Rice University RELI 101 Kripal Midterm 1 Chapters 1-6

Mystical

dimension of a religious system that emphasizes an element of "secret" communion, connection, or identity between human nature and the divine or the "really Real"

Axial Age

that period of time, roughly between 800 and 200 BCE, during which human civilizations around the world developed radically new religious orientations

Anthropomorphism

tendency to attribute human form to non-human entities like gods

Diffusion Theory

the hypothesis that the religious complex found in one place came from another place through migration, trade, war, or other forms of travel

Polytheism

any religious system that holds that there are many gods

Euhemerism

the theory that the gods had originally been human beings who were worshipped in their own lives for their accomplishments and were later divinized as local gods

Platonic Orientalism

the ancient tendency to locate in the orient ("the East") revelation and wisdom, thought to resemble or prefigure the teachings of Plato

Nonlocal Self

the phenomenon of recognizing one's self most accurately reflected not in the culture and religion one was born into, but in a "foreign" framework

Evolutionary Monotheism

the historical phenomenon of polytheistic systems developing into an accompanying monotheistic system

Cosmotheism

a religious system that understands the physical universe to be a God and posits local gods as partial manifestations of this cosmic God

Pantheism

position claiming that everything is God and God is identical with the physical/natural universe

Panentheism

position claiming that the physical universe is within God or is a part of God's body, but that God also transcends it

Monotheism

any religious system that holds that there is only one God

Scripture

any set of writings believed to be revealed or divinely inspired

Revolutionary Monotheism

a type of monotheism that denies the existence of other gods rather than seeing them as expressions of its own cosmic god

Polemics

the art or practice of arguing against an alien philosophical position or religious belief

Canon Formation

the process whereby a tradition defines the scope and content of its scriptures by choosing certain texts as authoritative or revealed and rejecting others

Orthodoxy

an ideological system, especially religious—usually the one in authority—believed to be"straight" (orthos), in other words, correct

Heterodoxy

any religious system believed to be "other" than/at variance with the official (orthodox)position, hence incorrect, and hence not authoritative

Theology

intellectual domain consisting in attempts to relate human reason to a revelation, particularly around the nature of God, in the traditions of a given community of believers

Implicit Theology

a model of the nature of God or the gods that is not spelled out systematically but assumed in the mythology or ritual

Explicit Theology

a model of the nature of God (or the gods) that is spelled out systematically

Doctrine

specific teaching or system of beliefs

Pagan

people (originally from the country side) who do not accept Christianity

Heretics

people who, instead of submitting to the authority of tradition, follow their own opinions and choose to believe something else

Neoplatonism

Middle Platonism, a continuation of the Platonic tradition in Alexandria after the closure of Plato's Old Academy in Athens, became "Neoplatonism" from Plotinus on (third century CE)

Ancient Wisdom Narrative

an imagined history of religious truth that posits a line of inspired teachers who passed on a specific revelation

Fundamentalism

a modern way of being religious that relies on highly selective literalist readings of an inerrant scripture and on a return to fundamentals—the postulated original truths of the faith

Deism

natural theology that views the universe as a kind of machine assembled by a God who "steps back" after creation, leaving the world to its own mechanisms

Natural Theology

a way of thinking about God that relies on the study of the natural world as an expression of God's nature, wisdom, and intentions

Projection Theory

a model of religion that posits that the gods and other religious phenomena are expressions of human nature rendered "objective" or external to human beings

Romantic Reversal

an employment of projection theory during the romantic movement that suggested that the human projector may in fact be divine

Idealism

a philosophical position that understands mind as the ultimate nature and source of reality

Christ of Faith

the theological understanding of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah or Son of God, within a Christian community of belief system

Historical-Critical Method

contextualizing a text by treating it as a human product written at a particular time, in a particular place, for a specific audience, and with a specific purpose

Linguistics

the study of languages—sometimes pursued from a comparativist angle and aimed toward modeling the universal structures of language

Modernity

a period characterized by a very broad and influential style of thought and practice, which emphasizes scientific progress, reason and universalism

Metaphysical Religion

a phrase used to describe those alternative movements in modernity that emphasizes mind, magical powers, energy, and healing "beyond the physical"

Spirituality

term used to signal a personal way of relating to the divine or the underlying reality, a way that is more or less independent of religious authority and its social institutions

Marxism

the philosophical doctrine of Karl Marx—a form of dialectical materialism positing that all the forms of human consciousness, social behavior, political order, culture, art, and ideology ("the superstructure") are produced by their corresponding economic systems ("the base")

Materialism

a position according to which matter is the primordial factor or "existent" in the universe

Holocaust or Shoah

the systematic murdering of approximately ten million people, mostly Jews, in the labor prisons of the Nazi concentration camps

Race

a person's or a group's identity, as constructed on the basis of skin color or presumed physical features

Class

the place of an individual or group in a hierarchal society system, usually determined by birth, wealth, education, and/or political power

Gender

the "standard" model of what it means to be a man, a woman, or some third gender in a particular culture

Altered States of Consciousness

forms of mind, often of an extreme religious nature, tht are experienced as radically other than the social ego

Counterculture

a youth movement, roughly from 1960 to 1975, that aimed to "counter" established society and to embrace alternative forms of consciousness and culture

Tantra

an umbrella term covering a set of Asian traditions that emphasize the unity between the divine and the human nature, particularly as this unity is manifested in the human body and its erotic energies

Contextualism

position claiming that human behavior and experience are best explained as the product of local linguistic, social, and political processes that cannot be universalized

Constructivism

position claiming that all forms of human experience, including religious forms, are best explained as "constructed" through local processes

History of Religions

branch of the study of religion that emphasizes the comparison of religious forms, often of an extreme nature, across large stretches of space and time

General History of Religions

the full historical sweep of humanity's religious experience, form prehistory to the present day

Both-And

the paradoxical cognitive structure that robust comparison often produces

Principle of Extremity

the hypothesis that the dynamics of religion can best be seen in extreme forms of religious experience, where they are magnified and therefore rendered visible

Reflexivity

capacity to think about thinking, become aware of awareness, and hence free consciousness temporarily from the parameters of society and ego

Humanities

the study of consciousness coded in culture

Culture

the entire network of institutions, laws, customs, symbols, technologies, and arts that constitute the life of a particular society

Initiation

a set of formalized activities and teachings through which a person's social or religious identity is transformed

Cultural Anthropology

the study of human nature through the analysis of social practices, symbols, myths, rituals, and so on

Liminal State

the middle or "in-between" phase of an initiation in which the person's old identity is deconstructed

Secularism

any system of thought or practice that does not invoke a religious principle and does not rely on explicitly religious values

World Religion

a religious tradition that has expanded beyond its original cultural context, to reach a global audience

Religion

any set of established stories, rituals, mental and bodily practices, and institutions that have built up around extreme encounters with some anomalous presence, power, or hidden order

Sacred

that which is special or set apart from the ordinary and is often experienced as a power or presence at once terrifying and attractive

Profane

that which is ordinary, banal, or mundane

Experience

a subjectivity felt, perceived, or cognized event that is self-evident to the person "having" it

Alchemy

a practice that combines chemical and spiritual techniques to transform matter into gold and/or the human being into spirit

Agnosticism

position claiming that we cannot know the truth about religious matters; it is often combined with the conviction that science is the only reliable means of knowing

Insider-Outsider Problem

the question of who makes a better scholar of religion: the "inside" believer or the "outside" analysts

Plausibility

the degree to which an idea is accepted or rejected within a particular cultural context, very often irrespectively of its objective truth or falsehood

Religious Question

any question that attempts to address matters of ultimate concern, such as the nature of reality, the meaning of life, or the purpose of suffering

Mythology

a systematic study of myths and sacred stories

Transcendence

state of being above, beyond, or outside the natural-physical world

Libation Rituals

religious practices of spilling a liquid, often over or before the image ofa deity, and often in commemoration of the dead or chthonic deities

Pilgrimage Rituals

ritual acts of traveling, for a religious purpose, to a place held to be sacred

Life-Cycle Rituals

religious practices around a biological event or a social transformation related to a biological event (such as birth, puberty, marriage, death)

Civil Religion Rituals

public ceremonies that draw on religious structure for political purposes, thus imbuing the city or nation-state with sacred values

Sacrifice

a ritual in which some vegetable, fluid, animal, or human being is offered to a deity, sometimes trough violence and usually in hopes that the deity will give something in return

Blood Sacrifice

a sacrifice that involves killing an animal or a human being

Gift Model of Sacrifice

an implicit or explicit understanding that a sacrificial offering is a "gift" to the deity for which something is expected in return

Scapegoat Model of Sacrifice

model that works on the implicit or explicit assumption that the sacrificial offering is a replacement or stand-in for the community

Divination

any practice, formal or spontaneous, that attempts to intuit, predict, or fathom the future, usually toward some practical end (such as deciding on a course of action)

Prophecy

the use of altered states of consciousness to predict the future or to criticize a political or religious authority

Omens

signs that occur either spontaneously in nature or in a formal ritual context and indicate that something—often something of a bad nature—is about to happen

Founding Myth

sacred story about the founding figure of a religion

Hagiography

an idealized story of a saint or founder that expresses the self-understanding and values of the tradition in question

Asceticism

a religious lifestyle of discipline and denial of bodily pleasures for spiritual ends

Cosmogony

myth about the genesis of the universe

Anthropogony

myth about how human beings came to be

Draper-White Thesis

a model of the interaction of religion and science that emphasizes conflict and the attempted suppression of science by religious authorities

Merton Thesis

a model of the interaction between religion an science that emphasizes forms of concentration pursued for religious ends

Ecology of Religion

the study of religions as expressions of their natural local environments

Purity Codes

a set of rules and attending moods and assumptions that structure a particular community around the binaries of "purity" and "pollution"

Binary

any set of opposites (self/other, subject/object, mental/material, inside/outside) within a cultural or cognitive system that structures thought, feeling, and behavior within that system

Contagion

the belief that an attribute of a social nature (like pollution or impurity) can be transmitted through touch or physical contact

Hierarchy

any system that subordinates "lower" classes of people to "higher" classes of people whiin an idealized social whole

Endogamy

practice of marrying strictly within one's close social subgroup

Structuralism

method within anthropology that understands particular social phenomena as meaningful parts of a larger meta-system, whole, or "structure"

Cosmology

study of the origin, evolution, and structure of the physical universe

Deep Ecology

a broad environmental movement that seeks to awaken human beings into the biological fact that they are intimate parts of a larger ecosystem, which is their bigger body