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1. Laicism is a political ideology developing in Catholic-dominated France, under the name laïcité, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The French word laïcité is a neologism, derived from laïque (French, ‘secular,’ or ‘lay’), which is in turn derived from the Greek laós (‘simple people,’ as distinguished from their rulers and priests). It arises as a counter-concept to the polemical expression ‘clericalism,’ which has been used since the Revolution of 1848 as a deprecating designation for the dominance of the Catholic Church in society. The aim for laïcité is the strict leg…

[German Version] The term Iroquois, in the narrower sense, refers to those North American Indian tribes which, according to their own tradition, joined together around 1570 to form the Iroquois League (alliance of the five “nations” [Haudenosaunee, see below]: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca; in 1740, the Tuscarora joined as well), or, in a broader sense, to the members of the Iroquois language family which were prevalent in the area around Lakes Ontario, Huron and Erie, in the modern …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Semiotics, a discipline inaugurated primarily by C.S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure (see II and IV below), is the systematic analysis of signs (Gk σημεῖον/ sēmeíon) and the way the human mind perceives and understands them. A sign in the sense of semiotics can be any present physical or mental entity that is in a position to stand for an entity not present. A sign is constituted by the conjunction of two elements, the signifier and the signified. In religious studies, semiotics examin…