Drawing on a range of hard evidence, Neil Van Leeuwen shows that the psychological mechanisms underlying religious belief are the same as those enabling imaginative play. He argues that we should therefore understand religious belief as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express the values sacred to them.

More than a narrative about a young man destined to accomplish the impossible, more than a chronicle of successful Hollywood writer, producer, and director, Lee Stanley’s unparalleled success that changed not only his life but also the lives of millions of others … Faith in the Land of Make-Believe is the gritty memoir of someone who was never taught how to be a man, a husband, or a father, and was scared to death somebody would find out. Now an award-winning filmmaker, author Lee Stanley learned early in life never to show a weakness. With a macho facade, womanizing ways, and hair-trigger rage, Stanley became his own worst enemy—an enemy that only Christ could defeat. Faith in the Land of Make-Believe is the powerful and brutally honest story of a man who learned how to become totally dependent on God. This is a book about passion, determination and a refusal to give up. Most importantly it is about fulfilling your purpose by never backing down, and always standing solely and completely upon the Word of God.

Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes looks at fantasy film, television, and participative culture as evidence of our ongoing need for a mythic vision—for stories larger than ourselves into which we write ourselves and through which we can become the heroes of our own story. Why do we tell and retell the same stories over and over when we know they can’t possibly be true? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not because pop culture has run out of good ideas. Rather, it is precisely because these stories are so fantastic, some resonating so deeply that we elevate them to the status of religion. Illuminating everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dungeons and Dragons, and from Drunken Master to Mad Max, Douglas E. Cowan offers a modern manifesto for why and how mythology remains a vital force today.

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

"In Unbridled, scholar of religion William Robert uses Peter Shaffer's enigmatic 1973 play Equus, about a boy passionately devoted to horses, to think about and teach religion. For Robert, a play like Equus tangles together text, performance, practice, embodiment, and reception. Studying a play involves us in playing different roles, as ourselves and others, and those roles, as well as the imaginative work they require, are critical to the study of religion. By approaching Equus with the reader, Robert transforms standard approaches to the study of religion, engaging with key themes including ritual, sacrifice, worship, power, desire, violence, and sexuality, as well as major thinkers such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and contemporary theorists such as J. Z. Smith and Judith Butler. As Robert shows, the way themes and theories play out in Equus challenges us to imagine the study of religion anew through open questioning, contrasting perspectives, and alternative modes of interpretation and appreciation"--

Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Why are religious obligations that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other obligations of conscience are not? In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.

Why do so many people - sometimes even intelligent people - swallow the preposterous claims of religion? G.A. Wells, the leading freethinker of our time, tries to shed light on this puzzle in his entertaining and enormously learned book, Belief and Make-Believe. Professor Wells begins by analyzing the nature of belief. To dispel popular confusions on the relation between words and thoughts, he compares the thinking process of scientists, laymen, and chimpanzees. The power of emotion and instinct to help form people's ideological outlooks is analyzed by preference to "defiance" and "reliance", polar attitudes which arise from the need for dominance and submission in primate groups. Wells shows the influence of defiance and reliance in patriotism and in monotheistic religions, where submission to the will of the omnipotent is a wonderful technique for feeling secure in the face of life's actual and ineradicable dangers. Since the knowledgeable Christians now accept that the Bible is uneven, unreliable, and sometimes morally abhorrent, and that the New Testament account of the origin of Christianity is mostly legend, various attempts have been made to save something from the debris by selective re-interpretation. Wells evaluates several typical examples, showing how the apologists shrink from the clear implications of their arguments, which would demolish the whole edifice of Christian doctrine. Finally, Professor Wells debunks some of the extravagant and mystical claims that have been made for the arts, notably poetry, as quasi-religious vehicles for gaining insights into the human condition.

In this second edition, the author opens with a discussion of important developments in the discipline. His closing chapter, 'Global and Intercultural Performance', is completely rewritten in light of the post-9/11 world. Fully revised chapters with new examples, biographies and source material provide a lively, easily accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, post-structuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy and aesthetics. User-friendly, with a special text design, Performance Studies: An Introduction also includes the following features: numerous extracts from primary sources giving alternative voices and viewpoints biographies of key thinkers student activities to stimulate fieldwork, classroom exercises and discussion key reading lists for each chapter twenty line drawings and 202 photographs drawn from private and public collections around the world.

Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

A major question in studies of aesthetic expression is how we can understand and explain similarities and differences among different forms of representation. In the current volume, this question is addressed through the lens of make-believe theory, a philosophical theory broadly introduced by two seminal works - Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe and Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction, both published 1990. Since then, make-believe theory has become central in the philosphical discussion of representation. As a first of its kind, the current volume comprises 17 detailed studies of highly different forms of representation, such as novels, plays, TV-series, role games, computer games, lamentation poetry and memoirs. The collection contributes to establishing make-believe theory as a powerful theoretical tool for a wide array of studies traditionally falling under the humanities umbrella.