God, Jack Frost, and Chiquita Banana: Religion as Anthropomorphism
By Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Ph.D.
Please mark your calendar to attend this master lecture. Stewart Elliott Guthrie (Ph.D. Yale 1976) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Fordham University and a founding member of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. He is currently an independent scholar and a Friend of the Center from the CFI Community of Miami. His primary fieldwork has been in Japan, resulting in his book A Japanese New Religion. He has done survey work in a number of other countries. Guthrie has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from sources including the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown University, Yale University, the Japan Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Guthrie's ground-breaking 1980 paper, "A Cognitive Theory of Religion," published in the journal Current Anthropology, has been widely influential in cognitive studies of religion, which have adopted its central propositions. These propositions include the ideas that our sense of unseen intentional agency stems from a better-safe-than-sorry perceptual strategy, producing hair-trigger judgments that agents (or their traces) are present; that these agents have humanlike mentality and communications; and that we bet on them because they provide the most significant and powerful interpretations possible. He elaborates these ideas in his book Faces in the Clouds and elsewhere.
Please click here to read about Stewart E. Guthrie’s unique contribution to the theory of Religion.
Reviews of Stewart Elliott Guthrie’s book FACES IN THE CLOUDS
"Given the general mood of the modern field [religious studies]...simply to interpret what are widely considered to be self-evidently religious phenomena, Guthrie's book is a welcome contribution."--Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion
"Guthrie manages to draw from the murky reasonableness of everyday living what is most human in our perceptions of what animates life."--American Anthropologist
"Witty, elegant, magnificently written...A stunning achievement that will have an enormous impact on religious studies."--Robert Orsi, Indiana University
"The book will be indispensable to all students of religion."--Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
Please click here to read other reviews.
The book Faces in the Clouds will be sold and signed by the author at this event. Checks and cash accepted.
Click here for directions and free parking information to BankUnited Center Room 100
Related
- File Attachment: Flyer-Nov7-doc.pdf
- File Attachment: Invitation-Guthrie.pdf
