Thinking about Feminist Leadership

This essay introduces a series of four Bible studies on the first eleven chapters of Acts; they were developed for and undertaken at the CWM Theological Education in Mission consultation. After noting the key opportunities that the Bible studies provided, the essay shares the material offered under four themes: and Mission (Acts 1 and 2); and Mission (Acts 3, 4 and 5); and Mission (Acts 6, 7 and 8); and Mission (Acts 9, 10 and 11). The essay closes with reflections on the Bible study process. ********** The planning group for the Council for Mission (CWM) consultation, Transforming Theological Education in Mission, decided that it would be appropriate to have Bible studies rather than sermons in the morning devotions. The evaluation of the consultation suggested that this was a positive experience for delegates. In this article, I have been asked to share the process and content of these studies. The vision of the Bible studies As we began to plan these studies, we saw that they would provide us with three important opportunities. In the first instance, they would provide time at the start of the day for biblical reflection and for grounding our wider discussions in the word of God. It is sometimes easy for such conferences to move quite quickly into abstract theoretical discussions, and to lose an immediate connection with the Bible. For many delegates from the South, where the immediacy of the biblical text is vital for shaping the work of the church, this is a crucial consideration. Rooted in the Bible, then, the studies would provide an opportunity to introduce the four themes at the heart of the conference, namely, Gospel and Mission, World and Mission, Church and Mission, and Formation and Mission. Second, it was decided that the Bible studies would make use of the inductive method. This method does not assume that there is only one way of interpreting the text but that we hear God speaking to us through the range of cultural, political and contextual experiences and commitments that we bring to the Bible. Inductive Bible study introduces us to the text, identifies some key themes, and then opens up space for participants themselves to contribute to what is learnt. It recognizes that there is no teacher-opposed-to-learners but that we are all teachers and all learners. This kind of Bible study seeks to undercut the language-power-knowledge dynamics that often characterize biblical interpretation, and does so by explicitly valuing all insights and inviting all to share their perspectives. It is an approach that provided an opportunity for each person at the conference to share and to listen, and thus freed up a range of different voices that could then be drawn into the wider consultation. The third opportunity that we sought to seize was the chance to engage in small group reflection with a diverse range of participants gathered for the consultation. CWM represents a collective of churches from a wide range of contexts. The Congregational and Presbyterian ecclesiologies of these churches mean that they are diverse according to the cultures and circumstances in which they have found themselves. Gathered at this consultation were people responsible for the organization of the theological education that their churches provide, as well as theological educators from the training institutions themselves. So often people are invited to such gatherings but then are forced to sit as isolated individuals and hear experts give papers to which the listeners respond as individuals. Yet, it is our experience at such consultations that in one way or another every delegate is an expert. So, we need to balance the offering of papers with the opportunity to be enriched by intentional engagement with others in a small group format. The Bible studies provided a chance for this. Bearing all of this in mind, the first eleven chapters of The Acts of the Apostles were chosen for the focus of the Bible studies. …

Since the mid-2000s, cognitive science approaches have been used in biblical studies. Cognitive science came into existence in the 1950s as a reaction to the psychological behaviorism of the time, and it studies human thought processes, such as memory, learning, decision making, and social cognition, including the role of emotions. Cognitive science is multidisciplinary in nature, with contributions from linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, experimental psychology, ethology, computer modeling, and other disciplines. It has influenced a variety of academic fields, ranging from anthropology and education to musicology and medicine. Its appearance and impact is often referred to as the “cognitive turn.” Cognitive approaches to religion examine cross-culturally recurrent religious thought and behavior from the perspective of cognitive science. Cognitive approaches to religion, in turn, offer important insights and theories for the cognitive scientific study of biblical texts and traditions. Three research areas can be identified that especially influenced the emergence of cognitive science approaches to biblical studies: (1) A considerable part of cognitive research on religion can be linked to the program called cognitive science of religion (CSR), which started in the 1990s. In the beginning, CSR focused mainly on god concepts and rituals, with a strong emphasis on the evolved cognitive structure of the human mind. New research areas of CSR include the role of religion in social cooperation, experimental studies in ethnography, discussions and applications of the theory of cultural evolution, quantitative studies of large-scale historical processes, and computational models of religious thought and behavior. While some scholars have argued that religion is a by-product of cognitive mechanisms (such as traits underlying social cooperation) that evolved previously for other purposes (the so-called by-product hypothesis), others see religion as an evolutionary adaptation. (2) The neuroscientific study of religious experience started in the 1980s and gained momentum with the rapid development of new neuroimaging technologies in the 1990s. Work on religious experience in biblical studies draws on insights from this area. (3) Finally, the field of cognitive linguistics also started in the 1980s and examines the role of the human body in shaping human thought and language. Biblical scholars have drawn especially on cognitive poetics and conceptual metaphor theory. In this article we will first discuss overviews of cognitive science approaches in biblical studies. Second, major contributions to the cognitive science of religion and conceptual metaphor theory will be presented, with an emphasis on publications that have exerted an influence on biblical scholars. This part will also include cognitive studies of ancient religions outside biblical studies. Third, cognitive science approaches to various research questions and topics in biblical studies will be discussed, including Jewish and early Christian history, memory and transmission, ritual, miracle and magic, ethics and morality, religious experience, theological and Christological concepts, applications of conceptual metaphor theory, the use of computational modeling, and other exegetical topics.

This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.

Portfolio of WoodturningA Special Section Charles Farrar (bio) [End Page 379] Click for larger view View full resolution Charles Farrar © Ellen Scarborough / The Charlotte Observer [End Page 380] Click for larger view View full resolution Hol-e Grail (2003) by Charles Farrar. Thin wall ant-eaten vessel, poplar (h: 7″h × 7″). Collection of Mrs. Joan Leggett, Danville, Virginia. Charles Farrar © 2003 [End Page 381] Click for larger view View full resolution Singing Bowl (1997) by Charles Farrar. Tall, open jar, quilted maple burl (h: 13″ × 10 ½″). Collection of Ms. Marlene Cox, Charlotte, North Carolina. Charles Farrar © 1997 [End Page 382] Click for larger view View full resolution Hammered Wood Series (1999) by Charles Farrar. Textured wood surface with gilding, ash (h: 5″ × 7″). Charles Farrar © 1999 [End Page 383] Click for larger view View full resolution Windswept (1999) by Charles Farrar. Black walnut burl (h: 9½″ × 19″). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Warren Kean, Mooresville, North Carolina. Charles Farrar © 1999 [End Page 384] Click for larger view View full resolution Hollow Form (2004) by Charles Farrar. Buckeye burl (h: 11″ × 12″). Charles Farrar © 2004 [End Page 385] Click for larger view View full resolution Hammered Wood Series (2003) by Charles Farrar. Textured surface with African blackwood spout and foot, poplar (h: 8″ × 11″). Charles Farrar © 2003 [End Page 386] Click for larger view View full resolution Lidded Vessel with Brass (2009) by Charles Farrar. Textured surface, antiqued with brass application, ambrosia maple (h: 10″ × 13″). Collection of Mrs. Crandall Bowles, Fort Mill, South Carolina. Charles Farrar © 2009 [End Page 387] Click for larger view View full resolution Lidded Hollow Form (2011) by Charles Farrar. Spalted maple with maple burl lid (h: 10″ × 9″). Charles Farrar © 2011 [End Page 388] Charles Farrar American Artist Charles Farrar Charles Farrar holds a business degree from Virginia State University, is a James Solomon Russell Scholar in Religious and Philosophical Studies, and has completed graduate work with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace, London. His artwork has been exhibited in such major US cities as Albuquerque, Charlotte, St. Paul, Richmond, Atlanta, and New York, and his work has been on permanent loan with the State Department at the US Embassy in Madagascar. His corporate commissions include Bank of America, First Citizens Bank & Trust Company, and The David Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles. He has served as member of the Advisory Committee of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, NC, and is a member of the Cabarrus Arts Council Board, Concord, NC, the American Association of Woodturners, the American Craft Council, and Charlotte Area Woodturners. He lives and creates in Concord, NC. Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 10–13 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.03 Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies Abtsam Saleh Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Why is American Islam is so Rarely Framed as an “American Religion” in the Field of Religious Studies? Despite existing in America long before the establishment of the United States, Muslims have been largely left out of discussions on American religion within the field of religious studies. In order to answer the question of why, one has to ask what scholars of religious studies have understood “American religion” to be. According to most surveys of American religious history, the term has been used to denote the history of Christianity in America, white Protestantism more specifically, some dating the origins of American religion back to the Protestant Reformation.1 Narratives surrounding American religion were constructed to center Protestantism and the ways it has dominated public religious life in the United States, reified by legal and political actors.2 Considerations of what fell under the category of American religion were largely based on proximity to mainline Protestant churches, casting all other denominations and/or religions outside of the category. Over time, however, 1 For more recent work on this topic see John Modern, “Marshall McLuhan, Playful Prophet” in “Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2),” Religion and American Culture 29, no. 2 (2019): 153–162. 2 See Marie A. Failinger, “Islam in the Mind of American Courts: 1800 to 1960,” Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice 32, no.1 (2012): 1–29. Abtsam Saleh 11 historians of American religion have begun to expand on this narrow definition. R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans,3 although working with this mainline definition of American religion, expands on the category by examining its relationship with denominations and/or religions deemed as religious outsiders on the basis of dissenting from mainline Protestantism. Moore concludes that this categorization based on consensus-dissent is inadequate in expressing the plurality of American religious life in-so-much as it continues to center mainline Christianity as the religion of the US as a nation. In the more recent “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization,” Finbarr Curtis critically examines the category of American religion as a specialization within the discipline of religious studies, including its history of Protestant bias. Curtis highlights how despite attempts at expanding American religion to include narratives of underrepresented religious groups, these inclusions remain peripheral despite being recognized.4 This precise centering of Protestantism as the American religion and the locating of those not in proximity to it in its periphery is a reason why American Islam is so rarely framed as an “American religion” in the field of religious studies. Narratives of American religious history place American Islam in the periphery, dismissing its influence on American culture and American culture ’s influence on it. American religionists reify this categorization both in their scholarship and institutionally when American Islam is positioned as peripheral to the construction of the American nation and religion. Can Islam be “American religion”? If we move away from an understanding of American religion that centers white Protestantism and expand the category to mean religions who have both shaped and been shaped by this nation, whose understandings are put in conversation with the legal, social, political, economic, and cultural life of the United States, then Islam is certainly an American religion. American Muslims are part of the patchwork of American social-religious life, preceding the formation of the United States. Enslaved African Muslims were brought to the Americas centuries prior to the American Revolution, bringing with them their religious traditions, many maintaining them in conversation with their new surroundings, and some preserving them over generations.5 Over centuries, Islam lived and grew within 3 R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4 Finbarr Curtis, “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization ,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 365. 5 See Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New...

The paper examines John Samuel Mbiti’s legacy in teaching, research, and publication in African Traditional to Religion (ATR) at Makerere University. It documents his contribution Religious Studies’ scholarship. The crux of the paper is to interrogate his contribution towards teaching, research, and publication in ATR, with an interest in how this has continued to influence scholarship in religious studies. By examining his legacy, we aim at documenting knowledge production in ATR. This paper utilises data obtained through in- depth interviews with Mbiti’s contemporaries and other scholars, including alumni and current students of Religious Studies, and those that have read his publications. Besides, archival records of Mbiti’s works and online articles were reviewed to provide data that will enhance the discourse on his legacy. The paper contributes to the existing knowledge on Mbiti’s legacy in the teaching, research, and publication of ATR literature.

Alabama’s Anti-Miscegenation Statutes Jeremy W. Richter (bio) In the immediate aftermath of the civil war and, more specifically, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, various southern states began passing laws to preserve a now-fragile social structure. Beginning with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which liberated all slaves residing in rebel states or territories, the southern states’ social ecology had begun to unravel, and southern whites faced a situation in which the black Americans once deemed property were now citizens—equal in the eyes of the law. Nevertheless, white citizens sought to maintain control over their black counterparts. In an effort to preserve their society, southern states in 1865 began to pass a series of laws, which varied by state and collectively became known as Black Codes. These laws were designed to exploit and control former slaves. For example, freedmen (as freed black citizens became known) who were arrested for vagrancy could be contracted out for labor; freedmen were, in some states, not allowed to raise their own crops and were precluded from entering towns without permission. Most significantly perhaps, the Black Codes enacted offenses containing differing penalties for black versus white citizens. These racially-discriminatory penalties were later outlawed upon the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and the enactment of the Reconstruction Acts. Two centuries of slavery had, prior to 1865, created a caste system which maintained, at least officially, the distinction between white and black. With that barrier removed and the federal government attempting to institute legal racial equality, of primary concern to [End Page 345] many was the preservation of the purity of the white race. In response, many states throughout the United States, largely regardless of geography, passed laws prohibiting the intermarriage of white and black citizens.1 In 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States held in Loving v. Virginia that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and as such any such existing laws were overturned. At the time of the Loving v. Virginia decision, sixteen states still had anti-miscegenation laws in effect: Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. The State of Alabama enacted its first anti-miscegenation law in the Penal Code of 1866: If any white person and any negro, or the descendant of any negro, to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry, or live in adultery or fornication with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary, or sentenced to hard labor for the county, for not less than two, nor more than seven years.2 The Alabama legislature reinforced this statute in new penal codes that were enacted in 1867 (§ 3602), 1876 (§ 4189), 1886 (§ 4018), and 1896 (§ 5096). In 1901, Alabama drafted a new state constitution, wherein the anti-miscegenation statute was made a part of the state constitution: “The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, [End Page 346] or descendant of a negro.”3 The final revisions to Alabama’s anti-miscegenation law were adopted in the Code of Alabama of 1940, which stated: “If any white person and any negro, or the descendant of any negro intermarry, or live in adultery or fornication with each other, each of them shall, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary for not less than two nor more than seven years.”4 Judicial Application of Anti-Miscegenation Laws in Alabama: Setting Precedent, 1868–1881 In addition to a law disallowing marriage between whites and blacks, the Alabama Penal Code of 1866 adopted laws governing adultery. Where Alabama Code § 3598 outlined the repercussions of adultery offenses generally, Alabama Code § 3602 specifically addressed the penalties for adultery between white and black persons: If any white person or negro, or the descendant of any negro, to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry or live in adultery with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary, or sentenced to hard labor for the...

“Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack”: John Updike and the Construction of Middle American Masculinity 1 Sally Robinson (bio) My earliest sociological thought about myself had been that I was fortunate to be a boy and an American. Now the world was being told that American males—especially white, Protestant males who had done well under “the system”—were the root of evil. Law-abiding conformity had become the opposite of a refuge. The Vietnam era was no sunny picnic for me . . . —John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs In a 1974 book entitled The Male Dilemma: How to Survive the Sexual Revolution, Anne Steinmann and David J. Fox describe the “pain of transition” suffered by ordinary Middle American white men attempting to come to terms with the radical changes wrought by the civil rights and sexual liberation movements. Steinmann and Fox draw attention to [End Page 331] the forced invisibility of these normative Americans who have been decentered in an era marked by the coming to visibility of others: Whenever there is a major revolution or change in the power structure of some aspect of society, the outs, the insurgents, the underdogs always become the center of attention and receive the major share of publicity. Thus, in the United States, the activities of racial minorities and youthful rebels are given center stage, while their adversaries, the white, middle-class, middle-age establishment, sink into the shadows. In the sexual revolution, the male has been cast as the adversary, the “enemy.” (9) Throughout The Male Dilemma, Steinmann and Fox make liberal use of the figure of the “shadow” to describe the paradoxical condition in which white men find themselves vis-à-vis the revolutionary movements of their time: at once invisible behind the “underdogs” who have taken center stage, and newly visible as the “enemies” of change and liberation, middle-class white men become a shadowy presence-absence on the American scene. In the late sixties and early seventies, the felt social, cultural, and political marginalization of Middle American white men is articulated through the metaphor of the “silent majority,” as countless magazine articles, news programs, and books announce a crisis in American normativity. For Steinmann and Fox, that crisis stems from a massive realignment of gender positions, and it afflicts (white) men who, buried under the “avalanche of words by and about women,” have “become a symbol” spoken by others, but not themselves speaking (9). For Richard Lemon, whose The Troubled American (1969) anatomizes the alienation of white American men, the crisis is primarily racial: the “forgotten” Americans are white Americans who now lack “a voice” in national and local affairs. If contemporary studies of Middle American angst are any indication, however, these troubled Americans are remarkably vocal for those who claim to have been silenced. As the wife of John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom puts it in Rabbit Redux (1969), “‘He’s silent majority . . . but he keeps making noise’” (49). In the first section of this essay, I analyze the emergence of the “Middle American” as white and male and argue that, paradoxically, this figure is created as the spokesperson for a normative American [End Page 332] identity unmarked by gender and race, and as a specific gendered and racialized identity. The class position of the Middle American is less clear, and the confusion between the working and middle classes evident in the discourse on his “discovery” ensures that white masculinity become a remarkably inclusive category whose internal differences are far less important than what holds it together. The category “Middle American” becomes increasingly visible following the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. It becomes visible not as a secure and self-evidently normative standard of American identity, but as a beleaguered and disenfranchised group whose rights have been trampled upon in the rush to embrace the gender, racial, and sexual “underdogs” whose demands have “silenced” the majority. Discussions of the silent majority paradoxically have the effect of making white men newly visible as a specific category of American identity, even as a wide range of commentators act to remedy the proclaimed invisibility of these “ordinary” Americans. But invisibility can be a privilege as well as a burden, and in the discourse on...

Reviewed by: Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe ed. by Letha Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Hildo van Engen Mariusz Bęcławski Böhringer, Letha, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, eds, Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Sanctimoniales, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. xii, 235; 2 maps, 4 b/w tables; R.R.P. €80.00; ISBN 9782503551357. This collection of essays is the first volume of Brepols’s new series Sanctimoniales, and comes out of the work of the Arbeitskreis geistliche Frauen im europäischen Mittelalter (Research Group for the Study of Religious Women in the European Middle Ages) which was established in 2004 by the series’s co-editors. The beguines and beghards that are the focus of the essays collected here represent the new forms of medieval spirituality that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The new approach to faith was characterised by a personal and inner-oriented kind of religious life, that reflected the ideals of poverty and penance, and Christ’s sufferings and it tended to marginalise [End Page 266] the intermediary role of the clergy. Groups of beguines and beghards could be found all over Europe, especially in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France. Indeed, in his contribution, Walter Simons claims that more than one hundred and fifty beguinages ‘are known to have existed in the southern dioceses of the Low Countries before 1300’ (p. 37). In general, the book tackles the problem of terminology: various words were used to name beguines and beghards, which have misled both contemporaries and later scholars. Even the etymology of the words ‘beguine’ and ‘beghard’ has been questioned, but most of the nine contributors stick to the theory that they originate from the root ‘begg’, and related to murmuring or mumbling after reciting prayers. Simons further remarks that ‘any question of terminology raises the far more difficult one about the relationship between language and social change’ (p. 9). This problem helps explain why different groups reacted differently to this new form of religious practice and why traditionalists clashed with reformers. Limitations of space prevent a detailed discussion of each contribution, but two are especially noteworthy. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, focusing on beguines in Würzburg, writes about two Clementine (after Pope Clement V) decrees in terms of their effect on beguines: ‘The Clementine decrees have received insightful analysis in recent years, yet the repeated generalization of the “common” or “vulgar” naming of the women has been taken rather at face value’ (p. 54). Deane adds that in 1320, ‘a marked terminological shift appears’; that is, after the publication of the Clementine decrees, there is virtually no use of the term ‘beguine’ in fourteenth-century documents from Würzburg, apart from two incidences of the term ‘beguinages’ (p. 64). In her essay, which focuses on lay religious women in thirteenth-century Brabant, Vera von der Osten-Sacken casts more light onto the character of the beguine movements and their daily accomplishments. Like most of the other contributors to this volume, von der Osten-Sacken relies directly on Latin records, such as Jacques de Vitry’s Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, for her evidence. Von der Osten-Sacken also reveals that the role models of beguines came about not only through ‘external preaching’ but also through ‘their own biblical studies’ (p. 101). And although their principles followed those of the Cistercians – beguines fostered personal relations with adjacent Cistercian women – the first beguines rejected enclosure to form open lay communities. The first beguines are also thought to have originated from affluent, middleclass families, which had become wealthy through trade and financial transactions. Additionally, like contemporary crusade preachers from the milieu of Petrus Cantor, the first beguines regarded suffering as God-given, and an opportunity to do penance for themselves and others, and rather than simply as punishment. All of the contributions in this collection are very informative and as a whole form an indispensable resource on the topic of beguines and the [End Page 267] issues related to labelling them. I fully recommend the publication to anyone interested in the topic. From a technical viewpoint, it needs to be added that...

ABSTRACTIn this article I introduce a self-taught Chicana artist, Caroline Martinez, and highlight her work's religious significance. I offer a brief account of her life and a preliminary interpretation of her art. The art that adorns her Texas home and yard, I argue, is a visual testimony to the intercessory power of Jesus and Mary to heal the sick, feed the body, and protect the vulnerable. I then consider the implications of this case study for scholars in religious studies, Chicana studies, Catholic studies, and art history. Martinez's art evokes three important themes—religion, identity, and modernity—and offers reminders about three concomitant issues that face everyone who thinks about religion and art, especially self-taught artists and Chicana art: (1) What is the function of religion—and religious visual culture? (2) How do we talk about artists' religious identity, especially when there are multiple converging influences? (3) To what extent and in which sense can the work of self-taught artists like Martinez be understood as “modern” and to what extent are the artist and her work shaped by the social forces of “modernity”?

This chapter presents an overview of how Confucianism has been classified as a world religion in both popular and academic texts over the past century, suggesting that this classification has had a lasting impact on both the popular imagination and academic institutions. It argues that the notion of world religions has become the universally recognized “achievement” that provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. In this case, this community consists of scholars in religious studies, as well as scholars who study Chinese religions in other fields, such as sociology, history, philosophy, and Asian studies. The chapter focuses on the acceptance and implementation of this paradigm in American academia, instead of comparing it to that of another country, such as Great Britain.

This article illustrates the value of computer modeling and simulation (CMS) for linking theory and data in the academic study of religion, focusing on ways in which scholars in religious studies and the humanities can benefit by collaboratively engaging in this relatively new and radically transdisciplinary methodology. I begin by briefly introducing CMS and describing some of its recent uses in analyses of religious phenomena. The second part provides a case study – an agent-based model (ABM) designed to simulate and forecast changes in religiosity and existential security in Europe (Gore et al. 2018). The main research question guiding the construction and validation of this model was: What are some of the conditions under which – and mechanisms by which – religiosity declines in contemporary European populations? I highlight one of the main research findings from the simulation experiments on the model. Finally, I briefly explore some of the material and methodological implications of the development and deployment of such models for the academic study of religion.

This three-part article traces the use of the word “prophet” to describe Native actors such as Neolin and Handsome Lake in colonial North America and the early United States; details the category's perpetuation and effects in work by ethnologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religious studies; and, finally, proposes a focus on visionary media, including wampum and maps, as articulations of Native peoplehood—a concept borrowed from Native American and Indigenous Studies. The goal is to show how “prophet” classifications emerged within a context of colonization and religious dispute. Continued use reinforces narratives of Native disappearance, if not excuses anti-Native violence, in American religious studies. In response, I call on scholars to decolonize their writing and teaching about Native visionaries by focusing on their media as evidence of the futures they projected for their people.

Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory

International audience