This article examines the emergence of a range of new spiritual practices reshaping traditional religious expressions within Nordic Lutheran churches over the last fifty years. These holistic practices, which include meditation, yoga, sacred dance, and other creative forms of expression, integrate influences from Eastern traditions, folk religiosity including New Age practices, and secular...
Contemporary spiritual festivals attract heterogeneous crowds of adherents of emergent religions, practitioners and aficionados of fringe knowledge, self-seekers, and many others. Focusing on the ethnographic context of Estonia, this paper approaches such festivals as occasions of self-transformation, where festival participants collectively engage in various practices that encourage them to...
In this essay the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the concept ‘religion’ is analysed in relation to how it was applied to the so-called shamanism of the indigenous peoples of the Soviet North. The point of departure is the correspondence between the head of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults in the Soviet Far East and his superior in Moscow. Further, the legal consequences of the...
In this essay the author explores the thesis that music is by its nature religious, or rather, that it has qualities that correspond well with what religion, in a broad sense, aspires to be. Four musical qualities are explored: timbre, the tonal system of western music, the time relations within the tonal network, and the non-referential nature of music. These qualities are linked to the...
The dominant approach to the study of religion known as the phenomenology of religion's core assumption was that underlying the multiplicity of historical and geographically dispersed religions was an ultimately metaphysical, trans-historical substratum, called 'man', Geist, or 'consciousness'. This transhistorical substratum is an expressive agent with a uniform, essential nature. By reading...