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The article examines how water features in different rituals in Leviticus and Numbers. It starts by providing an overview of how water is used in Leviticus and Numbers for cleansing and other rituals, focusing on cases where water is mixed with something else. Then, the article focuses on three pericopes from the Book of Numbers that describe concoctions of water mixed with other substances. These concoctions are given specific names in Numbers. Lastly, the article discusses diachronic arguments about these ritual texts. Contribution: The article shows the creativity that the authors of Numbers employed in reworking and innovating ritual texts from Leviticus.

With the world facing an ecological crisis, Hindus are challenged to reflect on the ways they impact their environment. The last few decades witnessed a rise of theological reflections on Hindu traditions—especially scriptures and concepts (not least by western scholars)—that advocate environmentally friendly perspectives. This stands in sharp contrast with the multiple examples of how Hindu ritual practices cause harm to the environment. Ganesha Chaturthi is a festival that due to the public element of immersion of Ganesha idols, has led to severe pollution of waterbodies. Because of the attention that has been paid to this lately, the festival now calls for ecofriendly alternatives. This article analyses how recently, environmental awareness is ritualized and materialized in the festival of Ganesha Chaturthi. For this, fieldwork was conducted during Ganesha Chaturthi in Chennai and Mumbai in 2022. The focus of the article lies on the ecofriendly material and ritual innovations of the festival—for instance the variety of Ganeshas made of biodegradable materials—and the dynamics of interaction with (alleged) traditions to validate a Green Hindu identity in general and the development of a Green Ganesha in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Hindu India were manifold and, at times, publicly contested, which raises the question of which societal differences became visible and were augmented as the pandemic unfolded. Based on observations mainly from the first coronavirus wave in 2020, this article argues that the limited religious innovation that ensued gave rise to a lively public debate that revealed marked differences within the Hindu community, that the pandemic offered new possibilities for affirming Hindu identities while othering Muslims, and that it accelerated the transition to online religious services in prominent temples while pausing the activities in others, thus augmenting a marked digital divide that may well outlast the pandemic. Pandemic religious changes notwithstanding, the article concludes that most of the changes were ephemeral and produced minor jolts rather than major transformations.

With the world facing an ecological crisis, Hindus are challenged to reflect on the ways they impact their environment. The last few decades witnessed a rise of theological reflections on Hindu traditions—especially scriptures and concepts (not least by western scholars)—that advocate environmentally friendly perspectives. This stands in sharp contrast with the multiple examples of how Hindu ritual practices cause harm to the environment. Ganesha Chaturthi is a festival that due to the public element of immersion of Ganesha idols, has led to severe pollution of waterbodies. Because of the attention that has been paid to this lately, the festival now calls for ecofriendly alternatives. This article analyses how recently, environmental awareness is ritualized and materialized in the festival of Ganesha Chaturthi. For this, fieldwork was conducted during Ganesha Chaturthi in Chennai and Mumbai in 2022. The focus of the article lies on the ecofriendly material and ritual innovations of the festival—for instance the variety of Ganeshas made of biodegradable materials—and the dynamics of interaction with (alleged) traditions to validate a Green Hindu identity in general and the development of a Green Ganesha in particular.

In the mid-1960s, the people of the rural settlement of Cata in the Keiskammahoek district of the then Ciskei bantustan were moved by the apartheid government's "betterment planning" programme, from their small patrilineal-kinship-based residential clusters into larger, more concentrated residential areas; they were thus effectively forcibly villagised. This paper examines what appears to be a new ritual that has arisen in response to members of these agnatic clusters now being scattered throughout these new residential areas. The ritual of "fetching the ancestors," thus of collectively bringing the ancestors of an entire local agnatic cluster from the old settlement areas to the new villages, embodies elements of, but is significantly different from, existing ancestor rituals. By comparing it with other similar rituals elsewhere, including those performed to return the spirits of dead struggle veterans to their places of origin, the paper highlights similarities with those rituals and the innovative dimensions of this particular ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most striking images produced in north-east Arnhem Land today are the paintings given to young boys during their first initiation ceremony (dhapi). Skilfully applied on their chest over several hours, while singing and dancing proceeds on the ceremonial grounds nearby, these body paintings act as relational matrixes which locate the initiands within a socio-cosmic web of connections. At the other end of the male ritual life-cycle, the bodies of the deceased undergo a similar process of transfiguration, as they are made to resemble the groups’ most sacred objects, seen to instantiate the powers of specific ancestral beings. In the context of these rituals, the links between clans, places, and ancestral beings are expressed by being made visible on and around the body. Pragmatically composed and displayed for all to see, I suggest that Yolŋu ritual images appear as ‘matter(s) of relations’ par excellence, materialising various sets of social relationships. This paper examines the material logics behind this transfiguration process which, by turning people into ancestors, transform the relations between individuals and groups, between humans and non-human beings, and between the living and the spirits of the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study highlights the contribution of current scholarship focusing on ritual studies and its impact on biblical studies. Ritual is not just useful to discover activities, patterns, and the interaction of key elements of religious practice and textual worlds (including, among others, time, space, participants, objects, sounds, language, and action), but it also offers a helpful way of understanding the text's talking about God, or biblical theology. The three-step from ritual to interpretation to integration of the data into the big picture of theology (or ideology) is seldom done consistently and requires a methodological reset. Finally, a brief look at the New Testament Lord's Supper within this framework is attempted, demonstrating the potential of such an approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the altar law in Exodus 20, the statement that frames it in Exodus 19, and its application in Exodus 24 as a single narrative that denies the professional configuration of sacrifice as essential to religion and divine blessing. It puts the gift-blessing exchange into the hands of every family, and reverses the basic trope of hosting-visiting and the social poetics that govern hierarchical religion: rather than host at his palace through mediating attendants, Yahweh visits wherever he is invited. The study argues that the narrative attacks an Israelian and Judean ideology in which royal success defines territorial extent, shapes the polity, enshrines divine power in temples, and controls divine blessing. It reconfigures the elements such that territory and nationhood are defined by the divine king, who roams freely throughout the land to bless each of his subjects, so long as they invite him to receive a gift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on a very specific project of constructing authentic tradition by one of the most famous cult leaders in Afrocuban Santería. His model of tradition is generated within transatlantic networks of Africanization in Yoruba-based religions in the Diaspora. Emphasizing a larger project of ritual innovation he represents a very specific model of Lúkúmí tradition which is rejecting contemporary modes of Santería. Instead of that it refers basically to a former religious tradition in Cuba at the beginning of 20th Century which is reclaimed to get restored again. Its realization is based on multiple connections to religious actors, practices, debates, oral and written sources from Nigeria and the so called Yoruba Diaspora. Aiming a transatlantic vision of restoration of both Cuban and African Yoruba tradition, this model of religious innovation is on the one hand compatible with what is called by religious and scientific agency "Global Orisha/Yoruba World Religion". On the other hand it represents a very exclusive Cuban resource within the global spectrum of Yoruba religions. Introducing this Cuban religious project, its protagonists and debates, I will finally reflect this within an alternative, marginalized perspective on space-temporal and symbolic locations and discourses between Africa and Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]