Faith,Fact, and Behaviorism

David Hume argued that ought cannot be derived from is. That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet generations of well-meaning scientists (more and more as secular influences grow in the West) seem to have forgotten Hume''s words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods of science, that is, on faith.     

Signs in their times: introducing a review symposium on Robert Yelle's Semiotics of Religion

This essay introduces a review symposium on Robert Yelle's Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (2013). It first reviews the book's argument, then offers a selective review of the six contributions to the symposium, along with aspects of Yelle's responses to these.     

‘Be careful,or you'll act corruptly and make a carved image for yourselves,in the form of a figure,the likeness male or female’ (Deut. 4:16): A commentary on Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013)

Norenzayan's book is an ambitious attempt to integrate recent research from behavioral economics and social psychology, particularly priming studies, into a book about religion. If the account is meant as an explanation of religion or big religion, it does not succeed. If it has more modest aims, namely to describe how surveillance institutions, of which big religion is one important class, can sometimes lead to cooperation and conflict, then it is quite successful in doing so.     

A new theory of religion? Introducing the review symposium on Manuel A. Vásquez: More Than Belief (2011)

This essay introduces a review symposium on More than Belief: a Materialist Theory of Religion (2011) by Manuel A. Vásquez. The essay outlines the context and summarizes the structure and argument of the book. The author discusses its limitation as a full-blown theory of religion and summarizes the main points of criticism advanced by the other contributions to the review-symposium.     

Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization,by Hans G. Kippenberg,trans. Brian McNeil,Stanford University Press: Stanford,CA, 2011, viii + 286 pp. ISBN 978 0 8047 68726, US$70 (cloth); ISBN 978 0 8047 6873 3, US$21.95 (paperback)

The author argues in this paper that the ‘state effects’ generated by religious movements – even those operating at the margins of societies – require us to consider anew the impact of religious movements on state formation. In Sri Lanka, for instance, evangelicals are a minority. Yet their practice of proselytizing to new audiences was considered ‘unethical,’ generating opposition that was directed not only at them, but also at ruling elites for failing to stem what was seen as an intrusion of incompatible ‘Western’ ideals. Instead of considering how such Christian movements seek to ‘take over’ the functions of the ‘state’ as has been the experience in the United States and parts of Latin America, the author illustrates in this article why it makes more theoretical sense to ask how their activities impinge upon the conceptual frameworks through which the ‘state’ is imagined.     

Altered states of consciousness

This commentary dwells on the intellectual, methodological, and stylistic characteristics that constitute the novelty of Robert Yelle's approach to the semiotics of religion. While praising Yelle's refreshing approach and his ability to combine a semiotic mindset with accurate comparative perspective, deep contextual knowledge, and historical sensibility, the commentary raises the issue of the extent to which semioticians can, and should, acknowledge the transient, historical nature of their point of view. This acknowledgment, it is argued, does not necessarily result in a self-deconstruction of the semiotic method itself but in the somewhat paradoxical awareness of the semiotic ideology underpinning it.     

Is history important for a historical argument in religious studies?

This review article addresses the historical argument of Norenzayan's Big Gods. It questions the claim that there is enough historical evidence to support the thesis that gods, who are observing human behaviour from high, enable societies to grow beyond the stage of face-to-face groups.     

Evolutionism and Early Nineteenth-Century Histories of Religions

Evolutionism influenced the study of religion long before Darwin. Histories of religions feature prominently in the metaphysical philosophies of history of the Romantic period; these philosophies of history, in turn, draw on an essence-and-development concept of evolution constructed within eighteenth-century biological preformationism and theosophy.¹Preformationist and theosophical evolutionisms posit physiological and spiritual development of humanity. Ballanche and Schelling show how Romantic philosophers of history applied essence-and-development evolutionisms to history, to humanity and to God. For both Ballanche and Schelling, history is the unfolding in time of the essence of humanity; for both, the history of religions provides empirical corroboration for the metaphysical order underlying history. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century essence-and-development evolutionism historicized, and thereby reconceptualised, Christian providentialism, soteriology and theodicy. Historians of the study of religions have insufficiently appreciated this fact, both historiographically and methodologically.     

Buddhist prajÑĀ and Greek sophia

The present review examines five books, one by a non-Baha'i, three by a Baha'i academic, and one by a Baha'i non-academic. The non-Baha'i volume, which is very short, is by a Danish sociologist of religion, Margit Warburg. It forms a solid explanatory text informed by a lengthy experience of the Baha'is both in Denmark and abroad. This review discusses, inter alia, three volumes by a Baha'i sociologist, Peter Smith. While the three titles are very different books, taken together they form an intelligent presentation of the religion from the perspective of a thoughtful insider. Finally, the article looks at a completely different sort of book, an intelligent portrayal of Baha'ism from its spiritual and moral perspectives by Moojan Momen. This last brings readers closest to typical fare for believers and new converts.