Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.

Religion is set to be a major force in the twenty-first century. Here is a book that tells us what the world's leading scholars have to say about this. Issues of conflict and peace, ethical questions concerning the use of advanced technology, explanations of the global religious revival, and the role of women in religious leadership, as well as questions about how to study religion, are all discussed. It is a volume that ranges exceptionally widely, in terms of the themes discussed, the variety of disciplines, and the participation of international scholars debating with each other. One section of the book is devoted to Japanese scholarship concerning the world's major religions. Contributors include: Talal Asad, Chin Hong Chung, Armin Geertz, Gerrie ter Haar, Rosalind Hackett, Eiko Hanaoka, Shōtō Hase, Mark Juergensmeyer, Noriko Kawahashi, Kiyotaka Kimura, Ursula King, Pratap Kumar, William Lafleur, Sylvia Marcos, Tomoko Masuzawa, Ebrahim Moosa, Kōjirō Nakamura, Vasudha Narayanan, Haruko Okano, Suwanna Satha-Anand, Susumu Shimazono, Noriyoshi Tamaru, Masakazu Tanaka, Hiroshi Tsuchiya, Yoshio Tsuruoka, Manabu Watanabe, and Pablo Wright.

Presents entries A to L of a two-volume encyclopedia discussing religion around the globe, including biographies, concepts and theories, places, social issues, movements, texts, and traditions.

Although impotence may be the most widely recognized manifestation of male sexual dysfunction, many other forms of sexual disorders do not involve the erectile mechanism, from deficiencies of desire to disturbances in ejaculatory function to the failure of detumescence. With such a myriad-and often co-existing-number of disorders, the successful tr

Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis comprises 41 chapters that push for a new way of conducting the study of religion, thereby, transforming the discipline into a genuine science of religion. The recent resurgence of evolutionary approaches on culture and the increasing acknowledgement in the natural and social sciences of culture’s and religion’s evolutionary importance calls for a novel epistemological and theoretical framework for studying these two areas. The chapters explore how a new scholarly synthesis, founded on the triadic space constituted by evolution, cognition, cultural and ecological environment, may develop. Different perspectives and themes relating to this overarching topic are taken up with a main focus on either evolution, cognition, and/or the history of religion.

Latina/os are currently the largest minority population in the United States. They are also one of the fastest growing. Yet, we have very limited research and understanding of their sexualities. Instead, stereotypical images flourish even though scholars have challenged the validity and narrowness of these images and the lack of attention to the larger social context. Gathering the latest empirical work in the social and behavioral sciences, this reader offers us a critical lens through which to understand these images and the social context framing Latina/os and their sexualities. Situated at the juncture of Latina/o studies and sexualities studies, Latina/o Sexualities provides a single resource that addresses the current state of knowledge from a multidisciplinary perspective. Contributors synthesize and critique the literature and carve a separate space where issues of Latina/o sexualities can be explored given the limitations of prevalent research models. This work compels the current wave in sexuality studies to be more inclusive of ethnic minorities and sets an agenda that policy makers and researchers will find invaluable.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Tensions between claims for women’s equality and the rights of sexual minorities on one side and the claims of religions on the other side are well-documented across all major religions and regions. It is also well recognized in feminist scholarship that gender identities and ethno-religious identities work together in complex ways that are often exploited by dominant groups. Hence, a more comprehensive understanding of the changing role and influence of religion in the public sphere more widely requires complex, multidisciplinary and comparative gender analyses. Most recent discussion on these matters, however, especially in Europe, has focused primarily on the perceived subordinate status of Muslim women. These debates are a reminder of the deep interrelation of questions of gender, identity, human rights and religious freedom more generally. The relatively narrow (albeit important) purview of such discussions so far, however, underscores the need to extend the horizon of enquiry vis-à-vis religion, gender and the public sphere beyond the binary of ‘Islam versus the West’. Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere moves gender from the periphery to the centre of contemporary debates about the role of religion in public and political life. It offers a timely, multidisciplinary collection of gender-focused essays that address an array of challenges arising from the changing role and influence of religious organisations, identities, actors and values in the public sphere in contemporary multicultural and democratic societies.

Presenting various perspectives in human sexuality, this work includes data from 44 nations. It shows numerical figures for incidences of pregnancies, births and abortions.

The Body in Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectives surveys influential ways in which the body is imagined and deployed in religious practices and beliefs across the globe. Filling the gap for an up-to-date and comparative approach to theories and practices of the body in religion, this book explores the cultural influences on embodiment and their implications for religious institutions and spirituality. Examples are drawn from religions such as Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shintoism, Paganism, Aboriginal, African, and Native American religions, in addition to the five major religions of the world. Topics covered include: - Gender and sexuality - Female modesty and dress codes - Circumcision and menstruation rituals - God language and erotic desire - Death, dying, and burial rites - Disciplining the body through prayer, yoga, and meditation - Feasting and fasting rituals Illustrated throughout with over 60 images, The Body in Religion is designed for course use in religious studies as well as interdisciplinary courses across the humanities and the social sciences. Further online resources include a sample syllabus.