animals in culture and religion

Particularly noteworthy here is work by Richard Bauckman, Charles Camosy, Stephen Clark, David Clough, Celia Deane-Drummond, David Grumett, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Andrew Linzey, Jay McDaniels, Rachel Muers, Christopher Southgate, and Stephen Webb. How did human–animal relationships contribute to the development of human religion? Praise poems traditionally relate the heroic adventures of ancestors or political leaders. What Is an Animal? Working at the intersection of the history of religions and animal studies, this essay provides grounding in the subfield of “animals and religion,” as well as references to a wide range of work on the study of animals. Religious beliefs and customs vary immensely throughout the country, particularly in rural areas where … (81) (5) Without trying to find a single “origin” of religion, a task the study of religion has largely, and wisely, abandoned, we can productively think about what the influential German scholar of classical religions, Walter Burkert, calls “formative antecedents.” Burkert and other theorists, including the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade,61 arguably the single most influential theorist of religion in the US context, have speculated on one such antecedent: a tension created by, on the one hand, the human capacity for empathy with animal lives and sufferings—a capacity that can be sharpened in the process of learning to hunt animals or tend to their needs in husbandry—and, on the other hand, the social necessity or practical advantages of harming or killing animals. Sacred animals of Hinduism. It is complicated. Basel: n.p.Find this resource: Milgrom, Jacob. (60) New York: Routledge.Find this resource: Schaefer, Donovan O. “Animals.” In Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. 2008. This is due to the large number positive qualities possessed by elephants. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. Animals, the argument goes, press upon the conscience and stir our emotions in a way that plants, rivers, and so forth do far less frequently. Despite serious limitations to Meuli’s theorization, as one recent critic of Meuli explains, he “successfully showed that the Greeks shared with hunting cultures the anxiety and fear aroused by the killing of animals … for many notable features of the Greek ritual seem to be concerned … with reverence for the animal victim and awe before the act of slaughter.”67, Similar indicators of discomfort with killing are found in other sacrificial complexes all over the world, including the ancient Israelite sacrifices depicted in the Bible.68 As novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has pointed out, “the myth of animal consent” is alive and well in contemporary discourse where, Foer speculates, it is often used to deflect ethical questions about animal suffering in agriculture.69 James Serpell has helpfully described such phenomena as examples of a virtually culturally universal “zoo-ocentric sympathy.”70. New York: Oxford University Press.Find this resource: Waldau, Paul. (61) 1991. New York: Columbia University Press.Find this resource: Burkert, Walter. Feminist studies of religion became necessary not because women and the feminine lacked discussion by scholars, but because their discussion was marred by false assumptions, misogyny, and a tendency to render women absent as women in order to discuss other concerns.30 Scholarship on animals and religion must overcome similar false assumptions, misothery (hatred of animals),31 and a tendency to forget actual animals.32 Thus, in animals and religion scholarship today, if we wish to discuss traditions that imagine Jesus as the Lamb of God, we need attend not only to theology but to actual sheep. Roman Catholicism is the major religion in Brazil, with two-thirds of the population affiliated with the religion. In many ways this was an accurate description because the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West had shaped the dynamics of global affairs for half a century. : Approaches from Science, Religion, Folklore, Literature, and Art. Hinduism abounds with stories of sacred animals as a divine being in animal form or with animal features. The basic idea behind sacrificing an animal and presenting it to the Gods is a way to please them or thank them for their kindness. So strong was the national reaction to heart-wrenching scenes of families, usually people of color, forced to abandon their nonhuman members,52 that formal evacuation procedures were changed so that such a situation would not be repeated. Today scholars simply insist that we be certain not to render actual animals absent28 when we address how they have become “good to eat and also good to think with, as Plutrach observed some centuries before Levi-Strauss.”29. However, scholars in the subfield of animals and religion argue that we can rarely adequately understand the religious charge of animals by reflection on them only as a part of nature at large. 1995. Religion and Culture are two terms that human beings sometimes are unable to decipher. Religious and spiritual leaders of the six largest religions worldwide (18 branches) were contacted. Albany: State University of New York Press.Find this resource: Chris, Cynthia. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, x, 362. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/if-peas-can-talk-should-we-eat-them/.Find this resource: Marder, Michael. Some Notes on Animal Symbolism in African Religion and Culture. “Construction of Animals in Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” In New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Ultimately, critical reflection on this binary reveals that by privileging the “world religions” for study in our educational system, we have given an essentially lopsided vision of human religious expression, promoting the false notion that as humans “evolve” their religious expression ceases to be concerned with animals as religious actors in a primary way and articulates humans as radically different than the rest of the biotic world. 2007. Thus, the vibrant subfield inquiring into animals and religion that has emerged in recent decades in both secular religious studies and Christian theology raises an astonishing range of questions. 1996. While admitting that the reconstruction of these primal moments is inescapably speculative, Burkert insists that “we are still entitled to assume a ‘shock of killing,’ a mixture of triumph and anxiety, a catharsis of destructive impulses and the readiness to make amends”65—experiences that became drivers of religious formation. (28) There is no evidence that any non-human animals believe in God or gods, pray, worship, have any notion of metaphysics, create artifacts with ritual significance, or many other behaviours typical of human significance, or many other behaviours typical of human religion. Yves Bonnefoy. The Loss of a Pet. Animals in Stone: Indian mammals sculptured through time, Handbook of Oriental studies = Handbuch der Orientalistik Section 2, India. New York: Penguin.Find this resource: Seidenberg, David Mevorach. 1996. Jacob Kehinde Olupona. Such a definition, though, may distort the reality of human animals and our religions as much as the “lives of animals.”96 What is emerging today in the subfield of animals and religion may provide a more intuitive and productive mode of imagining religion, one in which the beings we call animals, the phenomena we deem religious, and even our own self conceptions will shift together. https://spiritualray.com/most-worshiped-animals-around-world (49) 2000. African American and African Studies Program, University of California at Davis, 467 Ken Hall, Davis, CA 95616 . See especially the work of Graham Harvey, e.g., Harvey 2006. Gil Anidjar, vi, 436. While animals have occupied a central position throughout Chinese history, especially in the form of slaughtered flesh and ritual offerings, it is currently unclear how animals were actually treated or what types of slaughter practices ended … Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Leiden: Brill.Find this resource: Melson, L. Gail. This volume assembles a truly interdisciplinary collection of contributions: some treat scriptural texts and some focus on art; some treat individual creatures (the snake, the horse, the crocodile), while others consider animals across the whole of a … 7 Religions That Hold Animals Sacred When you’re Buddhist, every day is meatless Monday. Ed. Plants, rather than being considered without sensibility, are considered one-sensed beings. (85) Daoism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Guides for the Perplexed. I and You. However, to study animals and religion properly, as Paul Waldau, an important theorist in the subfield, insists, is to explore how religions engage the “nearby biological individuals outside human communities.”27 Of course, these biological individuals are always in the process of also being transformed into symbols and ritual objects that stand for more than the animals themselves, and these are phenomena well worth exploring under the heading of animals and religion. Arguably, the most famous description is of the chimpanzee waterfall dance, Deep in the forest are some spectacular waterfalls. 1996. 1996. The Hopi people of North America perform annual snake dances to unite a pair of serpentine spirits and renew nature’s fertility. 2012. (56) On the concept of the absent referent, see Adams 2010. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. (2) Celia Deane-Drummon, David L. Clough, and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Find this resource: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton. Animal culture refers to cultural learning in non-human animals through socially transmitted behaviors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Find this resource: Shepard, Paul. (86) Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. The first stage of our research was a Summer School on Religion and Animal Protection at Stephen’s House, Oxford, on 21-23rd July 2014. Consider, for example, the simultaneous religious objectification of women, children, and domestic animals in the frequently repeated biblical phrase, “your wives, your children, and your livestock.”54 Feminist scholarship, especially the work of ecofeminist theologians like Carol J. Adams and Rosemary Radford Ruether, has demonstrated that in Western religious traditions and beyond, women and the feminine have been drawn closer to animals, and men and maleness accordingly have been placed closer to the divine. UK: Gracewing Publishing.Find this resource: Komjathy, Louis. Human sacrifice, where it existed, was always much more rare. 1946. 1983. New York: Columbia University Press.Find this resource: Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell. We hope this site will help people learn more and appreciate our animal friends. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pets-really-are-members-of-the-family-123604964.html.Find this resource: Crane, Jonathan, and Aaron Gross. All of these different observations—the diversity of ways that human communities draw the boundaries of “us humans,” the role of animals in human self-conception, the importance of animals in childhood development, the depth of mourning that animal death can evoke, and the way in which views of animals are knotted up with views of gender and race—make it hard to deny that our relationships with animals can be, as comparative religionist Kimberley Patton intones, “something charged, something holy, something that social construction can only partially interpret, but to which the religious imagination, with its unflinching reach into the depths of the human heart, must instead respond.”58 Whatever more particular understanding of religion one may adopt, there are compelling reasons to view human-animal relationships as possessing their own distinct religious charge.59 In sum, just as a diverse range of human-human relationships operate in a religious register, so, too, does a diverse range of human-nonhuman animal relationships. 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