mount, exploring the way the site was developed as a physical entity, religious concept, and cultural image. He traces the Temple Mount's origins and investigates its history, explicating the factors that shaped it both physically and conceptually.

Eliav refutes the popular tradition that situates the Temple Mount as a unique sacred space from the earliest days of the history of Israel and the Jewish people. Instead, he asserts that the Temple Mount emerged as a sacred space in Jewish and early Christian consciousness hundreds of years later. This new chronology provides the framework for a fresh consideration of the literary and archeological evidence, as well as new understandings of the religious and social dynamics that shaped the image of the Temple Mount as a sacred space for Jews and Christians.

"Eliav uses his impressive knowledge of Talmud, the Bible, archeology, languages, rabbinic texts, the classics and patristic literature to debunk the notion that the Temple Mount was a sacred space for ancient Jews and Christians. According to him, it did not achieve this status until long after the Second Temple was destroyed. In a dazzling display of erudition, he supports his thesis byproviding new readings of familiar sources and by citing many little-known references." -- Publishers Weekly

"All readers will be rewarded by Eliav's judicious insights, his nuanced reinterpretations, and his wide-ranging scholarship." -- Choice

"This book means to awaken an important scholarly debate and it deserves to succeed." -- Shofar

Yaron Z. Eliav is the Jean and Samuel Frankel Associate Professor for Rabbinic Literature at the University of Michigan.

Every year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world converge on Mecca and its precincts to perform the rituals associated with the Hajj and have been doing so since the seventh century. In this volume, scholars from a range of fields - including history, religion, anthropology, and literature - together tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. By outlining the parameters of the Hajj from its beginnings to the present day, the contributors have produced a global study that takes in the vast geographies of belief in the world of Islam. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims, touching on its rituals, its regional forms, the role of gender, its representation in art, and its organization on a global scale.

This illuminating account of contemporary American Buddhism shows the remarkable ways the tradition has changed over the past generation The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. In this fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape, Ann Gleig illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period she identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. She observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism, such as ethics and community, that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.