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This article questions today's implicit cultural assumption that Western Christianity continues to provide a cultural and credal framework within which the relationship between art and religion is acted out. It argues instead that today's artists are unlikely to be keyed into religious culture because there is no longer any identifiable religious culture for them to be keyed into. The reasons for this are explored, and include secularization (however problematically defined), an increasing transition from a religious to an aesthetic validation of experience, post-modernity and its socalled "crisis in representation," and the increasingly second-order status of the visual within at least the Western Christian tradition. Yet this scenario does not necessarily predicate terminal decline. Instead it is argued that today's artists are more likely to disclose the implicitly numinous rather than the explicitly incarnational, offering us generalized religious experience rather than Christian revelation, hence moving religious art beyond its traditionally didactic and narrative parameters, and firmly towards the primarily experiential. Such art does more than provide undemanding spiritual massage for Christians and post-Christians alike. It may also "democratise" religious art and widen public access to the transcendent. Drawing specifically on the work of Bill Viola, Anthony Gormley and the late Craigie Aitchison, several mixed, if not necessarily conflicting messages emerge--a cultural mutation way from "religion" and towards "spirituality," a transition from a narrowly and exclusively Christian art towards what one critic calls "works which are only implicitly religious in their inspiration and so without identifiable religious themes and traditional symbols," and, above all, evidence of today's "religious" artists increasingly seeking for meaning within themselves rather than from the supernatural stories or rituals of institutional churches. In this sense they provide an aesthetic response to Edward Bailey's own enticing "Invitation One" when operationalising the concept of "Implicit Religion" i.e. "to relate religion, consciousness and experience." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on analyzing philosophical assumptions in cognitive science of religion. Topics discussed include commitment to tacit folk psychological theory of beliefs, desires and actions that guides human behavior; replacing the intentional level with design and physics by cognitive science; and explanation of existence of religious beliefs.

Often, when teaching in fields focused on the exploration of human society, an instructor who is concerned with the pervasive societal importance of religion faces the challenge of students informed by a contrary cultural assumption about religion's significance. The notion that religion is fundamentally severable from other spheres of life is taken for granted in modern liberal, secular society, but is, nonetheless, a highly problematic idea that hides the profound extent to which multiple forms of religious experience are manifested throughout that same society. In teaching about such humanistic topics as politics and religion, political theory, modern world history, and the 2008 United States presidential election, I have discovered that introducing students to implicit religion, and "parallel" phenomena such as civil religion, offers them revealing tools with which to better grasp how, even within a seemingly secular milieu, humankind's religious life intertwines with all domains of society. Accordingly, it is pedagogically enriching for students, and theoretically beneficial for the conceptualizing both of implicit religion and of religion more broadly, to discuss in the classroom such embodiments of implicit religion as: political and economic ideologies and practices, such as liberal capitalism and communism; nationalism; cultural mores; impassioned social movements such as environmentalism; popular music; and sports. This approach not only inspires students to critically evaluate the narrow concept of religion that is peculiar to modern society; it also makes concrete, intimate, and compelling such phenomena as transcendence, the sacred, and ultimate commitments, thereby deepening students' understanding of how religious experience imbues the whole of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]