Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion

Editorial Note

Minna Opas, Sofia Sjö — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Jørn Borup: Decolonising the Study of Religion

Johannes Cairns — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Book review of Jørn Borup: Decolonising the Study of Religion: Who Owns Buddhism? Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2023, 211 pp.

Daniel Enstedt and Katarina Plank (eds): Eastern Practices and Nordic Bodies: Lived Religion, Spirituality and Healing in the Nordic Countries

Ella Poutiainen — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Book review of Daniel Enstedt and Katarina Plank (eds): Eastern Practices and Nordic Bodies: Lived Religion, Spirituality and Healing in the Nordic Countries. Palgrave McMillan, 2023, 306 pp.

Yoga in Norwegian Nature

Marie Glasø Glein — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

As modern yoga continues to be practised and spread all over the world, it is also changing and adapting to local beliefs, practices, and values. Yoga retreats in nature are now a phenomenon in Norway. This article is based on a document study of websites advertising yoga retreats in Norway, exploring how nature is described and presented. The analysis shows that nature is presented as sacred, healing, and valuable. Elements from Sámi spirituality and other religious traditions are drawn on, and nature is marketed as a necessary part of a spiritual package. This can be seen in connection with climate concerns and Bron Taylor’s formulation of the concept of dark green religion. Nature’s utilization in marketing material suggests a Norwegianization of yoga, where yoga is made more Norwegian by connecting it with Norwegian nature, Sámi spirituality, and local traditions. The article argues that we are seeing the emergence of a new pilgrimage practice in Norway as part of the Norwegianization of yoga. Yoga and wellness are paired here with nature experiences and nature spirituality in a local retreat setting.

Swedish Local Free Churches’ Use of Instagram

Julia Kuhlin — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

This study examines how local Swedish Free Churches use the social media platform Instagram. It builds on data from nine local churches’ Instagram accounts gathered between February and April 2024, encompassing 952 individual posts (including stories) and accompanying captions. Drawing on Adrienne Shaw’s (2017) work, the study not only investigates the technical affordances these congregations employ but observes what these platforms afford religious institutions. It thus challenges the technological determinism often prevalent in previous research, which tends to equate successful social media use with two-way communication and views its absence as a failure. The findings show that, rather than conforming to dominant platform norms, these churches take a negotiated approach, adapting their use of Instagram to serve their values and goals. The analysis highlights how these religious institutions translate their core values onto the platform by emphasizing congregational commitment, personal piety, and biblical authority in their posts, thus bridging their offline and online identities. The local churches included in the study belong to the Uniting Church in Sweden, the Pentecostal Alliance of Independent Churches, and the Evangelical Free Church.

Spiritual Festivals as Embodied Sites of Becoming ‘Porous Selves’

Toomas Gross — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Contemporary spiritual festivals attract heterogeneous crowds of adherents of emergent religions, practitioners and aficionados of fringe knowledge, self-seekers, and many others. Focusing on the ethnographic context of Estonia, this paper approaches such festivals as occasions of self-transformation, where festival participants collectively engage in various practices that encourage them to ‘open up’ – to themselves, to others, and to the world. The physical body often takes centre stage in these ritualized activities, which are typically performed in unison and involve interacting with other bodies through synchronized movement and sound, dance, touch, or at the very least deliberate eye contact with others. Charles Taylor’s (2007) distinction between the ‘buffered’ and the ‘porous’ self provides a suitable analytical framework for exploring and understanding these activities’ transformative potential and effect.

Being Finnish, Being Muslim

Saara Aitokari — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

This article explores Muslim women’s views of their religious and national identities, citizenship, and belonging in Finland. The primary material consists of 20 semi-structured interviews collected in 2021 and 2022. The interviews convey three different understandings of the relationship between Finnish and Muslim identity: the perception of oneself as a Finnish Muslim; the perception of oneself as a non-Finnish Muslim; and the perception of oneself as a multicultural citizen. Additionally, two notions can be observed regarding Muslim identity: one sees Muslimness as a central and unchanging aspect of one’s core identity; the other views it as a highly fluid and context-dependent group identity. Islamic religiosity does not in itself seem to reduce attachment to Finnish identity. Instead, those distancing themselves from Finnishness often referred to experiences of not having their Finnishness acknowledged by society. Identification with the ummah, the worldwide community of believers, proved to be relatively low or completely rejected.

“Only Russia Can Save the World”

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Drawing on previous research dedicated to the examination of far right media worlds that link Christian conservatives in the United States and Russia, this talk offers a broad overview of how technology and ideology transform American social ecologies. Contending that digital media are crucial to the social recalibrations of Russian Orthodoxy in the global context, this talk invites us to see better the philosophical connections across local religious beliefs and global politics in our mediated contemporary moment.