Old Ideas New Practices When Religion Is For Relationships

This book is an upstream solution to the problems, issues, and questions young people struggle with downstream--alienation, boredom, and mistrust of religion. It includes over a hundred teaching strategies, tactics, logistics, and relationship builders that teachers in homes, schools, and churches can use. This book is a treasure chest of old ideas cast into new and proven teaching practices, each to be mined for the gem in it. Potvin's interest in writing this book, however, is not to focus on what is broken and ineffective in Christian religious education (and a lot of education is broken and ineffective) but on what he has learned to be proven to be effective. He has drawn from his PhD studies, parenting with its perturbations and insights, and over forty years of teaching in universities, public, and faith-based schools. Jesus gave us our program of studies, with much to think about and practice what could work--to bring us to our true self, friendship with the Creator, love for others, and justice for all. And given the unprecedented trend towards home education and online teaching, designed for and led by parents, new practices based on old ideas may be just what the doctor ordered.

How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.

This lively and readable survey introduces students to key areas of the field and shows how to apply an anthropological approach to the study of contemporary world religions. Written by an experienced teacher, it covers all of the traditional topics of anthropology of religion, including definitions and theories, beliefs, symbols and language, and ritual and myth, and combines analytic and conceptual discussion with up-to-date ethnography and theory. Eller includes copious examples from religions around the world – both familiar and unfamiliar – and two mini-case studies in each chapter. He also explores classic and contemporary anthropological contributions to important but often overlooked issues such as violence and fundamentalism, morality, secularization, religion in America, and new religious movements. Introducing Anthropology of Religion demonstrates that anthropology is both relevant and essential for understanding the world we inhabit today.

Table of contents

Since the early 1980s, China's rapid economic growth and social transformation have greatly altered the role of popular religion in the country. This book makes a new contribution to the research on the phenomenon by examining the role which popular religion has played in modern Chinese politics. Popular Religion in Modern China uses Nuo as an example of how a popular religion has been directly incorporated into the Chinese Community Party's (CCP) policies and how the religion functions as a tool to maintain socio-political stability, safeguard national unification and raise the country's cultural 'soft power' in the eyes of the world. It provides rich new material on the interplay between contemporary Chinese politics, popular religion and economic development in a rapidly changing society.

This exciting volume explores how religious meaning is generated and performed in our present digital media ecosystem. It uses the spatial metaphor of a third space to visualize the mobility of everyday religion and to explore the dynamic ways in which contemporary subjects imagine, produce, and navigate new religious and spiritual places. Comprised of seven original essays, this book provides a rigorous discussion of the complex intersections of the digital and religion, demonstrating how third spaces of religion stand out by virtue of their in-betweenness. They exist between private and public, between institution and individual, between authority and individual autonomy, between large media framings and individual "pro-sumption," and between local and translocal. Including probing analysis of how Muslim, Catholic, and Neo-Pagan identities are cultivated and developed online, case studies reflect on the creative outcomes of this condition of in-betweenness and the emergence of other places of religious and spiritual meaning. Blending theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary religion, media and religion, sociology of religion, religion, and popular culture.

Religion has always been shaped by the media of its time, and today we live in a media culture that informs much of what we think and how we behave. Religious believers, communities and institutions use media as tools to communicate, but also as locations where they construct and express identity, practice religion, and build community. This lively book offers a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary field of religion, media, and culture. It explores: the religious content of media texts and the reception of those texts by religious consumers who appropriate and reuse them in their own religious work; how new forms of media provide fresh locations within which new religious voices emerge, people reimagine the "task" of religion, and develop and perform religious identity. Jeffrey H. Mahan includes case study examples from both established and new religions and each chapter is followed by insightful reflections from leading scholars in the field. Illustrated throughout, the book also contains a glossary of key terms, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion places objects and bodies at the center of scholarly studies of religious life and practice. Propelling forward the study of material religion, the Handbook first reveals the deep philosophical roots of its key categories and then advances new critical analytics, such as queer materialities, inescapable material entanglements, and hyperobjects that explode the small-scale personal view on religions. The Handbook comprises thirty chapters, written by an international team of contributors who offer a global perspective of religious pasts and presents, divided into four thematic parts: Genealogies of Material Religion Materializing the Terms of the Study of Religion Entanglements, Entrapment, Escaping Hyperobjects, or How Ginormous Things Affect Religions In these four parts, the study of material religion is redirected towards systematic, critical interrogations of the imbrication of religious structures of power with racial, economic, political, and gendered forms of domination. From Spinoza’s political theology to African philosophies of ubuntu; from the queer materialities of Mesoamerican religion to the Satanic Temple of the United States; from Islamic love and sacrifice in human-animal entanglements to Shia militants’ attachment to weaponry; from epidemic cataclysm in Latin America to vast infrastructures and the gathering of millions in India’s Kumbh Mela, the study of material religion proves to be the study par excellence of the human condition. The Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, anthropology, history, and media studies, and will also be of interest to those in related fields such as archeology, sociology, and philosophy.