This article explores questions raised by the scholarly view that modern popular discourse about religion overemphasises the role of belief. It asks how this alleged overemphasis on belief might be investigated, especially with regard to its effects on religious self-understanding and interreligious relations. In an effort to stimulate discussion and empirical inquiry, this article provides an initial definition of 'belief-centred religious constructs' and suggests that the use of these constructs is context-sensitive, tending to become more prevalent in situations marked by conditions of religious pluralism.

We contest the claim that musically induced sadness cannot be enjoyable in itself. This possibility is supported by closer attention to a musical experience as well as cases of affective reversal, such as the "hedonic flip" of painful feelings. We propose that the affective reversal of sadness in music is due to the high granularity of musically induced emotion.

Within disciplines of religious studies, discussions of religious experience tend to revolve around the most rare and extraordinary cases, while neglecting much more common varieties of ¿ordinary religious experience¿¿that is, experiences of regular practitioners in the midst of normal religious activities such as worship or prayer. This comment will, first, call attention to this essential aspect of religious life, and, second, will suggest ways in which it can be made more accessible to investigation. This article suggests that researchers focus on the variability of engagement in religious practice and the processes of learning and adaptation by which regular practitioners enhance their experience of religious practice. It also suggests that ethnographic studies be extended by carefully selected theories of perception and cognition that address the role of material conditions in ordinary religious experience.

This essay develops a Confucian theory of shame within a framework of related concepts, including concepts of value, personhood, and human flourishing. It proposes that all of these concepts should be understood in terms of a metaphysical concept of harmony (he). Moreover, it argues that this concept of harmony entails a relational experience of value, such that the experience of self-value and `other value¿ are deeply intertwined. An important implication of this theory is that the harmonic realization of value that is required for human flourishing necessarily involves heightened sensitivity to shame. The goal of this essay is not only to describe Confucian shame but also to view the human experience of shame through a distinctly Confucian lens. Accordingly, it offers a Confucian take on the pathology of shame, as well as recent debates concerning the role of shame in modern society.

The perception of value is one of the most important dimensions of religious experience, and yet the cognitive science of religion has so far had little to say about it. This neglect may be the result of a widespread assumption that value is constructed, that is, a special quality added to sensory input by the mind. However, such a view not only divorces value from meaning, but it also cannot register the ways in which value is discovered and enriched through skillful engagement. Accordingly, it is proposed that the experience of value is better understood in ecological terms, as the richness of meaningful interaction between a skilled perceiver and a suitably complex environment. An ecological approach opens up new opportunities for the investigation of the environmental conditions of value-rich religious experience. For example, it may be possible to determine how the experience of divine presence is supported by the structural features of music used in religious settings.

ICS In their effort to emphasize the positive role of nature in our lives, environmental thinkers have tended to downplay or even to ignore the negative aspects of our experience with nature and, even when acknowledging them, have had little to offer by way of psychologically and spiritually productive ways of dealing with them. The idea that the experience of value begins with the experience of existential shame¿arising from awareness of the limitations that define the self¿needs to be explored. The primary purpose of the ¿technologies of the imagination¿¿myth, symbol, ritual and the arts¿is to provide a passage through this shame to the experience of values such as community, meaning, beauty, and the sacred and, through these experiences, to inscribe them into conscience. The implications of this idea for environmental thinking and practice can be explored in two areas involving strong engagement with nature: ecological restoration and the production and eating of food. An environmentalism that fails to provide productive ways of dealing with existential shame may well prove inadequate to the task of providing means for achieving a healthy, sustain­able relationship between humans and the rest of nature.

ICS Writing in 1992, biologist E. O. Wilson prophesied, "Here is the means to end the great extinction spasm. The next century will, I believe, be the era of restoration in ecology." This statement has become the rallying cry for advocates of ecological restoration, an emerging international environmental movement focused on the renewal of damaged or destroyed ecosystems. The benefits promised by ecological restoration are manifold. In addition to its primary ecological goals of replenished biodiversity and improved ecosystem functioning, restoration fosters intimate, participatory kinds of community between practitioners and their local environments. Moreover, the idea that we can heal our environments rather than just minimize the damage we do to them is a much-needed positive message in the midst of our ongoing environmental crisis.

Much of recent scholarship on the Zhuangzi has focused on the distinctive picture of spiritual fulfillment offered by its various "knack" stories. These stories describe a special kind of skillful action marked by fine-tuned responsiveness, non-deliberative spontaneity, effortlessness, and enjoyment. Scholars agree that the Zhuangzian theme of effortless action, or wuwei, indicates an intimate relationship between spiritual satisfaction and skill. However, this emerging consensus has so far failed to produce a clear analysis of the transcendence of wuwei with respect to everyday instances of skillful spontaneity. This essay attempts to clarify the issue of transcendence by using the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow as a reference point. While flow may not provide a comprehensive theory of wuwei spirituality, it sharpens our thinking about the various kinds of transcendence that wuwei might entail. A comparison between wuwei and flow also helps to clarify more general questions about spirituality and its alleged separation from religious belief in the modern world.

Cognitive science of the last half-century has been dominated by the computational theory of mind and its picture of thought as information processing. Taking this picture for granted, the most prominent evolutionary theories of religion of the last fifteen years have sought to understand human religiosity as the product or by-product of universal information processing mechanisms that were adaptive in our ancestral environment. The rigidity of such explanations is at odds with the highly context-sensitive nature of historical studies of religion, and thus contributes to the apparent tug-of-war between scientific and humanistic perspectives. This essay argues that this antagonism stems in part from a deep flaw of computational theory, namely its notion of information as pre-given and context-free. In contrast, non-computational theories that picture mind as an adaptive, interactive process in which information is jointly constructed by organism and environment offer an alternative approach to an evolutionary understanding of human religiosity, one that is compatible with historical studies and amenable to a wide range of inquiries, including some limited kinds of theological inquiry.