Religious agency, identity, and communication: reflections on history and theory of religion

Establishing Self-World-Relations in Socio-Religious Practices. Looking at Roman Religious Communication

“…See e.g. Mylonopoulos, 2006;Rüpke, 2006;Stavrianopoulou, 2006;Rüpke, 2015. differently: Pace, 2011 bilized by current "knowledge" and affirmed by institutionalized traditions.…”

Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach

“…The religious character of an action is, by and large, a matter of argument (Rüpke 2015a). Consensus regarding the ascription of agency to the divine world depends on a variety of factors, ranging, in a polytheistic system, from the very awareness of the 'existence' of a given deity through the degree of commitment to any member of the pantheon, to the assessment of the relevance and salience of a single such religious identity in a given situation.…”

Introduction to Section 1

“…The embodiment approach to experience avoids reducing experiences to a culturally normative set of meanings, as is pointed out by Sharf, and it is precisely for this reason that the "lived ancient religion"-approach pursues an embodiment approach to religious practice and experience. The "lived ancient religion"-approach furthermore seeks to enhance the embodiment approach by introducing the concept of agency (Rüpke 2015). A "lived ancient religion"-approach to experience, thus, acknowledges the social world in which the agent is embeddedthe individual's cultural and social belongingjust as it acknowledges the individual's capacity to appropriate different strategies for eliciting sensory, emotional, and cognitive responses, as well as for expressing and communicating personal experiences (de Certeau 1984).…”