This article focuses on the history of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in Estonia from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. From the 1870s onwards a series of religious revivals in Estonia created the context for the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century. Proto-Pentecostalism at the beginning of the century transformed into a fully-fledged Pentecostalism in the 1920s with the involvement of foreign missionaries from Sweden as well as from Finland. The Finnish connection became important in the late 1960s with the emergence of a charismatic Pentecostal revival in the evangelical Christian churches, as well as amongst the Baptists in Tallinn. By the late 1970s the prayer revival had transformed into a healing ministry and this had an impact on the charismatic movement in the Soviet Union. The foreign impact on Pentecostal and charismatic movements in Estonia has also been important from the late 1980s onwards. There has been considerable diversification of the charismatic and Pentecostal traditions in Estonia since the 1990s, and the trends have reflected general changes in charismatic Christianity. Although internally diverse the charismatic Christianity (including the Pentecostals) may well be by now the second largest Protestant tradition in Estonia.

The article addresses the theme of accommodating an imported model of international religious practice into a national context. The case in question involves an intentional ’translation’ of an American Pentecostal concept of a lay-based prayer service into a Nordic, rather secularised Lutheran context. This recent newcomer into the Finnish religious field is the Healing Rooms network which is a predominantly charismatic Christian, globally expanded, interdenominational intercessory prayer service. This study of Healing Rooms is based on material compiled by means of ethnographic methods. According to the interviewees, the idea of a prayer clinic must be adjusted culturally and nationally, even though the basic function of the practice is the same everywhere. In Finland this means adjusting the service to fit a culture and society in which the mainline Lutheran Church has traditionally had simultaneously a distant and dominating role on the religious scene.

This article aims at defining a privately-owned manuscript from the end of the eighteenth century; a notebook of charms, recipes and ritual prescriptions, presumed to be connected with known manuscripts of magic, that were kept secret and hidden away. The study attempts to reconstruct the context of ‘The Sandvik Notebook’, in order to find out who penned it, when, and why. What kind of knowledge was sought: was it collected for antiquarian reasons, for esoteric interest, or for practical use – such as curing livestock and human beings? Was it copied from books or collected from peasant informants, and could it be related to the extant manuscripts ‘The Black Book’ and ‘The Red Book’, objects of the same line of enquiry? The three manuscripts are from Sandvik Manor, of the joint parish Burseryd-Sandvik, Sweden.

In this short article, the author is concerned with how the contemporary form of the telephone, a new media machine which was of deep-rooted significance for Marshall McLuhan, promotes our obsession with forms of shared participation and social implosion. The author argues that the form of the telephone involves a complex abolition of our sense of space, interwoven with unexpected socio-cultural effects, which then create new subjectivities as well as new forms of decentralization that are intuited but not fully understood. To politicize these effects, and following the revelations of the American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the author identifies the form of the mobile telephone as a new form of media and argues that it is no longer an ‘extension of man’, as McLuhan suggested, but an extension of the US State, which is producing new forms of socio-cultural collapse. The author then explores how the remote-controlled time and space of what he calls the ‘terrorphone’ cultivates, among other things, the contemporary visualization of speech. Finally, he questions the desirability of unrelenting mobile telephone interaction as our only ‘intelligent’ choice today when such interaction is, contrary to McLuhan, not a great extension of our central nervous system, but in fact a danger to it.

In October 1989, long-time yoga student, John Friend (b. 1959) travelled to India to study with yoga masters. First, he went to Pune for a one-month intensive postural yoga programme at the Ramamani Iyengar Memor­ial Yoga Institute, founded by a world-famous yoga proponent, B. K. S. Iyengar (b. 1918). Postural yoga(De Michelis 2005, Singleton 2010) refers to modern biomechanical systems of yoga which are based on sequences of asana or postures that are, through pranayama or ‘breathing exercises’, synchronized with the breath. Following Friend’s training in Iyengar Yoga, he travelled to Ganeshpuri, India where he met Chidvilasananda (b. 1954), the current guru of Siddha Yoga, at the Gurudev Siddha Peeth ashram. Siddha Yoga is a modern soteriological yoga system based on ideas and practices primarily derived from tantra. The encounter profoundly transformed Friend, and Chidvilasananda initiated him into Siddha Yoga (Williamson forthcoming).

The increased visibility of assertive forms of atheism has provoked much public debate. This article argues that new atheism primarily seeks to contest what it considers to be the unjustifiably powerful role of religion through a multifaceted challenge to religious beliefs, practices and institutions. Influential theories of power are drawn upon to unpack the character of new atheist positions. It is proposed that new atheism seeks to challenge four perceived ‘dimensions‘ of religious power, in particular (i) religion’s role in public decision-making; (ii) the ability of religious groups to shape policy agendas; (iii) the power of religion to create preferences that run counter to an individual’s true interests and, (iv) the role of religion in constituting forms of subjectivity more generally. Focussing particularly on the role of atheism in the UK, the paper also considers the implications such thinking has had on atheist practice and activism. The paper also considers how defenders of religion have reacted to the challenges posed by new atheism. It is argued that religious groups and authors have largely focussed on defending the role of religious faith and the significance of God in people’s lives, rather than explicitly defending what new atheists consider to be the unfair institutional privilege accorded to some religious organisations.

Matthias Knutzen (born 1646 – died after 1674) was the first author we know of who self-identified as an atheist (Schröder 2010: 8). Before this, the term had solely been used pejoratively to label others. While Knutzen is almost completely forgotten now, authors such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Sigmund Freud are better remembered and might even be considered classic writers in the history of the atheist criticism of religion. Whatever may be said about the influence of any one of these authors, there is no doubt that Germany looks back on a notable history in this field. About a decade ago, Germany’s capital Berlin was even dubbed ‘the world capital of atheism’ by the American sociologist Peter L. Berger (2001: 195).Given this situation, I am bewildered by the expression ‘New Atheism’. Yet, undoubtedly, the term has become a catchphrase that is commonly used in the public discourse of several countries. The most prominent authors to be labelled ‘New Atheists’ are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006), Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004, and Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Every­thing, 2007). These authors and their books – all of them international bestsellers – have been intensely discussed around the world, including in Germany. In this paper, I intend to illuminate some of the characteristics and remarkable traits of the German discourse on the ‘New Atheism’. Here we can distinguish between two phases. The German media initially characterised ‘New Atheism’ as a rather peculiarly American phenomenon. However, it soon came to be understood to be a part of German culture as well.

Economic thought of the eighteenth century has often been interpreted as a unitary whole, which set down the foundations of modern economics.In this essay, Pietilä discusses how the economic thinking of the era was fragmentary and more diverse than traditional overviews of the subject have suggested. Through a brief analysis of David Hume’s essay Of Luxury, published in 1742, Pietilä focuses on the complex concept of luxury as it was discoursed upon in the eighteenth century. Views of Hume and his contemporaries illustrate the level of disagreement in economic discourse during the eighteenth century,and as a conclusion it seems that diverse and wide-ranging arguments were part of the Age of Enlightenment as a whole.

Heli Rantala’s contribution discusses the heritage of the Enlightenment from the perspective of Finnish nineteenth century cultural discourse. She argues that the Finnish reception of the Enlightenment had a negative tone. This critical attitude was expressed amongst Finnish intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century. The main target of the critique was the French style Enlightenment and the French way of life in general, which was understood to be civilised but lacking in the idea of real culture. Rantala also states that J. V. Snellman opposed this dominant interpretation by highlighting the importance of the Enlightenment era and by cherishing the basic values of its ideas.

This paper aims at reopening the debate regarding ‘religious diversity’ in religious studies. A review of (recent or ancient) literature demonstrates that we have not finished with the complexity of the issue of ‘diversity’, whether in academic or social debates. Furthermore, diversity must not only be taken seriously, but impels us towards a comparative methodology in order to highlight the variations of the forms, dynamics, effects and contexts of diversity. As such, Asian countries represent a very interesting location for an epistemological deconstruction of the Western-style and monotheistic-centred concept of ‘religious diversity’, as it is often used in religious studies and the social sciences.