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In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.
Examining the reception of evolutionary biology, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, Donovan O. Schaefer theorizes the relationship between thinking and feeling by challenging the conventional wisdom that they are separate.
CONTENTS: Editorial. Summer School "Cibo: la vita condivisa", Paola Fossati - The Philosophical Origins of Vegetarianism: Greek Philosophers and Animal World, Letterio Mauro - God, the Bible and the Environment: an Historical Excursus on the Relationship between Christian Religion and Ecology, Marco Damonte - Respect for Intergrity: How Christian Animal Ethics Could Inform EU Legislation on Farm Animals, Alma Massaro - Philosophy of Nutrition: a Historical, Existential, Phenomenological Perspective, Enrico R.A. Calogero Giannetto - Livestock Production to Feed the Planet. Animal Protein: a Forecast of Global Demand over the Next Years, Antonella Baldi & Davide Gottardo - Skeptics and "The White Stuff": Promotion of Cows' Milk and Other Nonhuman Animal Products in the SkepticCommunity as Normative Whiteness, Corey Lee Wrenn - Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (2015). Review, Eleonora Adorni
Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion-from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists-has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs-needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”
The Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States is a one-volume examination of Christianity in its role, contributions, and embattled engagements with the contemporary culture of the postmodern United States. While Christianity has been a sustaining force and dominant storyline of the historical foundations of America, obvious social, political, and scientific inroads have lessened its influence and altered the issues considered. The handbook explores the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian faith and traditions in the United States and its rich and textured history with a discernable eye toward how the message, strategies, and initiatives of Christianity has adapted to contemporary American life.
In When Pentecostals Cry, Martin Warnelid presents a unique perspective on the affective dimension of pentecostal spirituality by exploring fourteen narratives of encountering God by ordinary pentecostal believers. From a practical-theological perspective, the author creatively interprets the research findings through the leitmotif of pentecostal tears, engaging constructively with Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and Simeon Zahl’s pneumatology. In doing this, the book offers a fresh understanding of what occurs when pentecostals cry that goes beyond dismissing the phenomenon as religious emotionalism. For the first time, affective experiences of encountering God are in this book interpreted as pneumatological resonance, a concept that expands the conversation on pentecostal spirituality in significant ways.
Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).
Represents some of the best, cutting-edge thinking available on multiple forms of social upheaval and related grassroots movements. From the January 2017 Women’s March to the August 2017 events in Charlottesville and the 2020 protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, social upheaval and protest have loomed large in the United States in recent years. The varied, sometimes conflicting role of religious believers, communities, and institutions in such events and movements calls for scholarly analysis. Arising from a conference held at the College of the Holy Cross in November 2017, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval gathers contributions from ten scholars in reli...