Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion最新文献

From a cultural phenomenology approach, this paper analyzes the experiences of spiritual warfare lived in an Evangelical Rehabilitation Center. The ethnographic study was conducted in Tijuana, B.C., Mexico. The discussion focuses on three paradigmatic cases, allowing us to analyze the transition from “life in addiction” to the experience of transforming desires, which also implies a process of subjectivity. We argue that desire is a bodily phenomenon with palpable somatic manifestations. However, in an existential sense, desire is also the corporeal link between spatiality and temporality. We maintain that the corporeal subjectivity of addiction defines spatiality and temporality in a way that is particularly susceptible to formulation in religious discourse, leading to a transformative shift in orientational self-processes of being in the world, where an existential struggle becomes spiritual warfare, simultaneously on the scale of embodiment and in a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

The scholarly study of religion has experienced substantial change over the past quarter-century. Central among these was recognizing religions as existing within and shaped by spatial relations—a.k.a. religious studies’ “spatial turn.” Engaging geographic theory offered several benefits, particularly concerning interreligious conflicts, religions and secularisms, and religions’ intersections with other, seemingly divorced facets of lives and livelihoods. Yet religion's spatial turn remains incomplete. One striking omission is that of scale. A nuanced concept central to understanding spatialities and their relations, geographers have recently centered on scale and multiscalar relations when theorizing spatialities. Greater engagement with scale and especially multiscalarity would similarly benefit the scholarly study of religion.

This article explores the complex intersections of religion and bodies through the lens of Sikh migrant cremations in the early 20th century Pacific West. Sampling English-language from 1900 to 1920, it highlights how racial and civilizational biases shaped discourses on open-pyre migrant cremations, even as cremation was gaining acceptance among white settler groups in the United States and Canada. Reading the news reports critically, the essay spotlights migrants’ efforts to confer dignity on the dead under adverse social and political circumstances by enacting Sikhism's essential tenets. By examining Sikh cremations, the article emphasizes not only the importance of including migrant bodies and experiences but also the need to decolonize and diversify histories of cremation in the United States and Canada.

Tattoos have evolved into a widely popular form of self-expression in the United States, especially for younger generations. Religious texts and images become increasingly common tattoos that now decorate the body. Surprisingly, previous research on tattoos is largely silent about religion. Given changing perceptions in the United States on tattoos, we ask: do religious people today have tattoos? And, how religious are people with religious tattoos? With a nod to Durkheim, tattoos may be conceptualized as profane and sacred, with religious tattoos functioning as sacralized markers of religious subcultural identity. We analyze tattoos and religion with nationally representative data from the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey. Religious affiliation is largely unrelated to tattoo acquisition or tattoo type, but religious commitment is related to both acquisition and type of tattoo. Highly committed religious people are unlikely to have a tattoo. If they do, it is likely a religious tattoo.

Although much research has been conducted on religious exits, most of it focuses on the characteristics of those who have left, the factors prompting them to leave, or the issues they face in their new lives, with little systematic theorizing about the forms and roles of religious exit costs—that is, the penalties religious adherents pay or anticipate paying should they leave their respective religious groups. In this article, I aim to fill this gap by providing a clearer conceptualization for religious exit costs, discussing how they may vary in form, and generating a series of theoretical propositions concerning their role in preventing exit and the implications associated with successful preventions.

Previous research has often found a strong link between religiosity and morality. Specifically, high religiosity results in more restrictive moral positions, and the tendency toward absolutism. In this paper, we use the World Values Survey (WVS) to show a weakening link between three morality scales and religiosity over time in five Western countries (Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand). The exception to this general trend is the area of sexual or body morality, where the correlation remains strong. Further, religiosity does not promote moral homogeneity, as those with high religiosity give no less diverse answers to moral questions than the nonreligious. We suggest that secularization, changing religiosity, and the discursive winnowing of “religion” help explain these trends.