Jacob L. Mackey – författare

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religionBelief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things.Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religionBelief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things.Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

Many American liberals believe that misinformation is just a right-wing problem. As a result, they ignore a similar crisis of misinformation occurring on the left—particularly within higher education—and reflexively dismiss any such claim as just another right-wing talking point. Yet, as Virtuous Nonsense makes clear, the epistemic problems in blue America are not only real but also worsening and can no longer be ignored. With contributions from a wide range of liberal-minded scholars and thinkers, including Musa al-Gharbi, Jonathan Haidt, Carol Tavris, and Matthew Yglesias, among many others, the volume demonstrates how large segments of the academy—namely, in the social sciences, the humanities, and education—have become captive to progressive ideology.Where universities once sought to produce and disseminate reliable knowledge, far too many academics today prioritize activism and political projects. This results in poorly supported academic theories and distorted claims that eventually proliferate beyond the university—through the graduation of students who’ve received a flawed education, through a mainstream media that all too often credulously parrots even the most biased claims as “the truth,” and ultimately through public institutions increasingly shaped by politicized expertise.On subjects ranging from race and gender to single parenthood and free markets, Virtuous Nonsense exposes the most damaging of these academic distortions, which not only undermine public trust and sound policymaking but also artificially narrow the boundaries of acceptable debate. In so doing, it presents a challenge to the left: face the crisis, or remain complicit in the degradation of our intellectual and civic life. Until more liberals acknowledge the problem of malfunctioning disciplines and uncritical media environments, America cannot hope to repair its engines of knowledge—or recover from an epistemic crisis that sickens our culture, society, and politics.