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Recent cognitive and evolutionary approaches to the study of religion have been seen by many as a naturalistic alternative to conventional anthropological interpretations. Whereas anthropologists have traditionally accounted for the existence of religion in terms of social and cultural determinants, cognitive scientists have emphasized the innate—that is pre-cultural—constraints placed by natural selection on the formation and acquisition of religious ideas. This article provides a critical assessment of the main theoretical proposals put forward by cognitive scientists and suggests possible interactions, perhaps interdependencies, with more standard anthropological sensibilities, especially between cognitive and evolutionary perspectives that see religion as a by-product of innate psychological dispositions and anthropological approaches that take the 'meaningful' nature of religious symbols as their point of departure.

“Why spirits?” asks Emma Cohen (97)—why are concepts of intentional and agentive supernatural beings such as spirits and gods so prevalent cross-culturally? What makes them appealing, contagious, and lasting? And what kinds of assumptions about the world and its workings do they entail and do they generate? In The Mind Possessed, Cohen offers us some answers; to some degree by appealing to her ethnography of the Afro-Brazilian practice of batuque in the Amazon-bordering town of Belém, but mostly by subordinating particularistic concerns to what she considers more general ‘scientific’ ones. However, it may be the questions, rather than the answers, that merit revising.

BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185.

BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011.

LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, 274 pp., tables, bibliographical references, index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 Paperback, $31.99/£17.99. ISBN: 9780521695411.

FAVRET-SAADA, Jeanne, 2009, Désorceler, 169 pp., bibliographical references. Paris: Éditions de L’Olivier. Paperback, €18.50. ISBN: 9782879296395.

GUADELOUPE, Francio, Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean, 255 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Hardback, $50.00/£34.95. ISBN: 9780520254886.

HACKETT, Rosalind (ed.), Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars, 480 pp. London: Equinox, 2008. Paperback, £18.99/$29.95. ISBN: 9781845532277.

JACKSON, Michael, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity and the Real, 256 pp., preface. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Paperback, $22.95. ISBN: 9780822343813.

KIRSCH, Thomas G., and Bertram TURNER (eds.), 2009, Permutations of Order: Religion and Law as Contested Sovereignties, 269 pp., bibliographical references, index. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Hardback, £55.00. ISBN: 9780754672593.

MAHIEU, Stéphanie and Vlad NAUMESCU (eds.), Churches In-Between. Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe, 340 pp., bibliographical references, tables, index. Munster: Lit Verlag, 2008. Paperback, € 29.90. ISBN: 9783825899103.

MARRANCI, Gabriele, The Anthropology of Islam, 224 pp., introduction, conclusion, references. Oxford: Berg, 2008, Paperback, £13.38. ISBN: 9781845202859.

MEYER, Birgit (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, 292 pp., illustrations, preface, bibliography, index. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Hardcover, $90. ISBN: 9780230605558.

PALMIÉ, Stephan (ed.), Africa of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions, 388 pages, preface. Leiden: Brill, 2008, Volume 33 of Studies of Religion in Africa: Supplements to the Journal of Religion in Africa. Hardback, €88.00/US$ 126.00. ISBN: 9789004164727.

PETERSEN, Jesper Aagaard (ed.), Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, xii + 277 pp., index. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Hardback, £55.00. ISBN: 9780754652861.

PINE, Frances and João PINA-CABRAL (eds.), On the Margins of Religion. ix, 286 p., illus., bibliogrs. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. Hardback, $90.00/£45.00. ISBN: 9781845454098.

PINXTEN, Rik and Lisa DIKOMITIS (eds.), When God Comes to Town: Religious Traditions in Urban Contexts, 151 pp., figures, index. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009, Volume 4 of Culture and Politics/Politics and Culture Series. Hardcover, $70.00/£45.00. ISBN: 9781845455545.

SARRÓ, Ramon, The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone, xviii + 239 pp., maps, figures, glossary, bibliography, index. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 2009. Hardback, £55. ISBN: 9780748635153.

SCHMIDT, Bettina E., Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City, 208 pp., figures, bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Hardback, £55.00. ISBN: 9780754663652.

STEWART, Pamela J. and Andrew STRATHERN (eds.), Religious and Ritual Change: Cosmologies and Histories, 371 pp., preface, appendix, index. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009. Paperback, $50. ISBN: 9781594605765.

TOMLINSON, Matt, In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity, 263 pp., preface, index, references. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Paperback, $21.95/£14.95. ISBN: 9780520257788.

TREMLETT, Paul-François, Lévi-Strauss on Religion: The Structuring Mind, 132 pp., bibliographical references, index. London: Equinox, 2008. Paperback, £14.99/$24.95. ISBN: 9781845532789.

VILAÇA, Aparecida and Robin M. WRIGHT (eds.), Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, 266 pp., index, illustrations, maps, afterword. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Hardback, £55. ISBN: 9780754663553.

CANALS, Roger (dir.). 2008. The Many Faces of a Venezuelan Goddess. Paris: CNRS. 55 min., color.

MOTTIER, Damien (dir.). 2007. Prophète(s). France, Les Films de la Jetée. 46 minutes, color.

Credit. From the Latin, credere, to trust or to believe. Crisis, from the Greek κρίσις, crisis, but also decision, judgment. Judgment day. I had imagined this article as a series of epistles, short missives with didactic aphorisms—postcards, really—from the credit crisis. Yet the effort foundered on two shores. First, my abilities are simply not up to the task, for this genre with its ancient history boasts so many predecessors and models that selection for the purposes of mimicry—or embodiment—became impossible. Second, and more important, I began to realize, in the effort, that the genre demands an analytical engagement with its material that this article in many respects stands athwart. How it does so will become apparent in due course. The credit crisis began in 2008 and continues to the time of my writing, in May 2010. In naming the credit crisis and its religion, I acknowledge I afford them a degree of reality they may not possess. I also acknowledge that this article comes with temporal limits, the limits of the time of its writing. My debts are many and cannot be fully acknowledged. Reality, time and debt are very much at issue in credit crisis religion. Worldly constraints narrow my inquiry to Anglophone and primarily United States examples. Christianity is, by necessity and design, over-represented.

This article discusses structural, logistical, and administrative issues associated with the use of participant observation assignments in teaching the anthropology of religion. Fieldwork presents extraordinary opportunities for teaching students about the nature of cultural difference, but it also poses pedagogical challenges that require careful planning and supervision. The article reviews problems including the scope and nature of the observation, student preparation and guidance, connecting with fieldsites, presentation formats, issues of ethics and confidentiality, and university administrative considerations.

As I began writing this piece, a blog post in the Guardian (18 May 2010) asked if “the markets” are our new religion, likening them to a “bloodthirsty god” in primitive religion. Financial markets are the outcome of thousands of independent decisions, but the media oft en speak of them as a single all-knowing entity. Almost a decade earlier, Thomas Frank (2001) published One Market under God and many others have made a similar connection. The editors of this journal approached me to comment on the possible interest the financial crisis might hold for anthropologists of religion. That begs the question of what religion is and what money has to do with it. In what follows I stick to a Durkheimian line on the affinity between money and religion. Its relevance to the current economic crisis must wait for another occasion.

This article explores the reality of translating or vernacularizing practices in relation to the politics of religion and the realities of faith. Taking violence as endemic to the processes of vernacularization and translation, the article articulates an analytic theory of religious faith—the way it is violated, often in the interest of making it legible within neo-liberal universalizing trends. Thinking about these realities involves understanding translations both as productive of cultural change and as manifestations of struggles over power. Many of these struggles are in the interstices among particular principles of individualism, secularism, legal rationality, and evidence. This article seeks to review the assumptions that emerge with these concepts and show their limits.

Th e refl ections presented here demonstrate the coherence and continuity of the part of my work that can be labeled as dealing with religion and ritual. Th is of course does not mean that everything I have written on the subject is coherent and continuous. Indeed as time has passed I have learned many things from my readings and experiences, from interacting with colleagues and friends, and from working with others, including the people I have studied and, above all, the PhD students I have supervised. As a result I have had to modify what I thought. Looking back I believe there is an ongoing line of argument in what I have published and this is what I attempt to clarify in what follows.