How can we nurture greater respect, more nuanced understanding, more care-full critical thought, and deeper community engagement in teaching on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions? In this article, we explore ways to incorporate theories and methods from Native American and Indigenous studies into religious studies classrooms. Teaching with Native American religious traditions, rather than just about them, can lead to better understandings of the history and formation of settler colonial societies. It can also create opportunities for students to imagine and enact more responsible and respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples, places, and knowledges. We offer a few key terms-place-relation, settler colonialism, sovereignty, tradition, story, and cultivation-that are significant in Indigenous studies, discussing their import for the academic study of religion, as a way to bring the two disciplines into productive conversation.
Indigenous relationality serves as a spiritual and political framework for sovereignty and kinship that governs the interconnected systems of global Indigenous nations. Consequently, as co-editors of this special issue, we see Indigenous critique as a necessary intervention to challenge the colonial biases, structural racism, and restrictive definitions found within the academic study of religion. We identify our positionalities and describe how we came to this work. These provided the grounding from which we encouraged contributors to engage with critical Indigenous studies as a means of challenging the Western European and settler colonial episteme that has profoundly shaped academic fields, including religious studies.
Occulture describes the growing presence of esotericism, occultism, magic, and spirituality in media, popular culture, and contemporary arts as part of the spiritual revolution in Western contemporary societies. The empirical study of occulture has been carried out through two main theoretical frameworks. In sociology and media studies, scholars have described the mediatization and commodification of esotericism, while in religious studies, scholars have examined artists as spiritual seekers. This article argues that these perspectives are pieces of a larger mosaic. It proposes applying a material cartography of occulture, capable of showing the relationships among different actors (artists, artworks, and audiences) - which can embody both secular and religious values. This article proposes a navigational cartography based on five key and 5) spiritual seekers vs. religious dwellers.
In his article "Toward a Realistic and Relevant `Science of Religion'" Benson Saler compliments me for urging scholars of religion to acquaint themselves with evolutionary theory in order "to re-establish a unifying framework for the study of religion." But he was also skeptical about my defense of a macro-level study of religion which he thought would have to be autonomous-wholly independent of the "findings and theorizing of other sciences, particularly the biological and cognitive sciences." Consequently, Saler insisted that a truly scientific study of religion must be unashamedly reductive, involving explanation of religious phenomena not only in terms of cognitive processes but also, "eventually," by way of neural processes alone. I agree with Saler's claim that the social sciences are not autonomous; that the sciences are all of a cloth in that they are necessarily constrained by the laws governing reality at the sub-atomic level of the physical universe. And that is to say that the emergent levels of reality including the biological, psychological, social, and cultural are identical with the physical. But like Poldrack in the epigram above, I will show here why it is "not quite right" to say that the study of these emergent levels of reality is the same thing as the study of physics.
This essay critically discusses Stanley Stowers's History and the Study of Religion (2024) as a bold criticism of antirealist and constructivist approaches and therefore a contribution to a realist turn in the study of religions. It interrogates the validity of its theoretical cornerstone of "religion as a social kind" and its distinction of religious "subkinds". Moreover, the essay highlights the methodological strengths of Stowers's critique of Christian origins narratives and his emphasis on non-elite religious practices, yet questions the payoff of the "social kind" framework relative to recent scholarship in the field. With the help of comparative perspectives from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Judaean traditions, the essay assesses the broader applicability of Stowers's theory and proposes additional perspectives. Ultimately, while recognizing its contributions, the essay calls for further conceptual clarification and integration with wider theoretical and historical debates.
