https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/issue/feed 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Kamila Klingorová & Andrea Beláňová religio@phil.muni.cz Open Journal Systems https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37600 2024-01-10T10:20:43+01:00 Aleš Hodes email@journals.phil.muni.cz

This article explores much debated contemporary development in the contestation of the dominant, liberal interpretation of modernity by conservative Christians in the United States through counter hegemonic discourse that is deployed in the political arena and facilitates broader cultural struggle. The examination combines the analysis of discourse from the extensive corpus of data produced by five elite actors in the American religious and political milieu and its interplay with the socioeconomic factors of their constituency on the one hand and the institutional and historical context of accounts. Following in the footsteps of critical sociology of religion, emphasis was placed on processes through which the actors establish a claim for power and legitimize the application of moral rationality as the different path to modern society. Employment of discursive instruments in form of myths, narratives, and negative representations tied to specific religious language, is not only showing the permeability of the church-state separation in supposedly secular political arrangements. More importantly, it is unrevealing the authoritative, mobilizational power of the religious matrix of emotionally motivating meanings and identity-making narratives in face of shortcomings and crises of the hegemonic socio-political constellation. In this manner, it serves as a tool to challenge established interpretations of commitments to freedom and equality, or in many instances reinterprets them to legitimize policy entailed in the notion of collective morality. However, this considerable engagement also creates points of contention in society and in religious formations, which leads to their fragmentation between different interpretations of such commitments.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37601 2024-01-10T10:27:18+01:00 Laura Shumka email@journals.phil.muni.cz Genta Rexha email@journals.phil.muni.cz

This paper investigates the role of religious tourism in local and regional development, featuring the case study of a church reflecting the resilience of local communities, in developing sustainable and specific organized tours. The main focus is an analysis of prevailing motives and the creation of tourist visits to south Albania. Five centuries of Ottoman presence in Albania and other Balkan countries has left visible traces combining culture and religion. The occupation itself and Ottoman rule (1392-1912) was characterized by different waves, these introducing numerous elements of oriental art, construction, and architecture into the local heritage. Data were collected from municipal and regional entities using a survey of the perceptions of, and attitudes towards the development of heritage tourism. Various aspects of art, such as the mural frescoes depicting Saint George of Ioannina at the Holy Apostles Church in the southern Albanian village of Hoshteve, illustrate Albania’s endurance during the post-Byzantine period. The religious diversity of Albanian society and the preservation of social harmony and religious tolerance, particularly during the recent transitional period, has been of particular importance. The analyses show a clear connection between religious tourism and the advancement of a sustainable local economy. The article’s conclusions highlight the need for coordination between public and private entities as well as tourism management plans in order for regions to have a successful future as destinations for heritage tourism. As such problems are similar to those faced elsewhere, the findings of this survey can be applied to other peripheral areas.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37979 2024-02-16T13:41:27+01:00 Helena Dyndová email@journals.phil.muni.cz

Contemporary shamanism, often referred to as neo-shamanism, is a popular spiritual practice within the modern landscape of non-institutionalized religiosity. This paper explores the relationship between contemporary shamanism and alternative spirituality (formerly also labelled as the New Age) in depth, underlining that contemporary shamanism owes much of its success to its compatibility with the religious worldviews of today’s era. In this sense, contemporary shamanism works similarly to "native" shamanisms, acting not as an independent religious system but as a configuration within distinct sociocultural and religious contexts. The article discusses the discursive transformation over the past three centuries that has led to the contemporary perception of the shaman as a healer, stressing the pivotal role of Michael Harner and his Foundation for Shamanic Studies in shaping and establishing contemporary shamanism. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in neo-shamanic communities, it shows how contemporary shamanism has adapted and "translated" the three key motifs of alternative spirituality (the concepts of energy, holism, and the soul) and uses them in healing practice. Ultimately, this article posits how contemporary shamanism fits within the broader tapestry of alternative spirituality, emphasizing that its adaptability is an asset, not an inauthentic glitch.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37998 2024-02-19T13:43:19+01:00 Aleš Chalupa email@journals.phil.muni.cz

The article presents an innovative view of the circumstances leading to the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire. The scenario presented incorporates in the historical narrative the influence of macro-historical factors such as: a) the deteriorated epidemic situation caused by the Antonine plague and the Plague of Cyprian; b) the gradual climatic change unfavourable for agricultural production, which began to manifest themselves in the Ancient Mediterranean during the 2nd and especially the 3rd century CE. These factors led to a deterioration in food security, a demographic decline, and increasing social pressure, which caused considerable erosion of the prestige of pagan religion and confidence in the Roman political system. From the perspective of Spereber's epidemiology of representations and Sørensen’s immunology of representations, the "crisis of the third century" also led to a weakening of the "cultural immunity" of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire and to the emergence of new conditions relevant to the acceptance of new cultural ideas. This situation enabled a wider dissemination and acceptance of previously only modestly successful cultural representations in the form of Christian ideas about God, the world, and man's role in it, which gradually began to increase their popularity in the changed conditions of the Roman world.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37602 2024-01-10T10:31:26+01:00 Lucie Valentinová email@journals.phil.muni.cz

Brazilian indigenous cultures and the phenomenon of "indigenous infanticide" present a paradigmatic example of a fundamental challenge for disciplines such as religious studies and anthropology: How to approach otherness? After briefly outlining the obstacles encountered in confronting infanticide in the context of human rights and cultural relativism, this article redirects the symmetrical approach from these Western constructions to intercultural overlap. It shows how the Western-scholarship approach encourages the construction of protective cognitive barriers between scholars and otherness. In visualising otherness, given the optical consistency of visual culture (Svetlana Alpers, Bruno Latour), we distance ourselves when we construct a fixed distant point of view of linear perspective from which an unchanging researcher can observe, approach and leave an independent and unchanging phenomenon (William Ivins, Bruno Latour) located in qualitatively the same but distant space and time (Johannes Fabian). Different evaluations of infanticide in relation to our imagined distance reveal the illusory nature of such representation. Thus, the article suggests that the concept of "boundary object" is more appropriate for describing phenomena belonging to more "communities of practice" that do not reach interpretative consensus (Susan Leigh Star, Zdeněk Konopásek). These phenomena show interpretive flexibility as each "community of practice" relates it to different referential frames; they tend to serve as vehicles for transforming, instead of transmitting, knowledge. Similarly, in ritual theory, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw show how in "liturgical" rituals, co-determination by diachronic meanings transmitted by tradition separates the intention from the identity of a (ritual) act and thus weakens the authorship of the ritual actor. These two models allow us to focus more on the transformative quality of interaction with cultural otherness (Rita Laura Segato), as evidenced by long stays in the Amazonian terrain challenging the identity of the researcher (Daniel Everett). At the overlap of cultural systems, we enter diverse, culturally shaped but synchronous temporal, spatial and symbolic frames of action to whose totality we are unable to relate. For scholars concerned with interpreting cultures, including those that have disappeared, the challenge is to experience the recognition of otherness as a shared performative action.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37978 2024-02-16T13:37:13+01:00 Barbora Churaňová email@journals.phil.muni.cz

The purpose of this article is to present a new perspective on the biblical judge Samson. The author draws on previous work on this character and works with the concept of Samson‘s liminal nature, which allows him to mediate between two cultures, Israeli and Philistine. This quality of his is seen as essential. It is because of it that he can be a judge, and not in spite of it, as has often been perceived. The paper then develops this approach further and adds a view of Samson‘s legitimating role within the period of the judges. The article employs a structuralist approach and Samson is thus placed in opposition between the Israelite and Philistine cultures, which also have a geographical expression in the form of the opposition between the city and the desert. Samson‘s mediating role and liminal status is connected to Samson‘s trickster nature, which better enables his movement between cultures. This movement is then central to the entire narrative of the Book of Judges, in the context of which Samson‘s story should be read. Comparing his story with the stories of the other Judges reveals that Samson is both a kind of culmination of this time and a conclusion to it. Because of his liminal nature, he is able to embody the contradictions in Israelite culture and carry them over into the following age of kings.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38101 2024-03-06T13:00:35+01:00 Radek Chlup email@journals.phil.muni.cz

The article introduces a thematic section devoted to the book Monomyth: A Synthetic Treatise on the Theory of Myth by Jan Kozák. It summarizes its basic theoretical principles and sets them in the wider context of the history of modern theories of religion. It also briefly reacts to some of the criticisms of Kozák’s approach expressed in the responses of other scholars that follow in this thematic section.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38102 2024-03-06T13:03:12+01:00 Jan Reichstäter email@journals.phil.muni.cz

Jan A. Kozák, a Czech scholar in the field of religious studies, has until recently published almost exclusively articles and books focused on the narrow subject of the Old Norse Pagan religiosity. His new monograph, Monomýtus: Syntetické pojednání o teorii mýtu (in English The Monomyth: A Synthetic Treatise on the Theory of Myth), differs significantly from the previous works, both in its thematic focus on myth as an important theoretical problem of religious studies, and in the significant expansion of the ethnographic field in which the author operates. The result is an original – and, from the perspective of scientific discourse, somewhat eccentric – work that analyzes the problem of myth either on the basis of the reinterpreted schemes of the proponents of religious studies, or on the basis of the author’s own ideas supplemented by explanatory poetic metaphors. In a positive sense, Monomýtus stands out for its multidisciplinary approach to the problem of myth, its ability to find concrete examples from world’s religions for the theses it presents, and its readable, charismatic language. On the other hand, one can criticize those parts where author’s abstract and technical language prevails without concrete examples, or where his explanatory metaphors – usually apt and humorous – lead to misinterpretations of the observed phenomena. One can also disagree with the author’s exclusive emphasis on the psychological function of the myth and the trivialization of its didactic functions.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38104 2024-03-06T13:07:08+01:00 František Novotný email@journals.phil.muni.cz

This article is a critical response to the book Monomýtus by Jan A. Kozák. It argues that although Kozák presents his approach to the category of myth as non-reductive, in a certain sense he reduces the narratives he summarizes under the term myth to their their "weird" and "bizarre" motifs, while neglecting the social dimension of the formation and reproduction of these narratives. The article further argues that studying the social circumstances of a narrative’s formation and construction is necessary to understand not only its social function, but also its internal structure, including the character and role of "weird" motifs in the story. In the concluding section, the article addresses certain terminological blurriness of the book, which might be related the author’s non-reductionist ambitions, but limits the analytical potential of Kozák’s contribution, just like does the overly synthetic approach to classical works on the theory of myth.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38103 2024-03-06T13:05:10+01:00 Milan Fujda email@journals.phil.muni.cz

This review essay on Jan Kozák's book Monomýtus confronts the Campbellian tradition of the interpretation of myth, which is employed in a structuralist manner by Kozák, with Marquardian conception of the opposition between hegemonising monomythical and liberating polymythical modes of engaging the storytelling in life. Furthermore, it directs this confrontation towards ontological politics as a proper political disposition for the Anthropocene. The text shows that Kozák's engagement with mythology, which reminds of Mircea Eliade‘s project of new humanism and ultimately takes mythology to be a symbolic system able – due to its multilayered polyvalence – to refer beyond itself towards the numinous, is possible only by systematically leaving people engaging myths in their actual lives out of the analysis. Thus, it fails to touch on the world-making significance of storytelling. Due to that, such kind of analysis may satisfy the very partial "spiritual" needs of the contemporary materially well-off bourgeoisie in the West (or in the developed North) yet it cannot say much relevant to religious studies after the ontological turn and in the context of the task of re-composing a common world (or a pluriverse, into which many worlds fit) in a situation of fatal global environmental and geopolitical threats.

2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37976 2024-02-16T13:32:02+01:00 Valerio Severino email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38036 2024-02-23T13:23:10+01:00 Zora Hrabáková email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38108 2024-03-06T21:13:55+01:00 Matouš Mokrý email@journals.phil.muni.cz Márk Nemes email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38034 2024-02-23T13:19:26+01:00 Hana Lišková email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38105 2024-03-06T13:19:48+01:00 Renáta Sedláková email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37987 2024-02-17T13:16:50+01:00 Martin Klapetek email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37988 2024-02-17T13:19:55+01:00 Lucie Valentinová email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38106 2024-03-06T13:23:30+01:00 Andrej Kapcár email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/38107 2024-03-06T13:29:17+01:00 Zuzana Marie Kostićová email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37852 2024-02-06T16:41:22+01:00 Tancredi Marrone email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37985 2024-02-17T13:08:32+01:00 Jack David Eller email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37986 2024-02-17T13:12:15+01:00 Petr Novák email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/religio/article/view/37984 2024-02-17T13:02:22+01:00 Jiří Dynda email@journals.phil.muni.cz 2024-06-15T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright ©