Does the sacred make a difference? Category formation in comparative religion

When taken at face value, the sacred seems to be an unproblematic concept. Times, places, persons, animals and objects are classified as `sacred', because they have or have had a religious or spiritual significance for people in specific historical and social contexts. Religious traditions and their systems of signification are taken to explain why people have set aside specific things and considered them qualitatively different from other things. Deeming something as sacred means that it is disconnected from the category in social life in which similar things are classified and bestowed with special meaning and value. Sacredness of an object means that it stands in direct relationship to specific power-laden super-human entity by which members in a given culture mirror their self-consciousness or some aspects of it. A sanctuary for instance is a place that is set apart from the rest of the social space, because it is valued as a point of contact between man and the super-human agent worshipped by the local community

The impact of the Reformation on the formation of mentality and the moral landscape in the Nordic countries

Along with the Lutheran world the Nordic countries celebrated the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation on 31st October 2017. In this article I shall examine the impact of Luther’s reform on the formation of mentality and the moral landscape in the Nordic countries. Special reference is made to the impact of Lutheranism on the indigenous Sámi culture, a topic which has been explored extensively by Håkan Rydving, the expert in Sámi language and religion

Rethinking 'Religious' Cognition: The Eliadean Notion of the Sacred in the light of the Legacy of Uno Harva

The article discusses methodological similarities and differences between Uno Harva and Mircea Eliade, with the objective of reassessing the value of their comparativist programs for the study of religion in general and of 'religious' cognition in particular. The Finnish scholar Uno Holmberg-Harva (1882-1949) was a predecessor to Eliade as a scholar of Asian and European religious history. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the academic study of religion was still maturing in Europe, Harva expanded considerably the field of the ethnological study of religion with his religio-phenomenological monographs Der Baum des Lebens (1922), Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology (1927) and Die Religiösen Vorstellungen der Altaischen Völker (1938). Harva was a towering figure in Finnish scholarship. Originally a Protestant theologian and Lutheran minister, he resigned from his ecclesiastical position to become a historian of religion, field ethnographer, ethnosociologist and folklorist under the tutelage of Edward Westermarck and Kaarle Krohn. Harva's influence on the work of Eliade has been almost entirely ignorant by historiographers of Religious Studies

Space, Body, and the Notion of Boundary: A Category-Theoretical Approach to Religion

In the article the issue of sacrality is explored from the points of view of cultural anthropology and cognitive science of religion. Culture-specific contents of meaning bestowed on the notion of "sacred" are not approached as religious representations in which some theologically defined agent, metaphysical entity or otherworldly level of existence is believed to manifest itself to human beings. Instead, various attributions of sacrality are explored as representations of the general mental capacity of human beings to set apart places and sites in specific locations and points of terrain in local topography in order to mark ritual spaces and establish rules of conduct for their maintenance as well as for specific social valus and categorizations on which the inviolability of behavioral norms is based

Making space for the 'post-secular' in religious studies

Making space for the "post-secular" in religious studies' is based on the words of welcome on 15 June 2011.

The sacredness of the self, of society and of the human body: the case of a Finnish transgender pastor Marja-Sisko Aalto

In 2008 the change of sex of a Finnish transgender pastor attracted media attention to Lutheran Christianity on a worldwide scale, which compared to other religious traditions seldom makes it to the world news. This article­ discusses the sex reassignment undergone by Marja-Sisko Aalto, a Lutheran pastor from the town of Imatra, in south eastern Finland, who in 2008, at the age of 54, was transformed into a woman. First some remarks on the relation between religion and the body are made and terminological issues are discussed briefly. The second part of the article presents Aalto's life story based on the author's interview with her in April 2010. In the last section the author discusses the Finnish cognitive scholar Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s reflection on folk biology as an explanation for making sense of the public image regarding a priest’s gender. The article concludes by looking at Marja-Sisko Aalto’s case from the perspective of marking boundaries between the categories of the self, the society and the human body.

A reformáció hatásai a gondolkodásmód és erkölcs kialakulására a skandináv térség országaiban

A reformáció hatásai a gondolkodásmód és erkölcs kialakulására a skandináv térség országaiba