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This overview looks at the field of religion in Burmese studies from the perspective of practices that are relatively neglected, such as spirit cults. It argues that the overwhelming bias toward analysis of the Theravādin tradition tends to obscure the fact that in Burma, different kinds of religiosity actually interact in the shaping of the religious field and society. First, an analysis and selective review of past and present scholarly approaches to Burmese religion over the past forty years is presented. Then the Burmese spirit cult, the Thirty-Seven Lords, is introduced in this context as a component of a complex religious system dominated by the Theravādin tradition. This examination calls for a subaltern point of view capable of unveiling the hegemonic nature of Buddhism and of understanding the process through which the religious field is actually constituted in Burma through the incessant delineation of \"pure\" Buddhism.

Scholars routinely confront the problem of translating concepts from one cognitivelinguistic system to another. The concepts \"shaman\" and \"shamanism,\" which are employed particularly in comparative religious and anthropological studies, are a case in point. Scholars from various academic disciplines make use of different, indistinct, and indeed contradictory definitions of these terms. As a result, their content and meaning have been obscured. My aim in this article is to emphasize the importance of establishing comparative religious concepts as methodical research tools. In particular, I call attention to the need to distinguish between emic (indigenous) concepts and etic (constructed by the scholar) comparative \"ideal types\" (Max Weber) in cultural and religious studies. Through the methodology of constructing theoretical analytical notions advocated in this essay, scholars can identify similarities and dissimilarities between assorted phenomena by focusing on what Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss called caracteristiques différentielles. I argue that the fundamental spatial feature which distinguishes shamans from other categories of religious specialists is their unique command of ritual techniques that enable them to move between human and preternatural space, e.g., from the mundane world to the supernatural one and back again. Moreover, I contend that \"shamanism\" is not a religion in itself but only a \"configuration\" (Åke Hultkrantz) within a religious system. This point is important because numerous scholars tend to reduce so-called \"indigenous religions\" to the category of \"shamanism,\" thereby depriving these religions of their individual identity. Instead, these religions ought to be recognized and analyzed as distinct systems of belief and practice, just as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism are. The paradigmatic post-colonial reduction of many indigenous religious systems to \"shamanism\" has created an impoverished view of religions that are no less complex and sophisticated than the so-called \"Great Traditions.\"

The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions of religiosity. The dimensions of public practice, private practice, religious experience, ideology and the intellectual dimensions can together be considered as representative for the total of religious live. From a psychological perspective, the five core-dimensions can be seen as channels or modes in which personal religious constructs are shaped and activated. The activation of religious constructs in personality can be regarded as a valid measure of the degree of religiosity of an individual. The CRS thus derives from the five dimensional measures a combined measure of the centrality of religiosity which is suitable also for interreligious studies. The paper presents the theoretical basis and rationale of its construction with different versions of the CRS in 20 languages with norm values for 21 countries. Furthermore, the paper presents versions of different extension and describes specific modifications that were developed for studies with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.

Many Muslims continue to believe that Ashura is a custom and ceremony that is associated with expressing worry about the Karbala event, however in the Buginese community of South Sulawesi, this tradition is entwined with community culture, transforming it into a Buginese-specific tradition. The purpose of this study is to address the following three issues: (a) How is the community's understanding of the Mappasagena Culture practiced in the Ashura day celebration for the Buginese community of south Sulawesi, Indonesia? (b) What factors contribute to the Buginese community's belief in the rewards associated with mappasagena ritual compliance? (c) How the Buginese community in South Sulawesi preserved the Mappasagena culture based on the Qur'an? This article concludes the Mappasagena ritual is a regional custom preserved by the Buginese community of South Sulawesi. The tradition survives in the modern era influenced by the beliefs and the expectation of a prosperous and spacious life until new year. They also experience the influence directly or indirectly when they join in Mappasagena celebrations. Meanwhile, participation of actors such as religious leaders, traditional leaders, and traders helps maintain the mappasagena tradition among the Buginese community of South Sulawesi.

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference's thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary theory and its associated methodological toolkit. Employing evolutionary theory enables to systematize findings from individual psychological studies within a broader framework that could resolve lingering empirical contradictions by providing an ultimate rationale for which results should be expected. The benefits of evolutionary analysis are illustrated through the study of collective rituals and, specifically, their purported function in stabilizing risky collective action. By comparing the socio-ecological pressures faced by chimpanzees, contemporary hunter-gatherers, and early Homo, I outline the selective pressures that may have led to the evolution of collective rituals in the hominin lineage, and, based on these selective pressures, I make predictions regarding the different functions and their underlying mechanisms that collective rituals should possess. While examining these functions, I echo the Early Career Award and focus mostly on my past work and the work of my collaborators, showing that collective rituals may stabilize risky collective action by increasing social bonding, affording to assort cooperative individuals, and providing a platform for reliable communication of commitment to group norms. The article closes with a discussion of the role that belief in superhuman agents plays in stabilizing and enhancing the effects of collective rituals on trust-based cooperation.

This project uses local sources to visualize and analyze the spatial distribution of Buddhist sites in Hangzhou 杭州, China, in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). It aims to highlight regional religious features in Hangzhou as a locality—the interactions between Buddhism and sociocultural factors—from the visualization and analyses. With the advent of the spatial turn in the field of humanities, numerous endeavors have been undertaken to collect data from religious sites in East Asia. However, the collections are aimed at a nationwide-level scale rather than targeted at regional aspects. Studying religion by using the data of large-scale areas often prevents us from observing regional characteristics such as how religion interacted with local factors. Hence, this project draws spatial data from a Hangzhou local gazetteer titled the Xianchun Lin’an zhi 咸淳臨安志 (Records about Lin’an from the Xianchun Reign, a 100-fascicle local chronicle that depicted the Lin’an Prefecture in the Southern Song dynasty) to create a visualization for all Buddhist establishments in Hangzhou. We observe how a religious landscape within a locality is portrayed when it was renowned as a political, cultural, and economic center at a given time. Starting as a project led by him in 2020, Jiang Wu’s team converted all Buddhist temple locations recorded in the Xianchun Lin’an zhi into geographical coordinates. Based on the dataset, we analyze the distribution of Buddhist temples with the application of GIS via three methods: average nearest neighbor, quadrat analysis, and kernel density to highlight localism and regionalism in Chinese religious studies. Our results of GIS distant reading indicate a highly clustered congregation of Buddhist temples in Hangzhou. Corroborating the results of distant reading with factual information (recorded in historical materials) from close reading, we discover that the spatial pattern of Buddhist temples is correlated with socio-political factors including fengshui, state power, politics, and commercial exchanges. With the combination of distant reading and close reading, we can highlight the interactions between Buddhism and socio-political factors that are not easily spotted via traditional textual approaches or using data that is scaled nationwide.

The prevalence of religious beliefs and practices is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, but previous research has suggested that religious traditions may provide cooperative benefits and improve well-being. Seemingly in contrast to this claim are worldwide secularization trends in which people disaffiliate from religions and abandon belief in God. Theorists have suggested that diminished pressures on cooperation and well-being no longer motivate individuals to seek religious benefits and pay the associated participation costs. We investigate this claim using the National Study of Youth and Religion dataset, which tracks the development of religiosity among US Christians from adolescence to young adulthood ( n  = 3,370). Using a lagged panel design, we found that material security in Wave 1 (early adolescence) predicts a decrease in belief in God in Wave 4 (young adulthood), although this association is rather small. This result provides some support for the hypothesis that participation in religious traditions is associated with living in an insecure socio-ecology, where religious systems may still confer benefits on their members; yet it is not the only driver of secularization. We conclude with a call for further research using more nuanced measures and larger sample sizes to provide deeper insights into the potentially adaptive nature of cultural systems.

This book examines the \"constitutional faith\" that has, since 1788, been a central component of American \"civil religion.\" By taking seriously the parallel between wholehearted acceptance of the Constitution and religious faith, Sanford Levinson opens up a host of intriguing questions about what it means to be American. While some view the Constitution as the central component of an American religion that serves to unite the social order, Levinson maintains that its sacred role can result in conflict, fragmentation, and even war. To Levinson, the Constitution's value lies in the realm of the discourse it sustains: a uniquely American form of political rhetoric that allows citizens to grapple with every important public issue imaginable. In a new afterword, Levinson looks at the deepening of constitutional worship and attributes the current widespread frustrations with the government to the static nature of the Constitution.

Based on the spatial analysis and GIS modeling of the distribution of religious sites in Greater China, we have developed the concept of regional religious systems (RRSs) as a novel way of understanding and studying the spatial distribution patterns of religious sites and their relationship with other social and cultural factors. This essay further explores theoretical issues such as its center–periphery relations in existing administrative and economical hierarchies. Drawing on our current project on RRSs in the Hangzhou region and various available studies about pre-modern Chinese religion, the author explains the spatial characteristics of RRSs, such as the role of transportation, trade and pilgrimage routes in the formation of RRSs. Using Chinese Buddhism as an example, the author argues that RRSs in Greater China should be treated as a spatial formation without an internal hierarchical structure because the political and administrative hierarchy prevents the formation of a strong religious hierarchy.

Many studies have noted significant relationships between religious sentiment and psychological adjustment, but few have been able to comment on the direction of influence. We assessed the relationships between religious values, self-esteem, and trait hope when participants were in grades 11 and 12. The variables showed moderate levels of rank-order stability. Structural equation modeling revealed that religious values in grade 11 did not predict improvements in self-esteem in grade 12, but they did predict improvements in hope. In contrast, hope did not lead to increase in religious values. These results held after controlling for personality (Big Five factors and Eysenck's psychoticism factor). Results are discussed with reference to the beneficial effects of religious values in adolescence.