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"Religious symbolism"
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A Cultural Sociology of Religion: New Directions
In this article, I review three contemporary streams of scholarship that are revitalizing the cultural analysis of religion, an approach that dates to the discipline's founding. Research from an institutional field perspective focuses on the institutions that shape religious belief, practice, and mobilization. Work on lived religion, including neo-Durkheimian approaches, focuses on religious experience and contested practices of sacralization. Scholarship on religious cultural tools and symbolic boundaries analyzes religion as symbolic legitimation. These three approaches avoid serious problems associated with both market and secularization accounts, in part because of the way they conceptualize religious authority and religious identity, and in part because of their broader scope of inquiry. In the conclusion, I combine the insights from these approaches to articulate a promising agenda for future research, offering a set of focus questions that are relevant to both classical and contemporary concerns about religion's role in modern societies.
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Illustrating Dan: A Study on the Iconography of Liu Yiming’s Alchemical Doctrine
Liu Yiming, a Daoist priest of the Quanzhen Longmen sect during the Qing Dynasty, lived during the Qianjia period, a time marked by the overall decline of Daoism. To correct the vulgarization of theories surrounding Neida 內丹 (internal alchemy), he constructed a Neidan system based on the metaphysical foundations of the cosmological theories of the Book of Changes (易經) and the philosophy of Laozi. Liu argued that “the path of alchemy is the path of the Book of Changes,” and he extensively employed graphical tools such as figures of the Book of Changes and alchemical symbols to transform the abstract theories of Neidan into intuitive visual expressions. These images are concentrated in works of his such as Zhouyi chanzhen (周易闡真) (True Explanation of the “Changes”) and Xiangyan poyi (象言破疑) (Resolving Doubts through Images and Words). The study reveals that Liu Yiming’s reliance on imagery constituted a creative strategy to address the rigidity of Neidan theory and the crisis of its transmission. His iconography was not merely an interpretive technique but a crucial theoretical practice that revitalized the orthodoxy and vitality of Neidan during its period of decline.
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Symbolic Transfigurations of Jinhua in The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi太乙金華宗旨): From Inner Alchemy to Interreligious Synthesis
The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨), a Qing dynasty spirit-writing (fuji扶乩) text, is widely known through the Wilhelm–Jung translation lineage, where jinhua 金華 is rendered as “Golden Flower” and read as mandala-like symbolism. Based on a close reading of the Daozang Jiyao 道藏輯要version, this article argues that in the Chinese text jinhua is not primarily a floral image but a technical and experiential term for luminosity in Daoist inner-alchemical cultivation. Hua 華 is resemanticized from botanical “flower/flourishing” into “radiance,” and the work explicitly defines the key term as “jinhua is light”. The text further organizes cultivation into a three-stage trajectory—“sudden emergence”, “circulation”, and “great condensation”, through which qi 氣 is refined into light and luminosity stabilizes as spirit (shen 神). Finally, the analysis situates this luminous grammar within the work’s explicit Three Teachings (sanjiao 三教) framing: Confucian “illuminating virtue” (mingde 明德) and Buddhist idioms of luminous mind-nature (xin-xing guangming 心性光明) and dharma-body language function as a shared vocabulary for describing non-grasping awareness and embodied realization. On this basis, jinhua is best understood not as a decorative metaphor or a purely psychological symbol but as a practice-oriented mechanism of ontological luminosity, clarifying both the inner-alchemical logic of The Secret and the stakes of its modern reception.
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2013 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture: Finding Religion in Everyday Life
This address is a contribution to the study of \"lived religion,\" that is, the embodied and enacted forms of spirituality that occur in everyday life. Like the children's books that ask \"where's Waldo,\" sociologists are invited to think about the many ways in which we need to refocus our work in order to see the religion that often appears in unexpected places. As the discipline has broadened its geographical and cultural vision, it also must broaden its understanding of what religion is. Religion is neither an all-or-nothing category nor a phenomenon that is confined to a single institutional sphere. Understanding the multilayered nature of everyday reality and the permeability of all social boundaries makes a more nuanced study of religion possible. Using data from the \"Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life\" project, it is suggested that religion can be found in the conversational spaces—both in religious organizations and beyond—where sacred and mundane dimensions of life are produced and negotiated.
Journal Article
Spiritual Technologies: The Religious Symbolism of the Digital Universe
This essay attempts to analyse the discourses, gestures and projects of the new digital galaxy’s protagonists who conceive their mission in fundamentally religious terms. It will also aim to trace the intellectual genealogy and conceptual premises of their cultural and communicative vision. This analysis will attempt to define four ideal types based on reference figures taken from mythology and religion as well as the imaginary of contemporary popular culture: Prometheus, Moses, Hermes Trismegistus and Iron Man.
Journal Article
Spiritual Alchemy: Centered on the Concept and Iconography of the “Three Corpses 三屍”
Daoist Inner Alchemy (Neidan 內丹) takes the joint perfection of the physical body and the spiritual body as its core pursuit. Therefore, in its practice system, besides physical cultivation, spiritual cultivation is also an indispensable component, and the two together constitute the fundamental principle of “dual cultivating of xing and ming” (Xingming Shuangxiu 性命雙修) in Neidan theories. Spiritual cultivation in Neidan usually includes two aspects: one is the positive cultivation and elevation of inner-nature; the other is the confrontation with destructive spiritual entities. The common saying of “eliminating the Sanshi” (Qu Sanshi 去三屍) in Neidan texts is a typical representative of the latter. The “Three Corpses” (Sanshi 三屍) is an important category in Neidan theory, but relevant academic research remains relatively inadequate. An in-depth exploration of the concept of the Sanshi and its corresponding images helps to deepen the understanding of the theoretical, practical, and philosophical connotations of Neidan.
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Across Eurasia’s Middle Ages: “Women’s Weaving” Motif in Daoism and Christianity
This article undertakes a cross-cultural comparative inquiry into the motif of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity. Although the two traditions developed with minimal historical contact, both elevate women’s textile labor into a central metaphor for cosmogenesis, sacred order, and individual salvation. Nevertheless, their hermeneutic trajectories diverge in essential ways. Working within a tripartite analytical framework (intellectual roots, artistic images, ritual practices) to argue that Daoism interprets “women’s weaving” as a proactive technique of transformation and nurture, based on a cosmology of immanent huasheng lun. In this reading, the image is affiliated with the cosmic creativity of nüxian, the inner transformation of their body, and the autonomous pursuit of transcendence. By contrast, within Christianity’s transcendent theological horizon of creatio ex nihilo, “women’s weaving” is configured primarily as an ethical discipline of responsive obedience, closely tied to the mystery of the Incarnation, the imitatio Dei, and communal spiritual exercises and charity under monasticism. The cross-cultural resonance of this motif, I contend, is grounded in the “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” economic formation, patriarchal gender order, and shared symbolic cognition; its decisive bifurcation arises from contrasting deep cultural structures—namely, cosmology, conceptions of the body, soteriology, and church–state arrangements. Through this micro-case, the article further argues that the sacralization of secular gender roles constitutes an agentic cultural choice, one that indexes distinct civilizational pathways in understanding creation, nature, the body, and freedom.
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