There are no atheists in foxholes; or so we hear. The thought that the fear of death motivates religious belief has been around since the earliest speculations about the origins of religion. There are hints of this idea in the ancient world, but the theory achieves prominence in the works of Enlightenment critics and Victorian theorists of religion, and has been further developed by contemporary cognitive scientists. Why do people believe in gods? Because they fear death. Yet despite the abiding appeal of this simple hypothesis, there has not been a systematic attempt to evaluate its central claims and the assumptions underlying them. Do human beings fear death? If so, who fears death more, religious or nonreligious people? Do reminders of our mortality really motivate religious belief? Do religious beliefs actually provide comfort against the inevitability of death? In Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt begin to answer these questions, drawing on the extensive literature on the psychology of death anxiety and religious belief, from childhood to the point of death, as well as their own experimental research on conscious and unconscious fear and faith. In the course of their investigations, they consider the history of ideas about religion's origins, challenges of psychological measurement, and the very nature of emotion and belief.

Across history, our understanding of God, the soul, spirituality, and even science itself has shifted dramatically. Today, we have more scientific knowledge than ever, yet some age-old questions persist: Why do we believe in gods, souls, and rituals? Are these beliefs innate? Do existential fears drive us toward or away from religion? What can we learn about spirituality from children? How can we leverage scientific thinking to study spirituality? This book invites you into the labs and minds of some of the world's most renowned psychological scientists for an in-depth look at how psychologists can study religion and spirituality-and how they wrestle with doubts about ostensibly established findings and methods, even as the field advances. From China, India, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Tuva, this book takes a balanced perspective on a diverse range of experiments and studies, casting a light on both their brilliance and their limitations. Ultimately, this book reveals that psychological experiments that test spiritual beliefs are works of imagination that can help us discover truths about the human mind's proclivity for religious ideas, as long as we can adapt and learn along the way.

No doubt the 21st century will continue to surprise us, but the battle for the soul of humanity appears to be quickening. Do we have what it takes to save ourselves from ourselves? The internet has fundamentally changed our experience of shared life, for good and bad. The spiritual and ecological exhaustion of modernity is watched and discussed in a public realm mostly controlled by private interests, where our attention is easily hijacked and vulnerable to manipulation. There is joy and hope in life as always, but our species faces a capricious future. This anthology is an attempt to perceive our contexts and opportunities more clearly with an exploration of the metamodern sensibility: a structure of feeling, cultural ethos, epistemic orientation and imaginative outlook that is coalescing into an important body of theory and practice. Leading metamodern writers, including Zachary Stein, Bonnitta Roy, Lene Rachel Andersen, Hanzi Freinacht, Minna Salami and John Vervaeke, reflect upon the conjunction of premodern, modern and postmodern influences on the present to help contend with our plight in the 2020s and beyond. Fourteen chapters traverse a range of disciplines and domains to help the reader move beyond critique into vision and method. The aim is to create and inspire viable and desirable futures in this time between worlds, where one pattern of collective life is dying and another needs our help to be born.

There are no atheists in foxholes; or so we hear. The thought that the fear of death motivates religious belief has been around since the earliest speculations about the origins of religion. There are hints of this idea in the ancient world, but the theory achieves prominence in the works of Enlightenment critics and Victorian theorists of religion, and has been further developed by contemporary cognitive scientists. Why do people believe in gods? Because they fear death. Yet despite the abiding appeal of this simple hypothesis, there has not been a systematic attempt to evaluate its central claims and the assumptions underlying them. Do human beings fear death? If so, who fears death more, religious or nonreligious people? Do reminders of our mortality really motivate religious belief? Do religious beliefs actually provide comfort against the inevitability of death? In Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt begin to answer these questions, drawing on the extensive literature on the psychology of death anxiety and religious belief, from childhood to the point of death, as well as their own experimental research on conscious and unconscious fear and faith. In the course of their investigations, they consider the history of ideas about religion's origins, challenges of psychological measurement, and the very nature of emotion and belief.