Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Advance Access

No Universalizing Deductive-Nomological Explanations, Please; We're Irish: A Response to Thomas A. Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling

Curtis, F. — 2009-06-25

Crossing, Dwelling, and A Wandering Jew

Hughes, A. W. — 2009-06-25

The Limits of the Hydrodynamics of Religion

Vasquez, M. A. — 2009-06-20

Assessing Theories of Religion: A Forum on Thomas A. Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion

Taves, A. — 2009-06-20

Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Law in Modern Indonesia

Scott, R. M. — 2009-06-20

Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaom Synthesis in Silla Korea

Baker, D. — 2009-06-15

The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China

Schrempf, M. — 2009-06-13

Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America

Kittelstrom, A. — 2009-06-13

The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics

Droeber, J. — 2009-06-13

Grasping at Ontological Straws: Overcoming Reductionism in the Advaita Vedanta--Neuroscience Dialogue

Kaplan, S. — 2009-06-12

Contemporary neuropsychology reveals that the parietal lobe contains neurons that are specifically attuned to the act of grasping and this act may be fundamental to the establishment of the phenomenal boundaries between subject and object. Furthermore, alterations to this process, such as the hypoactivation of this region during meditation or the hyperactivation associated with schizophrenia, may eliminate or confuse, respectively, the phenomenal boundaries between subject and object. Traversing disciplines, the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism traces some of its key terms for subject and object to the verbal root grah, to grasp. The subject is literally the grasper. Furthermore, the practice of asparsa yoga, the yoga of no-touch, is aimed at stopping, hypoactivating, the grasping process in order to transcend all subject–object boundaries. This paper will argue that while we have not uncovered an identity of thought, we have uncovered a confluence of ideas between these two disciplines. We will see that this confluence of ideas has not pitted the believer against the critic—not forced us into the great reductionism debate that has dominated so much of the interchange between religious studies and the sciences. This case study will illuminate some of the methodological ways around this reductionism battle and also the boundaries of both disciplines for the intellectual benefit of each.

Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances

Johnson, G. — 2009-06-09

"Born Again Is a Sexual Term": Demons, STDs, and God's Healing Sperm

DeRogatis, A. — 2009-06-09

In this article I examine the intersection between sexuality and spirit-filled bodies in American Evangelicalism. I am interested in investigating two issues: the sexual body as a site of spiritual battle and the use of popular science, especially the domain of genetics, as material evidence for this spiritual warfare. Specifically, I trace the increasingly spiritualized framing of marital intercourse in evangelical literature. To follow this trajectory, I highlight the spiritualized dangers of transgressive sexuality as well as the sexualizing of spirituality in evangelical sex manuals and deliverance manuals. This article centers around one text, Holy Sex: God's Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality, whose authors' contend that sexually transmitted diseases are, in fact, demons lodged in genetic material that can be transferred through body fluids and bloodlines. The assertions about biology and demonic affliction made throughout the book are extreme and would be rejected by most readers of mainstream evangelical sex manuals. I argue that this book, though marginal, is not an irrelevant text. It reflects deep-seated anxieties about sexual bodies, spiritual concerns, and disease. Idiosyncratic though it may seem, Holy Sex taps into wider uncertainties about the spiritual vulnerability of the physical body found in contemporary evangelical literature.

Language, Orthodoxy, and Performances of Authority in Vietnamese Buddhism

Soucy, A. — 2009-06-09

Men and women in Vietnam engage in Buddhist practice in very specific ways and have widely different understandings of what their practices achieve. The Buddhist pagoda in Vietnam is generally seen as a feminine space, borne out by the fact that between 80% and 90% of participants are old women. Nonetheless, there are some old men who become prominent participants, but only after renegotiating the significance of Buddhist practice in ways that are more compatible with their masculine identities. This paper focuses on the performative aspects of masculine participation in the Buddhist field that are intended to gain greater status and authority. A secondary aim of the paper is to relate this particular ethnographic example to the larger field of Religious Studies. The concentration on texts, as authoritative voices in religious traditions, ignores the performative aspect of their creation. It suggests that, while they are performances that often hold greater currency, they should nonetheless be understood as only one sort of performance among many.

Sufis on Parade: The Performance of Black, African, and Muslim Identities

Abdullah, Z. — 2009-06-09

For over twenty years, West African Muslims from the Murid Sufi Brotherhood have organized the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day parade in New York City. It is a major site where they redefine the boundaries of their African identities, cope with the stigma of blackness, and counteract an anti-Muslim backlash. Rather than viewing religion as a subset of ethnicity, this study shows how African Murids interrogate the meanings of religion, race and ethnicity as intersecting constructs. National flags from Senegal, Islamic chants, and banners advocating Black solidarity all indicate a negotiation of terms. Clothes worn during the parade act as symbols and afford them another opportunity to work out these borderlands, especially in contradistinction to African American converts who follow a slightly different course. This article examines how their religious procession creates a Murid cosmopolitanism, allowing them a space in which to reconcile multiple belongings.

Queer Eye for the Ascetic Guy? Homoeroticism, Children, and the Making of Monks in Late Antique Egypt

Schroeder, C. T. — 2009-05-22

A famous instruction about children in monasteries reads: "Do not bring young boys here. Four churches in Scetis are deserted because of boys." Taken from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, this apophthegm exposes the presence of homoeroticism and anxieties about the homoerotic, especially erotic encounters with children, in early Christian ascetic communities. This essay examines the construction of male sexuality in early Egyptian monasticism, focusing on the Sayings and the rules of the monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe It argues that the masculine ascetic ideal builds upon certain classical ideals of masculinity, especially the control of the passions, but purports to eschew classical models of eroticism in which the adolescent male represents the ideal sexual partner. However, these sources are designed to be recited or retold as edifying texts; despite their overt disavowal of sexual contact between men and boys, their retelling and rereading keeps homoeroticism and the representation of boys as sexually desirable objects alive in the ascetic imagination.