The relationship between religion and dance is as old as humankind. Contemporary methods for studying this relationship date back a century. The difference between these two time frames is significant: scholars are still developing theories and methods capable of illuminating this vast history that take account of their limited place within it. A History of Theory and Method in the Study of Religion and Dance takes on a primary challenge of doing so: overcoming a conceptual dichotomy between “religion” and “dance” forged in the colonial era that justified western Christian hostility towards dance traditions across six continents over six centuries. Beginning with its enlightenment roots, LaMothe narrates a selective history of this dichotomy, revealing its ongoing work in separating dance studies from religious studies. Turning to the Bushmen of the African Kalahari, LaMothe introduces an ecokinetic approach that provides scholars with conceptual resources for mapping the generative interdependence of phenomena that appear as “dance” and/or “religion.”

Dance plays an important role in many religious traditions, in rites of passage, processions, healing rituals or festivals. But it is also controversial, especially in Christianity. Colonial European Christian discourses tend to separate dance from religion(s) and spirituality. This volume explores dance as "Third Space", following Homi Bhabha's postcolonial metaphor. The "Inter-Dance approach" combines interdisciplinary theoretical considerations with case studies. International experts examine dance controversies and discourses from the early church to World Christianity, as well as in Hasidic Judaism, Greek mysteries, Islamic Sufism, West African Togolese religions, and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda. Christian dance theologies are unfolded and the boundary-crossing potential of dance in interreligious and intercultural encounters is explored. The volume breaks new ground in how dance as ephemeral performative art, embodied thought and gendered discourse can transform studies of religion.

Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”

Economics, as intellectual discourse, is not a settled body of principles; it is a heterogeneous discipline with numerous traditions, each based on a cluster of theories. Ekelund and Hebert, experienced researchers and educators, balance continuity and consensus in the evolution of economic theory with alternative points of view about the nature, scope, and method of economic inquiry. Their creative approach gives readers a feel for the thought processes of the great minds in economics and underscores key ideas impacting contemporary thought and practice. Building on the solid foundation of previous editions, the fifth edition of A History of Economic Theory and Method presents an updated and expanded examination of the essential theoretical elements of an economy and the numerous institutions that affect market behavior, beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending with the late twentieth century. It features an in-depth interpretation of the transition from classical to neoclassical economic thought, exposes some of the dissident voices raised against classical economic orthodoxy, discusses game theory, takes a close look at the origins of traditional microeconomics, avoids highly technical or graphically complicated material, and examines the advantages and disadvantages of economics achieving a scientific statusapplying mathematical and statistical techniques in economic inquiry. Chapters contain boxed material that enrich touchstone ideas or mark procedural disagreements and alternative approaches to economics.

Annually published since 1930, the International Bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. The IBOHS is thus currently the only continuous bibliography of its kind covering such a broad period of time, spectrum of subjects and geographical range. The works are arranged systematically according to period, region or historical discipline, and alphabetically according to authors names or, in the case of anonymous works, by the characteristic main title word. The bibliography contains a geographical index and indexes of persons and authors.

In Religion and the Arts: History and Method, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona presents an overview of the 19th century origins of this discrete field of study and its methodological journey to the present-day through issues of repatriation, museum exhibitions, and globalization. Apostolos-Cappadona suggests that the fluidity and flexibility of the study of religion and the arts has expanded like an umbrella since the 1970s - and the understanding that art was simply a visual exegesis of texts - to now support the study of material, popular, and visual culture, as well as gender. She also delivers a careful analysis of the evolution of thought from traditional iconographies to the transformations once scholars were influenced by response theory and challenged by globalization and technology. Religion and the Arts: History and Method offers an indispensable introduction to the questions and perspectives essential to the study of this field.

This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance. In the first part, LaMothe investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, LaMothe traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of religion, on the one hand, and theology, on the other.In the second part, LaMothe revives the work of theologian, phenomenologist, and historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw for help in interpreting how dancing can serve as a medium of religious experience and expression. In so doing, LaMothe opens new perspectives on the role of bodily being in religious life, and on the place of theology in the study of religio

Gerardus van der Leeuw was one of the first to attempt a rapprochement between theology and the arts, and his influence continues to be felt in what is now a burgeoning field. Sacred and Profane is the fullest expression of his pursuit of a theological aesthetics, surveying religion's relationship to all the arts -- dance, drama, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. This edition makes this seminal work, first published in Dutch in 1932, newly available. A new foreword by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona analyzes the continuing relevance of van der Leeuw's thought. Van der Leeuw's impassioned and brilliant investigation of the relationship between the holy and the beautiful is founded upon the conviction that for too long the religious have failed to seriously contemplate the beautiful, associating it as they do with the kingdom of sensuality and impermanence. Similarly it has been alien to literati and aesthetes to reflect upon the holy, for they choose to consider this physical world to be permanent, and therefore to be glorified through beauty alone. In truth, as van der Leeuw undertakes to show in Sacred and Profane Beauty, the holy has never been absent from the arts, and the arts have never been unresponsive to the holy. Whether one considers the Homeric epics, the dancing Sivas and Vedic poems, the sacred wall paintings of ancient Egypt, the primitive mask, or the range of sacred arts developed out of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, primordial creation in the arts was always directed toward the symbolization and interpretation of the holy. The fact that in our day this original connection is obscured and the artistic impulse is more generally regarded as wholly individualistic and autonomous does not contradict van der Leeuw's thesis; indeed, the breakdown of the unity of the holy and the arts is central to his thesis. Van der Leeuw was the rare thinker who combined profundity of insight, grace of style, and a willingness to take daring intellectual chances. In Sacred and Profane, he describes each of the arts in its original unity with the religious and then analyzes its historical disjunction and alienation. After a penetrating investigation of the structural elements within the arts which illumines a crucial dimension of the religious experience, van der Leeuw points toward the reemergence of an appropriate theological aesthetics on which a reunification of the arts could be founded.