A call for contributions to a three-volume set on Religion and Societies: To understand, experience and transform

A CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO

A three-volume set on Religion and Societies:
To understand, experience and transform.

The proposed three-volume set on Religion and Societies presents the most-current research and provides a comprehensive understanding of the field in one convenient location for students, researchers, professors, and practitioners across fields. In each volume 12 field-based essays (7,000-10,000 words) provides the reader with a thorough, detailed overview of the topic. If you are interested in contributing a chapter to one of these volumes, please send a provisional title, brief abstract (150 words) and biographical sketch (6 lines maximum) to the corresponding editor before15 July 2013.

Volume 1: Religiosity Confronts Misfortune and Suffering
Editor: Dr. Liam D. Murphy / lmurphy@saclink.csus.edu

This volume will include essays, based on ethnographic fieldwork, dealing with religion and other cosmologies as power-laden symbolic systems that ask questions related to and propose solutions to misfortune, suffering, and “the problem of evil”. Beyond this approach the volume seeks to identify religiosity and cosmological meaning in cultural formations as different as anime (Japanese animated production) and heavy metal music, American football and Alcoholics Anonymous. Doing so, this volume expands the meaning of “religion” as a category of knowledge, practice, belonging, and experience to encompass institutions and perspectives that have not conventionally been understood as “religious,” narrowly construed.

Vol. 2 Religion experienced through rituals and pilgrimage
Editor : Dr. Anastasia Panagakos / panagaa@crc.losrios.edu

This volume will focus on rituals and the settings (sacred places and spaces) in which they are enacted are in a sense the public face of religion, the means whereby humans define themselves as members of faith communities. Essays in this volume will focus on ritual experiences across a variety of religious practices and settings, including pilgrimage sites. Essays will exemplify a range of approaches to rites of passage such as puberty, wedding, or death rituals; the political implications of ritual and place making; the ritual connection between mind and body; individual agency and ritual experience; and the performativity of ritual in so-called secularized societies.

Vol. 3 Religion transforming societies
Editor: Dr. Jean-Guy A. Goulet / jgagoulet@gmail.com

This volume brings together essays that analyze the interplay between religious traditions and political life at both intra-national and international levels, as for instance in the Protestant and Catholic traditions in Northern Ireland, the rise of Falun Gong within China and beyond, or in the revival of indigenous activities within and across nation-states worldwide. In this vein, some essays will focus on the religious identities of migrants within societies that become more and more religiously pluralistic, inviting antagonistic responses from those who fear that their national identity is being undermined and/or bringing into light the tension between religions and secular / modern

Liam D. Murphy, PhD
Professor, Department of Anthropology
California State University, Sacramento
phone: (916) 278-6022
fax: (916) 278-6339