Journal of the American Academy of Religion - current issue
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2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
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2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
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2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
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2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Contents Page
2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Interiorizing Islam: Religious Experience and State Oversight in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Foody, K., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Recent work in religious studies has turned from a long-standing focus on interior expressions of religion to emphasize instead embodied worship and the materiality of religious expression. Yet, for all the worthwhile critique of experience as a theoretical category, in practice various communities have taken up the language of experience as a central term for their own traditions. Scholars of religion have traced the cross-pollination of modern Hindu and Buddhist traditions with the language of "experience"; however, this question has received little attention in the study of Islam. This article addresses that lacuna. Muslim writings on Islam, specifically within the Islamic Republic of Iran, demonstrate a clear engagement with "religious experience." The Muslim writers discussed here, major figures of the Iranian reformist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, attempt to craft an arena of religiosity untouchable by state law and the Islamic Republic's governance of religious action.The Triumph of Narcissism: Theravada Buddhist Meditation in the Marketplace
Huntington, C. W., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
In recent years, "mindfulness based psychotherapy" has emerged as a lucrative business with its own brand of tech-savvy, scientific gurus and a literature that relies heavily on psychotherapeutic language for the transformation of Theravāda Buddhist meditation into a secular, Western idiom. My purpose in this article is to take a fresh look at some of the earliest rigorous psychological research on vipassanā meditation. I argue first that the perspective articulated in those publications embodies an understanding of Buddhist meditative practice that is considerably more nuanced than the perspective of contemporary psychotherapeutic discourse aimed at behavioral and affective change. Second, I argue that in conflating vipassanā-bhāvanā with psychotherapy, we effectively excise the soteriological heart of Buddhist meditation, the great, sacred mystery of the transcendent (lokuttara) embodied in teachings on no-self (anatta). When this excision is complete, Buddhism becomes something less than a religion, something less than what it is.Shamanism Theory and the Early Chinese Wu
Michael, T., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
This article undertakes a reexamination of shamanism in early China, an issue that centers on a religious title (wu) that is consistently mentioned in virtually every major text from the period. For roughly the last fifty years, sinologists have vigorously argued the appropriateness of identifying these wu as shamans. In an effort to bring a deeper degree of clarity to this issue, Parts 1 and 2 of the article explore certain findings from the field of modern shaman studies that can open up new ways of thinking about the wu. Part 3 examines the ways in which sinologists have approached the wu and attempts to show how modern shaman theory can allow us to better situate our thinking on this issue. Part 4 offers a brief case study of one early Chinese text and considers how modern shaman theory can shed new light on our interpretation of the wu.Obeah and the Politics of Religion's Making and Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad
Rocklin, A., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
This article investigates the practices of itinerant Indian Trinidadian ritual specialists, sadhus and priests, and their contestations with colonial institutions over the definition of their practices. It examines on the one hand Indians' norm-bending healing and spirit working, often construed as "obeah" or witchcraft in the Caribbean. At the same time, it looks at the role of laws that determined what practices got to count as religion, and the ways in which courtrooms became sites where religion was actively (though unequally) made and unmade, by both colonial elites and subalterns. By examining Indian ritual specialists on trial for obeah, the article analyzes Indians' participation in such religion-making: the construction and reinforcement of boundaries between reified categories and the redescription of Indians' ostensibly non-normative practices in accordance with regnant colonial norms for religion.Temples and Turnpikes in "The World of Tomorrow": Religious Assemblage and Automobility at the 1939 New York World's Fair
Curts, K., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
This article examines three exhibits at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where religion and religious subjectivity were automobilized and reassembled: the Temple of Religion, the General Motors' Futurama, and the Ford Exposition. In each exhibit, interwar religious visions trafficked with secular futures, demonstrating both the inherent messiness of religion and the secular as analytic categories and the shared patterns and paths by which they have been historically produced, traversed, and transformed. As popular articulations of more deeply entrenched heuristics, each Fair locale reveals descriptive and diagnostic contours for what too often serve as obfuscating scholarly shorthand: religious liberalism, secularization, and industrial religion. This article interrogates these slogans of religious studies as historical and interpretive artifacts and argues that the 1939 Fair can help scholars trace futurist descriptions of religion in the twentieth century as well as shared forms of subjectivity and scholarship reproduced in relation to them.Religion against Domination: The Politics of William James's Individualism
Bush, S. S., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
After a long period of neglect, William James's political philosophy has been receiving significant attention in the past two decades. For the most part, however, those interested in his political thought do not attend to his philosophy of religion and vice versa. In this article, I argue that we can understand the individualism that James famously promotes in Varieties of Religious Experience as very much a political ideal. The sort of religious individuality that James endorses does not abjure social responsibility but rather involves an activist commitment to improve religious and societal institutions."Dao with a Capital D": A Study in the Significance of Capitalization
Levinovitz, A., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
The use of initial capitals to designate special qualities of a term—Dao, Beauty, Intelligence, Dasein—is widespread in popular and scholarly writing. In this article, I trace the history and significance of the practice from the earliest days of printed English books to the present. Giving special attention to modern sinological work, I then argue that such use of initial capitals is an impediment to clear communication in scholarly writing and suggest it be abandoned.Bollywood Religious Comedy: An Inaugural Humor-neutics
Nayar, S. J., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
This media review explores the nascent genre of religious comedy in mainstream Indian film (also known as Bollywood). Focusing on two recent hits, OMG! (2012) and PK (2014), the review investigates what conventions or unspoken rules license laughter "at" religion in successful iterations of the genre, as well as how such films navigate India's cultural landscape, which is sensorily alive with multiple religions. Some of the more idiosyncratically Indian (which is to say, not merely Hindu) properties of the genre that are addressed include the subcontinental notion of secularism; the parallel texts produced by the actors' own religions; and the saliency, ironically enough, of television to the films—of a portrayed tele-belonging. In this way, the review offers pedagogical guidance for those who may wish to teach a religious comedy from the Bollywood corpus.A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins. By Burton L. Mack
Sanchez, D. A., Lopez, D. C., Penner, T., Arnal, W., Kotrosits, M., Stewart, E. C., Taussig, H., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Feminist Edges of the Qur'an. By Aysha A. Hidayatullah
Majeed, D., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory. By Jonathan B. Edelmann
Bryant, E., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico. By Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera
De Anda, N., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Early Islam: A Critical Reconstruction Based on Contemporary Sources. By Karl-Heinz Ohlig
Berg, H., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age. By R. S. Sugirtharajah
Melanchthon, M. J., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
The Art of Listening in the Early Church. By Carol Harrison
Hackett, R. I. J., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
The Theological Vision of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History: "In the Battle and Above It." By Scott R. Erwin
Paeth, S., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought. By Asma Afsaruddin
Dunn, S., 2015-09-10 09:22:19 AM
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