Book review of Benny Grey Schuster, The History of Easter Laughter: Johannes Oecolampadius’ De risu paschali from 1518 with an Introduction, Annotated Translation, and an Account of the Cultural, Ecclesiastical, and Theological Transformation of Laughter. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2024, 386 pp.
This article examines the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, arguing that religious socialization and radicalization within the movement are essentially manifestations of the same process, and demonstrating how educational and communal narratives may normalize militaristic and messianic themes, establishing conditions conducive to radicalized identity formation. We examine how pedagogical strategies and narrative frameworks promote fervour and activism among Jewish youth while creating a narrative environment in which extremist ideas may circulate, without implying a direct causal pathway to radicalization. Educational materials, including books, comics, and audiovisual content, serve as conduits for transmitting Chabad Kabbalistic political theology to children and adolescents, emphasizing messianism, militarism, and Third Temple aspirations. This study highlights the significant role prominent figures, most notably Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, play in crafting a binary worldview that sharply delineates ingroup and outgroup dynamics. By examining these processes, we illustrate the contextual narrative conditions that may predispose individuals to radical interpretations, without asserting a definitive causal link.
Dreams and dreaming are universal human experiences that form notable cultural themes in most folk traditions, traditional societies, and world religions. Scholarly attention has long emphasized the significance of dreams and dreaming in the study of beliefs and practices related to religious phenomena. Indeed, even in the early days of anthropology scholars proposed that dreaming was a primary source of religious belief and practice. By adopting some key observations and tenets of the naturalistic approach of cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion (CESR), this research article uses explanatory models of the salience, recurring structures, and functions of supernatural dreaming. These include imageries of supernatural/human agents, ritual actions, the use of experience, and more broadly, purported cultural transmission (factors) associated with dream representations. The article aims to address (a) lesser-known aspects of the cognition of supernatural agents in religious dreaming; and (b) lesser-known or unknown aspects of dream imagery about ritual interactions. These aims are also related to (c) the context of the cultural transmission factors of dream beliefs more broadly. These topics of religious dreaming are primarily addressed with reference to several research projects among Nepalese Hindus, ranging from pilgrimages to counterintuitive dreams and Covid-19 pandemic dream research.
This article examines the different framings of Elokapina’s Hätäjarrutus demonstration in October 2020, at which nonviolent civil disobedience activists were pepper sprayed. The research questions focus on the justifications of the activists’ nonviolent civil disobedience (NVCD) and the police’s use of force, as well as the media’s role in representing the events. The source material consists of news articles and material by Elokapina and the police, which are analysed using framing analysis. Theories of nomos and liminality are applied to explain the actions of both parties. Elokapina is interpreted as challenging the nomos, or the shared societal order, perceived as toxic and exacerbating climate change. The police interpret this demonstrative act as liminal, or beyond the normal societal order, and resort to unusual methods to control the situation. Media framing influences how the event is understood. While most articles are neutrally descriptive, both parties’ narratives are also presented, offering readers the tools to draw conclusions about which party to sympathize with. Applying theories of the study of religions deepens the understanding of climate actions and the sentiments they generate. This article highlights the role the study of religions can play in interpreting the most urgent questions of our time.
In this article we examine accounts in interviews with Finnish educators of adult migrants in relation to religion. We argue that a historically constructed normative and affective Finnish lens on religion that is closely tied to notions of whiteness and racialization shapes these accounts. Rooted in the intertwined history of Lutheranism and secularism, this lens favours private, personal, and low-key expressions of religion, forms that are seen as more compatible with Finnish societal norms. While culturalized aspects of Lutheranism such as holidays and traditions are accepted as educational content, educators are concerned about whether the practice of Islam and its approach to time are compatible with Finnish working life. This concern reveals that the model for understanding religion is both normative and affective. As divergent forms of religion are subdued in the public sphere, religious minorities therefore negotiate their positions within unequal power dynamics. Our findings suggest that the interviewed educators’ prevailing understanding of religion is aligned with the racializing structures of migrant integration. They privilege forms of religion that benefit the assumed white, Lutheran, and secular majority, and (Muslim) migrants are accordingly viewed primarily as the future workforce.
Organized Asatru is estimated to include no more than 20,000 members worldwide, and between 1,000 and 3,000 in Denmark, but it is well known that there are people outside organized groups who identify as Asatru. Yet no one knows how many, who they are, and in what they believe. Here, we examine the demography and spiritual life of this broader group of Asatru for the first time. Of 23,326 participants from a Danish national cohort group (EXICODE), 94 (0.40%) self-identified as Asatru, which extrapolates to 15,000–23,000 Asatru individuals in Denmark alone. Compared with other Danes, matched by age, gender, and ethnic/cultural background, these self-identified Asatru respondents tend to be single younger males with lower income and education. This invisible group of Asatru shares several characteristics with the more visible organized Asatru, including active spiritual lives, a tendency to turn to nature, and opposition to the church. Importantly, our data indicate that the vast majority of self-identified Asatru exists in unorganized, fluid, and less visible forms. Indeed, we argue that Danish Asatru may best be understood as a pyramid with different levels of investment and organization, ranging from a few highly invested and organized neopagan Asatru at the top to a much wider group of less invested and unorganized cultural Asatru at the bottom.
Book review of Andrea Franchetto: Rituals of Perceptual Presence: Space, Material Culture, and Efficacy in Late-Medieval Learned Magic. Stockholm: Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University, 2024. 316 pp.
Book review of Knut A. Jacobsen: Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence. London: Routledge, 2025, 203 pp.
Book review of John Björkman: Healing Springs and Haunted Woods: Sacred Sites of Folk Belief and Spatial Order in Southwest Finnish Village Societies. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University, 2024, 201 pp. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-4419-3.
While suffering the consequences of climate change, traditional lifeways in Sápmi are also under pressure from state-based plans for an energy transition, including large wind turbine parks in reindeer-herding districts. Critics speak of green colonialism and climate injustice, structurally connected with former modes of colonial intervention. Conflicts have played out in the courts, politics, and news media, mostly in secular terms, but increasingly in religious registers. I cover some of these grounds through a two-part agenda. The first exemplifies the presence of religion in nature-related conflicts in Sápmi. The second explores the wildcard dimension of such a presence. As a recent player, what can religion enable, facilitate, and contribute? What does indigeneity add? More broadly, what are the spaces of opportunity and limitation for indigenous religion(s) on nature-based conflict grounds?
This article examines the emergence of a range of new spiritual practices reshaping traditional religious expressions within Nordic Lutheran churches over the last fifty years. These holistic practices, which include meditation, yoga, sacred dance, and other creative forms of expression, integrate influences from Eastern traditions, folk religiosity including New Age practices, and secular approaches to wellbeing. Rather than existing as peripheral or fringe phenomena, these innovative practices have been woven into daily church life, serving not only as vehicles for spiritual progress but as expressions of holistic care and community building. The article argues that these practices are part of an 'immanent turn' in Protestant spirituality that has been ongoing since the 1970s. By adopting a bottom-up, lived religion perspective, the study challenges conventional topdown theological frameworks. It shows that when the focus shifts to laypeople's everyday practices in local parishes, Lutheran Christian practice is revealed to be more flexible, inclusive, and deeply connected with embodied experiential spirituality. This approach encourages a rethinking of how Lutheran Protestantism is conceptualized, highlighting the importance of personal bodily centred experiences in the pursuit of engagement in the world and the ongoing evolution of church practice in contemporary society.
Yoga has become increasingly popular in Denmark, much as in other European countries. However, its integration into Danish society often involves secularization or recontextualization to fit local cultural and religious frameworks. This article examines yoga's increasing incorporation within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark It explores how priests and church-affiliated groups navigate the balance between cultural appropriation and appreciation, redefining yoga within a Christian framework. By delinking yoga from its traditional Hindu roots and relinking it to Christianity in a broad sense, practitioners aim to create a form of yoga that is aligned with their faith while benefiting from its meditative and physical practices. The study highlights the complex interplay between religion, cultural adaptation, and globalization, demonstrating how yoga is reshaped to fit new contexts while retaining aspects of its original emphasis on the cultivation of the body as part of a religious or spiritual practice.
This article reports the results of the first detailed investigation of the Yoga of Stillness Christian yoga programme in Finland. It describes how the practice is structured, framed, and legitimated as specifically Christian, and the meanings its instructors ascribe to the programme. It also describes the practice's gradual but increasing establishment in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. The article thus provides a case study illustrating a broader transnational trend whereby originally non-Christian meditation techniques are increasingly making their way into traditional and institutional Christian settings.
Cultural appropriation has recently become a central topic in discussions regarding majority churches' adoption of 'Eastern' spiritual practices. This article employs a Vygotskian-Bakhtinian perspective on appropriation as developed by James Wertsch (1998) to examine the research question, how have the Danish and Norwegian majority churches made yoga their own, and how is yoga preserved as something that also belongs to someone else? The data consist of two types of sources: ten field visits conducted between January and November 2023; and a qualitative survey distributed in January 2024, with fifteen submissions from Norwegian respondents and sixteen from Danish respondents. The analysis reveals that 1) the churches' primary objectives play a crucial role in how yoga is incorporated in existing practices such as church services; 2) Christian concepts do not entirely replace historically attributed yoga expressions; and 3) the God-centrism of church yoga is well aligned with the prevailing holistic doctrine of self-spirituality. Based on our findings, we conclude that the majority churches in Norway and Denmark have appropriated yoga as part of their own theological tradition, introducing two novel concepts: linguistic domestication; and material domestication.
This article explores the incorporation of sound healing in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF), analysing how this embodied spiritual practice is reinterpreted within a Christian framework. Using digital ethnography, the article examines how ideas of embodiment, therapeutic sound, and silence intersect with Lutheran traditions. The theoretical concepts of acoustemology, sonic skills, and esoteric sounds are employed to highlight how non-verbal and non-musical sonic experiences are adopted and reshaped within the ELCF to fit Christian aesthetics. The findings reveal that sound heal-ing is primarily framed through the following strategies: redefining churches as acoustic spaces; framing sound healing as silent prayer; and negotiations of theological and ritual boundaries. Ultimately, the study provides knowledge about how the ELCF has integrated new understandings of sensory experiences in relation to sound and silence and their therapeutic potential into its activities.
Cultural appropriation has recently become a central topic in discussions regarding majority churches’ adoption of ‘Eastern’ spiritual practices. This article employs a Vygotskian-Bakhtinian perspective on appropriation as developed by James Wertsch (1998) to examine the research question, how have the Danish and Norwegian majority churches made yoga their own, and how is yoga preserved as something that also belongs to someone else? The data consist of two types of sources: ten field visits conducted between January and November 2023; and a qualitative survey distributed in January 2024, with fifteen submissions from Norwegian respondents and sixteen from Danish respondents. The analysis reveals that 1) the churches’ primary objectives play a crucial role in how yoga is incorporated in existing practices such as church services; 2) Christian concepts do not entirely replace historically attributed yoga expressions; and 3) the God-centrism of church yoga is well aligned with the prevailing holistic doctrine of self-spirituality. Based on our findings, we conclude that the majority churches in Norway and Denmark have appropriated yoga as part of their own theological tradition, introducing two novel concepts: linguistic domestication; and material domestication.
Book review of Christel Gärtner, Linda Hennig & Olaf Müller (eds): Families and Religion: Dynamics of Transmission across Generations. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2025, 425 pp.
Book review of Oliver Grimm (ed.): Bear and Human: Facets of a Multi-Layered Relationship from Past to Recent Times, with Emphasis on Northern Europe, vols 1–3. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2023, 1198 pp.
This article explores the incorporation of sound healing in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF), analysing how this embodied spiritual practice is reinterpreted within a Christian framework. Using digital ethnography, the article examines how ideas of embodiment, therapeutic sound, and silence intersect with Lutheran traditions. The theoretical concepts of acoustemology, sonic skills, and esoteric sounds are employed to highlight how non-verbal and non-musical sonic experiences are adopted and reshaped within the ELCF to fit Christian aesthetics. The findings reveal that sound healing is primarily framed through the following strategies: redefining churches as acoustic spaces; framing sound healing as silent prayer; and negotiations of theological and ritual boundaries. Ultimately, the study provides knowledge about how the ELCF has integrated new understandings of sensory experiences in relation to sound and silence and their therapeutic potential into its activities.
Book review of Jørn Borup, Mitra Härkönen, Knut A. Jacobsen & Katarina Plank (eds): Buddhism in the Nordic Countries. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025, 212 pp.
