TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations. ix List of Boxes.
Acknowledgments and Dedications
Introduction
PART I. WHAT IS RELIGION AND HOW TO APPROACH IT?
1. Religion: Language, Law, and Legacies
Case Study 1A: Falun Gong: Religion
or Self-Cultivation Practice?
Case Study 1B: Christians and
Ancestor Veneration: Religion or Culture?
2. Method: Insider-Outsider Debates, Phenomenology, and
Reflexivity.
Case Study 2A: Living between
Religious Worlds: Conversion and Reconversion
Case Study 2B: Hindu and Christian?
Multiple Religious Identities.
3. Life: Lived Religion, Syncretism, and Hybridity.
Case Study 3A: Mexican American
Catholicism and Our Lady of Guadalupe
Case Study 3B: Thai Buddhism as
Lived Religion and Syncretic Practice
PART II. THEORIES, METHODOLOGIES, AND CRITICAL DEBATES
4. History: Historical Methodology and the Invention of
Tradition
Case Study 4A: The Historical Jesus
and the Christ of Faith.
Case Study 4B: Laozi, the
Daodejing, and the Origins of Daoism
5. Power: Social Constructionism, Habitus, and Authority.
Case Study 5A: Mosques, Minarets,
and Power
Case Study 5B: Individual (New
Age/Alternative) Spirituality as Modernity's Ideology 135
6. Identity: Social Identity Theory, In-Groups, Out-Groups, and
Conflict
Case Study 6A: Shiv Sena, Hindu
Nationalism, and Identity Politics
Case Study 6B: Race, Religion, and
the American White Evangelical
7. Colonialism: Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and
Decolonization
Case Study 7A: Beyond
"Inventing" Hinduism
Case Study 7B: Magic, Superstition,
and Religion in Southeast Asia and Africa.
8. Brains: The Cognitive Science of Religion and Beyond.
Case Study &A: Religion,
Non-Religion, and Atheism
Case Study 8B: Ancestors, Jesus,
and Prosocial Behavior in Fiji
9. Bodies: Material Religion, Embodiment, and Materiality
Case Study 9A: Weeping Gods and
Drinking Statues –
Case Study 9B: Embodied Practice at
a Christian Shrine
10. Gender: Feminism, Sexuality, and Religion ·
Case Study 10A: Priests, Paul, and
Rewriting Texts
Case Study 10B: Buddhist Feminisms
and Nuns
11. Comparison: Comparative and Contrastive Methodologies.
Case Study 11A: Comparing Hinduism
and Judaism
Case Study 11B: A Comparison of Zen
Buddhist and Protestant Christian Sitting Practices
12. Ritual: Ritualization, Myth, and Performance.
Case Study 12A: The Zen Tea
Ceremony and Protestant Eucharist as Performance and Ritual 294
Case Study 12B: Buddhist Ordination
Rites
PART III. RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND SOCIETY
13. Diversity: Religious Borders, Identities, and Discourses
·
Case Study 13A: The Memory of
Al-Andalusia
Case Study 13B: Dominus lesus and
Catholic Christianity in Asia .
14. Dialogue: Interreligious Discourse and Critique
Case Study 14A: Christian and
Muslim Women Reading Scriptures
Case Study 14B: Buddhist-Christian
Dialogue: History and Discourse.
15. Violence: Fundamentalism, Extremism, and Radicalization
Case Study 15A: The Invention of
Islamic Terrorism
Case Study 15B: Buddhism and
Violence.
16. Secularism: Secularization, Human Rights, and Religion
Case Study 16A: Laïcité and the
Burkini Ban
Case Study 16B: Singapore's Common
Space
17. Geography: Place, the Lived Environment, and
Environmentalism
Case Study 17A: Trees as Monks?
Case Study 17B: Protestant
Christian Understandings of the "Holy Land"
18. Politics: Governance, the Colonial Wound, and the Sacred
Case Study 18A: Ethnicity and
Religion: The Singaporean Malay-Muslim Identity
Case Study 18B: Saluting the Flag:
The Case of Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States
Glossary
Who's Who
Notes
Index
