Η Αθηνά, κατά την Ελληνική μυθολογία, ήταν η θεά της σοφίας, της στρατηγικής και του πολέμου. Παλαιότεροι τύποι του ονόματος της θεάς ήταν οι τύποι Ἀθάνα (δωρικός) και Ἀθήνη, το δε όνομα Ἀθηνᾶ, που τελικά επικράτησε, προέκυψε από το επίθετο Ἀθαναία, που συναιρέθηκε σε Ἀθηνάα > Ἀθηνᾶ. Στον πλατωνικό Κρατύλο το όνομα Αθηνά ετυμολογείται από το Α-θεο-νόα ή Η-θεο-νόα, δηλαδή η νόηση του Θεού (Κρατυλ. 407b), αλλά η εξήγηση αυτή είναι παρετυμολογική.
This article on visions, possessions, and healing examines the Burmese cultural atmosphere in which stories, devotional literature, and religious magazines all recognize, endorse, and publicize the ways Buddhist weizzā(wizard-saints) interact with their female devotees to heal specific illnesses. Devotees possessed by a weizzā and carrying out his bidding can be seen as a creative yet culturally sanctioned response to restrictive gender roles, a means for expressing otherwise illicit thoughts or feelings, and an economic strategy for women who have few options beyond traditional wifely or daughter roles. They are able to renegotiate the often silent and passive roles assigned to them by the religious and medical cultures by setting the experience of sickness into a new narrative framework in which the weizzā are the source of all healing. Through the power of their wishes and within the flexible parameters of devotional practice, these women enact significant and positive changes in their lives and those around them.
The articles in this roundtable document the endurance and bravery of lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) Africans as they respond to a rising, public tide of homophobia across the continent. The authors present case studies from South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia, focusing respectively on literature, theology, public health, and constitutional law. Together, they also highlight four general features of contemporary life for LGBTIQ Africans. First, homophobia in Africa is a result of both African and international dynamics, including attempts at Christian and Muslim proselytization. Second, LGBTIQ identities and human rights approaches to LGBTIQ liberation compete and coexist with local notions of gendered and sexual identities and their affirmation. Third, homophobia is congruent with the broader dynamics of sexism and nationalism across Africa. Finally, LGBTIQ Africans and their allies have made great strides in improving public acceptance of LGBTIQ persons. This roundtable explores these dynamics.
It is a moral imperative that ethicists and human rights activists alike respond to the attempted and actual legal persecution of sexual minorities, which has cut short the lives of countless persons and enabled the violation of basic human rights. I begin by addressing the ontological and epistemological limitations that race has for any ethicist and human rights activist working for sexual–social justice in Uganda, and the sensitivities required in order to suggest a response. Second, I provide a cursory exploration of two Ugandan values that I believe are useful to harness in the ongoing conversation about human rights for sexual minorities. Finally, I conclude by making two brief, practical suggestions for decolonization that I hope will serve to spark further conversation about the many ways Ugandans themselves can foster a Ugandan society that is steeped in Ugandan values, where Ugandan sexual minorities can fully flourish.
On the basis of a study of a group of Zambian men identifying both as gay and as Christian, this article explores the negotiation of sexual and religious identity and critically addresses the "surprise" some scholars have expressed about the general religiosity of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) people in Africa. The study demonstrates that participants are not just victims subjected to homophobic religious and political discourses but have agency: resisting discourses of demonization, they humanize themselves by making claims toward the universal category of love—both their own inclination to loving relationships and their share in God's love. Hence, they claim space for themselves as full citizens of Zambia as a "Christian nation." This article particularly highlights how some aspects of Pentecostalism appear to contribute to "queer empowerment," and argues that the religiosity of African LGBTIs critically interrogates Euro-American secular models of LGBTI liberation.
This article examines two perspectives commonly invoked in debates about homosexuality in African cultures: claims by religious leaders that homosexuality is sinful, and calls for full acceptance of LGBT persons by human rights advocates. These two perspectives create an impasse with proponents for each position often speaking past each other. The article argues that religious condemnation is not merely predicated on a traditional view of religious teachings but has arisen in response to suspicion of Western economic and development programs; in such a context, an appeal to a human rights framework can actually increase suspicions rather than answering objections. As an alternative, the article argues that liberation theology can help move the debate beyond this impasse and demonstrates this claim in the story of a same-gender-loving man from Kenya.
Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying them as a genre. They all imagine the ideal self as a microcosm for a divinized cosmos, and they instruct their readers to conform to the ideal by means of ritual cognition, affect, ritual practice, and social action based in Jewish law. They also assume existence within a community so that material care for others was crucial to ideal selfhood. Contemporary kabbalistic self-help retains the microcosmic model, but some of its authors substitute psychotherapeutic and economic discourse for religious discourse, minimizing requirements for social action, maximizing the power of affect and ritual cognition, and valuing the attainment of personal desire. Other authors, however, use psychological discourse to emphasize the importance of social justice. Thus contemporary writers of kabbalistic self-help adapt and reformulate this earlier genre to different ends, depending on their use of religious, psychotherapeutic, and economic discourse.
Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men's capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women's disability in primarily visual terms. In the sensory anthropology of rabbinic desire, women are led by the nose—while men are drawn by the eye. This article uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the queer closet to probe the charged, sexual dimensions of knowledge and ignorance at the heart of rabbinic marriage. Rabbinic law aims to protect the husband from the possibility that a blemished bride might pass, while simultaneously guarding against the immodest gaze.
Peter L. Berger famously argued that any scientific inquiry into religious matters must be "methodologically atheistic." But methodological atheism performs no proper normative function in the academic study of religion; it fabricates, trivializes, and renders inexplicable religious experience; it is not neutral or objective; and the argument for its normativity improperly legitimates a secular worldview. Furthermore, the argument for the normativity of methodological agnosticism suffers some of the same flaws and has distinctive flaws of its own, including hindering scholars from articulating good reasons to believe that certain religious experiences are delusions and exhibiting self-referential incoherence.
This article explores the limits of the debate surrounding Robert A. Orsi's call for a "third way" in scholar-practitioner encounters in religious studies research. It argues that the debate has reached an impasse and that, as Joel Robbins suggests, an alternative approach might exist within theology—particularly, theological discussions of how the Christian is to relate to the non-Christian other. The article tests this notion by probing the writings of A. Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican theologian and Islamic Studies specialist who proposed the possibility of expanding the Christian canon within the context of interfaith encounters. The article concludes that although religious studies remains, as a field, unprepared to countenance the kind of hybridization toward which Cragg's conception of the interfaith situation leads, his notion of "bi-scripturalism" has the potential nevertheless of opening up new questions for religious studies scholars concerned with alterity.
This article offers a historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The main author was the celebrated Victorian diplomat Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888). Drawing on the teachings of the American "prophet" Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906), Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Le Strange (1846–1886), taught that everyone has a spiritual and physical complement of the opposite gender that can be encountered internally through spiritual practice. Humanity must abandon sexual intercourse in favor of individual communion with this counterpart, in order to return to its prelapsarian androgynous nature. Despite antecedents in earlier esoteric currents, the Oliphants' androgyne was a Victorian androgyne. It was intimately entwined with the pressing social, cultural, intellectual, political, and religious needs of a secularizing world in which the roles and rights of Woman were central—and contested—issues. It can be read as an answer to the nineteenth-century "problem of sex" and the "Woman Question," and it was both conservative and transgressive.
A major critique of American biblical archaeologists has focused on biblical presuppositions they brought to their work, whereas Israeli archaeologists have been critiqued for promoting Jewish ethno-nationalism through their work. I maintain, however, that American archaeologists also participated in the debate over Zionism, implicitly (and not necessarily consciously) through writings about the ancient past, and explicitly through political activism. This article focuses on contemporaries William Foxwell Albright and Millar Burrows, who disagreed about Zionism. Burrows, who opposed Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of cultural interaction and fluidity, while Albright, who favored Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of rigid ethnic boundaries. Burrows published a book about Palestinian refugees; thus, his political involvement was no secret. Albright's political involvement in favor of a Jewish state, which he later denied, is reconstructed here from archival materials. The terms of this debate still resonate, as demonstrated by the current controversy over archaeological theory at the City of David site in Jerusalem.
This article introduces the terms scientization and academization and applies them to Jainism. Scientization denotes processes by which proponents of a religion appeal to modern science, and I distinguish between four types of appeals. Academization points to processes by which proponents of a religion establish institutions and practices modeled on mainstream academia, actively use markers of such institutions, create ties with mainstream academic institutions and their scholars, and invite academic appraisals of their religion. Scientization and academization thus provide resources to explore, reformulate, and express one's religion. Tracing these developments back to the colonial era, I argue that the scientization and academization of Jainism entail changes in doctrines, religious life, and historical self-understanding. While some advocates of scientization and academization challenge traditional authorities, appeals to science and academia are also used to defend traditional views where the authority of science is paradoxically challenged by references to science or academia.
Many scholars highlight the 1963 Supreme Court Schempp decision as a major turning point, or even a point of origin for the field of religious studies. This origins narrative rests on two related ideas: first, Schempp provided the legal basis for public universities to have departments of religious studies, and second, Schempp posited a differentiation between teaching religiosity and studying religion. But neither can bear the weight that theSchempp-centered origins story assigns it. The decision discusses colleges and universities fleetingly, and only in order to draw an explicit contrast between them and primary school education. Moreover, at the time of the decision, forty-five percent of public colleges and universities already had a religious studies program. This article suggests an alternative history, in which rising student interest, college education focused on the whole student, changing geopolitics, the role of theology in "turbulent times," and external funding facilitated the rise of religious studies.
Mary Douglas is a prominent figure in the pantheon of religious studies, but the relevance of Douglas's influential theories about ritual pollution for Classical Indian Buddhism, a literate tradition that is sometimes critical of ritual and often explicitly distances itself from physicalized interpretations of bodily impurity, is not obvious. In fact, students of Classical Indian Buddhism have often argued that ideas about ritual impurity, including blood taboos, hold no place of importance in that tradition. This article brings together materials from the Indian Buddhist tradition and Douglas's theories of pollution in society to fulfill the dual purpose of testing Douglas's theory in a new arena and better articulating and explaining Indian Buddhist notions of female impurity.
In 1981 Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures in Louvain, Belgium, entitled Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, which focus on the concept of avowal or the ritualized production of true statements about oneself. Insofar as such rituals mediate relations of power, they constitute one form of the "governance" of speaking subjects, the stakes of which are the very constitution of that subject. Through a comparison of Foucault and J. L. Austin's work on performatives, I use the example of oath-taking to investigate possible forms of strategic resistance within the framework legal-religious avowal. Such a mode of participation takes both the ritual structure and its stakes seriously, allowing the speaking subject to play by the rules of the game while also playing with those rules. What I call "the strategic abuse of the constitutive rules" of the game permits the maintenance of the government of oneself in the face of the potentially undesirable demands of the governance of others.
In this article I examine the work of the earliest scholars to identify "fundamentalism" among Muslims and highlight debates over the cross-cultural usefulness of the Protestant label. I focus on renowned orientalists who used the metaphor to describe the differences among Muslims long before American liberals popularized it by applying it to the Iranian Revolution. These scholars applied the term to Islam to justify a larger narrative about the nature of religion and its relationship to universal history. Although this progress narrative, reliant on Hegelian idealism and dialectics derived from Christian templates, is rarely reiterated now, its binary image of Muslims (rabid fundamentalists versus enlightened liberal mystics) has become dominant. By naturalizing the use of the metaphor in Muslim contexts, the scholars I discuss helped foster the idea that fundamentalism occurs in all traditions and set the terms for contemporary narratives in which religious explanations for conflict elide political and economic issues.
Islamist activists are increasingly seeking, sometimes fitfully, to participate in democratic processes. In theory, these processes force communities to negotiate a historically novel range of possibilities concerning the place of religion in public life. The work of Sayyid Qutb, a prominent mid-twentieth-century Egyptian intellectual and activist infamous for his call to arms against enemies of Islam, provides an ideal vehicle to explore possible bases of such negotiation. When we interpret his writing through the lens of modern social theory, which I argue Egypt's colonial history requires of us, we can see that he is more a theorist of human welfare than of jihad. In fact, his Qur'an commentary In the Shade of the Qur'an shows how the concept of social welfare may provide sufficient ground upon which a "theo-political" vision of society might coexist with utilitarian-inspired sensibilities in the setting of collective life.
Like other contemporary "fundamentalist" communities, Nigerian Salafis have proven adept at transmitting messages and winning followers through electronic media. This article argues that Nigerian Salafis pursue an ideal of electronic media as spaces where an intellectual meritocracy, based on the ability to deploy proof-texts, can flourish. This ideal derives from Salafi conceptions of religious knowledge and draws its impetus from Nigerian Salafis' status as a minority that faces political and theological opponents with greater institutional power. Salafis engage media in an attempt to level the playing field. They work strategically with religious knowledge: they extend the status of proof-texts to media other than scripture, and they present messages in locally resonant idioms. Nigerian Salafis exemplify one way in which religious communities seek to manage new media spaces where the meaning of texts, the boundary between public and private, and the nature of religious authority are questioned and transformed.
This article brings together Mimetic Theory and Religion and Ecology to argue that our meaning-making practices (religious, philosophical, and ethical) are embedded in the larger mimetic structures of an evolving planetary community. Though mimetic theory has been applied to many forms of violence, it has rarely been extended to an analysis of ecological violence. Mimetic excess, much like the abject or remainder in theories of identity performance, provides us with opportunities for creative–destructive changes that can secure extant power structures or transform them. To a great extent, our meaning-making practices have made the rest of the natural world a scapegoat through promoting some form of human exceptionalism, thereby making nature as something completely "other" whether that other is to be dominated or revered. In other words, nature is both sacrificed in projects of modern industrial capitalism and made sacred in the form of national parks, preserves, and romantic ideas of restoration or saving.
Pūjā is the principal ritual of theistic Hinduism. As such, it rightly receives its fair share of scholarly attention. Much of this attention to date, however, has been primarily descriptive in nature. While the utility of the data writ large for certain introductions to Hindu traditions is not in doubt, such descriptions do not constitute explanations. Absent explanation, the presumption of understanding is premature. In this article, I argue that pūjā is a compensatory ritual for those with insecure-anxious attachment styles. Such styles are prevalent in India to the extent that they reflect facultative responses to Hindu childrearing practices. Hindu childrearing practices, in turn, employ what has been called the Pediatric model. This model is most adaptive to the rearing of children in robust pathogen and parasite ecologies. Through pūjā, the devotee seeks assurance of protection and resource distribution, assurances particularly sought by the insecure-anxiously attached.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Απαντάται για πρώτη φορά στην Ιλιάδα (0-412) : ''...που με την ορμηνία της Αθηνάς κατέχει καλά την τέχνη του όλη...'' .. Η αρχική λοιπόν σημασία της λέξης δηλώνει την ΓΝΩΣΗ και την τέλεια ΚΑΤΟΧΗ οποιασδήποτε τέχνης. .. Κατά τον Ησύχιο σήμαινε την τέχνη των μουσικών και των ποιητών. Αργότερα,διευρύνθηκε η σημασία της και δήλωνε : την βαθύτερη κατανόηση των πραγμάτων και την υψηλού επιπέδου ικανότητα αντιμετώπισης και διευθέτησης των προβλημάτων της ζωής. .. Δεν είναι προ'ι'όν μάθησης αλλά γνώση πηγαία που αναβρύζει από την πνευματικότητα του κατόχου της. "ΣΟΦΟΣ Ο ΠΟΛΛΑ ΕΙΔΩΣ" λέει ο Πίνδαρος ..
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου