New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion by

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 in order to formulate new theories about a wide range of religious materials, including religious ritual, religious representations, and modes of religiosity. Works exploring the consequences of those theories and advancing additional cognitive theories about these and other religious phenomena soon followed. Early work in the cognitive science of religion aimed to redress an imbalance in religious studies-an imbalance that favored the particular over the general and the interpretive over the explanatory (e.g., Lawson and McCauley 1993). Whether this outpouring of new research in the cognitive science of religion is sufficient to right that imbalance will turn, finally, on the level of its impact in the coming decade or two on the mainstream academic study of religion-which is to be contrasted with explicitly religious and theological scholarship. (An important problem here that, in effect, constitutes further evidence of that imbalance is the difficulty in distinguishing an academic study of religion wedded solely to the interpretation of particular texts, traditions, and (behavioral) turns from explicitly religious and theological enterprises.) (Sperber 1975) Even if disciplinary inertia and the cost of acquiring new intellectual tools that the new cognitive science of religion requires discourage conventional students of comparative religion from …