Building Religions 27: Priesthood

A little while ago, my friend Mike asked if I'd go into a bit more detail here on the varieties of priesthood and how they might be used in created worlds. Since I'm always willing to take requests, here's my answer.

Because 'priest' is a word whose meaning is primarily drawn from European Christian experience, it can be difficult to apply completely to other religions without bringing along certain expectations and baggage. You can, though, establish a minimum definition and use that to decide whether or not it's the best word to use to describe a type of practitioner, so that's what I'd do here: a priest is a religious specialist whose primary function is the performance of ritual in a fixed location.

Building Religions 26: Secularization

To recap my last post: according to Peter Berger, the functions of religion are to legitimize social institutions, provide continuity, and create meaning by connecting the human nomos with the sacred cosmos. It's not a stretch, then, to argue that these functions work best in communities in which the religion in question operates as a monopoly. But what happens when that's not the case, and how could such a situation occur? The second half of The Sacred Canopy addresses these questions. By considering Berger's theories on secularization, you can not only add depth to secularized cultures that you create, but also develop some interesting ideas for more traditional fantasy worlds.

Building Religions 25: Peter Berger

This isn't the post on asceticism that I promised; that will have to wait until I can do a little more reading and dig up some good sources. In the meantime, I'd like to present another sociological interpretation of religion, namely that found in Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy.

Berger is the scholar who (along with Thomas Luckmann) gave us the term "social construction," and with it, the idea that the world as we experience it is not simply a given, but perceived according to the rules and structures of society. In The Sacred Canopy, he focuses on examining the religious components of that idea, but before getting into those, it's best to go through some of his basic assumptions about how humans experience their world.