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.
