Introduction: New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion

The papers in this issue arose from a conference on the Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity that took place at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in August, 2003.1 This conference brought together scholars from ten nations and six disciplines (psychology, anthropology, religious studies, biology, philosophy, and cognitive science) to explore new developments at the interface of the cognitive sciences and religion. All four of these papers examine the promise of comparatively new theoretical proposals and empirical findings within the cognitive sciences for making sense of various sorts of religious phenomena. Although the theories in these papers were developed independently of the literature in the cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the past couple of decades, each notes suggestive connections with that body of work. Cognitive scientists of religion have advanced assorted theories about an array of different religious phenomena. Still, all champion the promise of the methods and findings of the cognitive sciences for enhancing our understanding of those phenomena and maintain that religious thought and action turn overwhelmingly on harnessing perfectly ordinary forms of cognition available to all normally equipped human beings. The earliest works in this field looked to theoretical strategies from the various cognitive sciences, including linguistics (Lawson and McCauley 1990), evolutionary