In today’s news we learn that Saudi Arabia is on the one hand buying Western academic prestige and on the other beheading a woman accused of practicing “sorcery and witchcraft.”
The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could [...]
Tags:Allah·Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar·beheading·faith healing·Islam·King Saud University·Muslim·Neil Robertson·Saudi Arabia·sorcery·Wahhabi·witchcraft
In religious studies and popular usage, the term “universal” is used to describe religions which are open to all and transcend ethnic, geographic, political, and cultural boundaries. Three religions are usually cited as universal: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Some newer religions, such as Mormonism and Bahá’í, would also qualify. But if we take a longer [...]
Tags:Bahai·Buddhism·Carmen Blacker·Christianity·Islam·Japan·Jason Josephson·Jomon·kami·Lori Meeks·Meiji period·miko·Mormon·neo-shamanism·premodern Japan·Robert Bellah·shamanic·shamanism·superstitition·The Catalpa Bow·Tokugawa·universal religion
Over at Salon the MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman recently asked whether God exists, a question he poses in the service of reconciling science with religion and lambasting Richard Dawkins. Although he is an atheist, Lightman’s accomodationist query prompted a predictable response from Daniel Dennett, to which Lightman has responded.
It is a thoughtful exchange [...]
Tags:Abrahamic God·Alan Lightman·atheism·Christianity·Daniel Dennett·deism·existence of God·God·god concept·interventionist God·Islam·Judaism·monotheism·monotheistic God·Richard Dawkins
It is always a sign of war going badly when the US mounts a “winning hearts and minds” campaign to go alongside conventional military operations. It surely is a worse sign when US Marines teach Afghanis to read the Koran so they can “help people understand Islam’s true nature.” When Devil Dogs are tasked with [...]
Tags:Afghanistan·Allah·authenticity error·Brian Mockenhaupt·Devil Dogs·Enlisting Allah·essentializing·hearts and minds·Is There a Text In This Class·Islam·Koran·Marines·Mullah Omar·Muslims·Navy·reader response theory·social construction·Stanley Fish
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber sought to correct or temper Karl Marx’s view that religion was always a reflection or epiphenomenon of the economic base. Although Marx’s understanding of religion was considerably more complicated and drew heavily on Ludwig Feuerbach’s idealist critique in The Essence of Christianity (1841), [...]
Tags:Calvinism·Christianity·evil·Friedrich Nietzsche·good·history of science·India·Iran·Islam·Judaism·Karl Marx·Ludwig Feuerbach·Max Weber·modernity·monotheism·Muslim·Parsis·Persia·profane·Protestant Ethic·Puritans·Robert Kennedy·Robert Merton·Rodney Stark·sacred·spirit of capitalism·truth·Zoroaster·Zoroastrianism
The German Interior Minister was recently interviewed by Spiegel. It begins with a nice example of the “authenticity” error (i.e., my understanding of the tradition is correct and any other is false):
Interior Minister: But we also have to realize that the abuse of Islam by Islamist extremists has contributed to this.
Spiegel: Anders Breivik claims to [...]
Tags:Anders Breivek·authenticity error·Christianity·essentialism·German identity·Germany·Hans-Peter Friedrich·Islam·Islamists
Unlike living organisms, cultural formations do not “evolve.” Evolution, sensu stricto, is a biological process and not a cultural one. Despite this fact, some scholars have fruitfully deployed evolutionary ideas — as analogy and metaphor — to analyze cultural history.
In 1964 the sociologist Robert Bellah did just this in his classic paper, Religious Evolution. Taking [...]
Tags:animism·Arabs·Black Stone·Christianity·cult practice·cultural evolution·Eric Voegelin·Eugene Stockton·Ingela Bergman·Islam·kaaba·landscapes·modern religion·multilinear·Norse·objects·pagans·pantheism·Phoenician·polytheism·primitive religion·religious evolution·religious stages·Robert Bellah·rocks·sacred·Sami·shamanic·stones·symbol systems·typology·unilinear·varro muorra·veneration·Vikings·wood
Over at the Evolution of Religion Project, Dominic Johnson comments on the first target article which will appear in what promises to be a fantastic new journal, Religion, Brain, and Behavior. Because the first issue has yet to be published, I will have to rely on Johnson’s summary:
Jeff Schloss and Michael Murray have written a [...]
Tags:Abrahamic faiths·Abrahamic God·adaptionist·biological evolution·Christianity·cooperation enhancement·cultural evolution·Dominic Johnson·Islam·Jeff Schloss·Judaism·Michael Murray·moral order·moralizing gods·nationalism·punishing gods·punishment avoidance·Religion Brain and Behavior·Rodney Stark·supernatural agents·supernatural punishment·supernatural punishment theory·unified theory
Over at The New York Review of Books, Peter Brown covers Alan Cameron’s recently published tome The Last Pagans of Rome. For those of us who are not classicists, it appears that an abridged volume would be useful sometime in the future. I suppose I will read it before then but it looks a bit [...]
Tags:Alan Cameron·Bernard Lewis·Faith and Power·Fred Donner·Islam·Islamic history·Malise Ruthven·Muhammad and the Believers·Peter Brown·The Last Pagans of Rome
As is the case with charismatic or evangelical forms of Christianity, some strands of Islam have a robust sense of supernatural agency that populates the world with all manner of malevolent spirits who are ostensibly responsible for real world afflictions. In a recent article, psychiatrist Amir Afkhami reports on an Islamic “faith healer” in Iraq [...]
Tags:Amir Afkhami·charismatic·Christianity·demons·evangelical·faith healing·folk beliefs·folk religion·Freud·hysteria·Iraq·Islam·jinns·Koran·Mullah Eskandar·Quran·shamanic healing·spirits
