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This chapter advocates applying a communication theoretical model to the study of religion. This proceeds by observing the procedure of religious communication, the ways in which this communication reflects upon and describes itself, and the means by which it sets itself apart from other kinds of communication. While there is no such thing as religion per se, the specific feature of religious communication consists in ultimately coping with contingency on the basis of the distinction between immanence and transcendence. Religious semantics and the institutional framework of religious communication should be analytically distinguished and synthetically related to each other. Inner and outer boundaries of religious communication should also be distinguished. Religious communication constitutes a self-referential societal system and also differentiates itself (and is distinguished) from other forms of communication such as politics, economics, science, and the arts. Differentiation is the basis for interaction between various forms of communication including religion.

This chapter investigates one of the most powerful mechanisms by which groups may be formed, inspired, and coordinated—ritual—which may be defined as normative behavior with an irretrievably opaque causal structure. The divergent modes of religiosity (DMR) theory is applied to armed groups engaged in civil conflicts, some of which explicitly incorporate “religious” traditions while others vehemently repudiate supernatural beliefs of any kind. It is argued that the DMR theory can be extended to explain recurrent features of ritual traditions which lack many or all beliefs typically marked “religious.” Unlike many religions, rebel groups tend to display the predictions of only one mode, although this may be an effect of small sample size. It is believed that the DMR theory can possibly clarify broad patterns in intergroup violence and the dynamics of contemporary civil wars.

Stories and images from the Christian Apocrypha have appeared in popular, or ‘non-ecclesiastical’, settings since the Middle Ages when the various collections of lives of saints, books of hours, mystery plays, and incunabula repurposed apocryphal traditions for devotional purposes. Examples of such use have increased exponentially over the last century, in music (Gustav Holst’s ‘Hymn of Jesus’, Tori Amos’s ‘Original Sinsuality’), fiction (Thomas B. Costain’s The Silver Chalice, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code), television (the ‘Hollywood A.D.’ episode of The X-Files, the Banned from the Bible documentaries), and film (Rupert Wainwright’s Stigmata, Abel Ferrara’s Mary). For the most part, these works, though entertaining, misrepresent and sensationalize the content of the texts, but their value lies not in what they say about ancient texts and traditions but in what they say about the interests and anxieties of their creators and audiences.

Religion often has attended to emotion as a part of religious experience. While that has enhanced theological depth and precision, it also has framed a highly psychologized view of emotion in religion. Historical scholarship of religious practice has prompted other views of emotion, shifting attention from religious experience to culturally derived emotional frameworks. Researchers have also emphasized the cognitive element in emotion, and the biological superstructures of emotional life. Research has translated to a range of investigative projects, some blending discussion of cognition, feeling, and biology with analysis of social life and the role of culture in emotional performances in religious settings. Current research on emotion has revolved around a fairly standard listing of familiar emotions. It may be, however, that emotions or emotional clusters in religion are not easily placed on such lists. The subfield should not shy from studying emotions that seem strange.

‘Religious experience’ is a concept attributed to a wide variety of phenomena, including mystical states, altered states of consciousness, and spirit possessions; theorists variously attribute the causes of experience to divine sources, social or cultural prompting, or natural, biological processes. Classic theorists employed a normative paradigm that authorizes some experiences as superior to others, and often linked their account of experience with an evolutionary theory of religion. These normative approaches have been called into question by contemporary theorists who have exposed the normative baggage in the classic works, baggage often tied to European colonialism or assumptions of Christian superiority. Contemporary theorists offer more critical, analytical paradigms for analyzing special experiences cross-culturally without reifying them or presuming their universality. These theorists not only permit but encourage some reductionist theorizing of experience. However, even these more analytical paradigms are subject to a number of possible criticisms.

The first part of the chapter, ‘Sources’, consists of an overview of various theological accounts of families, drawn from Roman Catholic official teaching, from the Protestant Family, Religion, and Culture project, and from a range of other sources. The second part, ‘Themes’, analyses and compares the sources, allowing standard and contested issues to surface. The issues include the analogy between divine and human persons: the designation of families as domestic churches; whether theology stigmatizes ‘non-traditional’ families; the place of equal-regard love in families and the place of kin within the Kingdom of God; the claim that the family of church is prior to the family unit; the idea of kin altruism; and different approaches to the problem of family form. Finally the Trinitarian framework for thinking about families, and the method and key ideas of the Family, Religion and Culture are endorsed as a basis for future theological thinking about families.

This article discusses the relationship between cinema and atheism, and draws out some of the analogies used to describe the role of cinema in modernity (particularly similarities between Plato’s cave and the cinema experience and images of cinema as ‘dream-like’). It examines the work of Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov in particular, and looks at his use of anti-religious and atheist themes. The article suggests that while little attention has been paid to the topic of cinema and atheism, there is a rich seam of thinking to be mined here, and there exist unresolved questions about the ‘religious’ dimensions of cinema itself that go far beyond the force of the odd parodic or documentary atheist film.

In the cinematic world, the representation of the Holocaust began with the Third Reich's propaganda films and the footage taken by the Allies at liberated concentration camps. In the early postwar period, European filmmakers exaggerated resistance against Nazi Germany's policies and obscured the specificity of Jewish victimization, while Hollywood avoided the topic, allegedly because it was too depressing and parochial. The NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978) and Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985) shattered these patterns, and Schindler's List (1993) and Life Is Beautiful (1997) stimulated a second round of Holocaust-related cinema and scholarship on it, along with considerable controversy. This article shows that studies of Holocaust films made in particular nations have been a staple of research in the field, but that scholarship has shifted since 2000 toward analysis of the cinematic qualities of Holocaust-related film, the impact of globalization, comparisons with portrayals of other genocides, and the use of film in Holocaust education.

This article shows that German government offices and private diarists and correspondents kept widely scattered but extensive records of the unfolding of the ‘Final Solution’. Anti-Jewish legislation ensured that the paper trails of persecution ran to the far corners of the German bureaucracy. Moreover, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish actions at the local and national level commemorated their deeds, in effect preparing initial drafts for a victorious history of the destruction of Jewish life. Private diaries and letters not only confirm the widespread knowledge that Germans came to share about the ‘Final Solution’, but also the process by which many of them came to endorse cruelty toward Jews.

This chapter discusses the Jewish approach to business ethics. It first identifies several fundamental principles of Jewish business ethics, and then applies them to several common issues in business ethics: fraud, anti-competitive behaviour, theft (including theft of intellectual property), deception, kick-backs, and contract negotiation and interpretation. Next, the chapter discusses a number of concrete examples where Jewish sources have much to tell us about how to conduct business morally. It is shown that the Jewish approach to business ethics does not impose one-sided support for any particular group (employers vs. employees, individuals vs. society), but rather is an attempt to find a nuanced balance between competing interests so that the final conclusion represents a solution recognized as just.

This article argues that the Holocaust not only has become a mainstay of Jewish culture but also has engendered an array of cultural practices across the spectrum of Jewish ideological and geographical diversity. At the same time, the subject has prompted debates over the nature — or even the possibility — of ‘proper’ Holocaust remembrance. Jewish culture is engaged in forging new, definitional narratives of Jewish experience that respond to the Holocaust, and in establishing new cultural practices of Holocaust remembrance. Some of these rest on precedents for Jewish responses to calamity and others on the influence of new authorities, notably Holocaust survivors. Implicated in this discovery process are new forms of engagement between Jews and other religious and national groups, especially as Jews consider the implications of the wide embrace of Holocaust remembrance beyond their own communities, where it often figures as a master moral paradigm.

This article describes folklore as a unique form of cultural creativity and expression and discusses Jewish folklore through the ages and the scholarship of Jewish folklore. Folklore is a form of creativity and expression that exists in all the cultures we know. It is characterized by its qualities of collectivity and tradition, by its oral mode of expression, and usually by anonymity. Folklore is created and transmitted among individuals and groups through all the audio-visual interpersonal channels of communication. The discussion offers remarks on the field of folkloristics, to facilitate the application of accepted general terminology to the survey of Jewish folklore. The collective aspect of folklore is expressed both in the immediate interaction established between performer and audience, and in the concept of authority and ownership of the work, that is considered as belonging to the group and not an individual.