Term
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Definition
refers to the need to balance in one’s comparative practice the ways that
religious phenomena are similar across cultural and temporal boundaries and the ways that they
are different; if either pole is removed completely, comparison becomes impossible |
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Definition
religious traditions that emphasize some "hidden" or "secret" (Greek: mystikos)
communion, even complete identity, between the human and the divine |
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Definition
the universal tendency of human beings o imagine their deities in human
(anthropos) form (morphos), and more especially in their own particular ethnicities and local
appearances |
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Definition
| the idea that a religious complex in one place came from another, and that religious ideas and practices in general tend to “spread out” through migration, trade, war, and other human activities that involve travel |
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Term
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Definition
the theory that the gods had originally been human beings who were worshipped
in their own lives for their accomplishments and later, after their deaths, were divinized as local gods; advanced originally by Euhemerus (c. 330-260 BCE) |
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Definition
| the Greek word for “theory,” which originally referred to what “was seen” either on a pilgrimage to another city or land in order to witness religious spectacles, or to a vision of cosmic, divine, or philosophical truths |
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Definition
| any set of writings believed to be revealed or divinely inspired by a particular community or tradition |
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Definition
intellectuals writing from the second to fifth centuries who developed the
different stories and wide-ranging teachings of the New Testament into a systematic and coherent theology |
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Definition
| literally, a rational explanation (logos) of God (theos); today understood as the intellectual discipline that attempts to relate and synthesize the logical, philosophical, and scientific conclusions of human reason to the divine revelations of a particular faith |
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Term
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Definition
| literally, "teaching," that is, a teaching that is central to a particular religious tradition |
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Definition
| a person who, instead of submitting to the authority of a tradition, willingly chooses to believe something else (at the end of the chapter, listed as “heresy” instead) |
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Definition
| a Jewish teacher-scholar who interprets the scriptures for the needs and nuances of each new generation of the communit |
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Definition
| the followers of the philosophy of Plato in the Common Era who developed his ideas in new directions, largely under the influence of Plotinus |
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Definition
Jewish and Christian communities whose emphasis on personal and direct mystical
knowing (gnosis) did not always sit well with the bishops and churches |
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Term
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Definition
| any approach to a scriptural text that locates its primary sense in the “literal” meaning of words (not listed at the end of the chapter, but still emboldened) |
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Definition
| the sacred scriptures of Islam, believed to be revealed to the Prophet Muhammad |
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Definition
| in Islam, the "holy war" to be waged against infidel or non-believer |
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Definition
| the mystical borders of Islam |
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Definition
the religious practice of creatively and selectively combining elements from
different religious traditions in order to form a new religious complex, practice, or idea |
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Term
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Definition
the religious practice of creatively and selectively combining elements from
different religious traditions in order to form a new religious complex, practice, or idea |
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Definition
| the "secret teachings" that developed in India around the sixth and fifth centuries before the Common Era; considered to be part of the Vedas; central to Hinduis |
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Definition
| in early Indian traditions, a person who is in no way a part of the cultural system or orthodox tradition, a "foreigner" |
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Definition
| (1440-1518 CE) a fifteenth-century Indian poet who attempted to sing his listeners out of the religious ideas that made normative discrimination based on religious beliefs possible, particularly between Hindus and Muslims |
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Definition
| (1469–1539 CE) Spiritual Teacher Nanak, the founder of Sikhis |
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Definition
| a monotheistic Indian religion proclaimed by Guru Nanak that includes a theology that acknowledges the reality of reincarnation, insists on the equality of all human beings, and opposes the Hindu caste system |
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Definition
| a sixteenth century Mughal emperor who was a proponent of religious tolerance |
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Definition
| a Chinese scholar-sage and political theorist credited with the founding of Confucianism |
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Definition
| a Chinese nature mystic credited with the founding of Daoism |
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Definition
| an Indian wisdom teacher and founder of Buddhism; “Buddha” is a religious title, not a last name, meaning the “awakened one” |
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Term
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Definition
| a Chinese term meaning “way” or “path” |
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Term
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Definition
| a roughly two-century time period in European history—very roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—when numerous scholars, monks, priests, reformers, and activists began to "protest" what they perceived to be the political abuses and falsehoods of the Roman Catholic Churc |
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Definition
| a kind of promissory note that the faithful would purchase in order to shorten a loved one’s stay in purgatory |
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Term
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Definition
| the middle realm of the afterlife where souls where believed to go if they were not sufficiently ready for heaven but not sufficiently corrupt for hell |
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Definition
| a rallying cry of Protestant reformers, literally meaning, "Only the scriptures" |
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Definition
(1483-1546) a German monk and reformer who had strong opinions about the
role of the Catholic Church in people’s religious lives |
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Term
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Definition
| (1509-1564) a French theologian who was active during the Protestant Reformation |
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Definition
| a way of being religious that relies on literalist readings of a scripture that is considered infallible or inerrant in order to return to what are imagined as be the original and pristine "fundamentals" of the faith |
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Definition
| an intellectual movement centered in Italy that valued scholarship, language study, the arts, and particularly the ancient Greek and Latin classics in order to begin developing a worldview that could celebrate the human being as the unique pinnacle of God's creation |
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Definition
(1433-1499) an Italian scholar who translated the Corpus Hermeticum or The
Books of Hermes, a body of mystical texts that played an especially important role in Renaissance humanism |
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Term
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Definition
| the teachings of Hermeticism in its ancient Greek and Latin forms |
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Term
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Definition
| a body of thought created in the Renaissance by scholars whose primary method was to focus on the human being as a kind of mirror that reflects the deepest secrets of both the universe and the divine; the historical origin of our own “humanities” |
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Definition
| an intellectual movement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that rejected all forms of external authority, including religious authority, and held up universal reason as the only accepted way of obtaining reliable truths about the world |
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Definition
| the natural theology that views the universe as a kind of machine with God as its assembler, a God, moreover, who “steps back” and takes no more concern in the world |
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Term
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Definition
| an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement in response to the cold rationality of the Enlightenment that stressed poetic, religious, and visionary human experience; sought to combine the criticisms of “reason” with the poetic and imaginative powers of the human being |
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Definition
| a theory that says the gods are "projected," like a movie, out of the human brain and its fantastic ability to tell itself stories or myth |
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Term
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Definition
| a philosophical position that privileges Mind as the ultimate nature of reality |
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Definition
| a Protestant branch of Christianity that originated with the French theologian-reformer John Calvin [1509-1564]. |
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Definition
an early piece of Sumerian literature that predated the writing of Genesis and
that includes a flood story |
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Term
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Definition
| the philosophical position that "all is God" (pan-theos) or that everything is God |
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Term
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Definition
| a medical movement originating in the late eighteenth century that posited the existence of cosmic energies or "magnetic" forces in the human body as the ultimate source of healing. |
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Definition
| a Jewish term for any person who is not a Jew |
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Definition
| a Jewish rabbi who became an apostle and who composed many of the key ideas that would come to define much of Christian thought; he never met the historical Jesus |
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Term
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Definition
| the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by the Romans |
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Definition
| a religious title in Greek for the Hebrew “Annointed One” or “Messiah”; attributed to Jesus of Nazareth by his early follower |
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Term
| historical-critical method |
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Definition
| a way of reading a religious text by contextualizing it as a historical product of a particular time and place |
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Term
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Definition
| the scientific, comparative study of languages in an attempt to understand their deep or universal structures |
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Term
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Definition
the conviction that one’s own way of life or “people” (ethnos) constitute the
center of things |
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Definition
| religious position that there are many gods |
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Term
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Definition
| religious position that there is only one god |
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Definition
the practice of communicating with the dead through mediums that was prominent
in the second half of the nineteenth century in the U.S. and Europe |
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Term
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Definition
| literally, “of the psyche,” a term referring to the alleged powers of the human mind that cannot be explained, and so are not accepted, by natural science |
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Term
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Definition
| literally, “beyond the normal,” a term similar to “psychical” but appearing a bit later, around 1900, and usually suggesting some kind of mind-to-matter phenomenon |
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Term
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Definition
| the theory that different economic arrangements (how things are produced and sold toward the production of wealth) produce different forms of human consciousness, which in turn produce different economic practices, which in turn produce different forms of consciousness, and so on. |
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Term
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Definition
| the philosophical position that there is only matter; that there is no such thing as spirit, soul, or Mind |
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Term
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Definition
| a broad movement of thought and practice that came to the fore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and emphasized scientific progress, reason, and universalism |
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Term
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Definition
| a period of history in which eleven to seventeen million people, mostly Jews, lost their lives in the gas chambers, human ovens, and labor prisons of the Nazi concentration camps |
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Term
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Definition
| the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. |
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Term
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Definition
| the assumed, and largely constructed, identity of a person or group based on skin color or physical features |
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Term
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Definition
| the modal model of what it means to be a man, woman, or some third gender in a particular culture or subculture |
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Term
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Definition
| the place of an individual or group in a hierarchical social system, usually determined by wealth, education, and status |
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Definition
| biological distinction between male and female |
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Definition
| the conviction that the different major religions all point to a single mystical truth or core that perennially reappears in every age. |
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Term
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Definition
| the study of religious movements claiming some secret or special knowledge of the divine, which often goes against or counters the assumed religion of the land (hence the need for secrecy) |
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Term
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Definition
| the position that all human behavior and experience is best explained and interpreted through its local linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. |
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Term
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Definition
| the related position that all forms of human experience, including religious experience, are best understood as "constructed" through these same local contexts and processes |
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Term
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Definition
| historical documents written from within a particular tradition or movement discussed above |
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Term
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Definition
| an essay or book written about a tradition or movement, either from the inside or the outside |
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Term
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Definition
| the first half of the Christian Bible, originally the Torah |
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Term
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Definition
| a collection of books making up the second half of the Christian Bible. |
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Term
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Definition
| in Hebrew, "the Law"; also used, more loosely, to refer to the entire set of Hebrew scriptures. |
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Term
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Definition
| the method or “way” (hodos) “after which” (meta-) one follows to get to where one is going. |
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Term
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Definition
| unique, human ability to think about thinking, reflect on reflection, become aware of awareness, and so free consciousness from the ruts of society and ego. |
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Term
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Definition
| the ethical principle that the genders should be treated equally |
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Term
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Definition
| all those fields of study within a modern college or university that focus on the nature and construction of meaning, value, beauty, and narrative in the history of humanity as these have been crystallized in fields like philosophy, religion, literature, and art. |
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Definition
| the entire network or web of institutions, laws, customs, symbols, technologies, and arts that constitute the life of a particular society. |
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Definition
| a set of formalized activities and teachings through which a person's social or religious identity is transformed; Arnold van Gennep observed that many such rituals follow a tripartite pattern involving separation, transition, and reincorporation; Victor Turner later refined van Gennep’s work by focusing on the “liminal” qualities of the transition stage |
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Definition
| the study (logos) of human nature (anthropos) through the analysis of culture, social practices, symbols, rites, and so on. |
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Term
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Definition
| the “in between” phase of a ritual process in which the individual is removed from his or her world to undergo some sort of change |
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Definition
| literally “of the world,” the word refers to any system of thought or practice that does not invoke a religious principle or value |
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Term
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Definition
| that which is not profane; that which is special, set apart, and considered holy; often experienced in the environment as a power or presence at once terrifying and attractive |
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Definition
| that which is not sacred; the ordinary or mundane |
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Definition
| the problem within the study of religion that contrasts the insider, or participant in a religious structure, against the outsider, or researcher. |
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Definition
the likelihood of an idea being accepted or rejected within a particular cultural
context |
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Definition
| the state of complete disorder and non-meaning central to many creation myths |
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Term
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Definition
| the state of order, meaning, and structure; a “world” |
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Definition
| a sacred story that “founds” or underlies a particular religious world |
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Definition
| the systematic study of sacred stories; also used for a particular body of those sacred stories, as in “Hindu mythology” or “Christian mythology,” etc. |
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Definition
| the re-enactment of a myth through repeated scripted actions, usually in a culturally prescribed space and time and often by a religious specialist |
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Term
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Definition
| the state of being above or outside the material natural world, attributed to a deity or religious experience |
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Term
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Definition
| the state of being inside or within the material natural world, attributed to a deity or religious experience |
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Term
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Definition
| a sacred story about how the world and/or human beings came to be; often central to the structure and maintenance of a particular religious world |
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Term
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Definition
| a sacred story about the founding figure of a religion that explains how the religious world came to be and what an ideal human being looks and acts like |
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Term
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Definition
a sacred story about a character who through various comedic, ridiculous,
violent, deceitful, and offensive behaviors, often of a sexual or grotesque nature, upsets the
established order and mocks the sacred and the right in order to renew, reform, and loosen up the system |
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Term
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Definition
| rituals that occur within different religious systems during marked biological events or social transformations involving biology, like birth, puberty, marriage, and death |
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Term
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Definition
| “I give so that you might give”; a principle underlying the gift model of sacrifice in which sacrifices function as “gifts” to the deity, a gift that, like all human gifts, implies or sets up a reciprocal relationship and so a future response from the one so gifted |
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Definition
pertaining to a society organized around the power, authority, and sacrality of the
mother (mater) and women |
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Definition
a “manifestation of the sacred,” often through the medium of a natural object or
event, like a tree, rock, place, weather event, or celestial phenomenon |
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Definition
the “idle god”; a pattern in world mythology in which the creator god creates the
world and then steps back from it, with little or no further interaction with the human community |
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