How God Becomes Real

‘That’s Witchcraft’: Community entrepreneuring as a process of navigating intra-community tensions through spiritual practices

“…Similarly, witchcraft plays a similar role as people leverage, frame and rely upon the belief system that witchcraft provides -also to gain power and material advantages from the organizations they inhabit. Similar to what we found in witchcraft practices, we know that other forms of spirituality ground their reliance on cosmological beliefs to frame, cope with and build collective sustenance from events that scientific rationality fails to explain (Jalan, Sinha, & Ulus, 2014;Luhrmann, 2020).…”

“…The study of witchcraft as an occult spiritual form, which is widespread not only in Africa (Kluckhohn, 1944) but also in the global North (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2018), raises important questions for the flourishing literature on spirituality in organizations. Spiritual forms differ in their belief systems, rituals, sayings and doings across cultures and religions (Luhrmann, 2020); yet, they all potentially shape actions and interactions in organizations (Suddaby et al, 2017). Spirituality supports 'transmuting agency from a rational-scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system' (Ganzin et al, 2020, p. 77).…”

Reincarnation as a Complement to the Flawed DNA-Based Model of Life: Potential Contributions to Our Disposition towards Family and Religion/Spirituality

“…: p. 20). That statement and Barrett's followup, as well as similar content in T. M. Luhrmann's How God Becomes Real (Luhrmann, 2020), appear to be good examples of the intellectual hegemony of materialism, since confidently concluding that our innate religious beliefs were the "almost inevitable" outcomes of evolution is an enormous stretch. For additional context here Steven Pinker succinctly described our particular slog through evolution as having been akin to a "camping trip that never end[ed]" (Pinker, 1997: p. 207).…”

Linking Agent Detection of Invisible Presences to the Self: Relevance for Religious and Spiritual Experiences

“…Such presences can be broadly distinguished into intended or voluntary presences (individual actively sought out PH) and unintended, spontaneous presences (individual did not seek to experience PH). Since experiencing supernatural presences is often judged as socially and personally desirable, it is actively sought-after via rituals (Otero, 2003 ; Johnson et al, 2015 ), ingestion of psychedelic compounds (Sayin, 2016 ), as well as kindled through training, prayer (Luhrmann and Morgain, 2012 ; Luhrmann, 2020 ), or deliberate interaction (Morton, 2020 ). For example, intended presences have been described by Luhrmann ( 2012 , p. 148) in her anthropological field work with American Evangelicals, actively invoking God's presence (“to feel sensorily aware of God, as if God were a person who was physically present”).…”