Contextualization, Adaptation, and Syncretism

Intercultural Communication in Changing Religious Milieus

Summer Semester 2023
Prof. Dr. Nathan Gibson

These slides

https://23interkulturelle.pages.gwdg.de/7-slides

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Course Overview

Goals:

  1. To understand the social and cultural dimensions of religious change that connect the past and present
  2. To prepare students to take these dimensions into account in their work in the religious, cultural, and development sectors.

Course Overview

Session Unit
1 Intro
2-3 Religious Affiliation as a Social Category
4-7 Communal Change
8-11 Individual Change
12-14 Intercultural Communication

📈 Review

  • Last week’s objective: Describe some legal and political factors that can contribute to conversion or discourage it.
  1. Types of social pressure and violent threats: economic, professional/class mobility, family law, protection from populistic violence, right to practice religion (or lack of it)
  2. Possible reactions: conversion (sincere or feigned), emigration, going underground, multiple/hybrid affiliation, acculturation without conversion, new religious synthesis

🧭 Today

  • Learning objective: Identify some of the ways religions embrace outside ideas and give some examples.

Trivia

Teams of 5-6

Singer Bob Marley is associated with …

  • Vodou
  • Manichaeanism
  • Druze
  • Rastafarianism

In which religion are ancestors and Catholic saints believed to communicate through trances?

  • Yezīdism
  • Sikhism
  • Vodou
  • Bahā’ī

Which religious movement honors the Caliph al-Hakim (disappeared 1021 CE/411 AH)?

  • Druze
  • Sikhism
  • Bahā’ī
  • Rastafarianism

In which religion are people not supposed to cut their hair?

  • Manichaeanism
  • Yezīdism
  • Rastafarianism
  • Sikhism

Who believes that God has pardoned the fallen angel Lucifer?

  • Vodou practitioners
  • Rastafarians
  • Yezīdis
  • Bahā’ī believers

Which religious founder considered himself an “apostle of light” alongside Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus?

  • Mani
  • Gurū Nānak
  • Marcus Garvey
  • Bahā’u’llāh

Who practices a 19-day fast every year?

  • Yezīdis
  • Bahā’ī believers
  • Sikhs
  • Manichaeans

Group Work

https://etherpad.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/p/23interkulturelle7

Example: Sikhism

  • Founder: Guru Nanak
  • Scripture: Guru Granth Sahib
  • Relationship to Hinduism & Islam
  • Ethnic community

Discussion

  1. What might motivate people to follow a new religion?

Discussion

  1. Can we see the same processes and motivations at work within religions, e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam?

Preview

https://23interkulturelle.pages.gwdg.de/8