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This article engages with the moral theology of William Perkins of Cambridge (1558–1602), with particular attention to his celebrated and influential case divinity. Perkins’s case divinity set the stage for a Protestant return to casuistical ethics, following the eschewal and neglect of such applied moral reflection in the initial phases of the Reformation. While his cases originally received a positive reception, more modern evaluations have been less approving. Perkins has been accused of attempting to curtail Christian liberty by forging codes of piety and morality that crowd out space for personal deliberation and judgment. This essay argues that such evaluations misapprehend Perkins’s casuistical enterprise, overlooking or obscuring its chief and ultimate aim, which is didactic rather than prescriptive.

Despite the immense success of Christianity in many parts of the Global South, Asian intellectuals have often resisted actual conversion by incorporating Christian elements into new, more universal forms of spirituality. Caodaism, a syncretistic religion that emerged in French Indochina, offers one case study of this process, which is also found in Hinduism, Bahaism, and several Chinese redemptive societies. The place of Jesus within this new pantheon is explored in this paper by looking at the ways in which Christian ideas have influenced the organization, doctrine, and self-image of Caodaists in Vietnam and how these ideas have gained new force among Caodaists in the North American diaspora. Caodai “saints” famously incorporate prominent historical and literary figures as spiritual teachers, including Victor Hugo, Jeanne d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the United States) Joseph Smith. They provide new scriptures through spiritist séances, and through this mechanism they are able to “modernize” Caodai doctrine and expand it to fit new circumstances.

Pentecostal miracles and healings have often been described and interpreted, but rarely explained in their sociological workings. As former research implies, actual biomedical effects of Pentecostal healings are possible (the so-called placebo effect), but quite limited. In Pentecostal healing services, however, very impressive miracles and healings are routinely produced: paralytics arise from wheelchairs, cancerous ulcers disappear, legs grow, cavities are mysteriously filled, and the deaf suddenly hear. Drawing on a case study and qualitative interviews, this paper offers a sociological, mechanism-based, explanatory scheme for the observed phenomena. It is argued that a number of \"social techniques\" (e.g., suggestion, rhythm, music), context factors (e.g., audience size and beliefs), and causal mechanisms (e.g., probability, faency, selection, and editing effects) are combined in an ingenious way in order to produce miracles and healings.

My project will engage in the process of understanding animism through exploring an African ecotheological theory that speaks to the Zaramo ethnic group in Pugu Hills, and the way they relate to the landscape. The Zaramo is the largest ethnic group in Dar es Salaam. I was attracted by the origins of the Zaramo that can be traced back to a sacred spiritual cave known as ‘Mwenembago’ meaning “the lord of the forest” of the Wazaramo found in Tanganyika, known and believed as human ghost/s. Using principles of daily rituals and custom practices of the Zaramo, and in parallel with understanding the Shinto ethnic group (who practice shamanism) as a case study, I aim to create informed urban landscape spaces that speak to African ecotheology.Bozdogan (1999) in her paper Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey refers to Sir Bannister Fletcher’s (1896) “Tree of Architecture” as evidence of progress. Bozdogan describes how classical Greek architecture is shown in the ‘Tree’ as evolving through modernism, influenced by western attributes. The various non-European and non-western cultures were represented as nonhistorical styles, leading nowhere. This aligns with Amilcar Cabral’s assertion that in the process of colonialism, only Europe was thought to have a ‘history’ and to ‘progress’ (Bozdogan, 1999:208).To go back to tradition is the first step forward” – African Proverb.I believe It is important to scrutinize architecture, history and theory, and the education thereof and its relevance in contemporary culture. Most especially because it is historically dominated by western Eurocentric ideals and myths and would tend to exclude or marginalise indigenous non-western knowledge. African history determines the future of the spaces we enter and engage with. Irving Hallowell, an anthropologist who explored ‘the new animism’, emphasized the need to challenge the modernist, Western perspectives of what a person is by entering into a dialogue with different worldwide-views (Hallowell, 1955). How would space making be explored with African mythologies of a respective region in Africa? What would this mean for us? What tools are needed in architecture for us to further explore these?Sir Edward Tylor developed the idea of animism and describes it as “the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general” (Jong, 2017 after Taylor, 1958). Taylor initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as “spiritualism” but realised that would cause confusion with the modern religion of Spiritualism that was then prevalent across Western nations (Jong: 2017, 48).Ecotheology is a form of constructive theology that focuses on the interrelationships of religion and nature, particularly in the light of environmental concerns (Pihkala, 2013). It has been applied to various ethnic groups such as the Jewish, the Japanese and Hima where they believe that the concept of ecotheology is how they relate with the landscape using their traditional ritual practices. However, an African ecotheology has not been explored. The continent is dominated by western ideals of ecotheology, albeit the vast knowledge found in indigenous group such as the Bushman in southern Africa, the Wachanga and Zaramo along the eastern coast of ritual practices linked to ecotheology.

Across early seventeenth-century Europe, the physical boundaries that had structured reading practices in institutional libraries from monasteries to universities suddenly dissolved. Where readers had previously encountered shelving units that projected out perpendicular from the wall to create secluded study spaces, they now found open rooms outlined by shelving along the perimeter walls. Readers thus seemed to have been given a new freedom to pursue idiosyncratic activities; yet the open reading room coincided with sharpened anxiety about the hazards of undisciplined reading. InThe Malleable Early Modern Reader: Display and Discipline in the Open Reading Room,a case study of Oxford’s Bodleian Library together with contemporaneous notions of human perception,Kimberley Skeltonargues that, paradoxically, the open reading room was an effective response to seventeenth-century concerns about reading because it molded the reader into the ideally studious scholar.

This article combines ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary theory to explain musical boundary-work: the creation, interpretation, and use of music to reinforce, bridge, or reshape symbolic boundaries for social, political, spiritual, or other purposes. The multi-faith and multi-ethnic Afrogaucho religious community of metropolitan Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, serves as the case study, because practitioners use musical liturgy to combine and segregate the Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda religions and their denominations. This essay introduces the community, highlighting ethnoracial identity politics, and describes processes of musical boundary-work within the community, focusing on local concepts of crossing and purity.

Through the case study of the Teochew people of Northeastern Guandong who formed the bulk of Chinese immigrants to mainland Southeast Asia between the late 19th century and the Second World War, this article deals with a widespread Chinese technic of written spirit-mediumship, called fuji. By taking into account the example of a New Religious Movement, named Dejiao (teaching of virtue), which appeared in the context of the Sino-Japanese war and spread to Southeast Asia afterwards, the author analyzes the ways mediums enter into communication with gods and their state of mind before and after their performance. He also singles out the sociological factors, which lead to attractive oracles and thus strengthten the faith of the believers.

This article compares contemporary Japanese entities known as kyara (\" characters\") with historical anthropomorphized imagery considered to be spiritual or religious. Yuru kyara (\"loose\" or \"wobbly\" characters) are a subcategory of kyara that represent places, events, or commodities, and occupy a relatively marginalized position within the larger body of kyara material culture. They are ubiquitous in contemporary Japan, and are sometimes enacted by humans in costume, as shown in a case study of a public event analyzed within. They are closely tied to localities and may be compared to historical deities and demons, situated as they are within the context of popular representations of the numinous created to inspire belief and spur action. However, the imperatives communicated by yuru kyara are not typically religious per se, but civic and commercial. Religious charms and souvenirs also increasingly incorporate the kyara aesthetic.

Recent anthropological studies of divination have been marked by renewed and appreciative concern for the epistemological and performative dimensions of divination. Pursuing these recent investigations, and especially their interest in the nature of the knowledge and modes of knowing underlying divinatory ritual, the first part of the article attempts an understanding of the interpretative operations and modalities of knowledge involved in different forms of divination practised in Senegal and Gambia today. At the same time, and somewhat antithetically, it will be argued that the focus on the question of the cognitive nature of divinatory knowledge and the person of the diviner may also be problematic: it may lead to undervaluing the main quality of divination, which lies perhaps not in its cognitive but its consultational properties. Further decentring its initial cognitive outlook, the second part of the article addresses the question of how to understand the fact that within the divinatory discourse itself it is not the diviner but the divinatory apparatus that is being addressed as the source of enunciation. Where, if not in the person of the diviner, is the source of the knowledge underlying and resulting from divinatory procedure to be located? And in how far is it possible, as the title of this article suggests, to conceive of the divinatory process as being autonomous of the expertise and specialist agency of the individual diviner? Les études anthropologiques récentes sur la divination ont été marquées par un regain d'intérêt appréciatif pour les dimensions épistémologiques et performatives de la divination. En suivant ces études récentes et notamment l'intérêt qu'elles portent à la nature de la connaissance et aux modes de savoir qui sous-tendent le rituel divinatoire, la première partie de cet article tente de comprendre les opérations interprétatives et les modalités de la connaissance qui interviennent dans différentes formes de divination pratiquées au Sénégal et en Gambie aujourd'hui. Dans le même temps, et de manière quelque peu antithétique, il affirme que le fait de se concentrer sur la question de la nature cognitive de la connaissance divinatoire et sur la personne du divinateur peut aussi être problématique : il peut se traduire par une sous-évaluation de la qualité principale de la divination, qui réside peut-être non pas dans ses propriétés cognitives, mais consultationnelles. Décentrant sa perspective cognitive initiale, la seconde partie de l'article aborde la question du comment comprendre le fait qu'au sein du discours divinatoire lui-même, ce n'est pas le divinateur mais l'appareil divinatoire qui est traité comme la source d’énonciation. Où faut-il situer, sinon dans la personne du divinateur, la source de la connaissance qui sous-tend la procédure divinatoire et qui en résulte ? Et dans quelle mesure est-il possible, comme le suggère le titre de l'article, de concevoir le processus divinatoire comme autonome de l'expertise et de l'intervention spécialisée du divinateur individuel?

This book offers a close-up look at theological education in the USA today. The authors’ goal is to understand the way in which institutional culture affects the outcome of the educational process. To that end, they undertake ethnographic studies of two seminaries -- one evangelical and one mainline Protestant. These studies, written in a lively journalistic style, make up the first part of the book and offer fascinating portraits of two very different intellectual, religious, and social worlds. The authors go on to analyse these disparate environments, and suggest how in each case corporate culture acts as an agent of educational change. They find two major consequences stemming from the culture of each school. First, each culture gives expression to a normative goal that aims at shaping the way students understand themselves and from issues of ministry practice. Second, each provides a “cultural tool kit” of knowledge, practices, and skills that students use to construct strategies of action for the various problems and issues that will confront them as pastors or in other forms of ministry. In the concluding chapters, the authors explore the implications of their findings for theories of institutional culture and professional socialization and for interpreting the state of religion in America. They identify some of the practical dilemmas that theological and other professional schools currently face, and reflect on how their findings might contribute to their solution. This accessible, thought-provoking study will not only illuminate the structure and process by which culture educates and forms, but also provide invaluable insights into important dynamics of American religious life.