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A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life-Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

Tantric Buddhism. --- Tantrism. --- Buddhism, Tantric --- Buddhist tantrism --- Esoteric Buddhism --- Mantrayāna Buddhism --- Mikkyō --- Tantrism, Buddhist --- Vajrayāna Buddhism --- Buddhism --- Mahayana Buddhism --- Tantricism --- Tantrism, Hindu --- Hinduism --- Magic --- Mysticism --- anthropology. --- buddhism. --- buddhist tradition. --- comparative religion. --- contemporary religion. --- critical theory. --- cultural phenomena. --- east and west. --- eastern philosophy. --- european scholars. --- faith and spirituality. --- hinduism. --- india. --- indian religions. --- jainism. --- nonfiction. --- physical experiences. --- political power. --- religious lives. --- religious practices. --- religious secrecy. --- religious studies. --- sensuality. --- sex. --- sexual politics. --- sexuality. --- tantra. --- western thought. --- western world. --- world religions.

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New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements is the most extensive study to date of modern American alternative spiritual currents. Hugh B. Urban covers a range of emerging religions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Nation of Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, ISKCON, Wicca, the Church of Satan, Peoples Temple, and the Branch Davidians. This essential text engages students by addressing major theoretical and methodological issues in the study of new religions and is organized to guide students in their learning. Each chapter focuses on one important issue involving a particular faith group, providing readers with examples that illustrate larger issues in the study of religion and American culture. Urban addresses such questions as, Why has there been such a tremendous proliferation of new spiritual forms in the past 150 years, even as our society has become increasingly rational, scientific, technological, and secular? Why has the United States become the heartland for the explosion of new religious movements? How do we deal with complex legal debates, such as the use of peyote by the Native American Church or the practice of plural marriage by some Mormon communities? And how do we navigate issues of religious freedom and privacy in an age of religious violence, terrorism, and government surveillance?

Cults --- Sects --- Occultism --- United States --- Native American Church of North America --- Mormon Church --- Nation of Islam (Chicago, Ill.) --- Branch Davidians --- Witchcraft --- Neopaganism --- Peoples Temple --- Scientology --- Ras Tafari movement --- Satanism --- Hare Krishnas --- Raà«lians --- Cults -- United States.. --- Occultism -- United States.. --- Sects -- United States. --- american culture. --- american religions. --- american spirituality. --- comparative religion. --- cult leaders. --- cults and religions. --- cults. --- emerging religions. --- flds. --- islam. --- latter day saints. --- lds. --- mormon fundamentalists. --- mormonism. --- native american church. --- neopagan movements. --- neopagan. --- new age movements. --- new age. --- new american religions. --- new religions. --- new religious movements. --- new spiritual movements. --- new theology. --- occultism. --- rastafari. --- religious freedom. --- religious studies. --- scientology. --- separation of church and state. --- wicca. --- world religions. --- new religions in modern America --- the Native American Church --- Mormonism --- plural marriage --- the LDS --- the FLDS --- Spiritualism --- women --- mediums --- messages from other worlds --- the Nation of Islam --- the Five Percenters --- race --- religion --- hip-hop --- Rastafari --- Messianism --- music --- ganja --- the Church of Scientology --- new religions and tax exemption --- Wicca and Neopaganism --- magic --- feminism --- environmentalism --- the Church of Satan --- the Temple of Set --- religious parody --- Satanic panic --- ISKCON --- Hare Krishna --- Eastern religions in America --- brainwashing --- Channeling --- the New Age --- alternative spirituality --- popular culture --- media --- mass murder-suicide --- the Branch Davidians --- religious freedom --- privacy --- the Raëlians --- UFOs --- human cloning --- the study of new religions --- Millenarian movements

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Tantrism --- South Asia --- South Asia

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"Urban focuses on six modalities of religious secrecy, each illustrated by one primary example. He starts with nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, then moves to the Theosophical Society of the late nineteenth century; the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic, Maria de Naglowska, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Five Percenters, a radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam that formed in the 1960s; and white supremacist movements in modern America, especially the Brüder Schweigen or "Silent Brotherhood" of the 1980s. The final example is the Church of Scientology, allowing Urban to examine the role of secrecy as a dynamic historical process that adapts over time. A bracing read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban's reflections, and provides an indispensable account of a vexed, ever-present subject"--

Secrecy --- Secret societies --- Religious aspects --- Religious aspects

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Irreverence and the Sacred brings together some of the most cutting edge, interdisciplinary, and international scholars working today in order to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln, whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging, provocative, and often-irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important, sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies, Lincoln argues that the field has tended to champion a "validating, feel-good" approach to religion, rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history, politics, and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions, he suggests, would focus on the human, temporal, and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman, eternal, or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln's challenge to "do better," by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth, ritual, gender, and politics. The book also interrogates the "politics of scholarship" itself, critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion-such as Wendy Doniger, Russell McCutcheon, Ivan Strenski, and Lincoln himself-but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not as well known in the U.S.-such as Stefan Arvidsson, Claude Calame, Nicolas Meylan, and others.

Religion --- Historiography