In modern societies, attention to human beings’ complex needs has been largely divided into areas of specialization, with our bodies assigned to “medicine” (generally interpreted to mean biomedicine), our minds and emotions in the realm of “psychology,” and our souls entrusted to “religion” (or more recently, “spirituality”). Of course, lived practices often frustrate such differentiation, and recent developments like holistic medicine and integrative medicine try to attend to the health of individuals as whole beings. Holistic medicine tends to make space for the overlapping fields of “spiritual therapies” and “energy medicine,” whose promoters tend to posit the existence of a benevolent transpersonal force that governs human health. Practitioners frame their practices as a means to return to an ancient holism that predates the modern differentiation of human health into separate biochemical, psychosocial, and spiritual realms.
In this talk I will focus on the example of Reiki, often considered a paradigmatic form of spiritual healing and/or energy medicine, and consider how its practitioners and promoters have ambivalently located Reiki vis-à-vis the categories of religion and medicine. Drawing on examples from Reiki history as well as current efforts by practitioners to introduce Reiki to hospitals while also resisting state regulation, I will consider the challenges to secularity (and secularism) posed by appeals to a “recuperative middle” that predates the divide between religion and medicine.
Thousands of peasant protests took place in early modern Japan (1603–1868), and many of them featured protest leaders executed by the feudal government for resorting to illegal protest tactics, such as bypassing legal channels of appeal and engaging in disruptive and at times destructive behaviors. Following the executions, surviving community members deified these “protest martyrs” for having made the ultimate sacrifice in exchange for bringing economic relief to their fellow villagers, often by forcing the government to rescind unpopular taxes and other fiscal measures. Shrines dedicated to protest martyrs mostly remained localized institutions, known only to their immediate rural communities. I argue, however, that the emergence of these “martyr shrines” was a widespread phenomenon in early modern Japan, a new religious current largely ignored in traditional historiographies of Japanese religions. In this presentation, I will examine case studies from three different regions of Japan (the Imabari, Karatsu, and Tsu domains) and highlight the ways in which religion, protest, and rural livelihood intersected in early modern Japan.
A presentation by Levi McLaughlin of North Carolina State University.
Join us for an event featuring Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm of Williams College.
FESTIVAL OF SCHOLARS - “Hard to Digest” Panel
Santa Muerte is a folk saint in Mexico with origins in the old religion of the Aztecs that has an increasingly growing following not only in Latin America and the United States among Latinx populations, but also in the broader occult milieu. She is known as the patron saint of criminals or narcos, as a large portion of her devotees are involved in gangs, drug trafficking, and prostitution, however that is not the full demographics of her following. This paper examines why the cult of Santa Muerte is considered a “bad” and “dangerous” religion. Jason Josephson’s work on heretical anthropology, Ann Tave’s “specialness” theory, cult theory, and new religious movement theory is employed to gain deeper insights on the factors surrounding the labels attached to Santa Muerte and her followers. The Catholic Church claims that she is satanic and the Mexican government actively targets her followers and associates their crimes to her. To her followers she is a religious figure that helps them in a time of need, especially to those who are constantly surrounded by violence and death. By looking at Santa Muerte from these three different perspectives we can see that she is ultimately labeled a bad religion because of the challenge she poses the steadily declining Catholic population in Mexico.
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