Description
Book SynopsisThomas Lawson is Professor Emeritus at Western Michigan University, USA. He is also Honorary Professor and Research Scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast, UK.
Trade ReviewE. Thomas Lawson is the grand elder of the Cognitive Science of Religion, who brought together and mentored a younger generation of scholars as the field became established and who has continued to inspire at least two more generations after that. This long-awaited book reveals how he did it and it will be of great interest to everyone engaged in the scientific study of the religion. * Professor Harvey Whitehouse, Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK *
What better way to learn about this field than to listen to the stories and insightful musings of the field’s godfather and one of the first evangelists? This pithy volume gives readers a unique vantage of the intellectual motivations and innovations that birthed the cognitive science of religion. * Justin L. Barrett, President, Blueprint 1543, USA *
Tom Lawson is one of the creators of the field of cognitive approaches to religious thought and behavior, and one of the main contributors to what is now an established discipline, with journals, meetings, and textbooks. Lawson was also a pioneer in the formal study of ritual behavior. The essays reflect the breadth and depth of his insights about the relations between human mental capacities and cultural variation. * Pascal Boyer, Professor of Individual and Collective Memory, Washington University in St. Louis, USA *
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Toward Cognitive Science of Religion
PART I: Theoretical Issues in the Cognitive Science of Religion 2. Magic Bullets and Complex Theories 3. The Wedding of Psychology, Ethnography, and History: Methodological Bigamy or Tripartite Free Love? 4. Cognitive Categories, Cultural Forms, and Ritual Structures 5. Evoked and Transmitted Culture
PART II: Cognition and the Imagination 6. Cognitive Constraints on Imagining Other Worlds 7. The Explanation of Myth and Myth as Explanation 8. Psychological Perspectives on Agency 9. How to Create a Religion
PART III: Cognition, Culture, and History 10. History in Science 11. The Cognitive Science of Religion and the Growth of Knowledge 12. Counterintuitive Notions and the Problem of Transmission: The Relevance of Cognitive Science for the Study of History 13. Experimental Adventures
Conclusion Index
