This book utilizes an approach that centers on remix theory and conceptual metaphor theory, arguing for an examination of the study of religion via a model for analyzing cultural constructs that the author terms Remix+/-. After discerning the metaphorical correspondences underlying his argument, the author claims that the shift in conceptual and terminological framing remix provides can assist in understanding religious phenomena and developments differently, paying close attention to the sorts of meanings, implications, and assumptions that are disrupted and subverted as a result. The chapters indicate how notions of originality, authenticity, and authority are problematized and challenged from the perspective modeled by Remix+/-, with Buddhist philosophy occupying a significant role in the demonstrative examples. This book will be of interest to remix theorists and conceptual metaphor theorists because it advances a new approach to applying both remix and metaphor to the study of cultural constructs. It will also be valuable for those studying religion and digital culture—especially Buddhist thought and practice—as it proposes a new lens through which religiosity can be defamiliarized and critically analyzed.

This book focuses on the value and necessity of modern sociology to Pope Francis’s church reform project known as the Synod on Synodality. It explores the behavioral and research aspects of this latest synod, applying sociological perspectives and methods and drawing on secondary literature, media reports, and church documents. The author argues that sociology is crucial for translating the major theological concepts into behavioral and research indicators to empirically ground the overall theological framework of the synod as an ecclesial innovation rather than a revolution in the Catholic Church. The importance of sociological research methodology is emphasized to guide the synod’s complex and multi-stage qualitative data collection, which seeks to understand the synodal concerns of all Catholics in today’s world. The book addresses the need for scientific approaches to church reforms and for a nuanced complementarity between sociology and theology. It will be of particular interest to scholars of theology, religion, and sociology, as well as those actively involved in the workings of the Catholic Church.

This book explores the textual traditions that authorize the history, legitimacy, and authenticity of today’s physical posture practice. The volume focuses on why and how yoga communities have adopted various texts that they consider sacred or spiritually meaningful. Among the texts discussed are Yogananda‘s Autobiography, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the Yoginī Tantra. Famous thinkers included are Aurobindo, Yogananda, Osho-Rajneesh, Sogyal Rimpoche, Charles Johnston, and Howard Thurman. Offering a starting point, the ten chapters address the nature, selection, and function of various ancient and contemporary texts read in contemporary yoga settings. The attention centers on how and why texts are read and for whom they are read. As yoga is practiced in ashrams, yoga studios, gyms, meeting rooms, and even private living rooms, scholarly approaches to investigate the connections between yoga and texts are necessarily diverse. This volume aims to inspire further scholarship on the reading of texts in past and present yoga communities. The collection demonstrates that textual tradions deserve to be an important part of contemporary yoga scholarship. The volume will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of religious studies, yoga studies, and Asian studies, as well as those studying sacred texts.

Demons in the USA argues that the discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination. The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed. As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this "anti-Spiritualist" paradigm to condemn the movement. This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through the film The Exorcist. The author considers how the success of the film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, entangling it with entertainment, science, and politics such that it influences psychology, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the contemporary QAnon movement. This entanglement points to the broader argument of the work: While we may wish to think of a film as "entertainment" (and thus, having no bearing on "reality") or demonic material as "religious" (and thus exempt from categories like "politics" or "science"), the truth is that categories are not so easily separated. The author contends that the need to enforce the boundaries of such categories (and the failure to do so) is a hallmark of the intellectual construct of modernity, and that those who believe in demons in the contemporary United States are surprisingly modern in their views. The book grounds the importance of media to the twentieth-and twenty-first- century religious experience, arguing that the United States of today would not be possible without The Exorcist and its products. Demons in the USA will be of particular interest to scholars dealing with religion in America, those with a focus on religion and film, or those involved with contemporary demonology.

All religions undergo continuous change, but minority religions tend to be less anchored in their ways than mainstream, traditional religions. This volume examines radical transformations undergone by a variety of minority religions, including the Children of God/ Family International; Gnosticism; Jediism; various manifestations of Paganism; LGBT Muslim groups; the Plymouth Brethren; Santa Muerte; and Satanism. As with other books in the Routledge/Inform series, the contributors approach the subject from a wide range of perspectives: professional scholars include legal experts and sociologists specialising in new religious movements, but there are also chapters from those who have experienced a personal involvement. The volume is divided into four thematic parts that focus on different impetuses for radical change: interactions with society, technology and institutions, efforts at legitimation, and new revelations. This book will be a useful source of information for social scientists, historians, theologians and other scholars with an interest in social change, minority religions and ‘cults’. It will also be of interest to a wider readership including lawyers, journalists, theologians and members of the general public.

The World in the Year 1000 -- Go West, Young Viking -- The Pan-American Highways of 1000 -- European Slaves -- The World's Richest Man -- Central Asia Splits in Two -- Surprising Journeys -- The Most Globalized Place on Earth.

With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies. Orchestrating a layered conversation between arts, disciplines, and media, Stam argues for their "mutual embeddedness" and their shared "in-between" territories. Rather than merely adding to the existing scholarship, the book builds a relational framework through the connectivities within literature, cinema, music, and media that opens up analysis to new categories and concepts, while crossing spatial, temporal, theoretical, disciplinary, and mediatic borders. The book also questions an array of hierarchies: literature over cinema; source novel over adaptation; feature film over documentary; erudite over vernacular culture; Western modernisms over "peripheral" modernisms; classical over popular music; written poetry over sung poetry, and so forth. The book is structured around the concept of the "commons," forming a strong thread which links various struggles against "enclosures" of all kinds, with emphasis on natural, indigenous, cultural, creative, digital, and the transdisciplinary commons. World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media is ideal to further the theoretical discussion for those undergraduate and graduate departments in cinema studies, media studies, arts and art history, communications, journalism, and new digital media programs at all levels.