Over the course of his career, Luther H. Martin has primarily produced articles rather than monographs. This approach to publication has given him the opportunity to experiment with different methodological approaches to an academic study of religion, with updates to and different interpretations of his field of historical specialization, namely Hellenistic religions, the subject of his only monograph (1987). The contents of this collected volume represent Martin's shift from comparative studies, to socio-political studies, to scientific studies of religion, and especially to the cognitive science of religion. He currently considers the latter to be the most viable approach for a scientific study of religion within the academic context of a modern research university. The twenty-five contributions collected in this volume are selected from over one hundred essays, articles, and book chapters published over a long and industrious career and are representative of Martin's work over the past two decades.

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems- both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.

Does rationality, the intellectual bedrock of all science, apply to the study of religion? Religion, arguably the most subjective area of human behaviour, has particular challenges associated with its study. Attracting crowd-healers, conjurers, the pious and the prophetic alongside comparativists and sceptics, it excites opinions and generalizations whilst seldom explicitly staking out the territory for the discussions in which it partakes. Increasingly, scholars argue that religious study needs to define and critique its own field, and to distinguish itself from theology and other non-objective disciplines. Yet how can rational techniques be applied to beliefs and states of mind regarded by some as beyond the scope of human reason? Can these be made empirically testable, or comparable and replicable within academic communities? Can science explicate religion without reducing it to mere superstition, or redefine its truth in some empirical but meaningful way? Featuring contributions from leading international experts including Donald Wiebe, Roger Trigg and Michael Pye, Rationality and the Study of Religion gets under the surface of the religious studies discipline to expose the ideologies beneath. Reopening debate in a neglected yet philosophically significant field, it questions the role of rationality in religious anthropology, natural history and anti-scientific theologies, with implications not only for supposedly objective disciplines but for our deepest attitudes to personal experience. 'Interesting and important. Religion has long been associated with irrationality, both by its defenders and its critics, and the topic of rationality has been unjustly neglected The book certainly deserves to be widely circulated.' Greg Alles, Western Maryland College

Author Biography:
Jeppe Sinding Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus, and is co-editor of Religion, Tradition and Renewal (Aarhus, 1991). Luther H. Martin holds a professorship in religion at the University of Vermont, and is the author of Hellenistic Religions (1987) and editor of Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (1988). He has published widely on theory and method in the study of religion including the cognitive science of religion, and recently co-edited The Academic Study Of Religion During The Cold War: East And West (2001).

Ais zu Beginn der achtziger Jahre die ersten 64K Computer mit hochauflo sender Bildschirmgraphik ihren Einzug in die mathematischen Institute und die Arbeitszimmer der Studenten nahmen, konnte man nur ahnen, welch unent behrliches Hilfsmittel hier entstanden war, urn mathematische und naturwis senschaftliche Phanomene graphisch sichtbar zu machen und ihre Strukturen aufzudecken. Wenn in Windeseile ein Funktionsgraph oder das Drahtmodell eines Korpers am Bildschirm erscheint, verschoben, gedreht oder vergroJ3ert wird, Kurven oder Flachen in ein Gitternetz eingepaJ3t oder Datenmengen in Bildern veranschaulicht werden, dann liegen in allen Fallen mathematische Algorithmen zugrunde, deren Verstandnis fUr ein sinnvolles Arbeiten mit fertigen oder selbsterstellten Programmen der Computergraphik eine groJ3e Hilfe ist. So verfolgt dieses Buch mehrere Ziele. Zum einen sollen einige wichtige Algorithmen zur Erzeugung der graphischen Grundelemente vorge stellt und exemplarisch in Prozeduren einer Standard-Hochsprache umgesetzt werden. Die mathematischen Grundlagen, die zum groJ3en Teil aus der linea ren Algebra, Analysis und Geometrie stammen, werden im Text mitentwickelt oder zitiert. So wendet sich das Buch an Studierende der Angewandten Ma thematik, Informatik und der Ingenieurwissenschaften, ist aber auch dem interessierten Laien zuganglich. Andererseits haben wir besonderes Gewicht auf die vielfaltigen Einsatzmoglichkeiten der Graphik zur Veranschauli chung von Kurvenverlaufen, Oberflachenformen und Bewegungsablaufen aus den Bereichen der Ingenieurwissenschaften gelegt, die in den Grundkursen der Hoheren Mathematik abgedeckt werden. Die gewahlten Beispiele stammen zum groJ3en Teil aus Veranstaltungen, die von den Autoren an der RWTH Aachen gehalten wurden."

North Korea is a country shrouded in mystery for most people. It brings to mind barbed wire, famine, and Kim Jong Il's nuclear shenanigans. This book touches on some of the negative side to the nation as well, but also focuses on what God has done in North Korea in the past and the new work He is doing there today. One of the greatest revivals in all of Asia took place in what is now referred to as North Korea (officially called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea). Now, over 100 years later, most Westerners think the church in North Korea has been destroyed. This couldn't be farther from the truth. There is a body of believers there that has held out for generations, even after years of persecution and attempts to destroy Christianity. On top of this, sparks of revival are flying all over the country as thousands of North Koreans quietly give their lives to Christ. How can this be? This is the story of those men and women of God, and their struggle in one of the darkest spiritual places on Earth. This is not another book about North Korean politics or man-made solutions for their problems. It contains the latest information on what God is doing in North Korea, as spoken by the North Koreans and Chinese missionaries themselves. Be prepared to see a side of North Korea you've never seen before.

Go underground into the world of Brother Yun, the Chinese house church, and the Back to Jerusalem Movement. Many mistake the idea of Back to Jerusalem as a movement of the Chinese church to evangelize Jerusalem. However, Back to Jerusalem is the goal of the Chinese church to evangelize the unreached nations from China eastward towards Jerusalem. The vision was birthed among the Chinese in the 1920s, and since that time, the church of China have strived and even suffered persecution to fulfill what they believe is their integral role in fulfilling the great commission. Come, open the pages of this book, and be amazed at what God is doing in China.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++Library of CongressW036309Philadelphia: Printed by Eleazer Oswald, at the Coffee-House, M, DCC, LXXXVIII. 1788]. viii, 93, 3] p.; 8

In this volume, Calvin Luther Martin proposes that the Europeans learned what they wished to learn from the native Americans, not what the Americans actually meant. Drawing on his own experience with native people and on their stories, he offers the reader a different conceptual landscape.

This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new way oflooking at the natural world and our place in it, while boldly challenging theassumptions that underlie the way we teach and think about both history andtime. Calvin Luther Martin's "In the Spirit of the Earth" is a provocativeaccount of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human spirit.

According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithictimes, as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with theearth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--thetechnology that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world--a new, powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and rulingelites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of"civilization."

Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature--aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we lost--or left behind--in the distant past might bereclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace withourselves.

"Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true, real context, thatis. "Homo" is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination, an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care of us--that "Homo's" citizenship, and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had arisen.'"--from "In the Spirit of the Earth"

Historians bound by their singular stories and archaeologists bound by their material evidence don t typically seek out broad comparative theories of religion. But recently Harvey Whitehouse 's modes of religiosity theory has been attracting many scholars of past religions. Based upon universal features of human cognition, Whitehouse 's theory can provide useful comparisons across cultures and historical periods even when limited cultural data is present. In this groundbreaking volume, scholars of cultures from prehistorical hunter-gatherers to 19th century Scandinavian Lutherans evaluate Whitehouse 's hypothesis that all religions tend toward either an imagistic or a doctrinal mode depending on how they are remembered and transmitted. Theorizing Religions Past provides valuable insights for all historians of religion and especially for those interested in a new cognitive method for studying the past.