Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

Christopher G. White, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions.

2021-08-22T04:10:50+00:00

Christopher G. White, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, 376 pp, ISBN: 9780674984295 (hbk). $37.00 / £29.95 / €33.50.

Arnaud Blin, War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-first Centuries.

2021-07-27T08:31:08+00:00

Arnaud Blin, War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-first Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019, pp. 335, ISBN: 9780520961753 (hbk). £27.00/$34.95.

Christina Rocha, Mark Hutchinson and Kathleen Openshaw (eds), Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements.

2021-10-06T11:40:04+00:00

Christina Rocha, Mark Hutchinson and Kathleen Openshaw (eds), Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Leiden/Boston: Brill Publications, 2020, pp. 304. €55.00/$64.00. ISBN 9789004425781 (pbk).

A Tribute to Professor Gary Bouma, MDiv, MA, PhD, AM (1942–2021)

2021-09-28T03:43:19+00:00

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Political Power

2021-01-30T23:00:13+00:00

This article reconsiders the societal conditions determining ascetic Protestantism such as Calvinism during its early development, as distinguished from its later effects on society. It argues that a multiplicity of social conditions impacted the rise and expansion of Calvinism. These involve political, religious, cultural and economic conditions of the rise of Calvinism. They indicate the original societal conditioning of Calvinism, as distinct from and empirically prior to its subsequent effects on societies. This analysis specifically focuses on the sociopolitical conditions and conjunctures influencing Calvinism. The article concludes that early Calvinism was the outcome of political and related societal conditions and historical conjunctures, specifically of the Ancien Régime, and only subsequently producing its social outcomes emphasized in the sociological literature. The article aims to contribute to abridging a gap in the sociological literature, which centers on Calvinism’s outcomes in society, including economy and politics, and decenters on its own societal, including political, conditions.

The Momo Challenge

2021-10-01T23:04:50+00:00

From 2018–2019, the spectre of Momo haunted the internet. Momo is depicted as a gaunt Japanese woman with long black hair, an enlarged mouth, and bulbous, haunting eyes. Allegedly, Momo responds to those who text her phone with violent imagery and explicit threats. She also encourages children to self-harm and shows them triggering images of gore, sometimes interspersed amidst innocent cartoons. Of course, Momo is not real and no one has hurt themselves in response to her ‘challenges’. From the start, Momo was very clearly a novel urban legend whose influence was magnified in the popular press and by their deeply-held suspicion of internet predators, peer pressure, and an online world in which technology makes any kind of sinister attack possible. Momo is thus an important case study in establishing the recent history of online demon fear, which feeds into broader trends surrounding ‘Satanic panic’ gateways into the occult. This article positions Momo as the latest manifestation of a fear that children are especially susceptible to evil, and that parents must remain vigilant to the corrupting forces of the demonic.

The Quakers

2021-08-09T06:13:18+00:00

Liberal Quakerism’s engagement with the public sphere acts as a mechanism for producing social solidarity within the movement. This argument is demonstrated through an examination of Quaker engagement with Queer social issues in the UK, US and Australia. The social activism of Quakers sustains their identity as a liberal religious organisation sympathetic to progressive causes and nurtures a sense of common purpose within the movement that subsumes internal differences. It is argued that, while Quaker orthopraxis within the Society binds internal diversity together, this can also include Friends’ activist engagement with the secular world. This focus on the dialectical relationship between Quakerism’s internal culture and external social processes suggest that a dynamic relationship exists between contemporary secularism and liberal religious groups.

Classification of Theories about the Origin of Religions

2021-10-01T23:48:04+00:00

In this article, I will classify theories about the origin of religions, distinguishing two groups of theories: those upholding the revealed origin of religion and those denying it. The former can be split into two: theories assuming that revelation is an encounter between humans and certain finite extraterrestrial intelligences (an encounter taking place in the past or being expected for the future) and those defining revelation as the presence before humans of either a transcendent, immaterial God or certain mythological or historical beings sent by him. As for the latter, two varieties exist as well: theories holding that non-human animals also have religion, and those restricting religion to humans and explaining their origin through the relationships of human groups with their environment. To classify the latter, I will make use of Gustavo Bueno’s theory of anthropological space. Finally, I will touch on the necessarily partisan components of my classification.