New Books In Religion

It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light.  In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen draws on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to show that psychological mechanisms underlying religious beliefs function like those that enable imaginative play.  When someone pretends, they navigate the world on two levels simultaneously, or as Van Leeuwen describes it, by consulting two maps. The first map is that of factual, mundane reality. The second is a map of the imagined world. This second map is then superimposed on top of the first to create a multi-layered cognitive experience that is consistent with both factual and imaginary understandings.  With this model in mind, we can understand re