https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/issue/feed 2020-05-26T12:24:14+02:00 Maike Wachs mjr@staff.uni-marburg.de Open Journal Systems <p>The purpose of <strong>Marburg Journal of Religion</strong> is to publish articles on empirical and theoretical studies of religion.</p> https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8011 2020-05-26T12:24:14+02:00 Matthias Egeler matthias.egeler@daad-alumni.de

<p><em>The depiction of religion, spirituality, and/or the ‘supernatural’ in travel writing, and more generally interconnections between religion and tourism, form a broad and growing field of research in the study of religions. This contribution presents the first study in this field that tackles tourism in and travel writing about Iceland. Using three contrasting pairs of German and English travelogues from the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 2010s, it illustrates a number of shared trends in the treatment of religion, religious history, and the supernatural in German and English travel writing about Iceland, as well as a shift that happened in recent decades, where the interests of travel writers seem to have undergone a marked change and Iceland appears to have turned from a land of ancient Northern mythology into a country ‘where people still believe in elves’. The article tentatively correlates this shift with a change in the Icelandic self-representation, highlights a number of questions arising from both this shift and its seeming correlation with Icelandic strategies of tourism marketing, and notes a number of perspectives in which Iceland can be a highly relevant topic for the research field of religion and tourism.</em></p>

2020-05-26T11:34:27+02:00 Copyright (c) 2020 Matthias Egeler https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/8256 2020-05-26T08:44:28+02:00 Gerrit Lange langeg@staff.uni-marburg.de

<p>The wide range of approaches gathered in this volume makes it indispensable for studying how exactly the much-evoked forces and agencies of sensuality, matter and affect actually affect bodies. It has been often and repeatedly claimed that objects have agency, that religion might be seen as a flow of affective powers through bodies (see, for instance, Donovan O. Schaefer’s book on Religious Affects) – but the question remains open what that would exactly mean. In all their polyphony and discontinuity, the contributions to this volume give much-needed answers to such questions, gained from philological and ethnographic as well as from neuroscientific studies. Filling a lot of gaps, many new questions rise, and the insights into the diverse methods and processes of data collection are useful for ongoing and upcoming studies within the still emerging field of the Aesthetics of Religion.</p>

2020-05-22T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2020 Gerrit Lange