This study explores how women in two devout religious communities cope with the Internet and its apparent incompatibility with their communities’ values and practices. Questionnaires containing both closed and open-ended questions were completed by 82 participants, approximately half from each community. While their discourses included similar f…[Read more]

Review of “Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic,” Michael Allen and Scott Swain, eds.

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An MA thesis discussing the role of vegetal offerings in Roman religion, and the shift in attitudes towards them in the first centuries CE

In 1587 the Flemish composer Carolus Luython, employed by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, published an unusual motet collection in Prague. Titled Popularis anni jubilus, the collection describes the sounds and rituals beloved by Central European peasants, recasting them as the ecstatic songs of rustic laborers (jubilus) famously celebrated by Saint…[Read more]

Abstract: In Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, springs are a central motif of the Prologue
and the novel as a whole. This motif counters male domination, since it
is associated with Chloe, while the flowers watered by springs in this novel
are identified with Daphnis. This study will examine how the motif of springs reflects
the resistance of D…[Read more]

Lev 9:1–10:3 contains two of the most memorable events in the priestly narrative: a public theophany at the tabernacle, and the deaths of Nadav and Avihu. It also contains a long sequence of sacrifices, the importance of which has often been overlooked. This article argues that the ritual acts described in Lev 9 follow established and i…[Read more]

This article discusses the concept of kissing as it appears in the Bible and in Rabbinic writings. Special attention is given to different motives for kissing and to different conjugations of the Hebrew verbs for kissing.

This article discusses rabbinic qualifications to the Biblical prohibition of verbally saying the names of foreign gods (typically represented by idols).

Dempster’s goal in the commentary is to understand the original historical context of the oracles before examining their literary context (17). For this reason the introduction has a solid section placing Micah into the history of Judah in the late eighth century, especially in Assyrian invasion of 701 B.C. Dempster realizes the view that Micah i…[Read more]

John Goldingay has recently written several short, popular level books. IVP Academic published his Do We Need the New Testament? (2015) and A Reader’s Guide to The Bible (2017). In both books Goldingay argues the Old Testament (or First Testament in Goldingay’s book) is the foundational for a proper understanding the New Testament. As he obs…[Read more]

Users of contemporary media technology in religious settings often oscillate between immediacy in spiritual interaction and the increasing complexity and visibility of media technology as human artifacts. Drawing on approaches to mediation from philosophy and media theory, I examine Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in performing a d…[Read more]

This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and…[Read more]

In this article I suggest that the rapidly growing interest in the intersection of linguistic anthropology and media needs to be accompanied by a deeper investigation of the mediality of language. Discussing Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in religious events revolving around the recitation of devotional poetry, this paper explores h…[Read more]

This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious…[Read more]

This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida’s work entails that a…[Read more]

There is a significant debate in Origenian scholarship today about the allegory/typology distinction. Some scholars accept the demarcation between these two forms of nonliteral scriptural interpretation, whereas others reject it. In this paper I seek to determine whether, or to what extent, the allegory/typology distinction is valid for study of…[Read more]

Superheroes with Islamic backgrounds are nothing new, but their critical study is. The recently released Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Religion, and Representation proposes how best to deploy such analysis pedagogically, politically, pluralistically, pervasively, and persuasively. This roundtable considers the book’s contents through its political c…[Read more]

New scholarly books in religious studies defy easy labels and reflect the eagerness of publishers to widen academic discourse and to upset conventional wisdom in the name of new knowledge—in science, across genders, between faiths, and around the world.

Utilizing theory developed by scholars of Religious Studies and related disciplines, this essay theorizes the evolution of a specific rabbinic dietary regulation regarding the separation of meat and milk. In particular, this essay applies insights regarding religious rhetoric developed by Bruce Lincoln in order to analyze how ancient rabbis…[Read more]