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This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, the author develops a line of argument that begins with the aesthetics of academic writing in the field. He shows that successful writers on religion employ characteristic aesthetic strategies in communicating their visions of human truths, and examines these strategies with regard to epistemology and to the study of religion as a collective endeavor. The author looks at whether a peculiarly expressive genre of writing on religion began at a specific moment in history and, if so, what this might suggest about the cultural significance about religio-historical practice.

This book looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, the author describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a detailed history which presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, she shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, the author also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, the book helps to explain the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.

Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity — as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same literary, cultural, and religious origins, on the question of blood the two religions have followed quite different trajectories. For instance, while Judaism rejects the eating or drinking of blood, Christianity mandates its symbolic consumption as a central sacrament. How did these two traditions, both originating in the Hebrew Bible's cult of blood sacrifices, veer off in such different directions? The book traces the continuing, changing, and often clashing roles of blood as both symbol and substance through the entire sweep of Jewish and Christian history from Biblical times to the present.

“Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!” screamed a headline in the tabloid Globe in November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation's largest Christian diet corporation and the subject of extensive press coverage from Larry King Live to the New Yorker. In the United States today, hundreds of thousands of people are making diet a religious duty by enrolling in Christian diet programs and reading Christian diet literature such as What Would Jesus Eat? and Fit for God. Far ranging in its implications, and full of stories of real people, this book launches an investigation into Christian fitness and diet culture. Looking closely at both the religious roots of this movement and its present-day incarnations, the author analyzes Christianity's intricate role in America's obsession with the body, diet, and fitness. As she traces the underpinning of modern-day beauty and slimness ideals—as well as the bigotry against people who are overweight—she links seemingly disparate groups in American history including seventeenth-century New England Puritans, Progressive Era New Thought adherents, and late-twentieth-century evangelical diet preachers.

Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate “monks” awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, which looks at the cult phenomenon, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives—and sometimes their very lives—to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's Gate and at the Democratic Workers Party, a radical political group of the 1970s and 1980s, the author gives an insider's look at these two cults and advances a new theoretical framework of those who join such groups. She includes in-depth interviews with cult devotees as well as reflections gained from her own experience as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Workers Party. Incorporating classical sociological concepts such as “charisma” and “commitment” with more recent work on the social psychology of influence and control, the author develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders are able to dominate their devotees. She shows how members are led into a state of “bounded choice,” in which they make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations. The book also addresses the mentality of those true believers who take extreme or violent measures in the name of a cause.

This book looks systematically at American Christianity in relation to globalization. It shows that American Christianity is increasingly influenced by globalization and is, in turn, playing a larger role in other countries and in U.S. policies and programs abroad. These changes, it argues, can be seen in the growth of support at home for missionaries and churches in other countries and in the large number of Americans who participate in short-term volunteer efforts abroad. These outreaches include building orphanages, starting microbusinesses, and setting up computer networks. Drawing on a comprehensive survey carried out for the writing of this book, as well as several hundred in-depth interviews with church leaders, the text refutes several prevailing stereotypes: that U.S. churches have turned away from the global church and overseas missions, that congregations only look inward, and that the growing voice of religion in areas of foreign policy is primarily evangelical. The book encourages Americans to pay attention to the grass-roots mechanisms by which global ties are created and sustained.

The “Businessmen's Revival” was a religious revival that unfolded in the wake of the 1857 market crash among white, middle-class Protestants. Delving into the religious history of Boston in the 1850s, this book gives an interpretive study of the revival's significance. The book uses it as a focal point for addressing a spectacular range of phenomena in American culture: the ecclesiastical and business history of Boston; gender roles and family life; the history of the theater and public spectacle; education; boy culture; and, especially, ideas about emotion during this period. The narrative recovers the emotional experiences of individuals from a wide array of little-used sources including diaries, correspondence, public records, and other materials. From these sources, the book discovers that for these Protestants, the expression of emotion was a matter of transactions. They saw emotion as a commodity, and conceptualized relations between people, and between individuals and God, as transactions of emotion governed by contract. Religion became a business relation with God, with prayer as its legal tender. Entering this relationship, they were conducting the “business of the heart.” This study shows that the revival—with its commodification of emotional experience—became an occasion for white Protestants to underscore differences between themselves and others. The display of emotion was a primary indicator of membership in the Protestant majority, as much as language, skin color, or dress style.

What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other “fringe” notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. This book, the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date, unravels the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, showing how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. The author discusses a range of material—involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more—that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, he finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.

This book explores the remarkable religious renaissance that has reformed, revitalized, and renewed the practices of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan. The author connects these noteworthy developments to Taiwan's transition to democracy and the burgeoning needs of its new middle classes. He offers fresh thinking on Asian religions and shows that the public religious revival was not only encouraged by the early phases of the democratic transition but has helped to make that transition successful and sustainable. The author makes his argument through vivid case studies of four groups—Tzu Chi (the Buddhist Compassion Relief Association), Buddha's Light Mountain, Dharma Drum Mountain, and the Enacting Heaven Temple—and his analysis demonstrates that the Taiwan religious renaissance embraces a democratic modernity.

This book presents the most illuminating portrait we have to date of goddesses and sacred female imagery in Western culture—from prehistory to contemporary goddess movements. It looks at the complexity of the social forces—mostly androcentric—that have shaped the symbolism of the sacred feminine. At the same time, it charts a new direction for finding a truly egalitarian vision of God and human relations through a feminist-ecological spirituality. The book begins its exploration of the divine feminine with an analysis of prehistoric archaeology that challenges the popular idea that, until their overthrow by male-dominated monotheism, many ancient societies were matriarchal in structure, governed by a feminine divinity and existing in harmony with nature. It argues that the historical evidence suggests that the reality about these societies is much more complex. It goes on to consider key myths and rituals from Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Anatolian cultures; it examines the relationships among gender, deity, and nature in the Hebrew religion; and discusses the development of Mariology and female mysticism in medieval Catholicism, as well as the continuation of Wisdom mysticism in Protestantism. The book also analyzes the meeting of Aztec and Christian female symbols in Mexico and of today's neo-pagan movements in the United States.