Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience

Religion in Mind summarizes and extends the last decade's advances in the cognitive study of religion. Its aim is to use empirical research from psychology and anthropology to understand different components of religious belief, ritual and experience. The book examines cognitive dimensions of religion within a naturalistic view of culture, while preserving a respect for the phenomenology of religion and drawing together teachers of religion, psychologists of religion and cognitive scientists. Expert contributors focus on phenomena such as belief-fixation and transmission; attributions of agency; anthropomorphizing; counterintuitive religious representations; the well-formedness of religious rituals; links between religious representations and emotions; and the development of god concepts. The work encourages greater interdisciplinary linkages between scholars from different fields and will be of interest to researchers in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and cognitive science and also to the general reader interested in religion and science.