Religious Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)

ritual and regeneration. While segregated apart from society in the bush or for- est, the ordeals refer to bodily operations per ...

ritual The centrality of ritual for religion is argued by turn of the century scholars such as William Robertson Smith (1846–189 ...

ritual their actions meaning. Ritual also helps to relate the sacred narrative. In sharp contrast to Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, ...

ritual already been established; (2) formality, which suggests adherence to form in the sense of punctilious and repetitive beha ...

sacraments Most of the theorists would agree that ritual is a way of communicat- ing with the divine for the purpose of changing ...

sacraments effective because of divine power. This implies that the effect of the sacraments is not dependent upon the worth of ...

sacraments recruits on the hand or forearm with an abbreviation of the name of the general. Within the context of baptism, it si ...

sacred act is symbolic of the bride’s devotion and fidelity to her husband. Since females are excluded from the normal initiatio ...

sacred Examples of objects considered sacred in other cultures do not fully support Eliade’s definition of the sacred. Among Nat ...

sacrifice sacred and profane more as a continuum. A notion such as pavitra is closer in meaning to physical cleanliness and puri ...

sacrifice protects a society by ensuring that a society avoids becoming its own victim. Sacrifice operates to replenish the food ...

saint actual killing of the victim by cutting its throat, cutting its chest open, decapitation, or suffocating it as in the anci ...

saint century recognized as an early saint because of his martyrdom. Those individuals who suffer but do not die for their faith ...

saint context does not free them from becoming stereotypical descriptions of sacred persons. It is thus difficult to discern a c ...

salvation SALVATION The concept is rooted in the Latin term salus (sound, safe). This ubiqui- tous religious concept presupposes ...

scripture SCRIPTURE This concept is derived from the Latin scripto (“I write”) to refer to texts in various world religions. Man ...

scripture In contrast to Paul’s letters, the Gospels are more narratives and inter- pretations of the life and teachings of Jesu ...

scripture them by memory, and pass on the hymns by means of oral transmission before being written. The divinely revealed origin ...

sects originate with a historical person as in the case of Buddhism, they are eventually accepted as authoritative by the respec ...

secularization modes of behavior with worldly ways of thinking and behaving. During this process, the significance of religion i ...