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In the past, different points in time have been set as demarcating the beginning of the end of Ancient Egyptian religion. One of these is the start of the so-called “proscription” of the god Seth, whose names and images are found damaged in many of their occurrences. In previous studies, this observation was explained as the result of intentional destruction performed during the first millennium BCE, and as such as indicative of the decay of Ancient Egyptian religion at this time. However, Seth was from his earliest attestations conceived as a deity ready to perform acts of violence and disruption; under specific circumstances he needed to be banished, but his character was also valued in circumstances requiring violence. This article discusses the problems, fallacies, and arguments of interpreting the intentions behind the destruction of monuments in general and the treatment of Seth in particular. It will be argued that “negating” the image of the “negative” god was not done with malicious intent, but to highlight this god’s role, which was important for the context of the image. It will be proposed that this phenomenon proves that Egyptian religion was still vibrantly alive at that time, not fading away and dying.

Because of the plurality of the venerated figures, the holy places of Twelver Shiʿism are numerous. This paper focuses on places of devotion that are supposed to contain bodily relics and presents them in a schematic framework to discuss the importance of some of these places, and some aspects of their transformations over time. I first identify the sacred figures of Shiʿism and the place or the places (multi-locality of tombs) attributed to each of them. I then move on to a discussion of two things that can seem paradoxical, i.e. the immateriality of the sacred figure, and his/her omnipresence beyond places. My findings are based on field observations and interviews, and on documentary and published sources.

This paper builds on previous studies of UK churchgoers by examining the factors that predict concern for the environment and willingness to make sacrifices to preserve it. A sample of 825 churchgoers from a range of denominations completed a questionnaire that contained items used to assess psychological preferences, biblical literalism, and a range of theological stances toward creation. Psychological variables showed both direct and indirect effects on environmentalism that were in line with previous work by environmental psychologists. Indirect effects were related to the way that some psychological type preferences either shape biblical interpretation or are associated with religious conservatism. Religious affiliation had no direct effects on environmentalism, but did have indirect effects through literalism and religious conservatism. Beliefs about dominion and eschatology directly reduced concern, but dominion was also positively associated with stewardship, which emerged as the main promoter of both concern and sacrifice.

In July 2013, after months of protest, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was ousted by the Egyptian armed forces. The Muslim Brotherhood, who supported Morsi, took to the streets, chanting and singing against the ousting, which they termed a military coup, while supporters of Sisi, who viewed it as a revolution, began producing songs to show their allegiance to the military leadership. While abundant research has been conducted on the role of oppositional and revolutionary music in Egypt since 2011, relatively little has been done on the widely popular pro-military music sometimes known as watani music. Watani songs are a genre of patriotic music made by popular artists to show their allegiance to the Egyptian armed forces. In this paper I examine the surge of watani songs and trace their history back to the Nasser era, thereby showing a continuity in style as well as content. I further argue that there are connections between nationalism and gender constructions, as the national project comes with obligations for men to offer their bodies to the cause. This obligation is aided by constructions about ‘male bravery’ and ‘courage’ that are designed to make men believe that military service is somehow essential to masculinity. Watani music, whether commissioned or not, fits well with this mythology of military men. It forms an ideological undercurrent, supports the narrative that it is necessary for patriotic military men to bravely safeguard the nation against its enemies.

This paper examines the discourse of PiS party in Poland as a form of biopolitical populism. I view this phenomenon as a specific style of political discourse rather than an ideology, that, first, focuses on bodily issues, including family and gender policy, sexual behavior, etc., second—it is inherently performative and as such it appeals to emotions, and, third—it directly communicates with “people” while circumventing the existing institutional framework of the state. Based on the cases of PiS rhetoric on the Smolensk catastrophe, and its narratives on gender and anti-LGBTQ issues, I demonstrate how the latter could be used for political othering and for subverting the core democratic principles. My data includes publications in Polish media and on social platforms (Twitter and Facebook), mostly before and after elections to European and national parliaments in May and October 2019, as well as during the presidential election in spring 2020.

In this article an overview is given of the verbal valence patterns of the verb ‮נתן‬‎ in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Four patterns are distinguished for this verb: 1. ‮נתן‬‎ + OBJECT to produce; 2. + ‮נתן‬‎ OBJECT + RECIPIENT to give to; 3. ‮נתן‬‎ + OBJECT + LOCATION to place; 4. ‮נתן‬‎ + OBJECT + 2ND OBJECT to make into. All occurrences of the verb in the DSS corpus used, consisting of 1QHa, 1QS, 1QM, and 1QpHab, are discussed and divided into one of these patterns. This study shows that pattern 3 occurs most, followed by pattern 2, and that it can be argued that pattern 1 and 4 also occur in our DSS corpus, though the evidence is scarce. In some cases, translations, differing from the translations in the editions of the texts, are proposed that better reflect the verbal valence patterns used in the clause.

The following article aims at analyzing various classifications of knowledge that are found in the literature of classical Islamic mysticism. The discussion focuses on two main corpora: Sufi writings, composed in the central and eastern parts of the Islamic world, and works by the Andalusī mystics or theosophists Ibn Masarra (d. 319/931), Ibn Barraǧān (d. 536/1141), Ibn Qasī (d. 546/1151), and Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). The article examines the discrepancies between the Eastern-Sufi and Andalusī taxonomies of knowledge, in an attempt to highlight the typological differences between these two mystical traditions of classical Sunnī Islam.

Indian Buddhist literary sources contain both systematic and casual rejections of, broadly speaking, the caste system and caste discrimination. However, they also provide ample evidence for, possibly subconscious, discriminatory attitudes toward outcastes, prototypically caṇḍālas. The rhetoric found in Indian Buddhist literature regarding caṇḍālas is examined in this paper.

The disenchantment of reality has bankrupted conventional sources of meaning for many people in modern Western cultures. This has led a growing number of figures and groups to search for alternative sources of meaning. Typical of their quests for meaning is the entanglement of secular and religious discourses. Since the twentieth century, scholars have studied the social configurations of these figures and groups as “cults” or “new religious movements” and their ideologies as “New Age” or “spirituality,” which are seen as parts of a longer tradition of “Western esotericism” (Europe) or “metaphysical religion” (North America). Several leading scholars have also interpreted them as forms of “secular religion,” but this has yet to gain academic traction. This article argues that the former concepts are lacking or losing a logical connection with the socio-historical phenomena to which they pertain and reintroduces the latter concept as a more appropriate one.

This special section of Asian Medicine brings together three scholars of the history of healing practices and medicine in premodern Asian societies to explore whether and how emic boundaries between religion and medicine were drawn in different historical contexts. In this introduction, we use the example of ancient Japan in an attempt to show how first steps towards a separation of religion and medicine can be identified, even when they have not yet been clearly differentiated institutionally or distinguished conceptually as distinct fields of action. By doing so, we operationalize the macro-sociological question central to the ‘multiple secularities’ approach, namely how ‘secular’ fields of action—here, curing disease—emancipate themselves from ‘religion’ in premodern ‘non-Western’ societies. We propose to look for differences in the framing and interpretation of healing activities, for the ascription of either (professional) competence or (religious) charisma to the healers, to ask whether the activities are to be interpreted as a social function or service, and to identify the sources of authority and legitimacy. This is followed by a brief summary and discussion of the contributions by Selby, Czaja, and Triplett.

The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context, the divergent research approaches in the humanities and the sciences produce separate bodies of knowledge that are difficult to reconcile. To remedy this incommensurability, the article proposes to employ the complex adaptive systems approach, which allows to study specific cultural systems in their ecologies and to account for the myriads of factors that constitute such systems, including nonlinear interactions between these factors and their evolution. On a specific example of religious systems, we show that by studying cultural systems in their contextual variability, mechanistic composition, and evolutionary history, the humanities and the sciences should be able to fruitfully collaborate while avoiding previous pitfalls of excessive reductionism, genetic determinism, and sweeping overgeneralizations, on the one hand, and pitfalls of excessive holism, cultural determinism, and aversion to any generalizations, on the other hand.

Some Islamic traditions mention an enigmatic daughter of Adam named ʿAnāq. Little is known about her; for example, the corresponding entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam simply states that ʿAnāq is the “name given by the Arabs to the daughter of Adam, the twin sister of Seth, wife of Cain and mother of ʿŪd̲j̲.” ʿAnāq is always mentioned in relation to her son, the giant ʿŪj, who was supposed to be the only creature outside the Ark to have survived the Flood in the time of Noah, and who was assumed to have been killed by Moses. We gather here the information and traditions about the Islamic ʿAnāq in order to draw a more coherent and historically contextualized portrait of this legendary first witch.

The central claim of this article is that Jonathan Z. Smith, in addition to his extensive contributions to the study of religion, makes a valuable contribution to the theory and responsible public exercise of cognitive power. This larger public concern is explicitly and repeatedly addressed in his writings on the academy in which he develops a theory of the academy that articulates the conditions essential to the responsible exercise of cognitive power. A further claim is that this theory constitutes the integrating standpoint of his study of religion. The failure to recognize the relationship between his theoretical writings on the academy and his study of religion, reflecting his two careers, has given rise to misunderstandings that have obscured the wider public significance of his entire oeuvre.

I have spent a number of years focusing my research on the Roman Cults of Mithras. In this autobiographical reflection on that study, I consider the relationship between research on a specific, if perhaps obscure, religious tradition and methodological and theoretical issues in historical and comparative studies of religion generally.

Gil Anidjar begins his immensely ambitious bookBloodwith a strange statement/question “Why I am Such a Good Christian.” I begin by examining this question for its implications for cultural hybridity, for myself as well as for Anidjar, through the lens of Anidjar’s concluding discussion of Freud’sMoses and Monotheism. On the way I critically explore Anidjar’s insistence that blood is not a signifier of kinship or ancestry in the Hebrew Bible or in Judaism, and argue that both are in fact much more complex. I suggest also that Christianity has other elements than blood, such as the bread of the Eucharist, and that Anidjar devotes little attention to the differences between Protestant and Catholic Christianity. I conclude by reverting to Freud’s account of an experience of innocence inThe Interpretation of Dreams, as indicative of Freud’s ambivalent position between Judaism and Christianity.

This article explores the relationships between the critical and persuasive claims of genealogy. It begins by contesting a recent trend in scholarship that insists genealogies are meant to dismantle metaphysical ideas, not persuade concrete individuals to give up their beliefs. It argues such an interpretation conflates genealogical critique into Kantian, excises the role of the reader, and illegitimately allows genealogists to escape the question of whether the method’s efficacy is historically contingent. The second section investigates the assumptions about the historical position and normative commitments of both the genealogist and the reader that must be in place for genealogy’s critical work to become persuasive. It then questions whether those assumptions are compatible with the basic commitments of genealogy as outlined by Nietzsche and Foucault. The final section asks whether structures of authority such that genealogy as a tool still addresses the authority structures of the present moment.

A consideration of both the palaeographic and material features of a scroll provides scholars the opportunity to investigate the scribal culture in which a particular manuscript emerged. This article examines the papyrus opisthograph from Qumran containing 4QpapHodayot-like Text B, 4Q433a, and 4QpapSerekh ha-Yaḥada, 4Q255, on either side. There has been scholarly disagreement about this opisthograph with regard to a number of questions: (1) which of the two compositions was inscribed on the recto, (2) how the two compositions should be dated, and (3) which of the two texts was written first. This article looks at both compositions by means of palaeography and codicology. From this combined approach I deduce that 4Q433a was written first, on the recto of this papyrus manuscript. 4Q255 was added later, on the verso. Both compositions can be dated to the early first century BCE. This reconstruction makes it plausible that 4Q255 was a personal copy.

Characteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion (CSR) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as “our intuitive psychology run amok.” This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.

Since 9/11, there has been a surge in interest in the topic of violence both among scholars of religion and in the humanities more broadly. This article suggests that such works operate with a “hermeneutics of the spectacular” that functions to legitimate the liberal status quo by concentrating its focus upon the most visibly heinous forms of state violence under the aegis of a politics of “resistance.” This article uses the New Testament and its depiction of the military as a site for thinking about how folk definitions come to classify certain activities as “violent” and not others, both today and in antiquity. If biblical scholarship—or the study of religion more broadly—is to be something other than an ideological repository for late capitalism, it is necessary to reconsider the issue. This article, by point of contrast, discusses three theoretical approaches to violence that may be useful: Objective-Structural Violence, Symbolic Violence, and Violent Subjectivities.

This article considers how biblical scholarship might break out of its western-dominated, largely historical-critical mould. I argue that we might challenge the hegemony of ‘western worldview’ scholarship by capitalising on the interpretative insights of alternative worldviews; in that regard, I advance a cross-cultural methodology. Additionally, I advocate engaging with grassroots interpreters, thereby contributing to the decentring of scholarly biblical criticism. Finally, this article focuses on the value of interpretation through dialogue, which functions here on two levels: the researcher dialoguing with grassroots interpretation groups in cross-cultural settings, and the resulting grassroots interpretations dialoguing with western professional biblical interpretations. The potential of this approach is demonstrated using a case study: Mark 4:35-41 interpreted with Cross-Cultural Biblical Interpretation Groups in northern Namibia. The interpretative insights of grassroots groups in non-western contexts, free(r) from the influence of western worldviews and scholarship, function to highlight the equally contextual nature of mainstream professional biblical interpretation.

This article focuses on how community-sanctioned pilgrimage to Jerusalem could be employed to establish both the homeland and the diaspora as places of belonging. As a case study, I will analyze Philo’s portrayal of the ἱεροποµποί—a term unique to Philo used to describe those chosen to carry offerings, especially the annual half-shekels—from the diaspora to the Jerusalem temple. I will argue that, according to Philo, the ἱεροποµποί (1) were elected community leaders who functioned as representatives of their communities, (2) enabled those who did not travel to Jerusalem to participate vicariously in sacrifice and pilgrimage, and (3) established both the homeland and the diaspora as places of belonging for their community through providing a context for participating in and perpetuating the collective memory of the Jewish nation, in general, and the Alexandrian Jewish community, in particular.

John 8:44 has been a source of concern because of its ambiguity. Is it to be read “of (your) father, the devil” or “of the father of the devil”? This article contends that the former, traditional reading is not ungrammatical as suggested in the grammars and more recently by DeConick and that accordingly the verse cannot be considered pro-gnostic.

The paper aims to discover how youth at risk of becoming marginalised describe the relations between meaning, faith and belonging. The data consists of 20 individual interviews with young people living in the small rural district of Lammi in southern Finland, including the experiences of three asylum seekers. Thematic analysis of the data indicated that these young people experienced lack of belonging on the levels of relationships and life context. Formations of personal faith and meaning in life become contested when it is not possible to find belonging. Meaning and belonging are found to be the roots for the growth of faith.

Normative considerations are an important part of empirical research on the youth ministry. In the presentation of results in many practical theological studies on the youth ministry, however, rarely a sufficient reflection is provided on the kind of normativity that plays a role in the way practices are investigated or on how normativity is present in the practices that have been studied. Partly based on the case studies of three PhD studies on the youth ministry from the Dutch Research Centre for Youth, Church and Culture, this article aims (a) to give an overview of the layers of normativity that can be distinguished in current practical theological youth ministry research and (b) to give directions for the design, execution, and reporting of practical theological youth ministry research in terms of a sufficient reflection on normativity.

Various interpretations of Kāśyapaparivarta § 68 have been attempted in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition. This passage, which consists in a simile likening a magician devoured by his own creation to a monk involved in meditation practice, appears prima facie absurd, insofar as the similarity between the tenor and the vehicle is not readily apparent. This article mainly consists of two parts: The first part examines the received interpretations of the simile and reconstructs their interrelationship from a historical perspective. The second part explores the literary dimension of the simile and argues that its ostensible absurdity is rooted in a pun which is visible only in Middle Indo-Aryan and seems to serve no purpose. Coming to terms with the opaque and pointless pun, this essay is aimed at a new interpretation of Kāśyapaparivarta § 68 and, it is hoped, a deeper understanding of the literary playfulness inherent in the making of the Kāśyapaparivarta as a so-called early Mahāyāna sūtra against the backdrop of the Sanskritization of Buddhist sūtra literature.

The Roman Catholic Church has always been present in news media worldwide. In 2013 the papal election caused special attention from the media because of the resignation by Benedict xvi. Heated discussions not only on the possible successor, but also on the necessary obligations of the Pope took place in the press discourse. Is there a changing understanding of authority, as the press coverage as well as millions of websites, Twitter contributions etc. suggested? The influence of new media on religious authority structures is assessed quite differently so far. However, what exactly is understood as religious authority? The paper presents exemplarily the press coverage in the Philippines and discusses the construction of religious authority in the press discourse during the papal election. Applying an analysis model, it thereby analyzes the different construction processes within a specific media genre and asks how and what kind of authority was ascribed to.

Spiritism reached the Ottoman Empire very quickly via the European and Levantine communities in Istanbul in the 1850s. At the outset of 1910, spiritism had become a very popular topic in the press. Spiritist publishing burst in Ottoman Turkish is connected to the environment of a more or less liberal press in the aftermath of the Young Turk revolution of 1908. As was the case in the history of spiritism elsewhere, in the Ottoman Empire reactions against spiritism came mainly from two intellectual circles: the positivistic (or scientific and materialist) ones and the non-positivistic (or religious-spiritual and anti-materialist) ones. Besides, all this spiritist, para-spiritist and anti-spiritist publishing activity involved a respective translation activity into Ottoman Turkish, which enhanced cultural transfer processes.

Orality/aurality is recognised by a growing number of scholars as a significant aspect of the context of New Testament texts. As part of the exploration of the oral features of New Testament texts some are turning to Greco-Roman storytelling and oratory, informed by performance studies. A selection of these explorations are discussed to introduce scholarship that attempts to identify various elements of performance events in the early church as a basis for re-thinking our ways of studying and our interpretations of the New Testament writings in their original context. The obstacles to such efforts are considerable, but some significant gains have been made. Focusing on research on the Gospel of Mark, this discussion shows how performance critical studies allow new insights into the origins of the Gospels, leading to interesting new and meaningful perspectives on the history of the early Jesus movement with specific attention to the role telling and presenting the Markan story played.

This paper argues in favour of the need of a continuous decolonisation and contextualisation of theology. Global capitalism, modernity, and the persistent colonial attitudes of the Western world are the phenomena in which to frame the presence of striking inequalities among and within countries. By assuming a liberationist standpoint, the analysis points at the convergence in methods and scopes of the Western postcolonial thought and the Latin American Christian theology of liberation for an effective decolonisation of theology. Liberation, with all its implications, becomes the key term through which to understand this relationship.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the intersection of the discourse of slavery – or doulology – and Romanness in Salvian of Marseilles’ De gubernatione Dei. After providing a short overview of the author and his work, the study examines how Salvian considers the slavery to God as the most important expression of true Christian-Roman pietas. Thereafter Salvian’s vice list, which is based on servile vices or uitia seruorum – including robbery, lying, greed, homicide, and sexual misconduct – is investigated to show how his Christian opponents fail both at being good masters of slaves and good slaves of God. The sexual abuse of slaves by Christian masters receives special attention. Finally, the study delineates the key dynamics and implications of Salvian’s doulology, and shows that the Christian failure of mastery, both of the self and others, is what informs Salvian’s view of why the Christian-Roman Empire is disintegrating under barbarian powers.

Based on a lecture first presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), this paper explores the possible reasons for the continued popularity of the work of the late Huston Smith – carried out in what could be characterized as the pre-history of the North American field’s rebirth in public universities throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. For unlike other works dating from the 1950s, which are now read, if at all, only as primary sources and thus as evidence of an earlier time in the field, his book (originally entitled The Religions of Man [1958]) presents a dated example worth considering, inasmuch as it is, for many, still the preferred classroom resource for training newcomers to the field.

We engage with the practice of yoga in Californian public schools through a recent case to examine the discursive mechanisms at play when a practice is shaped as religious (or not). A correlation is made between the practice of yoga in schools and male circumcision, to think about its secular/religious vocation. This line of questioning is salient in exploring how law curates the body of the “secular” “modern” child. We argue that yoga, like circumcision, is an example of an ambidextrous practice that can be curated as either “religious” or “secular”. Section 1 provides a brief genesis of our legal cases and theoretical proposal for secularism as a curating practice. Section 2 offers discursive analyses of religious practice, as well as culture and health through yoga’s postures. Ultimately, we seek to critically examine the manner, mechanisms and methods through which different practices exercised by children or on their bodies are (re)shaped by/through the courts.

‘Religion’ is often, if not always, deemed a rather problematic category by critical theorists, who urge scholars to be more attentive to the genealogy and history of the category. As part of the review symposium ofTheory in a Time of Excess(2016), this review essay argues that ‘theory’ itself could be deemed problematic if we wish to be consistent in adopting such a critical stance, which can lead to several dead-ends when excluding other theoretical options and possibilities.

The centrality of Sharīʿah as a term and concept, together with its ubiquitous usage, reflects present Muslim understanding of their religion. Existing research indicates this Sharīʿah-based conception represents a later historical development. However, earlier studies have not documented contemporary understanding and use of the term in the primary sources of Islam. This has important implications regarding the imparting of sacredness according to its traditional conceptualization. Based on comprehensive research and close examination of the Hadith literature in particular, this represents the first work to examine whether and to what extent the term Sharīʿah was used by the Prophet and his companions. The present investigation makes the case for fundamentally re-evaluating the role of the Sharīʿah in understanding Islam, and argues that this is necessary in order for a positive impact on contemporary Muslim societies and their relationship with the rest of the world to occur.

This study proposes that the empire-wide Iudaea capta discourse should be viewed as a motivating pressure on the author of 4 Ezra. The discourse focused on Iudaea capta, Judaea captured, was pervasive across the Roman empire following the First Revolt. Though initiated by the Flavians, it became misrecognized across the Mediterranean and was expressed in a range of media. In this article, I examine the diverse evidence for this discourse and demonstrate that it not only cast Judaeans as barbaric enemies of Rome using a common set of symbols, but also attributed responsibility for a minor provincial revolt to a transregional ethnos/gens. One of the most distinctive symbols of this discourse was a personification of Judaea as a mourning woman. I argue that 4 Ezra delegitimates this Iudaea capta discourse, with its mourning woman, through the counter-image of a Mother Zion figure who transforms into the eschatological city.

This article explores the emergence of the sage as an exemplar in Greek and Jewish antiquity. Greek philosophical writings and Jewish literary accounts are analysed, the latter including texts written in both Hebrew and Greek. The Greek and Jewish sources are compared in order to highlight (dis)similarities between them. It will be argued that the conception of the sage as an idealized figure and object of emulation originates from the classical Greek world, but it becomes integrated into the Jewish discourse on wisdom and good life in the later Hellenistic period. In spite of this shared element, the portrayals of the sage vary regarding the amount of concreteness and the discursive strategies in which his exemplarity is constructed.

Much has been already written about public theology’s prophetic role in democratic South Africa. This study seeks to offer a reality check. By probing some of Nico Koopman’s views on justice and reconciliation I draw tentative conclusions regarding the shortcomings characteristic of the prevalent discourses that have developed in South Africa under the umbrella of public theology since the mid-1990s. I seek to explain why liberation theologies—be it black, feminist or queer—may and should constructively disrupt these discourses. I also point to some promising (prophetically-loaded) insights coming from the chosen public theologians that revolve around the tension between civic spirit and public anger. Lastly, I suggest that one essential aspect of public theologians’ navigating between a populist temptation and a prophetic calling may be found in the need to rethink their theological accountability whereby grooving with people’s anger appears as a sine qua non condition for prophetic theologizing.

The attack that caused the ruin of Ai Khanoum around 145 BC was a key event of its history. This was the beginning of the so-called post-palatial period, which is often considered of short duration. The article intends to provide a general study of this last stage of the history of the city, taking into account the information already published, but also the new evidence resulting from the ongoing study of its main sanctuary (henceforth the Sanctuary). The few inhabitants of Ai Khanoum still living in the city after 145 BC reoccupied its private and public buildings and were engaged in the recovering of all the riches of the former Graeco-Bactrian capital. They exploited the stone materials, the metallic objects, the furniture and even reused the ceramics abandoned in the town. The Sanctuary remained in activity for a while, under the control of an authority who undertook maintenance operations, but the religious conceptions of the population underwent some major changes. This study also enables to review the common assumptions regarding the role played by nomadic people during this period.

The patriarch Jacob is an involuntary migrant. Jacob lives as an asylum seeker from Esau’s threat of violence and then as a refugee under Laban’s protection. Eventually, Jacob returns ‘home’ to Canaan, but he finds there a society totally different than the one he remembers or imagines. Jacob resembles involuntary migrants from other cultures in all of these ways. The experiences of other involuntary migrants can and should, therefore, guide interpretation of this narrative. This article, therefore, exegetes the texts concerning Jacob in Genesis 25-33 by utilising findings from the social-scientific study of involuntary migration, James C. Scott’s work on subaltern resistance, and studies on the role of trickster narratives in the Hebrew Bible. By generating new interpretive solutions to perennially problematic passages and showing the prominence of the experience of involuntary migration in Genesis, this article outlines an important new hermeneutical approach relevant not only for this text but also for a large number of texts in the Hebrew Bible concerned with involuntary migration.

Leo Strauss’s grand theme, the theological-political problem, has its basis in the predicament of being a philosopher in a political society. As a Jew and a philosopher, Strauss also faced the entanglement of Judaism and German philosophy culminating in Heidegger’s historicism. These related challenges prompted Strauss’s recognition of the first steps for philosophy in a global epoch. Strauss reinterpreted Heidegger’s religious anticipation of a “meeting of East and West” as a philosophical re-encounter with the Bible as “the East within us.” Whereas the Bible challenges the rationality of the philosophical way of life, this “Bible as Eastern” challenges rationalism itself.

Out of several years of research experience in the field of religion in prison, this article proposes some reflections on how to consider both a superdiverse situation and power issues in public total institutions. It proposes to use the notion of ‘gray zone,’ which refers to both the fluidity of current religious practices in contrast to a clear-cut distinction between secularity and religion and to an ambiguous positioning of actors in the complex field of institutional power relations. First, the author discusses briefly the structural locations of religion in European public total institutions and the ways these have been studied. Second, the focus shifts to those locations and uses of religion that are informal and that open up what the author calls a ‘gray zone.’ The concluding remarks highlight the complex power issues and relations at work in the realm of such a gray zone.

The cultural geographer Lily Kong argues that spatial analysis is vital for an interrogation of the contemporary complexity of religion. Building on this observation and broader theoretical understandings of the dynamics of space and place, this paper asks what happens when religious ideas and organisations are implicated in contemporary social action initiatives in ethnically diverse cities. Drawing on ethnographic data, it provides a detailed spatial analysis of a range of initiatives aimed at combatting food insecurity and other forms of deprivation in the city of Bradford in northern England. It examines how and why certain types of religious institution are dominant in the delivery of social action and explores the political significance of more fluid initiatives conducted by religiously diverse independent agents. The paper concludes that initiatives such as street kitchens and foodbanks are playing an important role in recalibrating the social location of religion in contemporary multicultural environments.

The commissioning of a mosque in Woking in early 1913 marks a seminal moment in the establishment of Islam in Britain. It was the first purpose-built Muslim place of worship to be raised at the heart of Empire, though it did not come fully into use until some years after it was built in 1889. This article problematises the accepted narrative of how the mosque became operational and highlights factors bearing on the establishment of the Woking Islamic mission that are now obscure or have not previously been analysed. Addressing the ‘afterlife’ of the events and figures at the heart of this narrative, the mnemohistorical dimension will be juxtaposed with the historiographical towards recovering recondite aspects central to the first Islamic institutional stirrings in Britain. The article complexifies what may in contemporary terms be categorised as ‘difficult history’.

Introduction to the following set of papers: Lars Albinus, “A grammar of religious ‘truth’—pragmatic considerations on the nature of religious truth”; Terry F. Godlove, “Truth, meaning, and the study of religion”; G. Scott Davis, “Semantics and the study of religion”; Mark Q. Gardiner, “Why truth matters for the study of religion; a defense of a truth-conditional semantics”; Gabriel Levy, “Can fictional superhuman agents have mental states?”.

Theory in a Time of Excess(Equinox 2017) serves as a useful starting point to argue for a plural understanding of theory in the study of religion. While the existing conversation often implies that there is only one acceptable way of theorizing, it seems useful to distinguish between (at least) three understandings of theory—and a fourth potentially “illegitimate” one. These four forms (discourse theories, creative theories, scientific theories, and essentialist theories) are all present in the volume. Different theoretical approaches can learn from each other and expose their respective blind spots, which is the main reason to further a meta-theoretical debate about a permissible plurality within theory-building. Rather than a call to “just get along” under one big tent, this critical attitude implies that we should strive to better profile all four of these forms of theorizing in order to discuss their potential place in our discipline.

This article explores various ways in which the concept of truth is actually used across discursive boundaries separating common sense, science, mathematics, and religion. Although my overall approach is pragmatic, I argue that we also need to take some semantic restrictions into consideration. The main objective of the article is the issue of translating concepts of truth in various linguistic and cultural contexts without losing sight of the particular network of connotations. I come to the conclusion that with regard to a religious discourse, a translatable concept of truth typically enters the grammatical place of the subject rather than the predicate. From this position the discursive constraints of authority, authenticity and expressivity are held in check by an internal predetermination of the implied possibility of falsehood. Most of all, however, the article focuses on non-propositional aspects of a religious expression of truth, in which case the very distinction between true and false becomes patently irrelevant.