Search

After Musa al-Sadr arrived in Lebanon in 1959, the passive Shi'i community became active, and this activism finally ended with Hezbollah gaining control in Lebanon and serving Iran in its confrontation with Israel. The research literature on al-Sadr and his activities in Lebanon shows that al-Sadr was, and still remains, a phenomenon who, by virtue of his deeds and charisma, elevated the Shi'i population in Lebanon from being a feeble and ineffective community to a proud and dominant one. This article shows how Musa al-Sadr's actions not only inspired the Shi'i revolution in Lebanon but also led to its wider dissemination all over the Middle East, starting with the Iranian Islamic Revolution. It will also describe how both the informal relations and the three different ideologies held by Khomeini, the Shah and al-Sadr finally helped al-Sadr crystallize his own revolutionary formula for political Shi'ism. That is, how al-Sadr's activism and propagating within the Shi'i community in Lebanon two decades before the Islamic Revolution in Iran prepared the community to accept Khomeini's message of a revival of Shi'ism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, mainly based on the reference to the entries in the diary of Th. Dobzhansky, a geneticist and one of the founders of the "synthetic theory of evolution", examines how Dobzhansky tried to combine science, primarily evolutionary theory, and religion. It is argued that although Dobxzhansky was a believer during whole his life, he became a peculiar believer who revised for himself and for others the former, primarily religious answers to the "ultimate questions" of existence, and posed these questions in a new, evolutionary way. Even more, he tried to substantiate and justify religion and his belief in God through the evolutionary theory, to demonstrate that science and religion are not incompatible, and to offer his believe in the usefulness of science and religion to each other. This Dobzhansky's attempt was perceived and evaluated ambiguously by both scientists and religious figures. In addition, Dobzhansky owing to his search for these answers, made a number of world outlook and general cultural conclusions for himself and presented these conclusions in articles and books written not only for colleagues in the scientific community, but also for other people., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Monasteries were famous for their extensive libraries and richly decorated churches. Less well known are their observatories and their mathematical-physical collections with telescopes, air pumps, and friction machines. But how did the way of life in the monastery and scientific practices influence each other? This paper examines the interaction of scientific practices and religious way of life using the example of southern German monasteries in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how the monks pragmatically linked monastic life and research practice, thereby forming their own specific scientific culture. This closes an important gap in the understanding of scholarship in the eighteenth century by foregrounding the monasteries as places of knowledge production, which have so far received little attention alongside universities and academies., (© 2024 The Author(s). Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

This article offers a personal perspective on religious history after the institutionalisation of this field in the History Department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2015. In essence and method, religious history is like history of religion(s). In German and Dutch, one can speak of Religionsgeschichte or religiegeschiedenis / godsdienstgeschiedenis. Different terms are in use in English and French, reflecting the different traditions in the disciplines of theology and history. History of religion(s)/ histoire des religions is commonly associated with comparative studies of (non-Christian) religions, while religious history/ histoire religieuse developed as a specialisation within general history (mostly concerned with Christianity and therefore close to what is known as church history or ecclesiastical history). While understanding religious history as general history with a focus on the religious factor in cultural, social, and political realities, various research traditions should be converged and integrated by means of conceptual exchange, cross-disciplinary approaches, and linked scholarly networks. Given the interest in global dimensions and long-term developments, computer-assisted research of digitalised sources is recommended for doing religious history today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim this article is to study the implementation of the first Evangelical Church of the Portuguese language in Brazil, from the work of the Scottish physician Robert Reid Kalley and your wife Sarah Poulton Reid Kalley, protagonists of the congregational movement of the 19th century on the city of the Rio de Janeiro. Reconciling biblical preaching with social action in health and education, the Congregational Evangelical Church would change the percentage of Catholic hegemony in the national territory. If initially the Congregational Church, through yours pioneers, was disruptive of the social situation, during your story has not kept the same speech. However, during the installation of the first Evangelical Church in Brazil, it was alongside political leaders and economic power in order to ensure, in particular, the freedom of worship. If the Gospel may be preached within rational limits, this indicates that the target audience of the Congregationalist speech was, above all, the economic élite and cultured, probably as a strategy to influence the opinion leaders in the capital of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Eduard Nielsen almost sixty years ago placed the Shechem traditions in a pre-exilic contexts as evidence of a competition be-tween Jerusalem and Shechem with roots in the pre-monarchical period, re-cent studies have shown that it is better to see this animosity in an early Hel-lenistic context between the two growing religious centers of the central high-lands in Shechem and Jerusalem. However, the method of close reading found in Eduard Nielsen’s study as representative of the Uppsala school of Old Testament Studies has, still in this new context, much to offer for our un-derstanding of the Shechem-Jerusalem traditions in the Old Testament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the berserker, a frenzied warrior attested to in both the written and material sources of medieval Scandinavia, and elucidates the characteristics that define him. It critiques explanations for the phenomenon offered in the existing historiography and whether this can be explained as a psychiatric diagnosis. It concludes that the berserker cannot be simply defined as a culturally bound or other psychiatric syndrome, or accounted for by psychogenic drugs alone. Instead, it proposes that berserk frenzy constituted a transitory dissociative state shared among a small warband steeped in religious/spiritual ideology. In entering this state, the psyche of the berserker was reconstituted in an almost archetypal pattern. Further research is required into this phenomenon in other contexts, including modern conflicts.

Competing Interests: POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The author have indicated he has no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

This paper critically supports the modern evolutionary explanation of religion popularised by David Sloan Wilson, by comparing it with those of his predecessors, namely Emile Durkheim and Thomas Hobbes, and to some biological examples which seem analogous to religions as kinds of superorganisms in their own right. The aim of the paper is to draw out a theoretical pedigree in philosophy and sociology that is reflected down the lines of various other evolutionarily minded contributors on the subject of religion. The general theme is of evolved large-scale cooperative structures. A scholarly concern is as follows: Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, And The Nature Of Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002) draws on Durkheim, (The elementary forms of religious life. Free Press, New york, 1912) using Calvinism as an example without mentioning Hobbes (Leviathan, Edited by E. Curley, Cambridge, Hackett, 1651), but it was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who used Calvinism as an example of a leviathanesque religious structure-which is not acknowledged by either Wilson or Durkheim. If there are even any similarities between these authors, there appears to be an omission somewhere which should rightly be accounted for by giving credit to Hobbes where it is due. I issue on conclusion, what it is that makes Wilson's approach radically different to that it skates on. I also issue it with a cautionary word.

Given changing demographics of religiosity and spirituality, this article aims to help clinicians understand contemporary trends in patient religious and spiritual orientation. It first identifies and describes the evolving varieties of religio-spiritual orientation and affiliation, as identified in survey studies. Particular attention is given to the examination of those who identify as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) and None (i.e., no religious affiliation), which is important to mental health practice because many patients now identify as SBNR or None. Next, empirical data are considered, including what the literature reveals regarding mental health outcomes and SBNRs and Nones. We conclude with a summary of the main points and five recommendations that mental health practitioners and researchers need to consider regarding this increasingly large portion of the population.

This article surveys the evolution of Rwandan family planning practices from the nation's mythico-historical origins to the present. Rwanda is typically regarded as a patriarchal society in which Rwandan women have, throughout history, endured limited rights and opportunities. However, oral traditions narrated by twentieth-century Rwandan historians, storytellers and related experts, and interpreted by the scholars and missionaries who lived in Rwanda during the nation's colonial period, suggest that gender norms in Rwanda were more complicated. Shifting practices related to family planning - particularly access to contraception, abortion, vasectomies and related strategies - are but one arena in which this becomes evident, suggesting that women's roles within their families and communities could be more diverse than the historiography's narrow focus on women as wives and mothers currently allows. Drawing upon a range of colonial-era oral traditions and interviews conducted with Rwandans since 2007, I argue that Rwandan women - while under significant social pressure to become wives and mothers throughout the nation's past - did find ways to exert agency within and beyond these roles. I further maintain that understanding historical approaches to family planning in Rwanda is essential for informing present-day policy debates in Rwanda aimed at promoting gender equality, and in particular for ensuring women's rights and access to adequate healthcare are being upheld., (© The Author(s) 2020.)

The ancient catacombs of Egypt harbor millions of well-preserved mummified Sacred Ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus) dating from ~600BC. Although it is known that a very large number of these 'votive' mummies were sacrificed to the Egyptian God Thoth, how the ancient Egyptians obtained millions of these birds for mummification remains unresolved. Ancient Egyptian textual evidences suggest they may have been raised in dedicated large-scale farms. To investigate the most likely method used by the priests to secure birds for mummification, we report the first study of complete mitochondrial genomes of 14 Sacred Ibis mummies interred ~2500 years ago. We analysed and compared the mitogenomic diversity among Sacred Ibis mummies to that found in modern Sacred Ibis populations from throughout Africa. The ancient birds show a high level of genetic variation comparable to that identified in modern African populations, contrary to the suggestion in ancient hieroglyphics (or ancient writings) of centralized industrial scale farming of sacrificial birds. This suggests a sustained short-term taming of the wild migratory Sacred Ibis for the ritual yearly demand., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The fresco The Creation of Adam (1511), painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by the great genius of human anatomy Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), represents one of the most emblematic and best-known scenes in the world. This fresco illustrates a key passage from the Book of Genesis: the moment when God creates the first man, Adam. Since its completion, this work has been intensively studied by many scholars of art, and by several anatomists, who have pointed out signs of anatomical representations contained in the scene. However, there is still some uncertainty regarding this famous scene, especially in relation to its complete iconography. In an attempt to understand Michelangelo's purpose better regarding this emblematic scene, this article presents unpublished evidence that the artist could have concealed within the figure of Adam the anatomical image of a rib which, according to traditional Biblical accounts, is iconographically associated with the origin of Eve, Adam's companion. Curiously, this hidden rib in Adam's body figure could be related to the traditional view of the origin of the first humans expounded in the Jewish Kabbalah. Clin. Anat. 32:648-653, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

The 9th-15th century Angkorian state was Southeast Asia's greatest premodern empire and Angkor Wat in the World Heritage site of Angkor is one of its largest religious monuments. Here we use excavation and chronometric data from three field seasons at Angkor Wat to understand the decline and reorganization of the Angkorian Empire, which was a more protracted and complex process than historians imagined. Excavation data and Bayesian modeling on a corpus of 16 radiocarbon dates in particular demand a revised chronology for the Angkor Wat landscape. It was initially in use from the 11th century CE with subsequent habitation until the 13th century CE. Following this period, there is a gap in our dates, which we hypothesize signifies a change in the use of the occupation mounds during this period. However, Angkor Wat was never completely abandoned, as the dates suggest that the mounds were in use again in the late 14th-early 15th centuries until the 17th or 18th centuries CE. This break in dates points toward a reorganization of Angkor Wat's enclosure space, but not during the historically recorded 15th century collapse. Our excavation data are consistent with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the region's continued ideological importance and residential use, even after the collapse and shift southward of the polity's capital. We argue that fine-grained chronological analysis is critical to building local historical sequences and illustrate how such granularity adds nuance to how we interpret the tempo of organizational change before, during, and after the decline of Angkor., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Considerable debate surrounds the economic, political, and ideological systems that constitute primary state formation. Theoretical and empirical research emphasize the role of religion as a significant institution for promoting the consolidation and reproduction of archaic states. The Tiwanaku state developed in the Lake Titicaca Basin between the 5th and 12th centuries CE and extended its influence over much of the south-central Andes of South America. We report on recent discoveries from the first systematic underwater archaeological excavations in the Khoa Reef near the Island of the Sun, Bolivia. The depositional context and compositional properties of offerings consisting of ceramic feline incense burners, killed juvenile llamas, and sumptuary metal, shell, and lapidary ornaments allow us to reconstruct the structure and significance of cyclically repeated state rituals. Using new theoretical tools, we explain the role of these rituals in promoting the consolidation of the Tiwanaku polity., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles 1-8 . The 'moralizing gods' hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies 9-13 . Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity 3,6,7,9-18 , the relationship between the two is disputed 9-13,19-24 , and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow-rather than precede-large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions 9,12,16,18 , powerful moralizing 'big gods' and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of 'megasocieties' with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations 25,26 generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity.

This article discusses alcohol use throughout history. The discovery and cultivation of wine and beer and distillation of spirits are explored. The article spans prehistory, Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Europe, and the Americas; and the religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Also explored are the history and distillation of rum, gin, and champagne. Effects of alcohol use on society are discussed., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Competing Interests: None

Laughter played a crucial strategic role in the fight against clericalism and religion in France during the second half of the 19 th century and the first half of the 20 th century. The cultural output from this polemical use of laughter is contrasted with a "scholarly literature," which fought against religion in a radically different manner that featured reason facing obscurantism and prejudice. Drawing on a study of the contributions dealing with "the psychology of religion" or "hieropsychology" published in the Revue de l'hypnotisme, I will try to show that there also exists a "scholarly ridicule," the forms, codes, and uses of which are characteristic of the anticlerical laughter associated with "medical materialism."

The decline in the everyday importance of religion with economic development is a well-known correlation, but which phenomenon comes first? Using unsupervised factor analysis and a birth cohort approach to create a retrospective time series, we present 100-year time series of secularization in different nations, derived from recent global values surveys, which we compare by decade to historical gross domestic product figures in those nations. We find evidence that a rise in secularization generally has preceded economic growth over the past century. Our multilevel, time-lagged regressions also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization. These findings hold when we control for education and shared cultural heritage.

The relationship between pain as a physical and emotional experience and the concept of suffering as an essential aspect of sanctification for faithful believers was a paradoxical and pressing theological and phenomenological issue for puritan and non-conformist communities in 17th-century England. Pain allows the paradox of non-conformists' valorisation and suppression of corporeality to be explored due to its simultaneous impact on the mind and body and its tendency to leak across boundaries separating an individual believer from other members of their family or faith community. The material world and the human body were celebrated as theatres for the display of God's glory through the doctrines of creation and providence despite the fall. Pain as a concept and experience captures this tension as it was represented and communicated in a range of literary genres written by and about puritan and non-conformist women including manuscript letters, spiritual journals, biographies and commonplace books. For such women, targeted by state authorities for transgressing gender norms and the religion established by law, making sense of the pain they experienced was both a personal devotional duty and a political act. Three case studies comprise a microhistory of 17th-century English puritan and non-conformist women's lived experience, interpretation and representation of pain, inscribed in a series of manuscripts designed to nurture the spiritual and political activism of their communities. This microhistory contributes to a better understanding of pain in early modern England through its excavation of the connections that such writers drew between the imperative to be visibly godly, their marginalised subject position as a proscribed religious minority and their interpretation of the pain they experienced as a result., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2018. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.)

Early in the Ptolemaic era, Egyptian cults, particularly those of Isis and Sarapis, spread successfully to ports across the ancient Aegean Sea. Leading researchers in the field claim that the spread of these cults was influenced by multiple factors, ones that were mainly economic or political in character. However, the question of which factors had more weight or impact than others in the process of the early spread of Egyptian cults has not yet been answered in academic discussion. This could be related to the fact that the issue of the spread of religious innovations in the ancient Mediterranean has been addressed mainly by established historiographical methods such as the collection and critical analysis of archaeological and literary sources. Hypotheses and conclusions derived from these methods are, however, often unable to reflect the complexity of historical processes. A possible solution can be found in supplementing this established methodological apparatus by formalized methods, e.g. the coding of relevant datasets, statistics, geospatial modeling, and network analysis. To be able to compare the possible impacts of different factors on the spread of Egyptian cults in the Aegean Sea region, we 1) constructed a model of the ancient maritime transportation network as a platform for quantitative analysis, 2) transformed selected factors of possible influence into georeferenced parameters of the network, and 3) defined a mathematical model that allowed us to determine which parameters of the network explain the spatial dissemination of archaeological evidence connected to Egyptian cults. The results suggest that the most significant correlation is between the placement of Ptolemaic garrisons and the distribution of Egyptian temples and artefacts in the early Hellenistic Aegean Sea region. The interpretation would be that Egyptian military forces potentially played a significant role in the spread of Egyptian cults.

William James greatly influenced the fields of psychology, philosophy, and religion during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. This was the era of Modernism, a time when many writers rejected the certainty of Enlightenment ideals. Positivism, which rose to prominence in the early 19th century, had emphasized physical phenomena, empirical evidence, and the scientific method. Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), with its theory of natural selection, provided an explanation for the evolution of species apart from a divine Creator. Within this context, William James served as a "mediator between scientific agnosticism and the religious view of the world." James' own experience inhaling nitrous oxide played an important role in shaping his views. For James, the use of nitrous oxide served a key role in elucidating some of his most central ideas: 1) the value of religion, and the emphasis on mysticism and revelation (as opposed to theology and doctrine) as religion's foundation; 2) the universe as pluralistic (as opposed to absolutist, constant, eternal), driven by chance, experience, and change., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Infant baptism originated when St. Augustine proclaimed the doctrine of original sin in 412 CE. Neonates stillborn or deceased before baptism were declared to go down to Hell and were buried outside of sacred ground. From the 15th century, parents carried these infants to "respite sanctuaries" in remote mountain chapels, where miraculous images were believed to revive the infant in order to allow baptism and a Christian burial. Monasteries made fortunes out of the parents' anguish. In 1528, the abuse of the Oberbüren image ignited iconoclasm and heralded the beginning of the Reformation. From 1740, Pope Benedict XIV opposed the sanctuaries, especially Ursberg in Swabia, declaring as invalid any apparent signs of life, e.g., changes in skin color, a change from rigidity to flexibility, blood flowing from the nose, sweat on the skin, cessation of a cadaveric smell, and the movement of a feather held at the infant's mouth. Only crying and sounds of respiration remained valid signs of revivification. The debate ran for centuries, highlighting the difficulty of distinguishing a stillborn from a liveborn baby before the stethoscope became available. The existence of respite sanctuaries is an illustration of the failure of the doctrine of original sin, which was never accepted by the pious., (© 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

The origin story of professional nursing associated with antebellum American faith communities is all but lost. This paper provides historical evidence for professional nursing for that period using a case study approach that examines three faith communities: the Sisters and Daughters of Charity, the Shakers, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The purpose is to present an historical analysis of the three communities' health beliefs, recipes and remedies that were foundational to the spiritual formation and education of professional nurses within their communities. The focus of the analysis is to place the evidence for professional nursing in these faith communities within the broader context of the contemporary American narrative of the "secularization" of professional nursing associated with the adoption of the Nightingale Training Model after 1873. Nursing became a profession in America because of the courage and passion of many for spiritual formation in community around a need to relieve suffering and demonstrate kindness. The history of American nursing is comprised of stories of powerful nurse ancestors that have the potential to inspire and unite us in that same purpose today despite the ambiguities that may still exist around spirituality, religiosity, and secularization., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The texts written by the people of past societies can provide key information that enhances our understanding of disease in the past. Written sources and art can describe cultural contexts that not only help us interpret lesions in excavated human remains, but also provide evidence for past disease events themselves. However, in recent decades many biohistorical articles have been published that claim to diagnose diseases present in past celebrities or well known individuals, often using less than scholarly methodology. This article aims to help researchers use historical written sources and artwork responsibly, thus improving our understanding of health and disease in the past. It explores a broad range of historical sources, from medical texts and histories to legal documents and tax records, and it highlights how the key to interpreting any past text is to understand who wrote it, when it was written, and why it was written. Case studies of plague epidemics, crucifixion, and the spinal deformity of King Richard III are then used to highlight how we might better integrate archaeological and historical evidence. When done well, integrating evidence from both archaeological and historical sources increases the probability of a complete and well-balanced understanding of disease in past societies., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Introduction In the context of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, it is time to take a survey of the history of Martin Luther's (1483-1546) pathography and to deduce possible conclusions from it for psychiatric practice. Results In a 1035-page work written in German between 1937 and 1941, the Dane Paul Reiter retrospectively diagnosed Luther as manic-depressive. In 1956, Grossmann was unable to prove persistent synchronicity of depressive mood and reduced motivation in Luther in the key years 1527 and 1528, which led him to conclude that Luther had a cyclothymic personality with a pyknic constitution. Discussion One very central source of Luther's life's work may have arisen from the tension between emotional constraints and crises of faith, on the one hand, and resilience and trust in God, on the other. Conclusion Luther can be used as an example of the importance of religiousness as a curative resource for the psyche., Competing Interests: Interessenkonflikt: Die Autoren geben an, dass kein Interessenkonflikt besteht. Unter den Autoren sind die beiden großen christlichen Konfessionen gleichmäßig vertreten., (Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.)

Science is expected to be objective: however, since practiced and produced by humans, it has to reflect human flows - prejudices, stubbornness, malice, and the tendency to be misused. No wonder an excellent scientist like John Eccles proclaimed science to be among the most personal activities he had known. By analysing a few examples from the history of science (in particular the intellectual development of Van Rensselaer Potter, the American onco-biochemist and bioethics pioneer), as well as the current trend of the evidence-based approach, the present paper will try to demonstrate that denying, distrusting, and opposing science for the sake of religion, as seen so many times in human history, has significant similarities to the overestimation of science we more often encounter in our times.

Finland holds a unique place in the geographical and cultural map of Europe by being situated between the East and the West. This article will offer a historical overview of Finland's death culture from the point of view of the various religious and ideological practices that reflect influence from these two sides. I also explore the factors that may explain the Lutheran Church's hegemony over death and dying in Finland.

Rites of passage mark important changes during human life and, for the neonate, its transition from intrauterine life into society. Their original intent was to purify the body from blood and meconium. But the cleansing rites had a spiritual dimension from the very start. When the rites of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Nordic, Muslim, Maya, and Christian cultures are briefly compared, they reveal a remarkable similarity. What most rites had in common was the cleansing of the body, or sprinkling it with water; special clothing; the exorcism of evil spirits; blessings and prayers for good spirits; and a name-giving ceremony and a feast for family, relatives, and friends. Before this rite, the infant's social existence was incomplete and it could easily be abandoned or killed, as was usual in cases of severe malformations. Infant baptism originated in the 4th century CE with the concept of original sin. Emergency baptism originated in the 12th century and had a profound influence on the development of obstetrics and neonatal care. Rites of passage defined, but also set an end to, the liminal status between life and death in a phase of high mortality and partial personhood, and granted the right to live for the infant., (© 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

Modern historiography of collective attitudes, practices, and conflicts surrounding death often focuses on the institutional history of cemeteries and nonreligious funerals in 19th-century France. Institutional and cultural discussions concerning funerals and cemeteries also divided nineteenth-century Belgium. This article explores emblematic civil burials and the secularization of cemeteries in major Belgian cities. The article distinguishes different dimensions of the secularization of death and highlights the particular nature of Belgian funerary conflicts and burial reform within a broader European context.

For most of human history, fire has been a pervasive presence in human life, and so also in human thought. This essay examines the ways in which fire has functioned intellectually in Western civilization as mythology, as religion, as natural philosophy and as modern science. The great phase change occurred with the development of industrial combustion; fire faded from quotidian life, which also removed it from the world of informing ideas. Beginning with the discovery of oxygen, fire as an organizing concept fragmented into various subdisciplines of natural science and forestry. The Anthropocene, however, may revive the intellectual role of fire as an informing idea or at least a narrative conceit.This article is part of the themed issue 'The interaction of fire and mankind'., (© 2016 The Author(s).)

Feyerabend's interests in religion and mysticism grew through his career. In his later writings, Feyerabend's numerous critiques of scientific materialism are often accompanied by purported advantages of religious orientations and temperaments. These recommendations do not simply follow from his tolerant theoretical pluralism; they are more positive attempts to articulate distinctive aspects of human life satisfied by religion, but not by scientific materialism. Elevating the human need for mystery, reverence, and love, he contrasts these goods with the deliverances of monistic conceptions of science and reason. I bring attention to some of the common themes in these remarks to argue that they were integral with other parts of his philosophical project and that they could serve as helpful rejoinders to contemporary exhortations to science-based secularism from philosophers of science., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

I summarize certain aspects of Paul Feyerabend's account of the development of Western rationalism, show the ways in which that account is supposed to run up against an alternative, that of Karl Popper, and then try to give a preliminary comparison of the two. My interest is primarily in whether what Feyerabend called his 'story' constitutes a possible history of our epistemic concepts and their trajectory. I express some grave reservations about that story, and about Feyerabend's framework, finding Popper's views less problematic here. However, I also suggest that one important aspect of Feyerabend's material, his treatment of religious belief, can be given an interpretation which makes it tenable, and perhaps preferable to a Popperian approach., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Thanks to the work of politics and religion scholars, we now know a lot about the relationship between religion and voting in American presidential general elections. However, we know less about the influence of religion on individual vote choice in presidential primaries. This article fills that gap by exploring the relationship between religion and candidate preference in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries. Using pre-Super Tuesday surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, I find that the Republican candidate who most explicitly appealed to religious voters (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) was the preferred candidate of Republican respondents who attended religious services at the highest levels, and that as attendance increased, so did the likelihood of preferring that candidate. I also find that identification as a born again Christian mattered to candidate preference. Specifically, born again Christians were more likely than non-born again Christians to prefer Huckabee to Mitt Romney, John McCain and Ron Paul in 2008, and Santorum to Romney in 2012. Although ideology was not the primary subject of this article, I find that ideology was also a statistically significant predictor of Republican candidate preference in both 2008 and 2012. This robust finding reinforces scholars' prior work on the importance of ideology in explaining presidential primary vote choice. The overall findings of the paper provide evidence that religion variables can add to our understanding of why voters prefer one candidate over another in presidential primaries.