New edited volume in honor of Armin W. Geertz

Brill has published a new edited volume Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis.

4 Jan 2019

Intended as a Festschrift for Armin W. Geertz, this joint project provides a new synthesis of the study of religion, advocating the need to integrate three approaches, namely the evolutionary, the cognitive and the historical, into a single stream. Among the 41 chapters coming from the world's leading experts on these approaches, you will also find chapters by Radek Kundt (Making Evolutionary Science of Religion and Integral Part of Cognitive Science of Religion) and Eva Kundtová Klocová (Experimenting with Cognitive Historiography). Many thanks to all editors for their relentless efforts!

13 Aug

Pain and suffering as part of religious life: The Mauritian Thaipusam kavadi

In a pop-science article published in Dingir, E. Kundtová Klocová discusses the various socio-cultural aspects of the Thaipusam Kavadi ritual as practiced in Mauritius.
2 Aug

Jana Nenadalová defended her dissertation thesis

Religious experiences can be found across many cultures in various forms. Nevertheless, we can trace their underlying and potentially universal factors. In her thesis, Jana asks whether these factors include sensory deprivation, social seclusion, and the influence of authority. She further explores how these factors manifest in the context of experience. Her research is based on the predictive processing theory, assuming that our bodies and minds constantly predict ongoing events and that under the influence of studied factors, these predictions – including those learned from religion – can dominate over sensory perceptions.
2 Aug

Emotional contagion in a collective ritual – a study by LEVYNA & colleagues

In a field-study conducted among Hindu-Mauritians published in the American Journal of Human Biology, D. Xygalatas, M. Lang, P. Maňo, J. Krátký and R. Fischer discovered that individuals dynamically attune their affective states to one another in a collective religious ritual, implying that they adjust their emotional states to align with the group.
25 Jun

Adverse effects of meditation – a new paper by LEVYNA & colleagues

In a single-group observational study published in the Journal of Religion and Health, S. Kotherová with J. Cigán and colleagues showed that one-fifth of their Samadhi meditation participants (first timers) got post-meditation nausea symptoms – this result indicates that meditation can cause adverse effects in some practitioners.

All articles

New edited volume in honor of Armin W. Geertz

More articles

Pain and suffering as part of religious life: The Mauritian Thaipusam kavadi

Jana Nenadalová defended her dissertation thesis

Emotional contagion in a collective ritual – a study by LEVYNA & colleagues

Adverse effects of meditation – a new paper by LEVYNA & colleagues