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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.

This book provides an unprecedented portrait of the dynamic role religion plays in the everyday experiences of Americans over the course of their lives. The book draws from a unique sixty-year-long study of close to 200 mostly Protestant and Catholic men and women who were born in the 1920s and interviewed in adolescence, and again in the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, and late 1990s. Woven throughout with intimate life stories, the chapters present and analyze a wide range of data from this study on the participants' religious and spiritual journeys. A testament to the vibrancy of religion in the United States, the book provides an illuminating and sometimes surprising perspective on how individual lives have intersected with cultural change throughout the decades of the twentieth century.

Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic—the use of sex as a source of magical power—emerged. This book, a history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition, places these practices in the context of the larger discourse surrounding sexuality in American and European society over the last 150 years to discover how sexual magic was transformed from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. Focusing on a series of key figures including American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Gerald Gardner, and Anton LaVey, the author traces the emergence of sexual magic out of older western esoteric traditions including Gnosticism and Kabbalah, which were progressively fused with recently discovered eastern traditions such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. His study gives new insight into sexuality in the modern era, specifically on issues such as the politics of birth control, the classification of sexual “deviance,” debates over homosexuality and feminism, and the role of sexuality in our own new world of post-modern spirituality, consumer capitalism, and the Internet.

Washington, D.C., is a city of powerful symbols—from the dominance of the Capitol dome and Washington Monument to the authority of the Smithsonian. This book takes us on an informative tour of the nation's capital as the text unravels the complex symbolism of the city and explores its meaning for our national consciousness. The book finds that mythic and religious themes pervade the capital—in its original planning, in its monumental architecture, and in the ritualized events that have taken place over the 200 years the city has been the repository for the symbolism of the nation. As this book tours the city's famous axial layout, it discusses many historical figures and events, compares Washington to other great cities of the world such as Beijing and Berlin, and discusses the meaning and history of its architecture and many works of art. Treating Washington, D.C., as a complex religious center, the book finds that the city functions as a unifying element in American consciousness, and provides a provocative new look at the meaning of religion in America today.

This book explores rites of passage in America by sifting through the accounts of influential thinkers who experienced them. The author explains the underlying theologies, evolution, and actual practice of Jewish bar and bat mitzvahs, Christian confirmations, Hindu sacred thread ceremonies, Muslim shahadas and Zen Jukai ceremonies. In rare interviews, renowned artists and intellectuals such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, holistic guru Deepak Chopra, singer Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), actress/comedienne Julia Sweeney, cartoonist Roz Chast, interfaith maven Huston Smith, and many more talk intimately about their religious backgrounds, the rites of passage they went through, and how these events shaped who they are today. The author compares these coming of age ceremonies' origins and evolution, considers their ultimate meaning and purpose, and gauges how their meaning changes with individuals over time. He also examines innovative rites of passage that are now being “invented” in the United States. The book reveals a deep, ultimate need for coming-of-age events, especially in a fluid society such as America.

Founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus remains the largest and most controversial religious order of men in Catholicism. Since the 1960s, however, Jesuits in the United States have lost more than half of their members, and have experienced a massive upheaval in what they believe and how they work and live. This book draws on interviews and statements gathered from more than four hundred Jesuits and former Jesuits to provide an intimate look at turmoil among Catholicism's legendary best-and-brightest. Priests and former priests speak candidly about their reasons for joining (and leaving) the Jesuits, about their sexual development and orientation, and about their spiritual crises and their engagement with other religious traditions. They discuss issues ranging from celibacy to the ordination of women, homosexuality, the rationale of the priesthood, the challenges of community life, and the divinity of Jesus. The book traces the transformation of the Society of Jesus from a fairly unified organization into a smaller, looser community with disparate goals and an elusive corporate identity. From its role as a traditional subculture during the days of immigrant Catholicism, the order has changed into an amalgam of countercultures shaped around social mission, sexual identity, and an eclectic spirituality. The story of the Jesuits reflects the crisis of clerical authority and the deep ambivalence surrounding American Catholicism's encounter with modernity.

This book explores the nature of religious faith in a provocative examination of the most massive atheism campaign in human history. That campaign occurred after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when Soviet plans for a new Marxist utopia included the total eradication of all religion. Even though the Soviet Union's attempt to secularize its society was quite successful at crushing the institutional and ritual manifestations of religion, its leaders were surprised at the persistence of religious belief. This account reveals how atheism, when taken to its extreme, can become as dogmatic and oppressive as any religious faith and illuminates the struggle for individual expression in the face of social repression.

Just one hundred years ago, Americans almost universally condemned cremation. Today, nearly one-quarter of Americans choose to be cremated. The practice has gained wide acceptance as a funeral rite, in both our private and public lives, as the cremations of icons such as John Lennon and John F. Kennedy Jr. show. This book tells the story of cremation's rise from notoriety to legitimacy and takes a provocative new look at important transformations in the American cultural landscape over the last 150 years. The book synthesizes a wide array of previously untapped source material, including newspapers, consumer guides, mortician trade journals, and popular magazines such as Reader's Digest to provide an historical study of cremation in the United States. It vividly describes many noteworthy events—from the much-criticized first American cremation in 1876 to the death and cremation of Jerry Garcia in the late twentieth century. From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era to the baby boomers of today, this book takes us on a tour through American culture and traces our changing attitudes toward death, religion, public health, the body, and the environment.

Religion: Material Dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. Part 1 revitalizes basic categories—animism and sacred, space and time—by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part 2 examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and cultural economies and are most clearly shown in the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. Part 3 explores the material dynamics of circulation through case studies of religious mobility, change, and diffusion as intimate as the body and as vast as the oceans. Each chapter offers insightful orientations and surprising possibilities for studying material religion. Exploring the material dynamics of religion from poetics to politics, the book provides an entry into the study of material religion that speaks to the interests of both students and specialists in religious studies, anthropology, history, and other fields that have made the material turn.

Sociologists, historians, and other social observers have long considered the secularization of American public life over the past hundred and thirty years to be an inevitable and natural outcome of modernization. This book rejects this view and fundamentally rethinks the historical and theoretical causes of the secularization of American public life between 1870 and 1930. The editor and his team of contributors argue that the declining authority of religion was not the by-product of modernization, but rather the intentional achievement of cultural and intellectual elites, including scientists, academics, and literary intellectuals, seeking to gain control of social institutions and increase their own cultural authority. The contributors examine power struggles and ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and journalism. Together the chapters depict a cultural and institutional revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency, conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, the book offers a new theoretical framework and original empirical research that will inform our understanding of American society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

This book reveals how liberal Protestants went from being early-twentieth-century medical missionaries seeking to convert others through science and scripture, to becoming vocal critics of missionary arrogance who experimented with non-western healing modes such as Yoga and Reiki. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, the book shows how and why the very notion of healing within North America has been infused with a Protestant “supernatural liberalism”. In the course of coming to their changing vision of healing, liberal Protestants became pioneers three times over: in the struggle against the cultural and medical pathologizing of homosexuality; in the critique of Christian missionary triumphalism; and in the diffusion of an ever-more ubiquitous anthropology of “body, mind, and spirit”. At a time when the political and anthropological significance of Christianity is being hotly debated, the book forcefully argues for a reconsideration of the historical legacies and cultural effects of liberal Protestantism, even for the anthropology of religion itself.