Building Religions 28: Asceticism

We get the English word asceticism from Greek, where it referred to the training of athletes. How it became associated with practices of self-denial largely has to do with the ways that accounts of early Christian hermits described them: as athletes competing against the temptations of the world. That metaphor, in turn, may have been applied in response to the descriptions of the martyrdoms of certain saints, particularly those who died in the Roman arenas. Even though the narratives all ended with the deaths of the martyrs, they were often represented as defeating wave after wave of animal and human opponents before the Roman authorities finally had them executed. They were, in short, superior athletes.

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.