In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing to fight-and die-for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses.

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing to fight-and die-for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses.

An exploration of Edgar Degas’s laundress works and their significance within broader debates art, urban life, and women’s work in the nineteenth century   Edgar Degas’s depictions of Parisian laundresses are some of the famed Impressionist’s most revolutionary works. In paintings, drawings, and prints throughout his long career, Degas emphasized the strenuousness of women’s labor and highlighted social-class divides in his idiosyncratic avant-garde style. Laundresses washing, ironing, and carrying heavy baskets of clothing were a highly visible presence within late nineteenth-century Paris, and their job was difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid. Indeed, many laundresses were forced to supplement their income through prostitution. Degas’s portrayals of this harsh and complicated life were included in his most significant exhibitions and were praised by artists and critics of his time as epitomizing modernity. Contextualizing Degas’s laundress works with those of his contemporaries, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, this volume also looks at examples by painters that Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. Richly illustrated and featuring essays by an interdisciplinary group of authors, this study draws on art history, literature, and history to reveal how Degas’s stunning works take part in a more widespread debate concerning the topic of laundresses during the late nineteenth century.   Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art   Exhibition Schedule:   The Cleveland Museum of Art (October 8, 2023–January 14, 2024)

This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Following Isaac D'Israeli's gloss on Jean de La Bruyere, it asks, in particular, whether writing should be 'called working'. Whereas previous studies have focused on national literatures in isolation, this volume demonstrates the two-way traffic between British and French conceptions of literary labour. It questions assumed areas of affinity and difference, beginning with the labour politics of the early nineteenth century and their common root in the French Revolution. It also scrutinises the received view of France as a source of a 'leisure ethic', and of British writers as either rejecting or self-consciously mimicking French models. Individual essays consider examples of how different writers approached their work, while also evoking a broader notion of 'work ethics', understood as a humane practice, whereby values, benefits, and responsibilities, are weighed up.

Putala bases her study on a set of correspondence, the Osborne Family Papers, 1812-1968, housed in the Special Collections Research Center of Syracuse University. She focuses on the period 1838-1862, drawing from about 300 letters primarily from the Wright/Mott/Osborne women. Among the topics she pursues are contextualizing Eliza Wright Osborne in

Foreword, Joan N. Burstyn. Chapter I: Beginning to Contextualize Eliza Wright Osborne in Her Literacy. Chapter II: Wherein the Problem is Set. Chapter III: Reading the Writing of The Particular: A Methodology. Chapter IV: On Their Own: Women Reading (Mostly) Women. Chapter V: Not on Their Own: Mothers and Men Prescribe Their Reading.