This article reconsiders the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria by Christian militants in 391 within the context of Christianization in the late fourth century. The attack on the Serapeum was a deliberately staged, high-profile act of religious violence designed to demonstrate to the wider imperial community that the Roman state was no longer interested in protecting targeted cult sites from Christian militants, and that the perpetrators of such violence would suffer no negative consequences for their actions. The Serapeum, dedicated to the worship of the gods Serapis and Isis, was traditionally associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and with the pharaonic and later Roman Imperial cult. The destruction of this religious and cultural complex by a Christian mob, acting under the direction of the local bishop Theophilus, was a deliberate act of vandalism intended to demonstrate the greater power of the Christian God over his spiritual competitors. In addition, the destruction of this famous sanctuary was undertaken with the approval of the reigning emperor, signaling a change in the locus of sacral authority in the Roman world as Roman emperors were now abandoning traditional pharaonic and Hellenistic models of divine kingship by ceding spiritual authority to Christian bishops.

In the civilizations of the classical West, as exemplified foremost by that of Greece, as well as in that of early imperial China, the idea that humans who excelled exceptionally in war could merit deification was an abiding operative assumption. Given this premise, unsurprising then is the fact that such individuals should be found to have exhibited certain defining traits in common, including exceptional bravery and skill in leadership as well as—at least up until the point of their own deaths—an outstanding record of battlefield success. In addition, whether in Greece or in China, we find that the elevation of the exemplary warrior to the status of a god occurred under religious auspices, or was abetted by a belief structure that at least exhibited many of the core customary functions of a conventional religion. However, if we must regard the normative Chinese paradigm of martial divinization as having consistently departed in conception from its counterpart in the West, then surely the determinative difference is the premium placed on the Chinese demonstration of loyalty. In China, inasmuch as there were credentials for deification, the individual warrior’s unfailing subscription to the virtue of loyalty seems to have superseded all else, and the pathway to immortality as a god was forever obstructed without it.

This article examines India’s uneven sex ratios (the ratio of women to men) and explores how religion may shape beliefs on gender, son preference, and femicide. Estimates vary, but at least 13.5 million females that should exist in India, do not. Extensive literature has discussed the wide range of potential factors that may influence India’s uneven sex ratio including education, socio-economic status, gender equality, and geographic region. Scholars have also examined the role religion has in shaping beliefs on gender and son-preference. Most religion-centered analyses have focused primarily on Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. This article expands on previous research by providing a comparative religious approach that includes Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in addition to Jainism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Animism. Religion is not monolithic and individual beliefs and practices vary significantly throughout India. However, understanding how key figures and texts from the religion contextualize this problem may help better understand India’s imbalanced sex ratio. This paper provides several insights on this topic. First, it maps the district-level sex ratio across India to demonstrate the geographical variation in sex ratios. Next, it discusses how factors such as dowry, joint family system, and inheritance practices are deeply embedded in a family’s preference for a male child, but manifest differently based on different factors, including religion and socio-economic status. Third, it provides a brief overview of each religion’s view on son preference and sex-selective abortion. Finally, it concludes by offering suggestions about how future research can expand on this work.

The growing internationalism of armed conflict in Yemen has presented challenges to Muslim reformers working to achieve social justice. This paper attends to the ethical dimensions of Islamic activism by exploring the use of hunger strikes to strengthen otherwise fractious political coalitions. Facing pressure from actors willing to evoke the most strident forms of sectarianism to explain, license and justify violence, hunger strikers and their supporters enlist what Abdulrabbuh al-Rubaidi (2018) has called a “new skepticism” toward conventional religious establishments that, for many Yemenis since 2011 especially, have become complicit with authoritarian oppression. With the aim of identifying new currents in Muslim reform across the Global South as sovereign state formations face unprecedented scrutiny, this paper considers hunger strike activists’ turn to what political theorist Achille Mbembé (2019) has called “the necropolitical.” In drawing attention to the relationship between hungry bodies and forms of living death exacted on populations through regimes of national and parastatal violence, Yemeni activists hail the value of older, anti-imperialist discourses for reconstituting Islamic solidarity. The ethical leverage of such activism inheres, it is argued, in manifestations of “the secular,” understood not as something opposed to, or outside of, religion but, pace anthropologist Khaled Furani (2015), as a recognition of finitude whose sensory dimensions, magnified against frailties of sovereignty, knowledge and certitude, guide believers toward otherwise unavailable modes of religious worldliness. Islamic fasting rituals help activists frame and stage finitude. Conducted in ordinary and domestic spaces and coordinated with hunger strikes, in practice as well as through literary and artistic representation, fasting rituals situate hunger strike activism as an exercise in Muslim sovereignty tethered to virtuous self-fashioning.

Correlates of militarism have been widely explored in the last twenty years. Since the shift in attention from Great Power Competition to the Global War on Terror, researchers have focused on religiosity’s role in the development of militant attitudes primarily in the context of Islamic extremism. Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power has coincided with increased religious language and fervor—each quite antithetical to the Soviet ethos but useful in chastising Western decadence. Despite Russian elites’ desire to possess and partake in the trappings of cosmopolitan internationalism (again, contra communism), they have adopted the same critical, conservative outlook of Russian Orthodoxy. Using data from The Survey of Russian Elites, Moscow Russia, between 2012 and 2016 (https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03724.v6), this paper explores the relationship between expressions of religious Orthodoxy and militant internationalism among Russian elites. Through multiple regression analysis, little evidence was found to support the relationship between religious measures and the militarism sub-dimension of militant internationalism. However, various religious measures were statistically significant in predicting the Anti-Americanism sub-dimension of Militant Internationalism. These results conflict somewhat with past research analyzing Islamic religiosity and militarism. Despite these inconsistencies, evidence suggests that the importance of God in an individual’s life and the cultural significance of Russian Orthodoxy predicts Anti-Americanism among Russian elites.