Pathways to Understanding
God, Man, and Superman: Heroic Powers, Fragile Moments, and Religious Understanding
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gian Pagnucci
Peter, and Jesus, walked on water: Belief, doubt, faith, and fear intertwined with superpower in one fragile moment. This paper explains how these fragile moments, when human vulnerability intersects with superpowers, illuminate the ways superhero stories have shaped religious understanding in contemporary society. Interest in superheroes is a worldwide phenomenon. The 34 films produced by Marvel Studios have grossed over $30 billion dollars. One reason for the popularity of these films is they offer a glimpse of how ordinary people connect with the lives of superbeings. Superman is a “god” but seen through Lois Lane’s eyes, he becomes a vulnerable lover. Such fragile moments can be found in the Bible as well, as in Peter and Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. To explore the concept of fragile moments, Biblical passages of ordinary people interacting with Jesus is linked to the experiences of three human friends of culturally important superheroes: Superman’s lover Lois, Spider-Man’s friend and later foe Harry Osborne, and Daredevil’s law firm partner Foggy Nelson. While people may be drawn to the excitement of superpowered heroics in such stories, it is in the lives of the ordinary beings around the heroes that we can come to understand how power, vulnerability, and divinity intersect: “Though one is weak, they are strong.” Heroism lies not in power but in our heart. Exploring these fragile moments enables us to gain a deeper understanding of how religious themes and meanings circulate within popular culture.
Evangelical Exodus: From Trauma to Transcendence
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicol Michelle Epple
By the next generation, the number of Americans who identify as Christian will be half the number that it is today. The contemporary movement of persons leaving American evangelical churches has been deemed a modern Exodus. This paper explores the responses to one common cause of the exodus: Exploitative manipulation of faith-adherents’ devotion to please and serve God. Such devotion is measured by compliance and commitment to the leader’s biblical instruction, dogma, and proscriptions. Such exploitation is generated by church leaders, yet perpetuated by the respective religious community. Invoked guilt and shame, ostracism, embarrassment, and humiliation are the onslaught for slack or waywardness. Such abuse induces trauma causing psychological, psychosomatic, spiritual, and relational harm. This paper discusses the vulnerabilities and resilience of those who has left evangelical churches. Through qualitative research based on interviews, it examines the processes of deconstruction through the areas of faith crisis, identity annihilation, and relational detachment. It shows that those who leave exploitive religious settings fall into three categories: nones, transitioners, and pluralists. Those in the category of nones reject organized religion and no longer affiliate with a faith or church system. Transitioners keep the crux of Christian theology and find new, healthy church affiliations. Pluralists often develop a broader spirituality and migrate into a more diversified understanding of religious expression and experience. Each of these groups exemplified heightened empathy towards others as a result of having experienced spiritual trauma. They have transformed trauma into transcendence.
Extraterrestrial Theologies: When Conspiracy Theories and Science Fiction Become Religion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leonardo Breno Martins
Since the 1950s, several religious movements have emerged centered on extraterrestrial beings and UFOs. Over the decades, these groups and belief systems have diversified and adapted to different cultural contexts. The Brazilian case is particularly interesting, as it is based on the country's remarkable religious diversity and has seen some of its groups spread throughout Europe and the Americas. Different Brazilian UFO religions have been studied from 2010 to the present using the ethnographic method, seeking to understand the profile of their members, their belief systems and practices. Among the main conclusions of these studies, their members typically have a long history of changes in their religious affiliation, having previously been Catholic, Evangelical, Spiritist, Candomblecist or Umbandist. Often, such people report having experienced some level of helplessness, prejudice and non-acceptance within these religions, with subsequent disenchantment with religious institutions. UFO religions end up filling this empty space in their lives, also allowing them to reconnect with a group and find belief systems that unite traditionally sacred themes such as God, reincarnation and the meaning of life, and contemporary themes that are appealing, such as extraterrestrials, conspiracy theories, science fiction and social representations of science. Such a union allows for interesting belief systems in which, for example, Christ or Orishas are seen as the supreme commanders of legions of benign extraterrestrials that visit us while fighting evil aliens that rule the Earth secretly.
Dealing with Deficient, Defective and Dysfunctional Spiritualities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Gifford
The modern world, the world of air travel, the internet and Pfizer vaccines, depends on a particular mode of cognition. This cognitive style has made widely possible advances like increased life expectancy, considerable control of everyday events and circumstances, and relative ease – with of course all the huge problems modernity brings. This is our human condition today. A religion, spirituality or world-view which militates against modernity is deficient. This paper focuses on the worldview underpinning witchcraft in Africa. It is dysfunctional and harmful, particularly to vulnerable women and children. The paper argues that many theories advancing a cultural relativism or prioritising ‘culture’ over ‘modernity’ should be challenged.
