Review of: Eva Pocs, Bea Vidacs, eds. Faith, Doubt and Knowledge in Religious Thinking. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2020. Pp. 409.
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2023
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University of Pennsylvania Press
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This collection contains one of the most attention-grabbing chapter titles that I have read in a long time: “I was Angry with the Angels for F*cking Me Over.” Beyond mere shock value, the subtitle of that piece helps to give some sense of the range of religions and religious movements covered in the volume as a whole: “Angel-Cult and UFO-Religion in Hungary.” Indeed, the volume ends with several chapters addressing present-day new religious movements, including those involving beliefs about angels and extraterrestrials (and angels as extraterrestrials), a fundamentalist Christian prophetic movement, and Hare Krishnas in Hungary. Yet the volume begins, chronologically, in Western antiquity, with chapters focusing on Greek philosophy and different miracle narratives in both pagan and early Christian texts. In between are chapters addressing, among other things, medieval stigmata, exorcism during the Enlightenment, Sami cultural practices in modern Scandinavia, and the interactions of different religious groups in war-torn northern Iraq.
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This manuscript is published as Bailey, M.D., Review of:Éva Pócs and Béa Vidacs, eds., Faith, Doubt and Knowledge in Religious Thinking. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2023, 18(1);129-31. https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2023.a906605. Posted with permission.