bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Comments on 'Oxhide Ingots, Recycling, and the Mediterranean Metals Trade'
Authors: Gale Noel H. , Stos-Gale Zofia A.
Published: March 2015

This article adds another to the adversarial papers from the Bradford group with no new evidence or scientific data and a liberal sprinkling of misunderstandings and misquotations. Their article calls to mind the comment by Bass (1973) on another paper:

"The article must be read with care, as Muhly seems either not to have read all of the sources he cites, or not to have understood them". To take one example: they quote Knapp (1990) as a source for their statement that the consensus view shifted away from a Lavrion origin for the oxhide ingots found in the eastern Mediterranean towards a potential Cypriot source. Knapp's paper contains no statement that any oxhide ingot was made of copper from Lavrion and no statement that any author had ever made such a claim. To our knowledge there is nowhere to be found any such idea in the whole literature on oxhide ingots. A more serious example is their accusation that our latest published data set for Cypriot ores (Stos-Gale and Gale 1994) has presented five samples which are changed from our previous publications by only one ratio. Of these, two were not previously published at all, two have precisely the same ratios as in Stos-Gale, Gale and Zwicker (1986), whilst one was misprinted in Spooner and Gale (1982).

Budd et at. 1995 repeat yet again that the lead isotope compositions of deposits in Sierra de Cartagena, Oman and the Negev overlap those of Cyprus. To the contrary, examination of all the data (Gale 1991) showed that there is no such overlap. Again contra their implications, Gale and Stos-Gale (1988) did not state that the ingots from the Minoan palace of Hagia T riadha on Crete were made from Sardinian copper. In fact we firmly concluded that there was no evidence whatsoever for the import of Sardinian copper into Minoan Crete.
The Dynamics of Modern Land Use and the Acconia Survey
Authors: Ammerman Albert J.
Published: March 2015

At a time when surface visibility is one of the key issues for archaeological surveys in the Mediterranean world, it is of interest to look more closely at the character of modern land use. In this case study of the Acconia area in southern Italy, the mapping of land use on a field-by-field basis was carried out in two different years (1980 and 1989). As part of the analysis, use is made of a transition matrix to summarize the patterns of continuity and change in the exploitation of fields between the two dates. The longitudinal study of land use at Acconia reveals the growing importance of groves of fruit trees at the expense of other forms of land use. The installation of a new grove commonly involves sub-surface intervention (the levelling of the ground, the digging of holes for planting the trees, the excavation of trenches for the irrigation system) which increases the chances that archaeological material at a buried site will be brought to the land surface, thus making it possible for the survey to discover a new site. In retrospect, much of the success of the Acconia Survey in recovering a dense pattern of Neolithic settlement is now to be linked with the dynamics of modern land use. In a final section, some of the broader implications of the case study for survey work in the Mediterranean are discussed briefly.
Isolation or Interaction: Prehistoric Cilicia and the Fourth Millennium Uruk Expansion
Authors: Steadman Sharon R.
Published: March 2015

The late fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia may be understood in terms of a complex economy that expanded across western Asia. Some suggest that this trading network may be described as an Uruk-dominated world system in which the southern Mesopotamian core expanded to incorporate the peripheral regions of Syro-Mesopotamia, the Iranian highlands, and southeastern Anatolia. Alternatively, others suggest that the Late Uruk expansion was a catalyst for the development of the Mesopotamian hinterlands, resulting in socio-economically complex regional centers. Such centers may have competed for resources to satisfy both a local elite class as well as a newly established exchange system with southern Mesopotmia. Whatever its nature, within the realm of this Mesopotamian political and economic expansion, but on its fringes, was the region of Cilicia. This study examines the Cilician reaction to this economic expansion period. The Late Uruk period forms the main focus of this study, although the periods preceding are also of considerable importance; the Cilician history of economic interaction with neighboring regions prior to, during, and after the Late Uruk period is traced. An explanation for Cilicia's apparent absence from the late fourth millennium Mesopotamian economic structure is offered.
Handmade Burnished Ware and the Late Bronze Age of the Balkans
Authors: Bankoff H. Arthur , Meyer Nathan , Stefanovich Mark
Published: March 2015

Handmade Burnished Ware from late Mycenaean contexts has been interpreted variously as a unified ceramic assemblage, a conflation of different indigenous coarse-ware traditions, evidence for intrusive ethnic elements in the Mycenaean world, a symptom of the economic and systemic decline of the palace elite, and the re-emergence of the Aegean peasant substrata as the destructions of the Late Bronze Age took their toll. The authors propose that it may represent the ceramic tradition of people brought into Greece from the Balkans and other areas beyond the Mycenaean periphery, and could be investigated through comparison with models developed in the New World and through the study of the technology of production.
Mirroring Processes, Religious Perception and Ecological Adaptation
Authors: Wilson Burgess C.
Published: March 2015

The theory of mind hypothesis is the basis by which biologically based theories of religion typically explain beliefs in supernatural agents and, in turn, religion. Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that social cognition also involves the mirror neuron system and simulation. This paper summarizes these advances and offers an additional hypothesis regarding the neurological basis for supernatural agents and religion. According to this hybrid hypothesis: religion’s neurobiological basis is (1) the mirror neuron system and simulation based processes, which respond to expressive objects in the natural environment and produce embodied knowledge that imply sentience, and (2) inferential knowledge-based systems, which interpret these intuitions in terms of beliefs in animism and/or supernatural agents. This hypothesis places the mirror neuron system and simulation based processes (i.e. processes conjectured to underlie a direct embodied form of empathy) in an instigating role, and places inferential knowledge-based systems in a secondary, albeit crucial, role. Consequently, this hypothesis is an empathic theory of religion. Moreover, these processes are hypothesized to have selective value insofar as they help small-scale cultures manage their natural resource base more sustainably.
Guest Editor’s Introduction
Authors: Gunzburg Darrelyn
Published: March 2015

Darrelyn Gunzburg introduces the latest issue of Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture.
Astrology as a Social Framework
Authors: Shamos Geoffrey
Published: March 2015

During the Early Modern period, many believed that the seven planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon—affected the course of terrestrial events and determined the temperament, complexion, profession, and even the manner of death of individuals. Such concepts were depicted by artists in a series of images commonly referred to as the ‘Children of the Planets’. By merging scientific knowledge and popular imagery, the convention helped to shape the contemporary understanding of the cosmos. Astrology is often described in terms of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm or the universe and the individual, but by linking diverse individuals according to mutual planetary affiliations, the ‘Children of the Planets’ also offered a system for categorizing corporate identity and defining social relations.
Images in the Heavens
Authors: Brady Bernadette
Published: March 2015

The constellation images with their historically persistent nature and adaptability fulfil many contemporary definitions of culture. From the earliest Elamite seals of the fourth millennium to the list-maps in the first century C.E. through Ptolemy’s Almagest, the constellation images became established in western cultures. With the invention of printing and the age of the great star atlases from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the constellation images continued to display cultural resistance by cartographers to Gothicize, Christianize, politicise or simply remove them. This resilience has shown that the constellation images are in fact a living gallery of human history with images ranging from the Palaeolithic to the modern world. Furthermore with their acceptance across a diversity of people and nations, the constellation images today represents a form of world culture, in that it constitutes a culture of humanity which is not linked by a culture of tribes, clans, nations, religions or languages.
Turbulent Memories
Authors: Mitchell Wade A.
Published: March 2015

This article is concerned with addressing the tensions between art and religion. In arguing that this tension stems from the way memory processes work at the heart of both religion and aesthetics, I will draw Robert Corrington’s unique version of religious naturalism together with recent work done by art historian David Freedberg on the neuroscience of response to visual art. When properly framed by philosopher of religion Loyal Rue, these very different perspectives become highly complementary. By forging an interaction between them, I not only attempt to demonstrate how Corrington’s philosophical contextualization and Freedberg’s empathetic aesthetics mutually enhance one another, but I also hope to open up additional lines of inquiry about the role of memory within the problematic of art and religion, particularly for those seeking the interdisciplinary convergences between religion, aesthetics, science, and ethics.
The Human Animal and Christian Ecotheology
Authors: Bryant David James
Published: March 2015

Christian ecotheology tends to emphasize human identity with the rest of nature while also arguing that human society requires transformation through appreciation of intrinsic value in non-human nature. Since this sets up a tension between notions of humans as natural beings and as free to choose among alternative motivations, it would bene?t Christian ecotheology to think more consistently about implications of humanity’s belonging to nature. Science has provided compelling reasons for thinking that egoism is an incorrigible dimension of human life, thereby suggesting that abusive exploitation of nature has deeper roots than cultural constructs. This realization calls for fundamental rethinking of several traditional Christian doctrines, including the Fall, original sin, and free will. In fact, some theologies already anticipate these revisions, though more remains to be done. Moreover, Christian ecotheology’s attention to concepts of connections between humans and nature and of nature’s value remains important, but some of its emphases need to change.
Guest Editor’s Introduction
Authors: Corrington Robert S.
Published: March 2015

Robert S. Corrington introduces a special issue on Ecstatic Naturalism and Deep Pantheism
Editor’s Introduction
Authors: Witt Joseph
Published: March 2015

Joseph Witt introduces the latest issue of JSRNC.
Tramps, Mountains and Unicorns
Authors: Hughes Michael
Published: March 2015

In the late summer of 1921 the British travel writer Stephen Graham and the American poet Vachel Lindsay hiked northwards through Glacier National Park. Both men had in their different literary spheres established a reputation as refugees from modernity, writing books and poems that tried to articulate a vision of alternative societies, where life could be free from the materialism and corruption of western civilisation. The two men retreated to Glacier Park both to discuss their ideas and to seek a natural world where they could find a solace they could not find elsewhere. Both of them wrote books about their sojourn in Glacier Park, presenting it as a place where the mundane could give access to the numinous, and the place itself become an arena for a remaking of the self. Their books and their experiences provide access to a series of important questions ranging from the agency of the material landscape through to the challenge of capturing the spiritual in the language of both poetry and prose. ?
Everyday Buddhism and Environmental Decisions in the World’s Highest Ecosystem
Authors: Spoon Jeremy
Published: March 2015

As Tibetan Buddhists from the Nyingma sect, the Khumbu Sherpa generally view the landscape as sacred and protected by various deities and spirits. Beliefs that humans can earn protection by following certain religious practices have traditionally provided bene?cial environmental outcomes. Changing economic conditions, including those driven by foreign tourism, however, have reduced the prevalence or changed the character of these religious beliefs and practices. Mixed quantitative and qualitative research conducted in 2004–2007, 2008, and 2011 showed both generational and market-driven changes related to how consultants conceived of the relationship between humans and nonhumans and which environmental taboos they observed. Everyday Buddhist knowledge and practice appeared to focus on fewer spiritual entities and to be hybridizing with more secular belief systems. For Sherpa who are not following place-based religious traditions, economics may motivate less sustainable decisions; other Sherpa will likely continue their practice or utilize new knowledge to support sustainable environmental behavior.
Waste and Worldviews
Authors: Allison Elizabeth
Published: March 2015

The global trend toward urbanization has led to increasing waste challenges, especially in developing countries. Although Bhutan is still one of the world’s least developed countries, its economy and capital city have grown rapidly during the past two decades, causing solid waste production to outstrip management capacity. The government instituted new waste management initiatives in 2007, but they gained little traction. Ethnographic research in communities across the country revealed competing paradigms about the identi?cation of waste, the disposition of waste, and household practices of waste management. Vajrayana Buddhism, the dominant religion throughout much of the country, profoundly shapes local beliefs and practices. Local environmental imaginaries and cultural concerns about ritual pollution have con?icted with technocratic management protocols, leading to confusion and incompletely implemented policies. Waste management policies may be more effective if they engage with the values and practices inherent in a lived religion that contributes to cultural understandings of waste.
Indie-(an) Music
Authors: Cashman David
Published: March 2015

Local English-language adaptations of western rock are performed in India primarily for consumption by young, western-influenced, and English-speaking middle-class Indians. As Indian rock is predominantly a live rather than a recorded practice, venues are of particular import within the Indian rock scene. However, little formal research upon live Indian popular music has been undertaken. Between September and December 2013, the author undertook research in Delhi investigating live popular music. This article uses an ethnographic approach to investigate and contextualise the music-culture of a music venue, Café 27, within the Indian rock scene in Delhi. The article finds that the venue in question has a two-fold purpose: it provides a space for performance of local adaptations of popular music genres permitting Delhi-ite musicians to earn a living, and it provides a space for the western-influenced middle- and upper-classes to define their identity.
No Other Name?
Authors: Wagner Tom
Published: March 2015

This article investigates the role that celebrity plays in a Christian culture industry where authenticity and identity are always understood in relation to spiritual authority. In evangelical Christian (sub)culture, discourses of intention frame musical practice and arise from a historical Protestant emphasis on individual authority that is expressed in a highly-mediated consumer culture in which celebrity is a resource for identity and lifestyle. These discourses are reflexively activated through the evangelical concept of anointing, which fuses individual and institutional authority with spiritual authority. Exploring the ways in which this unfolds offers interesting ways for scholars of popular music to think about the relationship of popular music, celebrity and the culture industries in a variety of other contexts.
Motti Regev. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity
Authors: Toynbee Jason
Published: March 2015

Motti Regev. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. 224pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-6173-5 (pbk)
Wicca, Esotericism and Living Nature: Assessing Wicca as Nature Religion
Authors: Pearson Jo
Published: March 2015

'Nature Religion' is a relatively recent academic construct under which a variety of religions have been grouped including Paganism, eco-spirituality, and indigenous religions.
A Modest Look at Ritual Nudity
Authors: Hutton Ronald
Published: March 2015

Ritual nudity conveys a very powerful sense that the participants in the circle have cast off their everyday selves and limitations and entered into a space in which the extraordinary can be achieved.
The Twelve Wild Swans: Rituals, Exercises & Magical Training in the Reclaiming Tradition
Authors: Clifton Chas S
Published: March 2015

The Twelve Wild Swans: Rituals, Exercises & Magical Training in the Reclaiming Tradition by Starhawk and Hilary Valentine

Harper San Francisco, 2000 326 pages, $24 cloth
Traditionalism, Eclecticism, and Ecumenism
Authors: Bridger Margarian
Published: March 2015

...the very real danger of dissolving, around our edges, into the larger movement of environmentally aware, goddess worshipping new agers and liberal Christians.
Women as Initiators and Crafters of Human Growth in the ‘Reclaiming’ Witchcraft Tradition
Authors: Salomonsen Jone
Published: March 2015

A substantial piece of Reclaiming's initiation rite is inherted from the more ceremonial Witchcraft traditions and from privileged men's secret societies at the turn of the 20th century. These traditions have all made the 'dying and rising god' theme central to the rite.
Finding a Folklore
Authors: Hutton Ronald
Published: March 2015

Wilhelm Mannhardt tended to over emphasise ancient European religions as concerned with fertility rites, and made a leap beyond the evidence to assert that they had been focused upon the concept of animating spirits of vegetation.
Margaret Murray and the Rise of Wicca
Authors: Wood Juliette
Published: March 2015

Murray's quaint, 19th Century approach which sees 'survivals' in every custom and uses 'folk memory' to justify tenuous links between past and current practices, characterises the popular image of what folklore is.
Two Reviews of The Truimph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. By Ronald Hutton
Authors: O'Connor Gina , Whedon Sarah
Published: March 2015

The Truimph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. By Ronald Hutton. NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. 486 pages. US$32.50 cloth.
WICCAN COVENS: HOW TO START AND ORGANIZE YOUR OWN
Authors: Muntean Fritz
Published: March 2015

WICCAN COVENS: HOW TO START AND ORGANIZE YOUR OWN

by Judy Harrow

Citadel Press, 1999

285 pages. $12.95 paper
Post-Modernism and Witchcraft Histories
Authors: Waldron David
Published: March 2015

The Neopagan movement relies extensively on representations of the past for historical, cultural and ideological legitimacy. Of particular importance in these histories is the reclaiming or re-creation of pre-Christian pagan societies, the witchhunting crazes of the early modern period, and the reinterpretation of the rise of modernity and industrialism. The means by which these histories are constructed and the changes in the processes by which

historical representations are formed are indicative of broader changes in the configuration of historical legitimacy in western culture.
Of Myths and Monkeys: A Critical Look at Critical Mas
Authors: O'Hara Maureen
Published: March 2015

Those who engage in pseudoscience want it both ways. They

want the authority of science but are unwilling to abide by the rules by which the scientific community earned its authority in the first place
Nordic Religions in the Viking Age by Thomas A DuBois
Authors: Hoglund Cara
Published: March 2015

Nordic Religions in the Viking Age by Thomas A DuBois

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 x + 271 pp, 5 illus.
James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Critical Appreciation
Authors: Muntean Fritz
Published: March 2015

There is a lake near Rome known as 'The Mirror of Diana'. An ancient volcanic crater, the lake is perfectly round and almost completely enclosed by steep wooded slopes. Lake Nemi and its surrounding forest, in our age, is a heavily numinous landscape still.
Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt
Authors: Gibbons Jenny
Published: March 2015

Since the late 1970s, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. While this revolution may not seem quite as dramatic as the development of carbon dating, many theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept away by a flood of new data.
An Archaeological Evaluation of the Gimbutas Paradigm
Authors: Hayden Brian
Published: March 2015

As an archaeologist, I found Mara Keller’s assessment of the discipline and Marija Gimbutas’ contributions to it in the August 1998 issue of The Pomegranate both inaccurate and disturbing. Keller’s portrayal of archaeologists is a parody of the discipline a half century ago, while she uncritically accepts Gimbutas’ Interpretations which are fraught with very real problems.
The Stoic Way of Nature: A Pagan Spiritual Path
Authors: McNierney Michael
Published: March 2015

Stoicism doesn’t have all the answers. It doesn’t even have all the questions. But it has some very good answers to some important questions - sensible answers to questions people still ask today, in spite of two thousand years of Christianity and a century of psychotherapy.
Notes from the Underground
Authors: Editors The
Published: March 2015

When we changed the typeface and the layout of The Pom last issue, we

expected that we’d receive compliments or complaints.But we weren’t expecting nothing at all—which is what we got. We can either assume that everyone is completely happy with the magazine’s new look or that nobody cares. If you do care, or (better yet) if you have suggestions or comments, please let us hear from you.
BOOK REVIEW: The New Edition of Leland’s Aradia
Authors: Magliocco Sabina
Published: March 2015

Pazzaglini accurately observes that the Aradia material has very likely been 'de-Christianized' or 're-paganised' because actual Italian folk magical charms all have some Christian content.
The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius
Authors: Carew Maggie
Published: March 2015

One of the classics of Roman literature, Apuleius' Golden Ass freezes, like a snapshot, a moment in time which was of crucial significance to the history, not only of Graeco-Roman Paganism, but of western religion in general.
Pagan Deism: Three Views
Authors: Bridger Margarian
Published: March 2015

Most discussions of the variety of Wiccan beliefs start by assuming that there are two basic positions; either one believes literally in personal, named deities, or one does not. The more I talk to non-deist Witches, the more I believe that this is an oversimplification. I'd like to suggest a new model, using not two but three endpoints, to which I have assigned primary colours for convenient reference.
The Neolithic Great Goddess: a Study in Modern Tradition
Authors: Hutton Ronald
Published: March 2015

Modern belief in the veneration of a single Great Goddess in the European Neolithic is often accompanied by the notion that those cultures of 'Old Europe' were woman-centred in society as well as religion. What is the long history which precedes these contemporary notions? What is the complex history of their political development? A chain runs from Classical times to Marija Gimbutas and our own day.
Extreme music for extreme people?
Authors: Phillipov Michelle
Published: March 2015

This article focuses on the events of the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s, a period in which violent aesthetics in metal music became explicitly and deliberately articulated to real acts of violence. Concentrating on the musical and criminal activities of the band Emperor, the author suggests that the group’s success was, at least in part, the result of members’ simultaneous promotion and disavowal of their involvement in violent crime. The case highlights not only how not all claims of a link between music and violence are entirely fabricated, but also the necessity of rethinking conventional approaches to music, violence and controversy, given the ongoing legacy of the events of the early 1990s within the contemporary black metal scene.
Heavy metal and the deafening threat of the apolitical
Authors: Scott Niall
Published: March 2015

This article focuses on the relationship of heavy metal to the political. The political is often rejected in heavy metal scenes in favour of a desired apolitical autonomy. At the same time, as the author argues, there are also more political strains in metal, as in Napalm Death’s anti-fascist stance for example. Drawing on the work of Marcuse, the author affirms the potency and subversion inherent in metal’s apolitical stance. Metal provides a ‘liberated environment’ in which the rejection of politics creates a space for community and art.
Triumph of the maggots?
Authors: Laurin Hélène
Published: March 2015

It is generally accepted that heavy metal has been hated by the rock press more or less since its emergence in the early 1970s, because it is supposedly too hedonistic, too stagnant, too noisy, or too immature (Weinstein 2000; Walser 1993). Is this consensus regarding rock writers’ judgements about heavy metal justified? Looking at reviews, articles and interviews written by rock critics and journalists about metal bands who crossed over to rock culture, this article explores three valorization processes and what is at stake behind them: authenticity strategies (how metal musicians prove their authenticity to prove their legitimacy), historiographical (re)writings (how metal gets told and retold through the years and how it is differentiated from other genres) and art and self-consciouness in metal (how metal came gradually to be described as art done by self-conscious musicians). In conclusion, we see that metal has been assessed more positively than originally thought; more precisely, the rock press changed attitude concerning metal through the years.
The ‘double controversy’ of Christian metal
Authors: Moberg Marcus
Published: March 2015

The phenomenon of Christian metal music has always been precariously located on the borderline between the worlds of evangelical Christianity and metal music and culture. Ever since its inception in the early 1980s, Christian metal has provoked controversy in both of these often opposing camps for different yet closely related reasons. This article discusses the historical development of Christian metal in light of its ‘double’ controversies. Looking at contemporary discursive representations within today’s transnational Christian metal scene, the article also highlights how Christian metal culture has internalized its ‘doubly’ controversial character, making it key to an adequate understanding of the phenomenon of Christian metal as a whole.
Refusal to Mourn
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: March 2015

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.
The Three Dimensions of Scriptures
Authors: Watts James W.
Published: March 2015

This article proposes a new model for understanding the ways that scriptures function. Several big media stories of recent years, such as those surrounding controversies over Ten Commandments monuments in U.S. courthouses and Qur’ans desecrated at Guantánamo Bay, involve the iconic function of scriptures. Yet contemporary scholarship on Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures is ill-prepared to interpret these events because it has focused almost all its efforts on textual interpretation. Even the increased attention to the performative function of scripture by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and his students does not provide resources for understanding the iconic roles of scriptures. This article addresses the gap by theorizing the nature of scriptures as a function of their ritualization in three dimensions—semantic, performative, and iconic. The model provides a means for conceptualizing how traditions ritualize scriptures and how they claim and negotiate social power through this process.
From Performance to Casket Copy
Authors: Waldron Cordell M.
Published: March 2015

Does the central role of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek culture indicate that they functioned as scripture? Taking the role of the Tanakh in Jewish culture as the standard of comparison, this essay argues that, while the Tanakh and the epics functioned similarly as foundational texts in their respective cultures, the ways in which Homer was used in Hellenic culture differ markedly from the ways in which the Tanakh was used in ancient Jewish culture. The Homeric epics were primarily thought of as orally delivered or performed events throughout most of their history, only coming to be thought of as primarily written texts in the Hellenistic era and later, whereas almost from its origins the Tanakh commands and exemplifies a textcentered community in which that which is written is most important.
Public Scripture Reading Rituals in Early Korean Protestantism
Authors: Yoo Yohan
Published: March 2015

Many scholars assert that the Bible study meeting, which has public scripture reading as its central feature, played a crucial role in the rapid growth of Korean Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most scholars agree that the Bible study meeting promoted “the Great Revival,” which led to a fourfold increase in church membership in Korea between 1903 and 1907. These meetings have not been widely studied by academics. Analysis of the Korean public scripture reading from a comparative perspective provides a vivid illustration of the social function of the performative dimension of scriptures, but it also suggests the need to further define the meaning of “performative.” As to the first point, the particular ways in which the Bible was read in the Korean context contributed to the growing number of converts to Christianity. Bible readings in the context of study groups in early Korean Protestantism facilitated the absorption of Christianity into Korean culture by building on traditional religious practices and by offering a way for native Koreans to take the lead in the growth of the new religion. Second, these scripture readings were performative in the way defined by J. L. Austin’s theory of performative speech and elaborated by Roy Rappaport’s description of the indexical function of ritual, because they affected Koreans’ conversions into Christianity and strengthened their Christian faith. Austin’s necessary conditions of performative utterances were satisfied through ritualization of the activity of reading and ritualization of the Bible itself.
Be-Witching Scripture
Authors: Krause-Loner Shawn
Published: March 2015

This article describes the idea of the Book of Shadows (BoS) within both historical and contemporary Wicca/Neopagan Witchcraft, focusing specifically on how the BoS may be understood as “scripture.” The concept of “scripture” within this work is defined as a tripartite matrix of textuality, performance, and iconicity. Through a descriptive investigation of the history of the religion and the BoS, its use as ritual text and as ritual object, its physical meaning and iconicity, and its invested authority, this article shows that the BoS can be understood as a form of scripture, in a functional and analogous sense. In addition, the article briefly discusses the effect of popular “howto” books on scriptural or canonical authority and how these, along with the concept of the BoS, are serving to routinize and standardize a tradition that largely prides itself on being creative and spontaneous.
Pre-modern Scriptures in Postmodern Times
Authors: Pasulka Diana Walsh
Published: March 2015

A contemporary movement in Christian religious thought advocates for the recovery of pre-modern exegetical practices. Wesley Kort, Paul Griffiths, and Catherine Pickstock are among several theorists who support a return to pre-modern reading and writing practices as an answer to the crisis of modernity. In the context of scripture studies, the works of Kort, Griffiths, and Pickstock can be understood as examples of analyses that focus on the performative elements of scripture. Their stress on memorization, recitation, and reading reflect the influence of studies of the performative function of scriptures by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and William Graham. Kort, Griffiths, and Pickstock take this line of argument even further, by arguing that is it the very loss of scripture as performance that has inaugurated a loss of the sacred in modernity. This development thus tackles the philosophical issues at stake between secularism and theology and moves beyond the localized analysis of the meaning of specific scriptures. The following analysis places this development in an historical and philosophical context by revealing the theoretical precedents that each scholar draws upon, specifically the later writings of Martin Heidegger.
Observing the Secular
Authors: Furani Khaled
Published: March 2015

This essay examines ethnographically how Arab, mainly Palestinian, poets have been transforming their relation to the public while modernizing poetic forms. Drawing on narratives by poets who work with various literary forms, this study argues that the secular has been vital for this transformation. More specifically, I demonstrate how in poets’ narratives about means and ends of literary agency there lies the articulation of secular subjectivities that poets want either to constitute, contest or explore.
All American Messiah
Authors: Hall William David , Howard Ezra
Published: March 2015

Approaches the recent death of Captain America sideline of Marvel Comics from the perspective of political theology and philosophical messianism as these ideas appear in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt.
Passover Plots
Authors: Walsh Richard G.
Published: March 2015

Various modern fictions, building upon the skeptical premises of biblical scholars, have claimed that the gospels covered up the real story about Jesus. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is one recent, popular example. While conspiracy theories may seem peculiar to modern media, the gospels have their own versions of hidden secrets. For Mark, e.g., Roman discourse about crucifixion obscures two secret plots in Jesus’ passion, which the gospel reveals: the religious leaders’ conspiracy to dispatch Jesus and the hidden divine program to sacrifice Jesus. Mark unveils these secret plots by minimizing the passion’s material details (the details of suffering would glorify Rome), substituting the Jewish leaders for the Romans as the important human actors, interpreting the whole as predicted by scripture and by Jesus, and bathing the whole in an irony that claims that the true reality is other than it seems. The resulting divine providence/conspiracy narrative dooms Jesus—and everyone else—before the story effectively begins. None of this would matter if secret plots and infinite books did not remain to make pawns or “phantoms of us all” (Borges). Thus, in Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark,” an illiterate rancher family after hearing the gospel for the first time, read to them by a young medical student, crucifies the young man. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is less biblical but equally enthralled by conspiracies that consume their obsessive believers. Borges and Eco differ from Mark, from some scholarship, and from recent popular fiction, in their insistence that such conspiracy tales are not “true” or “divine,” but rather humans’ own self-destructive fictions. Therein lies a different kind of hope than Mark’s, a very human, if very fragile, hope.
From Disgust to Humor
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: March 2015

This paper argues that contemporary disgust toward nonheteronormative sexuality in the U.S. is conditioned by racialized representations of Canaanite sexuality in the Bible, even where that biblical heritage is no longer obvious. Using queer theory and recent cultural studies analyses on affect, it suggests that the well-recognized humor in the story of Rahab in Joshua 2 might intervene in the usual circuits of disgust. A humorous earlier indigenous tale can be discerned that undercuts the affective values of the story’s colonial final form, especially as they circulate around the Canaanites, the divine warrior, holy war, and even Rahab’s own heroism. It is in the final form of the story, however, that Rahab is the most queer. Though resistant, she is neither fully transgressive or heroic, but she is funny. That hilarity revalues the usual emotive response to Canaanite sexuality, allowing affective bodily energies to turn the repulsion of disgust into the inclusion of pleasure.
The Land and the Book
Authors: Whitelam Keith W.
Published: March 2015

The paper explores the ways in which the Bible has been used by European travellers and biblical scholars to construct imaginative geographies of Palestine. It is important to understand how these spatial stories work, and their continuing influence, by examining their representations and images of space that have such a profound and continuing hold on popular and scholarly understandings of Palestine. Failure to explore the critical relationship between the Land and the Book (geography and reading) runs the risk that received scholarship becomes an object of veneration or an instrument of oppression.
Guru Granth
Authors: Singh Nikky-Guninder Kaur
Published: March 2015

For the Sikhs, their scripture (Guru Granth) is the manifest body (deh) of their Gurus. But this quintessential Sikh metaphor has become so familiar an application that it has lost its “fundamental metaphoric quality.” We need to ask anew: what does it mean that the Guru Granth is the body of the Gurus? In their metaphorical relationship, the “text” and the “body” must maintain a dynamic tension—a simultaneous is and is not—so that the mind is forced to stretch and discover a new meaning. Using Philip Wheelwright’s framework and Gadamer’s hermeneutic lens, this paper explores the “widening experience” (Truth and Method, p. 429) brought about by the perpetual motion between the textual and the corporeal matrices. What significance does their metaphoric association have in the daily life of the Sikh community? The two areas that examined here are ritual performance and feminist ontology.
Sanctities, Blasphemies and the (Jewish) Nation
Authors: Noy Chaim
Published: March 2015

In this article I rematerialize discourse that is articulated in the shape of commemorative visitor book entries, in a national-military commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel. The materiality and communicative affordances of the commemorative visitor book, the physical environment in which it is situated and which grants it meaning, and the modes of interaction and inscription that it affords are examined. Located in a densely symbolic national commemoration site, the impressively looking book does not merely capture visitors' reflections. Instead, it serves as a device that allows participation in a collective-national rite. While seemingly designated as a visitor book, the discursive device functions performatively as a portal or interface between visitors, on the one side, and the nation and the dead and living soldieries, on the other side. Expectedly, the inscriptions that populate the book's pages are instances of iconic discourse (texts with graphic additions of sorts), that embody one of the heightened ideological and experiential moments of "civil religion" (Robert Bellah). They illustrate the resources used by nationalism in establishing sacred contexts and rituals. Also, they illustrate how different discourses of sanctity (and profanity), are juxtaposed on the same (Jewish) space. Specifically, while local Israeli sightseers present their appreciation for and participation in commemoration of the nation-state in terms of "civil religion," most of the international tourists, who are mostly north American Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, perform their notions of sanctity and sacredness in messianic and primordial terms, which look through or beyond the nation state.
Dancing the River
Authors: Sparks David Hatfield
Published: March 2015

The ideas presented in this paper, inspired by poet Audre Lorde's lines, “I will become myself an incantation, dark, raucous, many-shaped,” explore sacred performative roles and elements associated with gender/sexual diversity, including transgender behavior and same-sex eroticism in African-Atlantic religions, as practiced at the crossroads of American multicultural communities. These linkages interweave to form a tapestry of queer-cultural, including religious and aesthetic, categories (or “domains”). Among these categories are: spiritual forces or deities (orisha) having multiple, including queer, caminos (roads); music/song texts and dances/gestures performed in a ritual context that speak to diversity and fluidity of gender and sexuality; the embodiment of spiritual forces in “possession” or enthusiastic trance by which the initiated convey gendered and sexed behaviors and identities that may correspond to or contest those they inhabit in everyday life.
Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Four
Authors: Mack Burton
Published: March 2015

Part 4 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.
“Motherwork”
Authors: Corey Jean T.
Published: March 2015

Born in 1825, a free African American in Baltimore, Maryland, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper devoted her life to the struggle for freedom. An abolitionist, and suffragist, the Bible figured prominently in Harper’s poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches. This essay considers how Harper’s poetry particularly challenged her nineteenth century reader to engage in more meaningful biblical interpretive strategies. Anticipating twentieth century Womanist interpretations, Harper disrupts and revises interpretive strategies that had been used to read against the biblical narrative’s message of liberation. Rereading commonly known texts with a different perspective or highlighting lesser known biblical stories, Harper’s biblical interpretations give voice to the voiceless women in the biblical text. Whether writing about women found in the biblical text or women in her own nineteenth century context, Harper’s poetry testifies to the mothers and “othermothers” who have struggled to ensure the dignity and rights of all people, in their own generations, as well as for generations to come.
Phantomatic Presences and Bioreligiosity
Authors: Napolitano Valentina
Published: March 2015

This article explores the mimetic analogies between the twentieth-century Mexican order of the Legionaries of Christ and the Jesuits in their historic and current Atlantic reproduction. It argues for a line of study of the translocality of the Roman Catholic Church that pays attention to phantomatic presences, changing bioreligiosity and affective histories. Moreover it shows as a close focus on the “psychic glue” between different religious orders can shed light on the affective power of eroticism and mysticism within the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council.
Popes, Saints, Beato Bones and other Images at War
Authors: Norget Kristin
Published: March 2015

This article explores new political practices of the Roman Catholic Church by means of a close critical examination of the beatification of the Martyrs of Cajonos, two indigenous men from the Mexican village of San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca, in 2002. The Church’s new strategy to promote an upsurge in canonizations and beatifications forms part of a “war of images,” in Serge Gruzinski’s terms, deployed to maintain apparently peripheral populations within the Church’s central paternalistic fold of social and moral authority and influence, while at the same time as it must be seen to remain open to local cultures and realities. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, this ecclesiastical technique of “emplacement” may be understood as an attempt to engage indigenous-popular religious sensibilities and devotion to sacred images while at the same time implicitly trying to contain them, weaving their distinct local historical threads seamlessly into the fabric of a global Catholic history.