https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomImplicit Religion2023-09-06T07:37:54+00:00David G. Robertsondavid.robertson@open.ac.ukOpen Journal Systems<p>This international journal offers a platform for scholarship that challenges the traditional boundary between religion and non-religion and the tacit assumptions underlying this distinction. It invites contributions from a critical perspective on various cultural formations that are usually excluded from religion by the gatekeeping practices of the general public, practitioners, the law, and even some scholars of religion. </p>https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23314Dilemmas with Disciplinary Hierarchies and Ideals of Scientific Research in the Study of Religion2023-09-06T07:37:38+00:00Indrek Peedu
<p>While strictly conceptual matters have dominated much of the discussion concerning religion as an object of scientific research, different understandings of the scientific character of the study of religion have also always had a significant role in the scholarly self-understanding. Here two significant conceptualizations of this scientific character—that of the so-called new scientificity (as advocated mostly by scholars from the cognitive science of religion) as well as that of the comparative history of religion—are described in detail and then thoroughly analyzed and criticized. It will be shown how both conceptualizations face problems, but those of the new scientificity are significantly more serious. Lastly, some more general reflections will be offered concerning the significance of these matters for the study of religion overall.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23274Gender and the Conceptualization of Religion and Islam2023-08-25T23:29:05+00:00Giovanni Maltese
<p>The critique of power asymmetries reproduced by Eurocentric and essentialist conceptualizations of generic terms and analytical concepts is well-established in religious studies and gender studies, especially when investigating Islam. Yet each discipline is in danger of omitting the most critical discussions of the other. Discussions about conceptualizations of religion and Islam, even those adapting theoretically sophisticated global history approaches, largely ignore gender. Scholars of gender studies, in turn, have barely queried or nuanced “religion” and “Islam” as categories. Thus, they fail to take into account how conceptualizations of religion and Islam as generic terms have affected the power relations under scrutiny. This article aims to address this momentous mutual exclusion by examining a tract published in 1940 in the context of Anglophone Southeast and South Asian Muslim intellectual circles. Drawing on Judith Butler’s critical engagement with Luce Irigaray and on Butler’s notion of subversion by thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment and situating this case study within the mentioned mutual exclusion, I argue that studying the relation between concepts of femininity and masculinity and concepts of religion and Islam poses important questions regarding colonial, androcentric, and phallogocentric epistemologies underlying contemporary religious studies and gender studies. I contend that religion-making and gender-making should not be investigated apart from each other.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23665Religion in the 21st Century2023-08-25T23:29:01+00:00Peter Beyer
<p>Religion as a category and object of study in (Western) academia has undergone a sequence of upheavals over the last several decades, responding to significant transformations in global society and as a reflection of internal disciplinary developments. This paper focuses on such transformations and developments principally within the disciplines the sociology of religion and religious studies. After summarizing these transformations, it presents three interrelated arguments: a) Both transformations, in the disciplines and in the larger social context, are the latest versions of very long discussion and development that have their roots in the nineteenth-twentieth century foundation of religion as an analytic category, in the imperial/colonial spread and glocal appropriation of the category of religion, and in the “Westphalian” institutional modeling of religion with the modern nationstate. b) The current transformations in the “religious field” are a reflection of a decline in that modeling, yielding further uncertainty about how religion should be conceived. c) The ideas of religion and secularization should not be discarded, but should be contextualized in a broader diversity of categorization that goes beyond the binary modeling of religion/not-religion (or secular). A systems-theoretical approach informs all three arguments.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/24236Global Perspectives on Religion as an Object of Historical and Social Scientific Study2023-08-25T23:29:01+00:00Florian Zemmin2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/21305Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Problem of Conscience2023-10-15T19:15:14+00:00Arup K Chatterjee
<p>Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) remains an enigma for philosophers, historians and lay audiences. Being chosen to be made “World Teacher” by the Theosophical Society (Adyar), Krishnamurti renounced his demi-godhood, in 1929, and went on to become a spiritual teacher. Krishnamurti’s vexed life has increasingly come under scrutiny, in the last three decades, owing to his perceived acts of immoral behavior. This correlates to the growing culture of public denunciations of acts of moral transgressions that we have witnessed particularly over the last decade. Considering the importance of the themes of conscience and morality within Krishnamurti’s “spiritual anarchy,” this paper tries to locate the absent centre of his seemingly decentered philosophy. It draws a comparative trajectory of the centrality of these themes in the lives and works of his philosophical parents, Helena P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant. The paper contends that Krishnamurti’s conception of morality and its role in human suffering needs to be examined, that his philosophy atavistically recapitulates the struggles of Blavatsky and Besant and, ultimately, that his perceived forays into unconscientious realms do not disqualify but reaffirm his crusade against the “still small voice of conscience.”</p>
2023-08-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23162ReOrienting Religion?2023-08-25T23:29:11+00:00Armando SalvatoreKieko Obuse
<p>This study presents a case of East–West entanglement not confined to dynamics internal to the Western trajectory of production and critique of Eurocentric notions of religion. It explores how the critical opening initiated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1962 against reifying “religion” cannot be treated exclusively as an antecedent to the critical genealogy of religion performed by Talal Asad. We suggest that it needs to be read in the context of Smith’s collaboration with Toshihiko Izutsu, whose approach possessed a stronger counterhegemonic potential than the genealogists’ interventions in the critique of religion, which are still inscribed within a Western conceptual compass. We argue that thanks to his original skills as a philosopher of language, Izutsu put to better fruition Smith’s embryonic approach to the power-fraught character of language and discourse by studying Islamic traditions semantically, discursively, and contextually.</p>
2023-08-14T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/26879Does Anyone Sincerely Believe in Science? and Several Other Questions2023-11-17T11:17:24+00:00Charles McCrary
<p>This piece, a sort of epilogue to the special issue, reflects on different ways to study “religious belief.” It identifies two broad types of scholarly questions. The first concerns religious beliefs themselves, how they are held, what work they do in societies, etc. The second interrogates “religious belief” itself as a category. And yet, these two types, while having seemingly quite distinct aims and assumptions, often overlap. The piece concludes with a discussion of “scientific beliefs,” as a way of asking what, if anything, is distinctive about religious beliefs, approached through either type of question.</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/26873“I Believe in Bees”2023-11-17T11:23:18+00:00Jack WilliamsDavid G Robertson2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/21371Inference to the Best Explanation, Naturalism, and Theism2023-08-25T23:29:12+00:00Seungbae Park
<p>De Ray argues that relying on inference to the best explanation (IBE) requires the metaphysical belief that most phenomena have explanations. I object that instead the metaphysical belief requires the use of IBE. De Ray uses IBE himself to establish theism that God is the cause of the metaphysical belief, and thus he has the burden of establishing the metaphysical belief independently of using IBE. Naturalism that the world is the cause of the metaphysical belief is preferable to theism, contrary to what de Ray thinks.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23253What does Siberian Shamanism do for the Academic Study of Religion?2023-08-25T23:29:09+00:00Liudmila Nikanorova
<p>This article will problematize shamanism as an analytical category and challenge it through a critical reading of scholarship about the area that has attracted scholars and travelers in search of Siberian shamanism—Sakha Sire [Sakha: ‘Sakha Land’], currently known as the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic. The term ‘shaman’ entered European and then global imaginations and vocabularies through the writings of eighteenth-century travelers and missionaries. I argue that the term was initially reserved for Siberian practitioners to mark their assumed ethnic and civilizational differences. With the added -ism, shamanism became one of the imagined commonalities of people grouped by Eurocentric thinkers into “tribal,” “primitive,” and “aboriginal.” The translation and categorization of Sakha practitioners oiuun to shamans resulted not only in exotification and dehumanization of Sakha practitioners, but also in their imprisonment during the Soviet regime. As this article will argue, the study of Siberian shamanism tells us more about colonial scholarships on shamanism than about the practices and people who inhabit the imagined region of Siberia.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23260The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category2023-08-25T23:29:06+00:00Julian Strube
<p>This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of “esoteric” as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived “Western esoteric corpus” that limited our view on the majority of source material. This obfuscated the fact that notions such as “esoteric,” “gnosis,” or “Cabala” have been widely employed historically to discuss subjects ranging from the Arabic and Persianate world via India to East Asia. Since the eighteenth century, “esoteric” language formed an integral part of orientalist scholarship, which explains its omnipresence in (South) Asianist scholarship today. This immediately relates to broader issues of religious comparativism: I argue for the necessity of a decentered historiography to understand the development of categories such as “esotericism” and “religion,” not as a unilateral process of “Western” diffusion and projection but through entangled historical exchanges. Based on the approach of global religious history, I provide preliminary insights into what conditioned and structured these exchanges.</p>
2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/26667Puffing, Vexation, and Emanations in the Cognitive Science of Religion2023-11-17T11:17:26+00:00Tenzan Eaghll
<p>.</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3455The Return of the Repressed2023-07-12T19:00:21+00:00Ann Gleig
Recent years have witnessed an increasing embrace of forms of religion and spirituality within the field of psychoanalysis. This article examines the emergence of the phenomena of “psychoanalysis as spirituality,” namely the radical claims, advanced by a number of influential contemporary analysts, that the unconscious has an inherently mystical dimension and that psychoanalysis can function as a modern secular spiritual practice. It creatively adopts Freud’s concept of the “return of the repressed,” the return of desires that, being socially unacceptable, have been excluded from consciousness, to suggest that the current conflation of psychoanalysis and spirituality signifies a recovery of the hidden historic religious and esoteric origins of psychoanalysis. It concludes that the wider post-modern shift within psychoanalysis has undermined oppositions between the scientific and the religious, the objective and subjective, the ego and id, and created a contemporary context in which these repressed esoteric roots can manifest in culturally acceptable ways.
2012-07-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2012 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3451Sounding the Depth of the Secular2023-07-12T18:57:21+00:00J. Heath Atchley
By examining some of the thought of Paul Tillich and Henry David Thoreau, this article articulates a version of the concept of depth that is socially critical. For both thinkers, depth is a concept that works to disrupt the rigid division between the secular and the religious. Such criticism, of a structure so fundamental to modern experience, suggests that the concept of depth is not simply a mystifying supporter of established power. Instead, it can play an important role in a religious, yet progressive, critical social thought.
2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2012 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3452Humanitarian Physicians’ Views on Spirituality2023-07-12T18:58:00+00:00Helen Meldrum
The role of spirituality in medicine has become a focal point for an ongoing international debate and conversation. How do physicians who are recognized as outstanding humanitarians define the importance of spirituality, in their lives and in their professional work? Fourteen winners of the American Medical Association Foundation’s Excellence in Medicine: Pride in the Profession Award were interviewed to ascertain their views on spirituality. This article focuses on the doctors’ perceptions of how their spiritual underpinnings affect their lives and work in medicine. All of the doctors felt spirituality was important to their own experience and to the task of understanding their patients holistically. A significant theme tying together the physicians’ views was that each one acknowledged that spirituality was a part of their undergirding support system, both in their private lives and in their profession. All of the doctors lived by a creed of “doing good while doing well by the patient”—inside or outside of traditional spiritual terminology.
2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2012 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3454“Implicit Religion?”2023-07-12T18:59:45+00:00Edward Bailey
The term “Implicit Religion” was (effectively) first coined in 1969, when it was adopted in preference to its predecessor, “secular religion.” The historical and ideological contexts of the concept will be sketched, before three definitions (or, better, “descriptions”) of the intended meaning are offered. Three studies, undertaken as test-cases for the utility of the concept, will be briefly reported, along with the subsequent development of study in the area of implicit religion, and its relationship with explicit religion and spirituality.
2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2012 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3456The Enduring Problem of Dualism2023-07-12T19:01:01+00:00John White
Arguments on how religion interfaces with sports are not new, and in particular, sports activity itself has been characterized as religion, namely, “cultural,” “natural,” “civil,” and “folk.” In this article, I want to consider a recent proposal by Shirl Hoffman in Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Hoffman attempts to reimagine how the Christian religion and sports should relate (on account of the problems of modern muscular Christianity), by justifying the sacredness of sports, in order to heal or put it back together; he appeals to sports intrinsic religious or hierarchical spiritual value. I will argue that, in his effort to redress the problems of modern muscular Christianity, Hoffman in the end falls prey to the same problem of dualism that has beset modern muscular Christianity. Specifically, dualism for Hoffman is both metaphysical and eschatological, both of which affect how he construes the human player and play itself. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports by Shirl James Hoffman. 2010. Baylor University Press. 356pp., Pb. $29.95. ISBN-13: 9781932792102.
2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2012 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3830Why Study Implicit Religion? An Account of the 27th Denton Conference on Implicit Religion, 7-9 May 20042021-09-27T00:02:44+00:00Karen Parna
<p align="left">Denton Hall in Yorkshire, UK, has been the seat of academic weekends devoted to research on implicit religion since the late 1970’s, more or less the lifetime of some of us younger participants in the latest conference. Judging from the very full schedule of the weekend that took place from 7–9 May this year, in those years study in the field has anything but exhausted itself. This year’s conference offered a broad range of topics and disciplines, and the cases presented promise to open up more and more interesting new domains. It would appear that the implicit religion approach lends itself to most facets of our society—from explicit religion to healthcare; from the business world to youth culture. What seems to tie the different uses of the concept together is not so much a unanimous understanding of what implicit religion is or should be. Rather, it is a shared interest in religiosity as something not necessarily institutionalised but nonetheless very much present in the modern world. However, if implicit religion can be described as a ‘common cause’, then what are its goals and what is the agenda of those studying it today?</p>
2004-03-28T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2004 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/3839Review of From Civil to Political Religion by Marcella Cristi, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation by Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle and Perspectives on Civil Religion by Gerald Parsons2021-09-27T00:38:17+00:00William H. Swatos, Jr.2004-03-28T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2004 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23200Republicanism as Bad Religion2023-06-07T08:27:11+00:00Susannah Crockford
<p>Since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it has become commonplace for his opponents to refer to him as a “cult leader.” The apparent fanaticism of his supporters inspires both awe and fear in observers. His propensity to disseminate conspiracy theories and alleged encouragement of the Jan 6 insurrection pushes Trump beyond the boundaries of political norms. In this article, I trace the elements of Trump’s rhetorical and political style that led to accusations of his being some sort of charismatic “cult leader.” The analysis broadens to discuss the complex interconnections between modern Republicanism in the US and Protestant Christianity, examining how a form of nationalist morality has come to uphold their claims to power. Both opponents and supporters of Donald Trump see him in a religious frame, either as a dangerous authoritarian leader or messianic saviour. What does this tell us about the definitions and boundaries of religion and politics? And why does Donald Trump seem to trouble those boundaries?</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23202Past the Pejorative2023-02-23T23:27:22+00:00Philip Deslippe
<p>Within the academic study of New Religious Movements, it has become standard to understand “cult” as a pejorative term which is dismissive of minority religions and in some cases harms them. This article, through a quantitative content analysis conducted by the author of various uses of the word “cult” in twenty-five American newspapers through the 1990s, is an attempt to understand, in detail and supported by data, how “cult” was applied to particular religious groups and used more widely within popular discourse. It argues that the word “cult” was primarily used for subjects that were not religious groups, and when it was applied to religious groups, it was largely done so to a very small number that all shared several characteristics. It further argues that “cult” should be understood <br />as a complex term with a range of meanings and applications.</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23203Cult/Art2023-02-23T23:27:20+00:00[M] Dudeck
<p>The American presidency of Donald J. Trump has been notorious in its disregard for established norms, while his radical reformation of the American project have led many to equate his presidency to a work of “performance art.” The worship of his followers and the devotion of his Republican base have led to Trump being hailed as a “flawed redeemer,” and all those who worship him as a new form of “religious cult.” News and media anchors regularly refer to the former American president as a cult leader, a performance artist, or both; yet neither signifiers are ever contextualized within the history of religion, or western art by those who invoke them. Both the performance artist and the cult leader are contemporary media constructions that activate the religious imagination through intrigue and horror. As an artist inventing a religion as art, and a scholar of new religious movements, I present this article as an excavation of these signifiers and speculate upon their unique conflation around the unprecedented American presidency of Donald J. Trump.</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23218“Cults,” Coercion, and Control2023-02-23T23:27:19+00:00Erin Martine SessionsBernard Doherty
<p>In the face of what has been called an epidemic of domestic and family violence (DFV) in several countries, scholarly analysts, journalists, and policymakers have increasingly turned to the matrix of ideas around what Evan Stark has called coercive control, for insights into the dynamics of abusive relationships. In seeking to address this social problem, some commentators—in both the DFV research space and cultic studies— have begun to see a link between New Religions (“cults”) and coercive control, and use the language of coercive control to revive a problematic rhetoric linked to ideas about so-called “brainwashing.” This article highlights some of the commonalities between coercive control, as theorized by Stark and others, and the classic work on coercive persuasion as this was applied—sometimes disingenuously—to a wave of New Religions during the 1970s through to the 1990s. Secondly, this article analyses the rhetorical use of elements of the “cult stereotype” in contemporary popular and academic discussions of DFV and how the language of coercive control has been employed. We conclude that the use of coercive control language in cultic studies is largely superficial and engages in tactical ambiguities which seek to apply various “cultic brainwashing” ideas in a new context and suggest that this approach is unhelpful both to victim-survivors of DFV and those who have experienced abuse in particular New Religions or, indeed, within mainstream religion.</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23330From Bad to Worse2023-02-23T23:27:17+00:00Edward Graham-Hyde
<p>The rhetoric “cult wars,” which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has stagnated in recent decades. Having empirically undermined the “brainwashing” hypothesis, academic research has progressed beyond the classic typologies and discussion of “dangerous cults.” Terms such as “New Religious Movement” became academized in a bid to recalibrate the discussion of religious phenomenon around the individual. However, “cult” rhetoric is still prevalent in popular vernacular, incipient in multiple discourses that redefine the terminology beyond an historic understanding of “religious.” In this article, I outline my initial intention to revisit the terminology currently used in the academy as a result of reflections from participants in my doctoral research. I designed a survey that sought out the thoughts of everyday people in how they perceive the key terms: “cult,” “brainwashing,” “new religious movement” and “minority religion.” Having used the Facebook Advert Centre to widen the reach of the survey, I quickly found that those commenting on the survey were engaging in a battle that is synonymous with the “cult wars” of old. I found that the discourse was predicated upon COVID-19 and a general distrust of “the establishment.” This article analyses the comments engaging with the advert and explores the usage of “cult” rhetoric in contemporary society.</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23573The Return of the “Cult”2023-02-23T23:27:15+00:00Aled ThomasEdward Graham-Hyde
<p>Recent years have seen an apparent “return” of normative religious and cultic language in political and media discourses, often adopted in pejorative and confrontational contexts. Arguably driven by contemporary political divisions and debates surrounding COVID-19 restrictions, terms including “cult,” “brainwashing,” and “groupthink” have reignited discourses surrounding so-called “cultic” behaviour and beliefs. We argue, however, that the “cult debate” has not returned, but rather transitioned into new and implicit conversations surrounding “good” and “bad” religion. In this special issue of Implicit Religion, we seek to avoid re-treading old ground concerning definitions of “cults,” and instead adopt a renewed approach to the academic study of normative cultic language—placing an emphasis on the ways in which these terms are used, negotiated, and understood in contemporary discourses.</p>
2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23883The (Un)Expected Gift2023-11-17T11:17:34+00:00Stefania PalmisanoNicola Pannofino
<p class="western" align="justify">Receiving an organ is an event that marks a turning point in the patient’s life trajectory, not only because it marks the beginning of a new phase in the therapeutic process, but also because it opens up an unprecedented existential perspective in the recipient. This perspective is typically told through an autobiographical narrative marked by an implicitly religious or spiritual vocabulary centred on the feeling of rebirth and the sacredness of organ donation. Starting from the analysis of a corpus of qualitative interviews, the article <br />aims to show the spirituality implicit in the autobiographical narratives of a group of members of the Associazione Nazionale Emo-Dializzati (ANED) of Turin (Italy). The data indicate that this implicit dimension is the product of a co-construction between patients and health workers in the context of the specific organizational culture of the hospital ward. This finding suggests possible directions for the implementation of spiritual care interventions in clinical practice.</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/24628“Call me a Fanatic"2023-11-24T11:10:50+00:00Naomi Richman
<p>Anthropologists have pointed to the politics at play in the uneven application of the term “belief” to describe different cultural representations of reality. They have observed that westerners sometimes reserve the term “belief” for the description of non-western epistemologies, while categorising their own perspectives, informed by theories of scientific empiricism for example, as “knowledge.” This is an important critique, so what to do when our non-western interlocutors insist on being called “believers?” This article considers the ideas of a Nigerian Pentecostal church who not only characterize their faith using the language of “belief,” but even aspire to be branded “fanatics” by outsiders. Drawing on the teachings of the church, striking congruences between the understandings of belief deployed by this group and by scholars of religion are brought to light, collapsing the distance between self-described African Christian “fanatics” and those who critically analyse them.</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/24338Zombies Roaming Around the Pantheon2023-11-17T11:17:32+00:00Leonardo Ambasciano
<p>The present contribution explores how the field of Roman History has formalized and justified the absence of “belief”—and religious belief in particular—as part of its standard research programme. In positing an unbridgeable gap between ancient Romans and modern human beings mainly based on the idea that “belief” and “faith” are modern Protestant concepts, Roman History inadvertently transmogrified its subjects of study into a legion of zombies incapable of holding meta-representations of their own religious (and non-religious) beliefs. While Roman History might have been an outlier in its staunch commitment to this exclusionary approach, the post-1970s move towards the abandonment of “belief” insofar as the study of ancient religion(s) is concerned was part of a widespread paradigm shift within the Humanities, which only very recently has been questioned. The history of the concept of “belief” in both Roman History and anthropology, as well as its rejection from the former’s disciplinary toolbox, are tackled, while the peculiar disciplinary concepts of Roman “orthopraxy” and “demythicization” (sometimes hailed as explananda or replacements for the absence of “belief” in Roman antiquity) are also explained. Finally, a cognitive rebuttal of this absence is provided through a reappraisal of David Chalmers’ “philosophical zombies” mental experiment.</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/23812The Intersectional Logic of “Bad Religion”2023-11-17T11:17:37+00:00Leonie C Geiger
<p>Using an example of German Christian development cooperation, this paper examines strengths and weaknesses of an intersectional analysis in relation to “religion.” I will make a twofold argument. First, I will argue that the rhetoric of “bad religion” present in development cooperation is based on an intersectional logic and reproduces marginalization. Second, I will present that intersectional approaches often conceptualize “religion” in an essentialist way. By doing so, I will explore the common features of “development” and “intersectionality,” referred to here as the intersectional logic of development, describe the role of “religion” within it and demonstrate a dualistic logic of reading positions as hegemonic and non-hegemonic within this intersectional logic of development. Drawing on the concept of assemblage developed by Jasbir Puar (2007), this essay concludes by proposing some programmatic considerations that allow addressing these challenges and further developing intersectional studies as well as the critical study of religion. </p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IR/article/view/24340The Feeling of Believing2023-11-17T11:17:29+00:00Jack Williams
<p>The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion</p>
2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.