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Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash Diana Eck, Harvard theologian, explores the significance of visual perception in Hindu worship through the concept of Darsan in her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Darsan refers to the act of seeing or being seen by a deity through idols or sacred images in Hindu worship. Darsan itself […]

Photo by Alok Verma on Unsplash Jennifer Knust, an American Biblical scholar out of Duke, posits Esther and Jezebel as two archetypal female figures—models of the feminine—in her writings on female figures in the Bible. In the Bible, Esther and Jezebel were both queens. Esther was a Jewish woman who married the Persian King Ahasuerus and convinced

Photo by Ali Köse on Unsplash I’ve previously written on Durkheim’s take on the sacred versus the profane (click to read). Therein we explore Durkheim’s take on religion as a social institution and his views on life’s major delineations: the sacred and the profane. With that base in mind, we can go a level deeper and

Hey! Jon here. I’ve worked in self-publishing for a solid eight years now. I recently released this three-hour guide to the whole self-publishing process (useful whether you’re at $0 or $10,000 per month) on my youtube channel. Check it out here—I guarantee you’ll find it helpful 🙂 Now, here’s a quick rundown of my top tips,

Photo by Pauline Lu on Unsplash In a previous article where we detailed Jane Iwamura’s Oriental Monk figure, we touched on her work Virtual Orientalism. We’ll detail her core premise in this article. Essentially, Iwamura describes how Western media has simplified and “made palatable” complex Eastern spiritual religions, practices, and groups into highly idealized and simplified symbols.

Photo by Dibakar Roy on Unsplash The late anthropologist Jill Dubisch popularized purity as a driving theme across religious belief, social boundaries, and gender roles. We’ll explore purity as an inteprlay to the domains that Dubisch presents: pilgrimage, gender, physical, and social. Across these domains, she notes how purity is a requisite to many pilgrims across many

Photo by Martijn Vonk on Unsplash French Sociologist Émile Durkheim posited the sacred and the profane as two distinct aspects of human life which play into his idea of religion as a social institution. Let’s break it down. Durkheim first defines the “sacred” as things which are set apart from everyday life considered powerful, holy, or deserving

Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash Binary structures in myth were popularized by British anthropologist Edmund Leach and detail how core binary oppositions are mediated via mythology. Let’s break that down. (I’ve also written articles specifically on binary oppositions and mediation — check the article list link at the bottom to access those!). He first introduces the notion of binary

Photo by Rodrigo Curi on Unsplash Binary Oppositions refer to implicit, at-odds facets of the human condition that individuals or society struggles with. Here are a few binary oppositions: Life and DeathOrder and ChaosIndividual Responsibility versus Social Responsibility There is no “in-between” life and death — there is simply life or there is death, and existing in one of these

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash Scholar John Bartkowski addresses Biblical Literalism in his sociological works on religion. Biblical literalism speaks to modern-day individuals and religious groups interpreting the Bible as being literal, inerrant word of God; this means that every single passage is understood to be factually and historically accurate. This contrasts any metaphorical, historical-critical,