Stray feathers

Building Religions 11: Authority My last few posts were a little light on the practical side for anyone designing a religion, so I thought...

Building Religions 10: Claude Lévi-Strauss This is less a post about how to write myths than about a way to read them, but it's a w...

Building Religions 9: More Myth When considering the relationship between myth and culture, there is one thought to keep in mind: myths li...

Building Religions 8: Myth I've been reluctant to cover myth so far. It's such a massive category, and there are as many arguments...

Building Religions 7: Sacrifice In sword & sorcery fantasy and occult horror, human sacrifice ranks up there with the use of the words...

Building Religions 6: Ritual I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theor...

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith Jonathan Z. Smith doesn't have the same range of influence as the other authors that I've mention...

Building Religions 4: Religion & Magic I'm going to take a detour here and focus on a theme rather than a single author. For the f...

Building Religions, part 3: Émile Durkheim I'm not going to deal with all of Durkheim here -- just the parts that I consider fun, whic...

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade There's a lot that can be pulled out of Eliade's work. He was a major influence on the field o...

Building Religions 1: Max Weber I've been thinking lately about religion in the Ingressa , which is leading me to muse about applying ...