Benjamin Zeller

In March 1997, thirty-nine people in Rancho Santa Fe, California, ended their lives. To outsiders, it was a mass suicide. To insiders, it was a graduation. This act was the culmination of over two decades of religious and social development of a new religious movement called Heaven’s Gate, America’s most famous UFO religion. The book considers Heaven’s Gate’s history, social structure, practices, beliefs, and worldview, and how they developed. The book argues that major American religious forces such as evangelical Christianity, the New Age movement, and spiritual seeking shaped Heaven’s Gate, and that the suicides must be read within the context of American religion. The book analyzes the historical origin of the movement, the backgrounds of its founders, social contexts of those who joined and left, the specific forms of Biblical interpretation or hermeneutics that members employed, religious practices developed by adherents, and the reasons that Heaven’s Gate ended as it did. Finally, the book argues that for all its seemingly oddness, Heaven’s Gate reflects American society by revealing some of the same forces at play in bigger, more recognizable, more publically accepted religions.

This article considers the "create your own religion" or "fictive religion" assignment as a pedagogical tool, contextualiz-ing it within the scholarship of teaching and learning, and positioning it as a tool for broad adoption in a variety of courses. I argue that we ought to conceptualize the fictive religion assignment as an instructional game, and make use of scholarship on teaching through games as a foundation for my analysis. While I offer the example of my own fictive religion assignment as a case study, the overall argument is a theoretical one, namely that the assignment works because of the nature of games.

This article offers a model of conceptualising religion as taste. Using religion and food as a point of entry, it demonstrates how modelling religion as taste permits attention to such concepts as embodiedness, the place of the senses within reli­ gious experience, the relation of memory to experience, and the mediation of culture. I draw on the cognitive and biological science of taste, and argue that religion functions analogously to this sense, experienced through the brain, body, and mind. The article uses the intersection of religion and food, and religion and visual taste, to develop the theme of how culturally conditioned tastes emerge out of embodied experiences, with reference to memories, past experiences, and collective worldviews.

ISKCON is traditionally studied as a new religious movement (nrm) or an instance of diasporic Hinduism. I argue here that an examination of the Finnish branch of ISKCON can be conceptualized as a case of a glocalized (global-local) religious movement wherein members have created amalgamated identities straddling the borders between nation states and cultures. Members have created a hybrid religious community appealing to both native-born Finns seeking to challenge and redefine the notion of Finnishness and Europeanness, and Indian immigrants seeking to bridge the boundaries between their new Finnish social-religious context and their Indian social- religious heritage. It offers a powerful example of the way in which members of a religious community have utilized their religious identity to situate themselves within the contemporary context of a secularized neoliberal European state.

This article focuses on food proscriptions such as veganism and gluten-free eating, and prescriptions such as the Paleolithic diet, focusing on the North American context. These quasi-religious foodways serve as means for individuals to engage in discourses of community, personal and group identity, and boundary-marking. Through the daily practice of eating, those who follow quasi-religious foodways mark their identities, literally consuming who they are. These quasi-religious foodways therefore function to allow contemporary consumer-oriented individualistic Americans to engage in discourses of community, identity, and meaning in a highly vernacular manner, that of the marketplace. They also point to the manner in which identity and community have expanded well outside of religious categories.

This article considers the challenges inherent when teaching about new religious movements (“cults”), how successful instructors have surmounted them, and how teacher-scholars in other fields of religious studies can benefit from a discussion of the successful teaching of new religions. I note that student-centered pedagogies are crucial to teaching new religions, particularly if students disrupt and defamiliarize the assumed and reified categories of “cult” and “religion.” I argue that what works in a classroom focusing on new religious movements will work more broadly in religious studies classrooms, since the challenges of the former are reproduced in the latter.

The modern period has witnessed a rise of religious interest in extraterrestrial life and visitations, which although dating back to the 18th century, culminated during the 20th century in the emergence of the ‘UFO religions’. This article highlights the manner in which the founders and members of unidentified flying object (UFO) religions have sought to operate at the nexus of science and religion in the modern world. The article first considers definitional questions and explains the origin of the concept of UFOs, ufology, and UFO religions. The article then traces the history of the development and rise of several of these religions, providing case studies of the major UFO religions and religious movements. Finally, the article considers recent scholarship and research issues involving UFO religions.

Many people assume that the history of religion and science in America is one of conflict. However, this is not the case. While an examination of the relationship between religion and science in America shows a variety of ways that they have related, there are few cases of outright conflict. This article takes a historical approach to the topic of religion and science in America. It looks to how both Native Americans and colonial-era Americans fused religion and science into a single system, the reasons that this approach began to falter during the early republic and antebellum era, and the twentieth-century repercussions. It treats the history of natural theology, natural philosophy, Baconian science, fundamentalism, and the post-Einstein “new physics” of relativity and quantum science. Special attention is paid the famous Scopes Trial, as well as the contemporary Intelligent Design movement.

This historiographic essay examines the scholarship of food and health in the United States in the twentieth century. It considers food in terms of production, preparation, and consumption of edible products, including the histories of what is and is not eaten in the United States. This includes drink, as well the history of what people do not eat. In terms of health, I focus here on health as it relates to food, encompassing the histories of nutrition and diet. I trace the major trends in developments of twentieth century American food practices as well as their historical treatment by scholars. One of the most important story lines I offer is the proliferation of studies on food and health in the past few decades, as well as an impressive increase in methodological diversity.

On January 25, 2015, Alex Gibney’s documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (2013). Importantly, the documentary covers very little new ground that scholars, journalists, or the inquiring public did not already know about the Church of Scientology, its beliefs and practices, history, and founder L. Ron Hubbard. It offered little new evidence in support of the most salacious of the charges—many of which are ultimately unprovable—made by anti-Scientology critics over the past decade. What Going Clear offered was a visual representation of the most sensationalistic of charges against Scientology, and in an age of visual media, it was highly successful. The documentary also marks a new phase in how opponents of Scientology present the group to audiences. In addition to appealing to the power of video media, Going Clear represents a fundamental shift away on the part of the filmmaker from envisioning Scientology as part of a cult phenomenon and instead characterizes it as part of a trend of religious radicalism and violence. That is, the film does not frame Scientology as primarily an instance of the category of “cult,” but rather of “radical religious belief.” Though it is impossible to delineate a clear causal link, this bears the mark of the post 9/11 context, the end of the cult wars, and the new era of conflict with radical Islam.

Syllabus for 100-level intro course on Religion, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. 25 person discussion class, with half the slots reserved for first year students. Designed as an introduction to college-level religious studies classroom, and religion & lit.