Anxiety and Salvation. A Soteriological Miniature

.Social salvation

“ Students here are basically apat­ hetic," Dean o f Students James Roemer commented to a less than capacity crowd at last n igh t’s security seminar in LaFortune Stu­ dent Center. Eight students were in attendance. The seminar was jo in tly con­ ducted by Roemer, Assistant D irec­ to r o f Security Rex Rakow, and investigator Ann Schelllnger. It focused on the security needs o f women at the U...

Spirituality, cultural wisdom and salvation

The aim of this speculative paper, rooted in a variety of concepts derived from social anthropology, theology, and the history of religion, is to develop the broad notion of spirituality in terms of what might be called cultural wisdom. This I do alongside a discussion of the human proclivity for meaning-making understood as a process expressed in numerous religious traditions as 'salvation'. T...

Salvation as a selective incentive

As club goods, religions face the problem of free riding. Smaller religious clubs, such as cults or sects, can often surmount this problem through communal pressures or by requiring their members to provide easily monitored signals. Generally, however, such tactics will be unavailable or too costly for large denominations, and, as such, these denominations must look for other techniques to avoi...

Salvation by registration.

Salvation for Bricoleurs

In a previous presentation at this workshop (Ben-Ari, 1999), the second author described an experiment in which (even) science educators studying for advanced degrees displayed abysmal performance on non-routine tasks using a word processor. The performance was described as bricolage, a term first used by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe the primitive science of a ‘savage’, and ap...