CEREMONIAL SINGING: KIDUNG AS RELIGIOUS PRAXIS IN CONTEMPORARY BALI

Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience

An earlier version of this book review appeared in Film Interernational, Nov. 13, 2013 (http://filmint.nu/ ?p=10038). It appears here by permission. Author Notes Brandon Konecny recently graduated from the Film Studies program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is a two-time scholarship recipient of the Fluor Scholarship Foundation, winner of the UNCW Award for Excellence in Fil...

‘Religious Diversity’ in Contemporary Chinese Scholarship

Contemporary China offers a particularly interesting setting to study religious diversity as a result of its unique socio-political context. Based on the quantitative and qualitative evidence in a representative sample of Chinese dissertations, this essay identifies two characteristics associated with the usage of ‘religious diversity’ in contemporary Chinese scholarship: firstly, the focal poi...

The Historical Foundations of Religious Restrictions in Contemporary China

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP’s distrust for, and restriction of, ...

Singing as communication

Healing Sound: Contemporary Methods for Tibetan Singing Bowls

Among the many ways that music affects the human spirit, personal growth and healing are among the newest and the oldest. It was not until World War II that a modern society accepted music as a source of healing. During that era, musicians were hired to perform for injured soldiers in hospitals. This paper describes how the uses of a type of friction idiophone, popularly known as singing bowls ...