This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s keynote address during his visit at the University of Łódź in 2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations, published by Peter Lang.

What is religion? How does it work? Many natural abilities of the human mind are involved, and crucial among them is the ability to use language. This volume brings together research from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, to understand the phenomena of religion as a distinctly human enterprise. The book is divided into three parts, each part preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, chapters introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology, and explore the brain's contrasting capacities, in particular its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the discussion of metaphor - the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. Specialists in particular religions apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive-linguistic research on religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years. What unfolds ultimately is the idea that the embodied cognition of humans is the basis not only of their languages, but also of their religions.

The European Union currently finds itself in the midst of its most profound crises since its creation. In the minds and writings of many commentators, politicians and European citizens, these multiple contemporary crises call the very future of the European project into doubt. Against the backdrop of economic and political crises across the continent, this edited collection examines the discursive workings and processes underpinning both the centrifugal and the centripetal political forces currently reshaping Europe and individual nation-states. This volume strikes an original balance between inter-disciplinary work and a shared analytical engagement with the different methodologies and conceptual approaches provided by political linguistics. This is an edited collection that explores the linguistic manifestations of the competing political forces currently being negotiated within European nation-states and between them. The chapters explore the different triggers, dimensions and reactions to recent and current crises across a range of European settings. Crises are thereby shown to give rise to com-plex political fields, in which different assessments and ideological blueprints compete for voters' attention and support. Nationalism, as the currently most prominent political force, is shown to require analyses capable of shedding light on its wider contexts and its political competitors.