The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

We’ve collected some of our most popular stories on topics related to religion—from scientific seances in Iran to solitary monks in the Wadi El Natrun desert, from Catholic priests in cars in Milwaukee to Buddhist monks admiring trees in Thailand. This wide-ranging collection highlights the true diversity of practice and belief in the long history (histories) of spirituality. As always, the scholarship underlying each story is free to read and download. Just look for the red J icon and follow the link!

JSTOR Teaching ResourcesJSTOR Teaching Resources

Shamanism

Colombian taitas, 2001

The Diverse Shamanisms of South America

In Brazil, Indigenous people and city-dwellers of all backgrounds mix various shamanic practices, including rituals imported from North America and elsewhere.
An Ayahuasca visual

The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience

“If someone is from the Amazon,” says Evgenia Fotiou, an anthropologist who studies Western ayahuasca usage, “they bring some legitimacy” to an ayahuasca ritual.

Jainism

Acharya Shri Bhikshu, the founder and first spiritual head of Śvētāmbara Terapanth

Jain Ascetics in a Material World

The Jain Śvētāmbara Terāpanth sect began as an ascetic discipline, but it has increasingly emphasized physical health over renunciation of the body.

Rastafarianism

Halie Selassie

Why a Coup in Ethiopia Created a Faith Crisis in Jamaica

Rastafarians emerged from anti-colonial, anti-racism movements of the 60s, they also looked back toward their African ancestry.

Spiritism and Spiritualism

Helena Blavatsky

Spiritualism, Science, and the Mysterious Madame Blavatsky

Madame Helena Blavatsky was the 19th century's most famous and notorious occultist. She was also the godmother of the New Age movement. 
"Spirit" photograph, supposedly taken during a seance, actually a double exposure or composite of superimposed cut-outs, showing woman with portraits of men and women around her head

How Spirit Photography Made Heaven Literal

Are the departed watching over us, and if so, what are they wearing? Victorian spiritualists believed that ghosts could be captured on film.
The Spiritualist gif

How to Summon Spirits

The Spiritualist, a newspaper published from 1869-1882, is filled with tales of supernatural phenomena and tips for communicating with the dead.
Ceiling of Shah Mosque at Fatima Masumeh Shrine, Qom, Iran

Scientific Seances in Twentieth-Century Iran

Spiritism appealed to Iranian intellectuals who sought to reconcile their commitment to science with their pursuit of moral reform.

Buddhism

Mahakala

Buddhist Pacifists at War

In the early centuries of Vajrayāna Buddhism in India, practitioners worked to reconcile the religion’s teaching of nonviolence with the realities of warfare.
Jizō, c. 1202

A Bodhisattva for Japanese Women

Originally known in China as Dizāng, the “savior of the damned,” Jizō has evolved into a protector of children and comforter of women in Japan.
Woman doing yoga on beach

How American Buddhism is Like an Elephant

Researchers see a distinct difference between Buddhist immigrants and Americans of European ancestry who have embraced Buddhism's tenets.
Alan Watts

When Buddhism Came to America

Buddhism was embraced by the Beats of 1950s America. But some Buddhists felt these converts were engaging with the practice in a shallow way.
Orange Buddish Monks Robe tied around a tree.

Why Some Buddhist Monks Ordain Trees

Buddhist monks in Thailand began tying trees with their traditional colored robes in the 1980s, as threats to ecology increased.

Judaism: Doctrines, Institutions, Texts, Global Culture

Soldier eating matzo, 1940s

Matzo and Oreos: Keeping Kosher in America

The koshering of America's food industry has mostly gone unnoticed. Yet most people who specifically buy kosher foods are not Jewish.
A troupe of mummers in animal costumes performing in a Medieval Baronial Hall at Christmas, c. 1500

Nittel Nacht: The Jewish Christmas Eve

'Twas the night before Christmas, and an undead Jesus walked the earth. No wonder early modern Jews played games and sang songs to scare him off.
Eva Frank

Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah

Was this revered female figurehead an empowered leader or a tragic victim in her father's wake?
Barabbas

A Passover Tradition to Promote Jewish Unity

Freeing a prisoner—a gesture of generosity and benevolence—may have been a way to bring together a fractured spiritual community.

Islam: Doctrines, Institutions, Texts, Global Culture

Jamia Mosque in Nairobi

A Mughal Mosque in Kenya

Built for Punjabi migrants brought to Africa by the British and modeled on Mughal architecture, the Jamia Masjid in Nairobi serves Kenya’s Muslim minority.
The dream of Zulaykha, from the Amber Album, c. 1670

Dreams in Islam

Even before the founding of Islam, Arabia was home to professional dream interpreters.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo

The Lost History of Early Muslim Americans

 Islam in America is clearly nothing new.
Great Mosque at Mecca

How European Empires Helped Shape the Hajj

Despite the Hajj's celebration of ascetic faith and brotherhood, there has always been plenty of profit made off the pilgrims traveling to Mecca.
Hagar in the Wilderness by Camille Corot, 1835

Following Haajar’s Footsteps to a Feminist Reading of Islam

A personal experience with the Hajj brought to life the iconic figure of Haajar, whose tenacity and stoicism highlight the importance of women in Islam.
Turkish women waiting outside a mosque for friends before going in to pray, 1920

Mosques of Their Own

The long, little-known history of Muslim women in communal religious life.
Dara Shikoh and Mian Mir

Popularizing Meditation in the Mughal Empire

The methods of Sufi meditation were regarded as secret during the early Mughal empire. Why, then, did Dara Shikoh feel the need to write them down?

Christianity: Doctrines, Institutions, Texts, Global Culture

Railroad Chapel Cars Brought God to the People

Between 1890 and 1946, thirteen railroad chapel cars made their way across America, spreading a Christian message in rural communities.
An image tiled "A strange gathering of Anabaptists and Quakers" depicting a naked woman and Anabaptists and Quakers before a pulpit

The Naked Quakers

Today, the international feminist group FEMEN uses nudity as part of its protests. But appearing naked in public was also a tactic used by early dissenters.
La Befana by Bartolomeo Pinelli, 1821

A Visit from La Befana

In the Catholic tradition, Epiphany is the day the Three Kings first met Baby Jesus. But in Italy, it’s also the day La Befana shows up with a basket of gifts.
Top portion of a "Letter from Heaven," produced in England, 18th century

Himmelsbriefe: Heaven-Sent Chain Letters

For more than a thousand years, people have used letters allegedly written by Christ as both doctrinal evidence and magical charms.
Illustration accompanying an account by Lawrence Banck of the 1644 coronation of Pope Innocent X. The pope is having his testicles felt by a cardinal in order to confirm that he is a man.

The Myth of the Papal Toilet Chair

Legend holds that newly elected popes in the Middle Ages had to present their genitals for inspection to confirm that they were male.
Jesus in jail with Instruments of the Passion

Visiting Christ’s Prison Cell

After Christian crusaders captured Jerusalem, the Prison of Christ featured on pilgrims' itineraries. But was Christ actually ever imprisoned there?
The interior of St Anne's Church, Bukit Mertajam, Penang

A Colorful Mix of Cultures at One Malaysian Catholic Shrine

Different—and sometimes competing—uses of sacred space is par for the course at the Church of St Anne in Penang’s Bukit Mertajam.
A Trappist monk in the cloisters of a monastery in County Waterford, Ireland, 1935

The Irish Fasting Tradition

Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican II), fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more seriously than the Irish.
Church above Vathy bay, Kalymnos island, Dodecanese archipelago, Greece

An Explosive Easter Celebration

The Orthodox Easter tradition of throwing dynamite on the island of Kalymnos echoes the Greek resistance to the Italian occupation of the 1940s.
An illustration of the case of Maria Elisabetha Beckensteinerin

Suicide by Proxy

In early Modern Europe, suicide was a sin to be punished with eternal damnation. Some women found an awful workaround: committing murder.
L'Envoûteuse (The Sorceress) by Georges Merle, 1883

Radical Theology: A Syllabus

Radical theology aims to construct revolutionary understandings of myth, ritual, and scripture that speak to the dearth of meaning in our contemporary moment.
Title page for Sinners in the hands of an angry God, 1741

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
Photograph: revelers in stylish Easter hats at the New York City Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival, 2015

Source: https://flic.kr/p/r2tGNN

The Religious Roots of the Easter Parade

The revival of Easter as a festival-type holiday coincided with a rise in Catholic immigration and relaxing religious standards in the 1880's.
Open Bible

The Dream of a Plain Bible

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, many Americans experienced a crisis of religious authority. During this time, the idea of an unambiguous “plain Bible” began to gain traction.
methodist religious revival

When Science and Religion Were Connected

During the Second Great Awakening of 1830, science and religion were seen as “two aspects of the same universal truth.”
anti-abolitionist cartoon

How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

After Emancipation, some Southern Protestants refused to revise their proslavery views. In their minds, slavery had been divinely sanctioned.
Pope Formosus and Stephen VI by Jean Paul Laurens, 1870

The Cadaver Synod: Putting a Dead Pope on Trial

Why did Pope Stephen VI go to such great lengths to destroy an enemy who was already dead?
Luther at the Diet of Worms by Anton von Werner

Ok papist

England faced a generational divide almost 500 years ago, as the Protestant Reformation split the nation apart.
Two arms with tattoos

Why Does the Bible Forbid Tattoos?

And have we been misinterpreting Leviticus?
Adherents of Santeria celebrate Santa Barbara on December 4 , 2002 in Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

Music and Spirit in the African Diaspora

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.
An illustration of a priest's hands blessing a car

Priests and Cars in Milwaukee

The popularity of the car reshaped Catholicism in the city, forcing churches to adapt their worship practices to attract newly mobile parishioners.
Group portrait of Christian heavy metal band Stryper, 1984

Sex (No!), Drugs (No!), and Rock and Roll (Yes!)

In the 1980s and 1990s, Christian heavy metal bands used head-banging music to share the politics and values of evangelical Christians with America’s youth.
a globe surrounded by symbols of faith

Come Let Us Argue: Faith and Intellectual Humility

Can belief in the divine endure in an individual who possesses an openness to being wrong? How do doubt and faith co-exist among the religious?
Joseph Durham looking at an urn

The Care of the Dead: A Reading List

An interdisciplinary bibliography exploring the care of the dead and how our final choices are shaped by culture, religion, economics, technology, and war.
Close-up portrait of Border Collie dog on Rainbow Bridge background

Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?

The belief that animals cross the “Rainbow Bridge” to an afterlife is relatively new and not part of any formal theology, yet many Americans embrace it.
Members of the Oneida Community

The Oneida Community Moves to the OC

The Oneida Community's Christian form of collectivism was transported to California in the 1880s, when the original Oneida Community fell apart.

Christianity: Saints and Servants

Saint Clare of Montefalco

Autopsy of a Saint

In the late thirteenth century, followers of the Italian abbess Clare of Montefalco dissected her heart in search of a crucifix.
Saint Wilgefortis

Meet Saint Wilgefortis, the Bearded Virgin

A Christian martyr, Wilgefortis was divinely gifted with a sudden growth of facial hair to escape forced marriage, only to be crucified by her father.
Antique illustration: Sleeping at sea

The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep

Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Pilgrims raising candles to the glass tomb cover of St. Francis Xavier in the Basilica of Dom Jesus, Goa, India, 1974

The Incorruptible Body of Francis Xavier

After the co-founder of the Jesuit Society died in 1552, the miraculous preservation of his body advanced the cause of Catholicism across Europe and Asia.
Degradation of William Sawtrey

Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation

The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.
Anna te Drieën, 1528

Who Was Jesus’s Grandma?

Canonical scripture never mentions the parents of the Virgin Mary, but the body of St. Anne was vital to Christianity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
St Cuthbert Gospel

Why Europe’s Oldest Intact Book Was Found in a Saint’s Coffin

The St. Cuthbert Gospel is the earliest surviving intact European book. Some time around 698, it was slipped into the coffin of a saint.
An altar for Santa Muerte

Who Is Santa Muerte?

The folk saint Santa Muerte might seem mysterious, but her devotees embrace a wide variety of everyday practices.
Statue of Julian of Norwich, Norwich Cathedral

Julian of Norwich, Anchoress and Mystic

A religious recluse, mystic and author, Julian of Norwich wrote of Jesus Christ as a nurturing mother and teacher to the faithful.
The Reverend Brian Hession of the Dawn Trust and Bible Films Ltd film company starts a showing of a religious film at St Peter's Church, Piccadilly, London, 1946

Seeing the World Through Missionaries’ Eyes

One way Americans got a look into life in distant parts of the world in the 1930s and ’40s was through films made by Protestant missionary groups.

Christianity: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Brigham Young and wives

Brigham Young and the Defense of Mormon Polygamy

Mormon leader Brigham Young tried to create a culture of polygamy in the nineteenth century. How did he justify the practice in Victorian-era America?
Salt Lake City Temple Glass Holy of Holies

How Mormons Have Made Religion Out of Doubt

Because of its commitment to continuing revelation, Mormonism is replete with examples of individual doubt that have resulted in more, not less, religion.
An illustration of Mormon leader James Strang speaking with a Mormon woman

When Adventists and Mormons Turned Sex-Positive

How the once sex-averse Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Seventh Day Adventism embraced (married, monogamous) sex as a positive ideal.
A view of Salt Lake City, Utah from the August 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly, accompanied by portraits of sixteen important early leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Mormon Fans of Europe’s 1848 Revolutions

As the crowned heads of Europe shuddered at the unrest in the streets, members of the Latter-Day Saints movement cheered.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31326238

The Sovereignty of the Latter-day Saints

Less about morality than about rights, the Mormon War of 1858 hinged on the issue of polygamy, pitting a Utah community against federal authorities.

Christianity: Monasticism and the Cloistered Life

Manuscript Illumination with Singing Monks in an Initial D, from a Psalter

Monastic Chant: Praising God Out Loud

For medieval monks, chant was often a crucial part of worship, but theologians had different ideas about how the words and sounds helped evoke piety.
Saint Mary of Egypt by Angelo Maccagnino, 15th century

Wild Saints and Holy Fools

Early Christian writers valorized the desert life of ascetic monks, but the city also had something to offer would-be “fools for Christ”.
Triumph of St. Benedict

What Monks Can Teach us about Managing our Work Lives

Medieval monks used labor-saving innovations like the mill not to increase productivity, but to free up more time for what they wanted to do.
Benedetta Carlini

Lesbianism (!) at the Convent

Mother Superior Benedetta Carlini, a visionary nun of Renaissance Italy, was accused of heresy and “female sodomy.”
The St. Bernard Abbey in Hemiksem by Jan Wildens, 1616

The Complex Economics of Medieval Convents

Medieval convents were better funded than many scholars assume, thanks in part to royal patrons sympathetic to the holy women's mission.
Benedictine nuns from Eibingen Abbey in Germany

Nuns Don’t Have Midlife Crises

Why Benedictine nuns report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than their non-monastic counterparts -- and what we can learn from them.
An abbey cellarer testing his wine. Illumination from a copy of Li livres dou santé by Aldobrandino of Siena, late 13th century

When Monks Went Undercover to Steal Relics

Because relics were understood to be capable of working miracles, any relic that was stolen must have wanted to be.
A personification of Acedia from between 1550 and 1625

Ancient Monks Got That Quarantine Feeling, Too

Listlessness, boredom, torpor, that "noonday demon" that tempts you away from spiritual connections—that's what was called acedia.
Sisters of the Holy Family, New Orleans

The Hidden History of Black Catholic Nuns

The lives and roles of African-descended women who joined predominantly white Catholic convents was deliberately hidden by congregational historians.

Christianity: Shakers

Based on a color lithograph of ca. 1826 by Anthony Imbert, entitled Shakers near Lebanon

The Rhythms of Shaker Dance Marked the Shakers as “Other”

The name Shaker originally comes from the insult “Shaking Quakers,” which mocked the sect’s use of their bodies in worship.
Shaker tree art

The Shaker Formula for Gender Equality

Shaker communities seem to have appealed to a lot of women because they offered a respite where their work was honored and respected.

Christianity: Religion and Health

An illustration from Technic and Practice of Chiropractic, 1915

The Metaphysical Story of Chiropractic

Chiropractic medicine began as a practice built on an approach to the human condition that was distinctly opposed to Christianity.
Older woman praying in an almost empty church.

Can Religion Be Helpful for People With Chronic Pain?

A group of researchers asked this question of a group of patients in secularized Western Europe.
Virgin of Guadalupe, 1779

Abstinence By Juramentos

Long before Dry January became a thing, Mexicans were using a similar program of temporary abstinence based on a pledge to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Parishioners worship during Sunday Mass at St. Augustine Catholic Church on August 15, 2021 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Black Church and Mental Health Support

Mental healthcare has not always been accessible for Black Americans. Could churches be part of the solution?

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.