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Abstract: Exorcism is practiced throughout the world. Allegedly evil beings or spirits are eliminated from an individual through a ritual. These rituals almost always invoke familiar or primary deiti…

Abstract: There are a plurality of religions and of variants within each. Religious pluralism is one response to this plurality of religious thought. The two alternative, competing responses are reli…

Abstract: The article first contrasts contingency with necessity, before tracing the role this contrast has played in philosophy from ancient Greece to the modern Enlightenment. The article then demo…

Abstract: Religion and literature have in common that both are viewed as hallmarks of human life, and the literary and religious traditions in each high-cultural system are found to have developed in…

Abstract: Divine kingship, the deification or self-deification of kings during their lifetimes, is a widely attested phenomenon, yet not all kings at all times were divine. The deification of kings i…

Abstract: This entry considers the origin and implications of the term “matriarchy,” as it has been applied to the study of religion since the Enlightenment. It examines some of the ideas that have c…

Abstract: Differentiation remains a core concept in the debates over secularization and its significance for religion in a post-modern world. In its most basic formulation, differentiation refers to …

Abstract: The concepts liminal (“threshold”) and liminality have been applied in religious studies to call attention to the role of religious rituals, and religion, in social change. Applications hav…

Abstract: The word “afterlife” has three main denotations along with scores of connotations. The question whether afterlife exists depends largely on one’s definition of reality and falls outside the…

Abstract: Within the Western philosophical tradition the term “intuition” can be used in at least three different ways, covering modes of cognition that are rational, pre-rational, or even irrational…

Abstract: The study of martyrs and their stories is a much debated subject. The early history of martyrdom can be found in the commemoration of the deaths of the Maccabean Martyrs (Judaism), Jesus of…

Abstract: Frazer set up the modern problematic of comparing the rationality of magic, religion, and science. His rationalism was inductivist and, following the distinction between truths by nature an…

Abstract: Since the late 1950s, “identity” has been a popular topic in social science and in public discourse. Philosophical discussions about personal identity culminated in a concept of narrative i…

Abstract: This entry considers what we know about the causes and consequences of happiness — a matter which has only recently been subjected to scientific study, although the topic has been dicussed …

Abstract: Conceptions of nature and its relationship to religion have varied widely. For some early scholars of religion, nature provided the base set of experiences out of which humans developed the…

Abstract:   ⸙Insider / Outsider Bibliography 

Abstract: A festival is a period of celebration, often in commemoration of a significant historical, religious, or social occasion. Festivals are often based on the calendar, celebrating saints’ days…

Abstract: Philology is not a method but a tradition of textual scholarship reaching back into Greco-Roman antiquity. The entry outlines four aspects that have been of central importance to its develo…

Abstract: Shamanism is an ancient spiritual healing practice found in pre-modern societies worldwide. The remarkable similarities in these practices cross-culturally and their similar functions in al…

Abstract: Since the earliest times, human beings have been constructing buildings and consecrated sites for the worship of deities and natural or supernatural powers. These serve a variety of purpose…