#every other evaluation is but an interpretation through my own language lens!

[pride-of-storm]

i was a legal assistant for like two hundred hours and using 'v' for 'versus' will never leave me

[a-queer-seminarian]

reformed theology

throwing all my notes about theology from my Presbyterian Heritage and Polity class here!

Why Reformed theology is all about Grace

there is no part of us that is untouched by sin

but there is also no part of us that cannot be touched by God’s grace!

the knowledge that we are sinful and that only God can fix that should make us act with humility -- we’re gonna mess up a lot, including in regards to what we believe, and have to be open to hearing people tell us we messed up so we can do better

this is how we can show gratitude for God’s grace and show grace to one another in turn

Sin

sin is an infection so holistic that we cannot cure it

taints our sense of the divine available to us in creation

we are “little idol factories”

we would prefer a smaller, more manageable, more manipulable God to this big God whom we do not control

we always try to make God containable, by limiting language for God and narrowing our theologies... 

Knowing God

yet we do all have a sense of the divine – God is transparent in Creation; but because of sin we can’t figure it out on our own (and also because God is ~Mysterious~)

because we are finite and because we are sinful and because God is mysterious, we can only know God insofar as God chooses to reveal Themself to us

Shannon’s example: If an elephant shouts at a ladybug, the ladybug won’t know what’s going on. But if the elephant becomes a ladybug, and speaks the ladybug’s language, they can communicate

Protestants down the line are going to twist this idea of knowledge, they’ll say that it’s all about knowing the right truth claims to assent to

What Calvin’s concept of knowledge is about is way more interesting; it’s kinda hard to grasp but i like it. It has to do with...

Affections!

affections = the kind of knowledge that includes both the intellect and the emotion -- a much more holistic idea of knowledge than what we usually think of

Don Saliers is a theologian who calls affections “belief-laden emotions”

And then there’s Wesley’s language of “our hearts are strangely warmed”

If you know “I am sinful,” but have no emotion of being sorry, being remorseful about that, then you do not truly know that you’re a sinner

Thus believing something in a religious sense is different from believing something in, say, geometry class

if you believe that Creation is a gift from God, you will have an emotional response to Creation – it won’t remain a neutral “it just exists” but involve gratitude, reverence

Shannon adds that there should also be a volitional response -- our will for how to be in the world: should belief that Creation is a gift from God not also include willing oneself to be in relationship to God?

If you believe Creation is a gift from God but then you go and destroy it for profit – then you don’t really believe that Creation is a gift from God

I’m starting over the bullet points for the next bit because i think it’s cool and important, but it’s still about the affections stuff above

Belief thus involves bodily responses

That doesn’t mean that every “belief-laden emotion” that affects your will and body and great

When we do something we know is wrong, our whole person is involved in the knowing -- we may feel physically sick

We practice affections like hope, like repentance; we do not practice affections like resentment and bitterness (because who wants to have those negative physical & emotional reactions?)

practice = attempt to be formed in such a way that we can know and live in emotions like forgiveness

LAMENT is a Christian affection!

all the affections we work to shape ourselves in are ultimately rooted in scripture, and that includes lamentation

Scripture

Calvin heavily influenced our modern church language about the Bible

We know God in and through scripture, through the power of the Holy Spirit

but interpretation is key to that! -- you don’t just wait for God to interpret it for you; the Spirit does the work through your studying of the text

Calvin’s humanist background led him to say that we should interpret scripture as we would any other text -- while taking its context seriously

This is why he argued that pastors need to be educated in scripture -- so they can help their congregations read the Bible well

being able to think critically about scripture will prevent the kind of idolatrous religious abuses that we are all tempted to

Law and Gospel

In a rare instance of Calvin saying something I actually like lol, Calvin added a third use of “the law” -- the torah -- on top of the two that Lutherans had: while Lutherans claimed the law’s purpose was (1) to show us our own sin and lead us to Christ and (2) to control non-Christians from “running wild” (lmaooooo garbage), Calvin said that (3) the law was also a guide for us

The law/torah has ongoing moral authority -- Presbyterians don’t agree that the Gospel “freed us” from the law (thank goodness, that’s super supersessionist)

The torah, which was a way for God’s people to relate to God, is really good news in itself – evidence that God wants to be in relationship with people and shows people how to do that!

Providence, Free will, predestination

This was such a huge section i went ahead and made it all a separate post.

But one big point is God’s sovereignty -- their active care and control over every aspect of life, no matter how small

There is no moment in your life when God is not with you, actively loving you in that moment

God wills the ultimate flourishing of all -- and humans have a role in that

And as to predestination stuff, the main thing to know is that we have no role in our own salvation -- God saves us freely; our proper response to that is gratitude

Reformed Theology’s development after the first Reformers

Since the time of Calvin, Christians were arguing about how Christianity can hold together with reason, with science

the Enlightenment that influenced the Reformation brought with it an ideal of knowledge as universally true and accessible

i.e. if one person does an experiment and no one else can replicate it, something is wrong with it

by the turn of the 1900s, some were coming to think differently about fairness; it was stuff that took place in the 1800s that caused that

Nineteenth Century Protestant Liberal Theology

emerges in the last quarter of the 1800s, continues through early 1900s

historical critical method of biblical scholarship – studying the bible in context, etc. – was new but becoming widely accepted

science and history as the lens through which you view scripture

theology is compatible with history and science; the relationship between theology and history matters

use methods of critical scholarship to avoid coming up with a personal view of Jesus who’s different from the historical Jesus

relativizing dogma: truth is relative to time and place -- different from that Enlightenment view of universal truth

a judging of Christian expressions as appropriate and correct

a sense that you don’t have to believe everything that Christians believed before – frees Christians from some of the constraints of tradition

General Themes

a desire for a living, vital faith like that of the early Reformers 

the parts of the Bible that hold the most weight involve Jesus’s activities

a sense that Christian faith has strong practical and moral implications

the social gospel movement grows from this

theme of the Kingdom of God

fundamentally optimistic -- we can make progress by moral effort

Experiential faith

“I know something of God through Jesus and through great literature / watching a sunset / listening to music”

...And then Karl Barth drops in.

his work is described as a “bombshell tossed into the playground of the theologians.”

once a Liberal theologian himself, Barth’s time as a pastor in a little village impacted by WWI causes him to criticize Liberal Theology as an attempt to domesticate a God who is known only as the Unknowable, whose yes is our no and no our yes.

Some of his criticisms of Liberal Theology:

too high a regard for humans

you are so optimistic about humanity -- have you forgotten that we are sinful? that our viewpoints are corrupted and twisted by sin?

humanity didn’t seem to be progressing that much from where he was sitting, with his parishioners struggling and bombs dropping.

if you’re tying to find the “golden kernel in the husk of Christianity,” how do you discern what’s kernel and what’s husk – an awfully high evaluation of your own discernment methods to think you’ll succeed

claims liberal theologians are too complacent, too self assured

“You look at the Bible and question it, instead of allowing it to question you.”

You’re not studying God; you’re studying human beings!

Better to word things not as “God does this” but “I experience God as”

An anthropological starting point -- liberal theologians are trying to get to God from humanity

in doing so, you’re only going to get a human blown up really big.

you have a general understanding of truth and history and reason and use that to approach the revelation of God

Liberal Theology makes God’s action continuous with social movements

don’t assume that God’s actions are continuous with yours – that makes God much smaller and more manageable than She really is

he criticizes these folks for being apologetic – trying to make Christianity understandable in cultural terms

you end up saying “God is like this human or that created thing”; “Christianity is like this”

Barth is talking to people who are used to walking around and seeing craters left after bombs

“What we know of Jesus is the crater left after the bomb is dropped”

revelation is not some kitten curling up next to you is to make you feel better

We cannot handle God’s bigness…so we make idols

Barth calls idols “no-gods” that give us their stamp of approval on our lives, instead of looking to the God of Jesus who upends our lives and whom we cannot manipulate

We cannot get to know God on our own steam at all

Revelation = God’s act in Jesus

God’s act of revelation in Jesus is like a flash of lightning that penetrates the sphere of human existence

gives us a reality of God that is inscrutable, rather than being a detailed description of who God is—God has revealed that God is Mystery

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Gods

Religious Worlds (1994)

“This book is a good introduction to the phenomenology of religion. Stressing that religions are not just systems of belief, but forms of behavior…William E. Paden focuses on four key complementary categories: myth, ritual, gods and systems of purity.”

This book is something of a landmark work within its field. "From gods to ritual observance to the language of myth and the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Religious Worlds explores the structures common to the most diverse spiritual traditions.” In other words, Paden is studying the concept of religion itself and how it manifests across the spectrum of available world religions. He is not surveying what individual religions have to say and then comparing his findings to find a right one. Paden asks questions like: What function do rituals serve across all religions? And, what about sacred writings and histories (properly called "myth" within comparative religion); how do these shape and fashion religion?

From his perspective, Paden is attempting to let each religion speak on its own terms and simply listen to what each is saying. Paden seeks to classify these facts, or "phenomena," in the search for religious structures, or "forms of expression," from any emerging patterns. Throughout the process, respect must be given to each religion's complexity of contexts (geographic, historical, sociological, etc.); each one sees the world in its way because of these dynamics, what Paden calls a "religious world," and engages the world accordingly. Only when we shed our "religious world" and enter into those of others can we truly understand them. Finally, Paden also stresses sensitivity for the sacred while surveying religions to help discern what is religious by nature. His goal is to understand and survey each world's respective landscape in a spirit of tolerance and diversity, and let the reader evaluate from there as necessary.

William E. Paden University of Vermont, Professor Emeritus

Area of expertise: Cross-cultural patterns of religious behavior.

Professor Paden had been a member of the Department from 1965 until his retirement in the spring of 2009. He served as Chair from 1972-78 and 1990-2005. His M.A. and Ph.D. (1963, 1967) in comparative religion are from Claremont Graduate University, and his B.A. (1961) from Occidental College (philosophy). He has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford (1999, 1992), and spent time as a research fellow and lecturer in Japan (1999, 1992).

Contents

Preface to the 1994 Edition    vii

Preface to the 1988 Edition    xiii

Introduction     1

One: Religion and Comparative Perspective

1 Some Traditional Strategies of Comparison   15

2 Religion as a Subject Matter    35

3 Worlds    51

Two: Structures and Variations in Religious Worlds

4 Myth    69

5 Ritual and Time    93

6 Gods    121

7 Systems of Purity    141

8 Comparative Perspective: Some Concluding Points    161

Notes       171

Index       187

Preface to the 1994 Edition

In the five years since Religious Worlds was published, the need to understand the plurality of culture and religion has become even more apparent. Issues of pluralism indeed seem to have become part of the tasks and riddles of civilization itself. The profound differences between human worldviews have not been erased by information technology or international business networks, with their appearance of having so easily unified the surface of the globe. Beneath the surface, the earth is still a patchwork of bounded loyalties and hallowed mythologies, a checkerboard of collective, sacred identities. The theater of ethnic and religious diversity has not gone away. The variety of human worlds, with all their conflicts, is still there despite the facade of unity.

Pluralism refers not only to cultural diversity but also to the many kinds of “knowledges” or lenses humans use to perceive and construe their universe. With increasing clarity we see how inevitably the world forms itself according to our different frames of reference. A chemical lens will only register a chemical world; a poetic lens uncovers a poetic world; a religious lens yields a religious world. These multiple frames whereby telescopes picture the universe one way and religious symbols picture it another simply coexist. Alter the lens and you alter the data; change the receiving channel and you change the program; switch groups and you exchange one world for another.

Models of knowledge based on an exclusive, privileged, single lens—whether that of the sciences or the religions or white middle-class Americans—have come under challenge. In a new, pluralistic setting, in this new openness to the many architectural possibilities of what we take to be the world, the study of religious diversity has a definite role to play.

When in 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the practice of prayer in public schools, it advocated at the same time that the comparative study of religions should be an indispensable part of education. Yet the study of religion has long been controlled by what might be called the interests of private ownership, that is, the religious groups themselves, so that the subject matter of “the gods” has until recent times lacked an appropriately unbiased vocabulary parallel to those in the study of the physical and social worlds. There cannot be a study of religion that is not at the same time the study of all religion, just as one cannot have a “geology” based only on impressions of the rocks in one’s backyard. Religious Worlds, which works at broadening, purging, and reshaping our otherwise provincial language about religious life, is a small contribution to this new globally oriented era of religious studies and I am gratified that it has found a wide readership in college classes and in Japanese and German translations.

I continue to be impressed by how useful, synthesizing, and far-reaching the concept of “world” is as an organizing category for the study of religion. “World” is not just a philosophical abstraction nor a word for the endless galactic stardust. In more human, experiential terms, it is an actual habitat, a lived environment, a place. It is what we need to understand about others in order to understand their life and behavior.

A “world” is the operating environment of language and behavioral options that persons presuppose and inhabit at any given point in time and from which they choose their course of action. The term has enough flexibility to refer to the scripts and horizons of an entire culture, a subculture, or an individual. Within a single tradition like Christianity, there are thousands of religious worlds, because of the many ways they are packaged by cultures and history. “World,” then, becomes a tool for getting at the shaping power of context in the fullest sense of the word, and the idea of multiple worlds helps us to recognize and take seriously the distinctive life-categories of the insider, however different they may be from our own.

Here variety and paradox abound. Some religious worlds are tightly bounded by rigid laws, others rely on individual conscience and no boundaries. Some are hierarchical, with stratified ecclesiastical functions, others dispense with all social roles and distinctions. Some worlds are fixed on tradition and the past, others on awareness of the moment. Some focus on everyday duties, others on states of ecstasy and escaping the mundane. Some revolve around worship, others around self-reflection and meditation. And everywhere cultures configure religious life with their unique styles and language.

Comparative method in the study of religion is still in its formative stages, still seeking self-definition as a tool in research, education, and interpretation, and Religious Worlds attempts to contribute to certain aspects of this process. While we have always made comparisons, the important issue now is the purpose for doing so. In the West, comparison has been used to attack Christian claims to uniqueness, to establish those claims, or to prove that all religions are really one. I do not take any of these traditional, political approaches here. Nothing is compared to show that one religion is better than another, or that some are exactly the same, or that none of them is true. Instead, what I submit is a framework for dealing evenhandedly and integrally with both difference and commonality.

Religious Worlds advocates the approach of a balanced comparative sense which neither ignores resemblances nor simplistically collapses them into superficial sameness; which neither ignores differences nor magnifies them out of proportion to the human, cross-cultural commonalities of structure and function that run through them. Every religious expression is different from others but also has something in common with them. My hope is that this book, while not pretending to represent any final, normative model for comparative work, will at least help stimulate further thinking along these lines. Clearly more historians of religion are now realizing that cross-cultural analysis is a tool not for dissolving variety, but for discerning and appreciating it; and this is a promising development. But you cannot analyze diversity without understanding commonality, too. The two go together.

A religious world is one that structures existence around sacred things. An important point of the book is that “the sacred” can be described without taking a position on whether it is something that exists or does not exist outside the participant’s own world. It exists to the insiders, to the believers. That is enough; that is the fact. Sacred objects play a powerful role in organizing human behavior. To the insider, the holiness of Christ, or Amida Buddha, or the Qur’an is absolute; to the outsider, in contrast, these symbols have no special value at all and may even be considered illusory. Holy objects, in this sense, are world specific. The most sacred and inviolable sacraments, traditions, gods, authorities, places, and times of one world are irrelevant or do not exist in another. One person’s “holiest day of the year” is just another working day for someone else. In a Buddhist world, the Muslim “center of the world,” the Kaaba in Mecca, is not on the map. Who among the Irish think that the Ganges River is holy? Taoists do not face Jerusalem for their meditations, and Protestants give no special role to the Roman Catholic pope.

Comparative religion makes this diversity intelligible. It shows that the very nature of a religious world is to experience the universe through its own focal symbols, to see the whole of time in terms of its own history, to find the absolute in its own churches and temples, and to equate its particular moral order with the ultimate order of the entire world.

Does the book itself have a point of view? General readers may find its approach peculiarly nonjudgmental. I do give priority to describing the insiders’ religious worlds before interpreting them by outsiders’ evaluations. And there is certainly something quite open-ended, enigmatically so, in the image that the world—whether that of the religious insider or that of the nonreligious outsider—exists in accordance with the lenses, contexts, and locations of its inhabitants. Religion scholars will recognize that Religious Worlds reforms and applies some aspects of phenomenological methodology, which attempted to delineate the structures of religious life (or the “phenomenon” of religion) without imposing metaphysical judgments. But more particularly, they may also notice that it presents a direction for comparative religion that invites convergence with socio-historical and anthropological levels of description and that, through the centralizing concept of world construction, brings to bear the contributions of scholars as otherwise different as Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade. Since Religious Worlds first appeared I have published a sequel, Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), which does deal directly with the radically different ways of explaining religion and in that sense takes up where Religious Worlds leaves off.

Changes to the actual text of this edition of Religious Worlds are strictly minimal, comprising only a few minor word substitutions where specific clarification or correction seemed necessary. Bibliographic references have been updated where relevant. Readers will understand that most references to socialist rituals in Eastern Europe should now be read in the past tense—indeed, the change of staging that hauled down socialist icons, removed the honor guard at the tomb of Lenin, and piped in Christmas carols to Red Square gives dramatic, contemporary illustration to the historically changing nature of world creation and definition.

When first-year college students come to orientation, I sometimes give a talk about liberal arts education. In a word, it is this. Welcome to the artes liberales, the arts of free persons (liberi). You are not here just to train for a job, in order to take a niche in someone else’s notion of reality, but you are free to study the nature of the world itself and come to your own views about it. Each department here offers a different set of glasses for seeing the world, so you will find that the universe in fact consists of a dazzling array of worlds and that each world has even more within it. Science guides you to some, history and sociology to others, art and music to still others. Now the world will appear one way, now quite another. Whose world will we choose to engage? Which world will we choose to live in?

Religious worlds should be studied, too, alongside all the others. Can anyone be truly educated about the complexity or scope of human existence and values who has never engaged the question of religious lenses, and who has never asked what can be learned from their global and inexhaustible variety?

Burlington, Vermont November 1993

page 121

Gods

Gods are a central, unavoidable subject matter for the study of religious life and require phenomenological analysis that is not governed by Western, theistic premises. Although gods are in some ways aspects of myth, they are also important enough structures in their own right to deserve special focus.

Gods as Religious Structures

We shall use the expression gods to represent a general type of religious experience. We will examine gods not for their intrinsic qualities as distinct, supernatural beings but as instances of a form of religious language and behavior. Gods are not just names and representations, not just literary, artistic or philosophic images, but the points at which humans relate to “the other.” We adopt here not a traditional theological approach that assumes one god, “God”—with a capital G— to be the reality behind all worlds and religions, but rather a descriptive approach that examines how any god represents a way of structuring existence and hence amplifies our thematic understanding of religious beings and objects. We set aside unresolvable evaluative questions about whether gods exist outside of human lives, and directly address how gods do in fact function in religious worlds.

The word god is used generically here to mean any superior being that humans religiously engage. Any being, visible or invisible, inhabiting past, present, or future, can function as a god. There are all kinds of such entities. For our thematic purposes, the category comprises a whole spectrum of mythic beings—more than what Westerners habitually associate with the term. Buddhas and bodhisattvas function as gods in many ways, even though they are a very different genre of being than the gods of theism. In traditional China the difference between ancestors and deities is sometimes hard to make. Kings, gurus, and other holy persons may be approached with the same behavior as that directed to divinity. The Greeks offered sacrifices to “heroes” and other demigods. Spirits and gods overlap in their functions and characteristics, and in Shintoist Japan everything has a kami—a term that, depending on the context, is translatable as soul, spirit, or deity. But there are kami of different powers and levels of importance.

Like myth and ritual, a god is a form of religion that can have any content. The content can be demonic or benign, male or female, limited or unlimited in power. It can represent the power of vengeance, kingship, love, ancestry, luck, territory, wisdom, fertility, consciousness, or being itself. A god can be endowed with specific character or personality—and given biographies—or simply representative of a force or function such as good fortune or cattle protection. Even within a tradition that has only one god, the images of that mythic being can be quite diverse. Phenomenologically, there have been many radically different experiences of the god of the biblical traditions, even though these are theologically understood as referring to one and the same god—namely, God.

Once again, in pursuing a comparative approach we must acknowledge the nets of semantic ambiguity. The term god means many things in modern Western culture, and understanding gods is easily impeded by any one of four thickly sedimented cultural predispositions.

First, it is not easy for a monotheistic culture to take an even-handed attitude toward gods when the very word God serves as the proper name of the Supreme Being of the universe, the one “before Whom there are no others.” We have seen above how “gods” in the plural conjures up idols of tin and wood, the hapless competitors, so railed against in the Bible, of “the one true Lord.” By definition, monotheism scorns polytheism and animism except occasionally to show that they are stages on the way to “pure” theism. In contrast to the observation of the Greek philosopher Thales that “the world is full of gods,” the central creed of Islam begins, “There is no God but Allah,” and the warning “You shall have no other gods before me” heads the list of the Ten Commandments.

A second bias comes from the side of rationalism, which typically takes all gods, including the biblical God, as fictions. Scientific explanation has done away with gods. Demystification of the universe is the goal of rationalism. Gods are merely projections of natural realities.

The third approach is the deistic, conceptualist one that accepts the general idea of a supreme being but takes it as an abstract, philosophical concept rather than as a religious presence. For many, the god of the West has been relegated to a principle—designating the ultimate force of order in the universe. God here is like a metaphysical hypothesis, to be either accepted as semantic currency or proved by argumentation. In this semantic context the word God often summons up a series of arguments for or against the existence of a supreme being. God is something to be argued about, not something to be sacrificed to.

The fourth bias is the universalist one that the main gods of the world religions are all versions of the same ineffable divine reality. Here Allah, God, Brahman, Buddha, and even Tao are but the various names for this transcendent mystery.

These approaches have their function within the world of their adherents, but tend to close off the process of observing and comparing what gods mean in people’s lives. Rationalist and conceptualist frameworks see god language as on the same level with rational language, yet we have seen that religion does not share the same territory as science but is a different sort of language altogether. The discourse of science is disengaged, objective, and neutral to issues of the significance of human life or how one should behave. The language of gods—as part of mythic expression—has to do with what acts one must take to lead a meaningful life. A world inhabited by gods is therefore not just a prescientific world but a completely different genre of worldview and world behavior. The two realms can certainly exist side by side, as they often do in modern culture, where the sheer differentness of their semantic form and context can provide for a degree of mutual autonomy.

As for the universalist view, there has been a definite value and truth to some of the parallels to which it has called attention. But insofar as it reduces gods to the same reality, it is engaging in metaphysical affirmations and transcends any real interest in comparative differences and hence specific worldviews.

The most important word in Western languages is the word God. Yet it is a term about which we have little reflexive or comparative awareness. It is typically insulated from inclusion in the cross-cultural subject matter of religious studies by its privileged place in living biblical language. In this chapter the god of monotheism is respectfully incorporated into a wider generic framework.

With these clarifications in mind we may proceed to examine further the idea of gods as experiential structures.

A god is not just a bare object—like a statue in a museum—but part of a bilateral relationship. A god is a god of someone or to someone. Only in the eyes of a religious person can a god be a god as such. A god is a category of social, interactive behavior, experienced in a way that is analogous to the experience of other selves. With gods one receives, gives, follows, loves, imitates, communes, negotiates, contests, entrusts. A god is a subject to us as objects and an object to us as subjects. We address it, or it can address us. Part of this relational quality is even evident in the etymology of the English term god, which traces back to a root that means either “to invoke” or “sacrificed to.”1

The religious meaning of a god lies in what one does in the presence of the god. If gods are not just objects but constituted by forms of behavior between subjects, this relational universe sharply contrasts with the antiseptic, demystified world of scientific language where the earth is not a place of any exchange or engagement—where nothing is addressable. In this absence of dialogue, scientific language flattens everything it sees into data, but in the language of gods, the world is experienced through categories of invocation, listening, and respect.

This dialogical factor may be understood better if we see how virtually any object can function as a “being.” Anything can be spoken to. Poetry has always known this. And any form can confront us with its own power and message. An “it” can become “you” or “thou.” It can be apprehended as “the one” that brings to us this or that effect. The evening news reported a falsely imprisoned man who found a turning point in his life when he met an object “he could talk to”: a button. With the button he became friends and found solace. Religiously endowed objects easily become personified: the sabbath has been addressed as God’s “bride”; Tibetan Buddhist shrines (stupas) are sometimes called “precious one” (rimpoche); the Sikh scripture is “the ultimate guru”; and the sacred fires of Zoroastrianism are addressed as though they were special beings. Any object, any “other” thing, can assume a temporary absoluteness in the way it faces and dominates us, in the way it forms a conduit between us and the infinite “wholly other,” the “thou” that is the self’s perpetual, complementary counterpart. Again, we both address and are addressed.

In the following sections we will examine two sets of variations related to the theme of gods. There are many others, but these are especially germane to our examination of the religious structuring of worlds. We will first see how kinds of gods correlate with kinds of worlds, and then look at the typical patterns that channel the interaction of gods and humans.

Gods and Worlds

Gods go with their worlds. It would be worth investigating the extent to which a god—in traditional geographies—could not really be worshipped outside its own land. In ancient Semitic religion the term baal—“master” of a house, “owner” of a field, “husband”—meant the god who possessed some place or district. In the ancient world, priests were customarily not priests of gods in general, and not even of one god or goddess in general, but of a particular god at a particular site. The Bible tells of Syrian armies that, after being defeated in the hill country of Samaria, held nevertheless that the gods of the hills would have no power in the plains.2 The god has its polis, its relative totality of influence. My great ancestors and heroes may not be yours. The territory of Ares is not the territory of Aphrodite. Nor does gentle Jesus the bambino rule over the same world as Christ the apocalyptic world judge. Protestants know nothing of the domain of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Gods are not just fantasy symbols but beings whose realms cannot be violated with impunity. Where sacrilege does take place with no consequence, the gods have fled. We see this in the historical transition between religious worlds: when missionaries hewed down pagan oaks with no divine punishment, and when Polynesian taboos were neglected without repercussion, the pagan world orders with their ruling gods had already been abandoned. In a similar way, secular cultures have replaced impotent historical sacralities. Behavior that under the sanctions and surveillance of the gods would have been unthinkable in one generation is routine in the next.

Gods correlate with the critical points of a world where humans are most open to the power of “the other.” If a world is crucially subject to what comes from the sky, from animal or plant life, from clan or political order, or from ritual purity, we may expect to find gods located in these junctures and conceived in these categories. In societies based firmly on family relationships and social hierarchy, such as traditional China, we are not surprised to find ancestors, elders, and emperors receiving the same reverence as gods. If a community or individual is weary of a despotic, alien world, we are not surprised to find gods appearing as messiahs, redeemers, and inner guides, delivering us to another, better place altogether.

Because the location of gods follows the location of the sacred, we get used to gods of mountains, rivers, vegetation, and fire; gods of the hearth, village, tribe, nation, and humanity; gods of thieves, merchants, smiths, hermits, priests, and mystics. There are gods such as the “One Great Source of the Date Clusters” (Amaushumagalanna of Uruk), and also the “one great source of yogic power” (Shiva). There are gods of the whole complexity of time (e.g., the ancient Iranian cosmic god Zurvan), but also gods for collecting wood, gods for cutting wood, and gods for burning wood. There are gods of longevity, child protection, health, and success; there are gods of death, misfortune, and every disease; and there are gods who are called “The True Parent.” There are gods who are the sun itself and gods of the inner light. Gods are the looming masks of the ultimate confrontational points of success and disaster, life and death. The history of gods is linked with the history of those points, with the succession of zones of sacredness.

…

This extraordinary specificity of gods extended even to powers of the moment. The Greeks “saw a special divine being, a daimon, in each piece of fortune or misfortune. The tragedians speak repeatedly of ton paronta daimona, the god who dominates someone at a particular moment, for instance during mourning over a dead person or on being shamed. ”6 Lightning and sheaves of grain were other instances of “momentary deities.”

In traditional Roman Catholicism the polytheistic outlook was carried on to some degree in the veneration of a multitude of saints. Forty different saints were invoked in the French Vosges, as “guardians of livestock and protectors from all kinds of sickness, such as gout, toothache, and burns (St. Augustine, for instance, protected one from warts), as protectors in storms and against fleas.”7 In Asia we find a similar assimilation of native spirits to Buddhist saints. The name of invocation could change, but the domain (childbirth, smallpox) of the god or saint remained the same.

One class of supernatural beings is that of the negative gods: demons. Every world has its negating forces. The Satan figure in the West became elaborated as a diabolical antagonist to the biblical God. Minor demons, though, may be limited to specific functions, like drought, leprosy, or the weakness of hunters. The Ifugao of the Philippines count thirty-one gods who send dysentery and twenty-one who produce boils and abscesses.8

Some gods are patrons of specific communities of people. In traditional cultures every significant collectivity would have a sacred group spirit of some kind. Each of more than 400 Australian aboriginal tribes had its own, different totemic being—usually a certain species of animal or plant. Each village in Bali had its own barong, a patron protector in the form of a supernatural dragon mask. Latin American villages each have their special saint. In many societies domestic spirits or ancestors rule the household circle. The Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, is the ancestress of all the gods, the imperial family, and ultimately the Japanese people. Traditional Near Eastern city states each had their divinity: Melkarth was the god of Tyre, Moloch of Carthage, Astarte of Byblus, Marduk of Babylon, Jupiter of Rome, Yahweh of Jerusalem. Moreover, within a society certain classes of people were accountable to certain gods—such as warriors to Mars, seamen to Neptune, merchants to Mercury, and farmers to Ceres. Juno presided at marriages. In Greece youths identified with Apollo, maidens with Artemis, married women with Hera.

These examples should help us to see how complex are the domains and nature of the so-called supreme beings of the world religions. The supreme being is that god that grounds the entire world, not just some part of it. There are several versions of such unity—different families, as it were, of supreme gods. Many tribal systems refer to a creator god who is ultimately responsible for the world but has withdrawn from activity in it. In biblical traditions, theocratic images of power over the world—such as God as creator, king, and lord—are central. In Hindu tradition, ontological metaphors dominate; a common name for Brahman is “being, consciousness, joy” (satchitananda), and Shiva and Shakti are the “perpetual union of consciousness and energy”—that is, existence itself. Buddhas are defined in terms of primal, archetypal virtues such as wisdom and compassion. Chinese religion pictures the cosmos as the harmonious “Way” (Tao) of “heaven and earth.”

For illustrative purposes consider the difference between Hindu and biblical images a little further. In the former, the supreme being is the indwelling reality of the world. In the latter, the world is under the monarchical power of the god, and there is an unbridgeable distance between the holiness of the Creator and the finitude of the creation. In the Hindu conception, all the countless gods are only the million faces of the one god. Krishna, as the supreme god in the Bhagavad Gita can say,

I [am] the oblation and I the flame into which it is offered.

I am the sire of the world, and this world’s mother and grandsire: ... I am the end of the path, the witness, the Lord, the sustainer: I am... the beginning, the friend and the refuge: I am the breaking-apart, and the storehouse of life’s dissolution: I lie under the seen, of all creatures the seed that is changeless. I am the heat of the sun; and the heat of the fire am I also: Life eternal and death. I let loose the rain, or withhold it. ... I am the cosmos revealed, and its germ that lies hidden.9

The biblical god Yahweh is more intrinsically connected with the symbolism of power, reflecting the kingship imagery so characteristic of the great gods of the ancient Near East. The Lord’s “answer” to the suffering Job makes quite a different point than Krishna’s:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding. … Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? … Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth? ... Who has let the wild ass go free? ... Do you give the horse his might? … Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? ... Will you play with him as with a bird? … Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.10

Here the god is not establishing his identity with creation, but his rule and mastery over it—the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, has an etymological connotation of “power” or “strong. ” There is nothing He cannot do: He made the world, parted the Red Sea, and called forth his Son from the realm of the dead.

Understanding the nature of the supreme being has been the endeavor of philosophers and theologians East and West. How are the many things of the world, including negativity and opposition, related to this one principle? Why is there evil if God is good?

But religion is not philosophy. Religiousness means engaging the sacred. It means having a focus, a point of engagement. These points are the earthly embodiments of the gods: incarnations, authorities, priests, and a multitude of symbolic objects.

The institution of the guru-disciple relationship illustrates this idea of focus.11 In Asian traditions the guru has some of the functions of a god. The guru is a living embodiment of the divine, a “realized being,” a “living master.” True progress is possible only with the guidance of such a person, who initiates and prescribes one’s spiritual path. To be in the presence of the guru is to be in the presence of a god. The entire focus of Christianity is on one great manifestation of the supreme god—Jesus Christ, the Christian guru, so to speak. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he enjoins, and “no one comes to the Father, but by me.”12

A god’s presence can be experienced in virtually anything, in shrines, words, and sacraments, in stones, and in people. Hindu scriptures teach that the supreme being is to be seen in all life. Sacramental religion finds the god in the rites of church and shrine. Some ethically oriented Christian worldviews are guided by the words of Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”13 The religious person always knows where to find and honor the god, and with what actions.

Gods also appear within the self, as spirit allies or as indwelling elements of the supreme god. We have seen that shamanic cultures give importance to the individual’s knowledge of personal supernatural entities. Many Christians testify to the presence of Christ within: “I have Jesus in my heart and I am no longer alone.” Mahayana Buddhist traditions speak of everyone being “the Buddha.” Islamic mysticism takes its cue from the Qur’anic phrase that Allah is closer to us than our very jugular vein.

Not all religious systems limit themselves to the idea that the supreme reality of the world is a being per se. Most noticeably in Asia, but also in some Western theologies and mysticisms, we find the notion of ultimate, divine reality as something utterly and intrinsically beyond any naming or representation. Hindu and Buddhist systems often point to an inexpressible unity of things that lies behind all human, subject-object distinctions. Said one Zen abbot, “There is Buddha for those who do not know who he is really, but there is no Buddha for those who know who he is really.” The image of the empty circle in Zen symbolizes this state of having gone beyond the process of mental objectivizing. Buddhism is perhaps the religion that offers the most illustrations of the attempt to transcend gods and other objectifications in the pursuit of enlightenment.

Often we find two or more religious systems interwoven or side by side in one culture, such as an ethical tradition like Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity coexisting with an indigenous system of spirit observance. The realms of the nats in Burma, the yang in Indonesia, and the jinn in Arabia are examples of the latter. In Japan the buddhas cohabit the land with thousands of Shinto kami, the latter governing the forces of everyday life. Residents do not find these systems contradictory. In India by traditional count there are 330 million gods—and yet ultimately there is only one.

The religious significance of gods is not fathomed by just showing and comparing their respective realms. The spatial metaphor has its limits. We understand the life of a god even more fully when we examine the actual ways humans interact with it. The most intimately local ancestral spirit profoundly approached may reflect a richer religious phenomenology than a sublimely conceived being that has only a philosophical or literary existence. So we must now turn to the question of how gods are approached. If a god is a god only in relationship to a human, then how is this relationship enacted? How is a god’s existence or presence acknowledged? Once again, we enter a world of variations.

Patterns in the Experience of the “Other”

Recall the principal: Gods appear to us reciprocally according to our attitudes toward them, and our attitudes toward them are reciprocal with the way gods appear to us. As the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart put it, the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which He sees us.

These patterns of interaction can be understood in terms of two main types. The first comprises those ways humans experience themselves on the receiving end of the relation; the second includes those ways humans are the active agent in the relation.

Receiving the Gods

Preeminently, a god is something received. This is connected with the sense of the numinous. Rudolf Otto’s term is useful here for naming the feeling of being encountered by a powerful “other”—of being faced by a reality or being that is astonishingly greater than one’s self. The contrast between this greater presence and one’s ordinary reality is dramatic and produces awe, amazement, ecstasy. Otto and many historians of religion have taken this sense of the holy to be the source of religion, suggesting that doctrines and rites are but elaborations of numinous experience.

While the numinous is something that comes to us, it does come channeled through given cultural forms. Religious systems, by definition, anticipate the points at which interaction with things supernatural might or will occur. For some these points are visions and dreams, for others ritually induced states of possession, conversion experiences, church services, sacraments, faith healing, illnesses, contact with a holy person, divination, contact with nature, meditation, or private prayer. Many religions have begun with visions or voices. Moses is reported to have seen the majesty of Yahweh on Mt. Sinai, and the Hebrew prophets felt “the Word of the Lord” come upon them. The Christian apostles ecstatically experienced the appearance of the resurrected Christ. Islam is the direct result of the words of Allah that came to the nonliterate Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel, words that were thereafter enshrined as the holy Qur’an. None of these experiences were solicited.

The experience of possession is common in many traditional cultures. Here a spirit, which may be either negative, positive, or something in between, takes over a body or personality. There are many societies for whom states of possession or trance are the regular religious avenues for contacting the supernatural.14 The assumption is that humans cannot communicate with the gods in a merely ordinary mode of consciousness. But even in the modern West, faith-healing rallies continue to fill stages with the entranced, prostrate bodies of those who have been touched by the “spirit of God.” Pentecostal and other charismatic groups make the direct experience of the Holy Spirit central to their faith. The power of their god is demonstrated to them regularly in such phenomena as “speaking in tongues” and spiritual healing. Worldwide we find practices aimed to demonstrate the direct power of spirit over matter—such as fire-walking or the handling of poisonous serpents.

Mystical experience, in contrast, is not a semiconscious or trance state but an intensely conscious state of union with or apprehension of the numinous. The experience itself is often felt as involuntary or spontaneous, as the grace of the god. Precisely because it is conscious, the effect of mystical experience is great on one’s life and dramatically transforms, through its searing impress, one’s normal system of priorities and attitudes. Many are the reports like those described extensively in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which speak of “that one great moment in my life spent in the presence of God.”

For some the presence of the supernatural is received intensely in holy objects such as relics or icons. “Seeing” the divine image, or darshan, is central to Hindu worship. A Hindu goes to a temple, pilgrimage site, or holy person not for “worship” but “for darshan.” The deity or holy person “gives darshan” and the people “take darshan.”15 Catholic and Orthodox Christianity focus on the presence of God in the rites of the Eucharist, in which the consecrated bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine are not just symbols but divine presences. Moreover, any object associated with the divine can have the same effect as the presence of the god itself, and it is not surprising that “miraculous” cures are regularly claimed as issuing from contact with the humblest of these vehicles. Recently a thirteen-year-old boy was reported as having recovered from leukemia after the skullcap of the late Cardinal Cooke was placed on his stomach.

A broad, universally found form in which divinity is manifest is that of dispenser of fate. Humans find themselves on the receiving end of life. Gods allot destinies. They are often synonyms for fate itself. Relating to this “givenness” of the will of the god can even constitute a large part of daily religious life—as in the Dantean phrase, “In His will is our peace.” Some terms for god actually mean “dispenser.”16 A true devotee is apt to “read” all events, negative or positive, as lessons in divine edification. The puritan Thomas Shepard thus wrote in his autobiography,

He is the God who took me up when my own mother died, who loved me, and when my stepmother cared not for me, and when lastly my father also died and forsook me, when I was young and little and could take no care for myself ... He is the God that brought me out of Egypt, that profane and wicked town where I was born and bred, ... He is the God that brought me, the least and most despised of my father’s house, to the University of Cambridge and strangely made way for me there. ... He is the God that carried me into Essex from Cambridge and gave me the most sweet society of so many godly ministers, ... 17

Many will dedicate themselves to a religious life as a result of feeling specially touched by some extraordinary event. In return for having his life spared during a terrible lightning storm, the young Martin Luther vowed to pursue a monastic vocation.

As Job found, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Gods dispense affliction, humiliation, chastisement, and destruction as well as blessing and mercy. The same puritan quoted above lost his wife and son through a tempestuous sea passage to America. His reading: divine instruction in humility. Certainly gods are not just expressions of solace for the ego, and any theory of religion based on such a concept is just neglecting the contrary evidence. Gods punish offenses, any violation of their order. They bring down pride. Hinduism has innumerable and terrifying representations of “the Destroyer,” such as the devouring goddess Kali, pictured with necklaces of skulls and bones. As a refrain, biblical monotheism speaks of the judging, punishing, wrathful side of God.

Gods dispense, but also empower. They give power to help against otherwise insuperable odds. Gods offer adherents part of their own “life.” Thus the great Buddha Amitabha (Amida in Japan) aeons ago made a vow that he would not enter nirvana himself until he had achieved such magnitude of virtue and enlightenment that ordinary beings could share in his liberation through sincerely calling on his name. This invocation, the nembutsu, is the primary religious affirmation of Japanese Pure Land Buddhist adherents, and consists precisely in the act of accepting a salvation that has already been given or made accessible. This religious mode of acceptance is an important strand of Christian tradition, too, as interpreted in the phrasing of a revivalist who preached, “In giving you Christ, it is like God is giving you a one hundred dollar bill: all you have to do is just accept it!” The affirmation that salvation is not man’s accomplishment but rather God’s grace is central to all major forms of Christianity. Hindu devotees receive a new life when a guru bestows shaktipad—a touch on the forehead.

Responses to Gods

Human responses to gods follow certain patterns. There are identifiable, thematic ways that people relate to numinous objects, and these actions form the stuff of much daily religious life. Two kinds of relationships are discernable here: the longterm relation to the god, and the set of short-term occasions where the superior being is enjoined in particular ways.

The long-term relationship is characterized by the theme of service and attitudes such as faith and trust. This is the realm of loyalty, steadfastness, and commitment.

One aspect of service is obedience or allegiance. Gods, after all, are “lords” of the world they embody. They have authority and in turn require fealty or loyalty. They are guarantors and maintainers of world and moral order. Authority is expressed positively in terms of obligations, and negatively in terms of interdictions and sanctions. Yet in the subject matter of religious allegiance we once again acknowledge cultural variations. There are different social forms of loyalty, and onto the idea of deity are projected the modes of allegiance familiar to the group’s tradition. Traditional monotheism, reflecting the imagery of the king-subject relationship, made homage and obedience the primary themes of scriptures and worship, and made disloyalty to the god the greatest sin. An apostate was a traitor. There was a joint obligation here, as in feudalism: if the people serve obediently, the lord protects; if people uphold their world, their world will uphold them.

But serving a god is certainly not limited to simple obedience. The variations on service to gods are revealing and instructive. Gods are served in conformity with their nature, and followers seek to imitate or participate in the nature of their gods. One serves the god of wisdom through wisdom, the god of love through love, the god of compassion through compassion. The divinity who challenges false rulers, who liberates slaves, who cares for “the orphan, the widow, the poor, the outcaste,” is a god served through social caring. At one point in the Bible, the Lord is satisfied by detailed kinds of animal sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, but at another, when the religious world reflects the values of the prophets, we hear, “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”18

Thus there is some correlation between the nature of a god and the act of serving it. Demons have their followers. Where fanatic devotees of Kali the Devourer took it as their divine responsibility to murder on her behalf, adherents of the peaceful Tao aspire to be like the Tao. Where gods are departmental bureaucrats, the employees behave accordingly. What the gods are determines what it is that belongs to them, and what it is that humans have received and hence should give back.

There are also more specific, patterned ways that the behavioral relationship between humans and gods is acted out. By distinguishing and comparing these ways we get a sense of the spectrum of responses to deity that are religiously possible as well as a sense of the cross-cultural nature of the patterns. We identify here the following: (1) petition, (2) atonement or confession, (3) offering, (4) celebration, and (5) divination. These indicate that in relation to gods humans ask, purify, give, honor, and inquire.

The first type of behavior, petitionary, is that connected with prayer and propitiation. Humans need and desire things, and what they cannot obtain on their own they need to seek and receive from a higher, other power. In religious terms, success in life lies outside the control of the human ego and reason. People perceive themselves as dependent on higher powers, and acknowledge that their well-being is in the hands of those powers. Humans approach gods in order to receive critical guidance and support and to avoid negative or disastrous outcomes. To many an adherent, prayer is not an episodic formality but a sustaining way of life, and existence would be unlivable without it.

Asking things of gods does not necessarily take the form of simple petition. There are all kinds of ways to ask for something, and each religious system has its own protocol for what it takes to be effective propitiation, such as self-accusation, flattery, vows, conciliation, and meditation. Some words for prayer mean ask; others mean seek, long for, speak in a formal manner, or soften. Proper propitiation may take the aspect of formal rites, spontaneous personal prayer, or acts of asceticism. Different gods will have different expectations and standards for determining the adherent’s sincerity.

Consider one example of propitiation from the realm of shamanism. Specialists in communicating with spirits while in trance, shamans are particularly adept in methods of direct negotiation. This usually involves a “journey.” The shaman knows spirit geographies and languages intimately and is a master intermediary between his or her audiences and the spirits who control the affairs of the local universe. Our illustration concerns the descent of an Eskimo shaman to the abode of Takanakapsaluk, the mother of the sea beasts. This is done in time of illness or famine and is conducted in the format of a seance. In trance the shaman successfully overcomes a series of obstacles (such as crushing rocks and vicious beasts) believed to be preventing access to the goddess. Finally reaching her marine domain, the shaman finds a pool of sea animals. The report of this seance continues as follows:

The goddess’s hair hangs down over her face and she is dirty and slovenly; this is the effect of men’s sins, which have almost made her ill. The shaman must approach her, take her by the shoulder, and comb her hair (for the goddess has no fingers with which to comb herself). ... As he combs Takanakapsaluk’s hair, the shaman tells her that men have no more seal. And the goddess answers in the spirit language: “The secret miscarriages of the women and breaches of taboo in eating boiled meat bar the way for the animals.” The shaman now has to summon all his powers to appease her anger; finally she opens the pool and sets the animals free.19

The shaman “returns” to the seance, gasping for breath, and asks the audience for confession of their sins.

This points to a second pattern; atonement and purification. One must actively remove offense to the gods in order to avoid their judgment and be a recipient of their benefits. Petition is often accompanied by acts of purification. One needs to make up for something done wrong, make oneself worthy of that which is desired, rid oneself of any impurity that may be obstructing one’s goals. Confession of sins is one format. Another is that of Chief Sitting Bull, who before an important battle would face the sun and make a hundred cuts in his arm. Prayer itself is often not just a form of communication but an act of humility, involving the chastening of self (or community) in order to be worthy of the god’s gifts.

The third pattern is giving. One gives—just as one serves, asks, and atones—according to the nature of the god. Some offerings to gods are like tributes or even taxes, but while a material offering may be appropriate for continuing land rights, in return for salvation one offers one’s entire allegiance and moral life.

There is reciprocity to giving, and Gerardus van der Leeuw saw perceptively that “the gift allows a stream to flow, which from the moment of the giving runs uninterruptedly from donor to recipient and from receiver to giver: ‘the recipient is in the power of the giver.’ ”20 The gift or offering sets in motion a cycle of giving. Giver and receiver are united in this binding quality of the offering. The more we give, the more the god gives; the more we have received, the more we must give back.

Sacrifices and offerings are the common external forms of giving. But to be effective they must always involve giving something that is one’s own possession or part of one’s own self. When an animal is sacrificed, it is not a wild animal but a domesticated one. In the bear sacrifice of the Ainu of Japan, the animal is reared among the villagers and treated as a member of the family before it is ultimately sent back to the gods. It is only a natural step in the logic of religious giving to shift from the sacrifice of foods and animals to the sacrifice of one’s own self-possession, one’s own ego. “My self belongs to God,” say the mystics. The dynamics of sacrifice and its endless contexts and variations form an enormous part of the subject matter of religious life.

A fourth pattern of action is celebration, the human response to blessings received. This is the behavior of thanksgiving, worship, and praise, again as expressed in countless cultural styles. We have already seen in the analysis of festival times how celebration follows the nature of its objects and goals. The gods may be honored by formal composure but also by exuberant singing and dancing.

The fifth pattern of relating to the gods is through divination. The Latin term divinatio (from divus, “divine” or “of the gods”) means the act of “reading” objects in the physical world to see how they express the activity or inclination of the gods. The premise of divination is that there is a synchronistic sympathy between the wholeness of life and each fragment of it, and, therefore, the action of gods can be deciphered by scrutinizing certain patterns in nature and interpreting them as signs or adumbrations of the future. Augurs look to the sky for such premonitory signs. Others scan the livers of animals, consult the “fall” of objects such as sticks, dice, or coins, or analyze dreams. Divining is often connected with the need for auspicious timing. A leader might consult a diviner to determine the right day for a certain military venture; or a wedding day may be selected astrologically. The act of opening a scripture at random in order to find the divine “will” is a spontaneous application of the divinatory principle, as is, in a purely secular sense, the act of deciding what action to take by tossing a coin.

Gods are religious forms that have had every conceivable content and scope, and endless local inflections. This experiential richness and diversity is often obscured by theological, con-ceptualist approaches that look at a god in terms of what it is ideally believed to be rather than in the phenomenological terms of how it is actually experienced. In seeing gods and their followers in experiential perspective, we emerge with another component of our framework for understanding and interpreting religious history.

Comparative perspective is not just a matter of judging the worth of gods, as in a beauty contest. It creates a broad cumulative outlook for appreciating any particular god or act connected with a god. It brings out both unity and difference in human experience.

There is no disparaging insinuation here that gods are mere inventions. In describing worlds, not only is the line between invention and discovery impossible to draw, but gods, whatever they may or may not be ultimately, present themselves to human experience as “other” and as primordially given. Even from the point of view of invention, gods and their worlds would surely be among the astonishing creations and creative acts of our human species, and unavoidable subject matter for any student of how humans choose to live.

The Unification Church and shamanism. At its heart the UC is not Christian; but it presents a Christian facade.

How “God’s Day” was established

The FFWPU is unequivocally not Christian

The Moons’ God is not the God of Judeo-Christianity

Hananim and other Spirits in Korean Shamanism

[zjarondinelli]

Reading the Field: Playing and Watching American Football as a Literacy Practice

I’ve always enjoyed watching YouTube football analyst, Brett Kollmann’s The Film Room channel, because he has one of the finest understandings of the discourse of football that I have ever seen. The videos that Kollmann produces often focus on a player or team that is seeing success (or having difficulties succeeding) in the National Football League (NFL) and goes into incredible detail about why this is based on previous game footage and an awe-inspiring comprehension of how the game of football is/should be played. It was after watching one of these breakdown videos, that I began to think about the ways that American football could be understood as a type of literacy.

As a result, I took advantage of the opportunity to explore some of the more complex ways that play designs (fairly common multimodal texts used in teaching football) revealed gestural modalities through encoding during my time as a student in Doctoral Seminar 1 (DS1). In what became my final paper for DS1, “Revealing Gestural Encoding: Exploring Multimodal Resources with Embodied Learning”, I suggest that football plays function as multimodal resources that encode gesture because “the icons used in the representation signify more than just the players positions, they signify the player’s themselves” (p. 5) and that as such, “while the multimodal resource helps the player know where they are expected [to be] it doesn’t tell them how to get there against a defender trying to prevent it” (p. 5), which leads to the requirement of personalized gesture when the play viewed on paper is put into action (Rondinelli, 2019). In other words, while the play makes it clear through visual and spatial modalities where the player needs to be in relation to the field at a plays end, it doesn’t give them any assistance as to howthey should get there when they are playing the actual game against an actual opponent.

Since working on that paper, I have fully embraced the idea that football should, indeed, be considered a literacy practice and that this opened up new opportunities to discuss how athletic popular culture impacts multimodal literacy development. Brian Street (1993) defines a literacy practice as the “many different ways in which we act out uses and meaning of reading and writing in different social contexts” (p. 139). As I will demonstrate, football provides the opportunity for a player to act out uses of reading in a particular social context, while viewing football allows one to act out meanings of reading in another context. Furthermore, when American football is viewed through the lens of popular culture, we can apply Donna Alvermann’s (2010) “three debates at the intersection of popular culture and literacy practice” (p. 544) as a way to frame how football can be used in the context of education and literacy development.

To support this idea, I want to extend my previous work. While the reading of playbooks certainly represents one of the literacy events (here defined as an instance in which a particular mode impacts a participants interaction with a text by influencing their interpretive processes and strategies) that make up the larger literacy practice of football, I have begun to recognize that it is far from the only, or even the most meaningful, literacy event in the sport (Heath, 1983). To the point, I have come to believe that the most meaningful literacy event in the sport of American football stems not from reading the playbook in pre-game study, but rather from the act of reading bodies as text either during (on the field) or after (in film study) the game.

As a player on the field, the act of reading bodies as text is much different from the act of reading bodies as text for a viewer; one of my closest friends knows this from experience. Andrew Ghaly has been an avid fan of NFL football for his entire life. He has also had the opportunity to play football at an extraordinarily high level as a wide receiver (WR) for both the Sydney (Australia) University Lions and the New South Wales Wolfpack. When I asked him to speak to the information provided by a playbook, he said: “[the playbook] only tells you where you’re going but what’s in front of you [on the field tells you] how you’ll get there” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019). He would further clarify that, “if [the defender] is playing up on you, you tend to run your route a little bit deeper because you’re trying to make him think you’re going down field…[so] as soon as he flips his hips, that’s when you break” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019). For Ghaly, the reading of a defender’s body (or the defender reading hisbody) is something that occurs before and during every snap of the football; to respond to the body as text is to alter and adjust gesture and motion in an attempt to confuse the defender who is also trying to do the same. In order to successfully beata defender (the goal as a WR is always to create space between you and the defender in order to make room to catch the football). Therefore, a WR must consciously and critically evaluate the gestural tendencies of the defender in order to preemptively predict what he plans to do. As a gestural literacy event (one player actively reading the body of the other player as a text in order to identify the best possible interpretive strategies) this fits within the larger schematic of football as a literacy practice. But, how does this shift when a player is watching versus playing?

In his book, Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look, former NFL scout, Pat Kirwan (2015), discusses how “football can’t be learned while it’s happening” (p. xiv) and it is for this reason that it is a mandatory requirement for football players to evaluate film of the defender that they will be going up against next week. The reason for this is simple; once you know the gestural tendencies of your opponent (say, the defender always lines up on the WR’s outside shoulder before backpedaling for a deep coverage defense)and can recognize his gestural discourses, you can design a response that will be most effective (for instance, call an option for an inside slant).Ghaly also spoke to the importance of film study as it relates to reading the body as text in preparation to compete against a particular opponent: “If [the defender] is giving me cushion but I know [from film] he’s going to always crash down, I’m gunna be playing it that way” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019).In other words, from the perspective of post-game viewing, the player begins to build up a sort of lexicon about the defender they’ll be playing against that acts as a sort of gestural discourse analysis and allows them to fill their toolbox for the game with strategies to utilize against the defender. Interestingly, this reading body as text in a post-game setting informs the strategies that will be employed on-field, as well.

So, while this all leads me to firmly believe that American football exists as a complex literacy practice built upon a “multiplicity of literacies” (p. 139) it is also, undeniably, a popular culture phenomenon and begs the question as to whether or not it holds any value within the framework of literacy education (Street, 1993). Here, we can turn to Donna Alvermann’s (2010) three debates to support the usefulness of football as both popular culture and literacy practice.

In her work, Alvermann identifies three debates related to popular culture and literacy education focused on agency, transfer, and identity.As it relates to the debate of agency, football as literacy practice can be seen as a powerful informal site of learning that can be used to shape interpretive processes and strategies for students within a larger literacy network which would allow students to use the skills (discourses) established within the sport to support the creation (design through hybridization/remix) of their own body as text (Alvermann, 2010). This also feeds into the question of transfer, because it recognizes that informal and formal sites of learning are both meaningful (qualitatively similar) and, as such, can co-exist in a reciprocal relationship whereby literacy development within informal settings (such as the football field) can feed into literacy development in the formal classroom setting (Alvermann, 2010). For example, football as a literacy practice that promotes the development of gestural literacy skills is likely to also promote the development of a more nuanced recognition and understanding of body language as communication in drama class, or film/media studies. This would allow the students to not only utilize those skills in the creation of body as text within those classes, but also allow them a better understanding of the discourse by which they could discuss and analyze instances of it in other texts. Indeed, if we accept Street’s “ideological model of literacy” (p. 139) that recognizes a “multiplicity of literacies” (p. 139), then we must also recognize the power of football as literacy on the questions of agency and transfer(Street, 1993).

Finally, Street’s ideological model of literacy also works to support football as literacy practice in response to Alvermann’s question of identity. Street (1993) says, “whichever forms of reading and writing we learn and use have associated with them certain social identities, expectations about behavior, and role models” (p. 140). Indeed, as a way to engage youth in conversation about social or educational equity, football as literacy practice can guide students who have developed skills in non-traditional areas of literacy towards an identity formation that informs the acceptable practices of the classroom (Alvermann, 2010). Acknowledging football as a popular culture literacy practice provides teachers the opportunity to leverage it as a site of “identity construction” (p. 551) for students that allows “youth to speak their own truths into existence” (p. 551) by accepting it into the wider literacy conversation within the classroom (Alvermann, 2010).

When kids are learning to play sports, there is one rule that a coach will always tell their players to remember: “keep your eye on the ball” (Kirwan, 2015, p. xiii). However, when it comes to football as a literacy practice, it would seem as though keeping our eye on the ball has prevented us from recognizing the powerful opportunity that exists to leverage a massive popular culture phenomenon for the purposes of literacy education. When we focus on the ball, we miss the nuanced gesture of a WR who feints and stutter-steps towards an inward slant to get a defender off balance before bursting towards the sideline for an out route or the safety who sees the body language of the quarterback and anticipates his through for a quick interception. When we finally take our eye off the ball, it becomes clear that American football, both on and off the field, has a lot to offer literacy education.

References

Alvermann, D. (2010). Popular culture and literacy practices. In M.L. Kamil, P.D. Pearson, E.B. Moje, and P.P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (541-560). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ghaly, A. (2019, November 4). Personal interview.

Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49-76.

Kirwin, P. (2015). Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look. Chicago, IL: Triumph Books.

Rondinelli, Z. (2019) Revealing gestural encoding: Exploring multimodal resources with embodied learning. Unpublished final course paper.

Street, B. (1993). Cross-cultural perspectives on literacy. In J. Maybin (Ed.), Language and literacy in social practice(139-150). The Open University.

[ralphlayton]

How to Power Marketing Presentations With Data Visualization & Win Over Your Audience

We’ve all been there. We’re five minutes into (what we thought would be) a riveting, data-driven presentation, yet a quick scan of the room reveals the audience is staring blankly at our data tables as we drone on. Or worse, someone asks a pointed question about what they do or don’t see and the discussion goes completely of course. Yikes. Perhaps the best advice I ever received in this regard was so simple yet incredibly smart: “Try it as a line graph.” I had presented a data-backed presentation and robust recommended next steps, but whether it was boredom or data suspicion that crept in, I failed to make my case. After the weeks I spent looking at a spreadsheet, I took that visionary advice. When the day came to remake my case, that line graph immediately won my critics over. When done thoughtfully, data visualizations have the power to change perspectives, far more quickly than a spreadsheet or bullet points on a slide. Data visualization allows us to take complex or even simple data sets, and present them in a way that allows us to see context, make comparisons, and enable decision-making.  The good news? Giving your data a visual identity is easier than you think.

The Case for Data Visualization

This is going to sound cliché, but we marketers really do have more data at our fingertips than ever before. And visualization is key in order for us to really leverage that data to tell a story and win over our bosses, colleagues, and customers. Here’s a simple example. First, the spreadsheet version: What can you take away from this example in just 5 seconds? 10 seconds? 30 seconds? July 2018 and December 2017 seemed to be big months. There was definitely some growth in the last two years. But how much? Is it consistent? How are we trending? Now, let’s look at this data as a line graph: Whoa! 2018 outperformed 2017 by quite a bit overall. However, 2017 traffic was on the up and up, and that momentum slowed in 2018. With the exception of a mid-year spike, 2018 traffic was flat, and dipped below year-over-year totals by the end of the year. The beauty here? As we prepare to deliver the data to our audience, we can draw some pretty important conclusions at a glance, helping us quickly arrive at what we need to find out next: What caused that big spike in July 2018? Is it an outlier or did we have an effective campaign running? What did the tactical mix look like throughout 2017? What were the top pages contributing to steady growth? Did we make major changes at the beginning of 2018? This not only helps us dig deeper into our data to understand trends and opportunities, but also prepare us to craft a narrative and answer the questions our bosses, colleagues, or clients will undoubtedly have about performance. After all, flashing a spreadsheet and then telling someone traffic is up year-over-year overall but flat month-over-month for the current year is not going to deliver much wow.

How to Get the Storytelling Started with Data Visualization

Creating a narrative, choosing your data set, perfecting your visualization, and adding context are essential for being able to persuade any sort of action or reaction with data. But whether you are using a simple Excel graph or a custom data visualization tool, here are some great tips to get started. 

Tip #1 - Start with your story and frame it for your audience.

Let’s say you’re presenting the results of your most recent marketing campaign to your internal stakeholders. It can be tempting to throw up any data point you can get your hands on, trying to see what sticks. Don’t do that. Your boss probably doesn’t care about how many shares you got on that one blog post or how many seconds someone spent on a video. They care about new prospects, re-engaged prospects, or advocacy. 

Stay laser focused on your objective: What are you trying to achieve with this presentation? A bigger budget? A promotion? A shift in tactics internally? Every data visualization included should tell that story. Too many data points can muddy the narrative and reduce your impact. 

Use your audience’s lens: Focus on the data you know is most important to your audience. Think of previous presentations you’ve done with them. Was there a particular data visualization they loved or one they pushed back on? Edit accordingly. If it’s your first time presenting to this audience, then use what you know based on job titles or culture in your office. 

One mistake it can be easy to make as marketers, is slipping into marketing lingo (e.g. sessions, shares, click-through-rate, bounce-rate). One simple shift if you’re presenting outside of your team, is shift your language to focus on meaningful business metrics. For example:  Instead of saying visitor, say potential prospect. 

Tip #2 - Design for comprehension.

Data visualization is so awesome because it’s able to allow humans to quickly make comparisons and decisions quickly, even with a complex data set.  So create charts with comprehension in mind. If your audience is staring at a graph trying to figure out what it means, they’re probably not listening to your supporting narrative. So make it easy for them to understand. Here are a few things to keep in mind:  Label Everything: This seems straight forward, but nothing is worse than when someone pauses you mid sentence to ask you to clarify your data set. So, label your chart, axes, legend, and so on. Also include a note on time frame and data source. Make sure all labels are visible and not obstructed by other text.  Chart Type: Choose the chart type that most efficiently illustrates your point:

Bar charts are best for comparing discrete values. 

Line charts are intended for a continuous data set.

Pie charts show the element something else is made up of, and are not ideal for comparing values.

Stacked bar charts are best to compare different items and show the composition.

For example, while the pie chart allows us to see a breakdown of traffic sources, the placement of legend, the close color families, and a similar proportion of the individual pieces make it difficult for a true comparison. With the bar chart, however, you can easily see how the traffic sources stack up next to one another.  Color: Incorporating color to help tell your story can be very powerful, but can also lend confusion. A few practical things to consider: 

Don’t choose colors that are low contrast. Consider the fact that you may be presenting on a different monitor and the audience will be further away from the screen. 

Use the same color to represent data from the same grouping or data set (e.g. all points from 2018 are in green and 2019 in yellow.)

Be careful about using colors that have significant meaning on their own (e.g. bright red is always going to set off an alarm bell, whereas green tends to indicate something is good.)

Use accent colors to highlight really key data points. This can draw your audience’s eye immediately and increase comprehension. 

A couple final thoughts here: 

Add call-outs to your slides so you can help your audience understand a data set really quickly (e.g. Sales reached an all time high in June 2019).

Keep your data ordering intuitive such as ordering by value, time period, or alphabetically.

Tip #3 - Create for context.

We should always anticipate, any presentation we create, can and will be passed along for others to consume, without the benefit of our verbal narrative. So, it’s important that your data visualizations have enough context so the impact can be understood with or without verbal support.  What do we mean by context? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Is this good or bad? What would you expect? This is definitely a frequently asked question from marketers as we are evaluating campaign or channel performance. One of the most important contextual markers you can add to a performance slide is a benchmark from previous data or third-party industry data. 

Why? Data visualization can help us understand the current situation, but they can also help us answer the “why” behind a data set. Context in this situation can reveal hidden insights, which can really change the minds of our audience. For example, let’s say you are charting MQLs over time, now plot that against another variables which may drive fluctuations in MQLs, like website traffic, paid investment or frequency of events. This might help you determine whether overall web traffic is irrelevant, but paid investments are critical.

What should we do next? Now that we understand the context for our data and what is driving it, the next question is what should we do next? Always include next steps related to your data visualization. 

Finally, looking at the same data as in our previous visualizations. This example dives into July 2018, with the added context of 2017. In this graph, we can easily see a spike in social caused our July 2018 increase. Now, we can add a call out to shout out to testing a paid social campaign or a contest that was running at that time. 

Tip #4: Be careful not to mislead your audience.

Data can be really powerful, if used wisely. But if we don’t understand or interpret it properly, it can also drive bad decision making. So as a presenter, definitely do these things to keep your data representation free of misleading information:

Start your key at zero (and keep it consistent): It can be tempting to make that 3% increase look like 50%, but don’t change your scale unless it’s really pertinent to the data set, and then call it out. 

Understand your data: If you (or your team) is pulling data from a tool like Google Analytics or Hubspot, be sure you understand the nuance or context of your data points (e.g. what’s included in that site conversion rate, how you’re categorizing a new user, what is the criteria for SQL versus MQL.)

Include context: Be careful not to omit the context or drivers of the data set you’re aware of, even if they don't necessarily fit your narrative. For example, if you had a great Q3 for leads, but the first half of the year was down, don’t omit that context, just to make Q3 appear better. That context will probably change your tactical mix, investment levels, and next steps. 

Show Don’t Tell

To be really effective marketers, we must review and analyze data in order to make our own decisions about a tweak in tactics or a strategy overhaul. Our ability to illustrate to our colleagues, bosses, and customers how data insights inform our decisions ultimately impacts our ability to move forward with our plans.  So practice! Find that colleague who can review your latest graph and see what their first takeaway is. Do your presentation with a smaller group before you bring to your boss. See what they respond well to or question, and edit accordingly.  Data is power. Data visualization is powerful. [bctt tweet="Data is power. Data visualization is powerful. @Alexis5484 #datavisualization #marketing" username="toprank"] Many marketers aren’t using the data they have to its full potential. Set yourself on a path to better data and analytics utilization with these tips for overcoming common barriers.

The post How to Power Marketing Presentations With Data Visualization & Win Over Your Audience appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

How to Power Marketing Presentations With Data Visualization & Win Over Your Audience published first on yhttps://improfitninja.blogspot.com/

[samuelpboswell]

How to Power Marketing Presentations With Data Visualization & Win Over Your Audience

We’ve all been there. We’re five minutes into (what we thought would be) a riveting, data-driven presentation, yet a quick scan of the room reveals the audience is staring blankly at our data tables as we drone on. Or worse, someone asks a pointed question about what they do or don’t see and the discussion goes completely of course. Yikes. Perhaps the best advice I ever received in this regard was so simple yet incredibly smart: “Try it as a line graph.” I had presented a data-backed presentation and robust recommended next steps, but whether it was boredom or data suspicion that crept in, I failed to make my case. After the weeks I spent looking at a spreadsheet, I took that visionary advice. When the day came to remake my case, that line graph immediately won my critics over. When done thoughtfully, data visualizations have the power to change perspectives, far more quickly than a spreadsheet or bullet points on a slide. Data visualization allows us to take complex or even simple data sets, and present them in a way that allows us to see context, make comparisons, and enable decision-making.  The good news? Giving your data a visual identity is easier than you think.

The Case for Data Visualization

This is going to sound cliché, but we marketers really do have more data at our fingertips than ever before. And visualization is key in order for us to really leverage that data to tell a story and win over our bosses, colleagues, and customers. Here’s a simple example. First, the spreadsheet version: What can you take away from this example in just 5 seconds? 10 seconds? 30 seconds? July 2018 and December 2017 seemed to be big months. There was definitely some growth in the last two years. But how much? Is it consistent? How are we trending? Now, let’s look at this data as a line graph: Whoa! 2018 outperformed 2017 by quite a bit overall. However, 2017 traffic was on the up and up, and that momentum slowed in 2018. With the exception of a mid-year spike, 2018 traffic was flat, and dipped below year-over-year totals by the end of the year. The beauty here? As we prepare to deliver the data to our audience, we can draw some pretty important conclusions at a glance, helping us quickly arrive at what we need to find out next: What caused that big spike in July 2018? Is it an outlier or did we have an effective campaign running? What did the tactical mix look like throughout 2017? What were the top pages contributing to steady growth? Did we make major changes at the beginning of 2018? This not only helps us dig deeper into our data to understand trends and opportunities, but also prepare us to craft a narrative and answer the questions our bosses, colleagues, or clients will undoubtedly have about performance. After all, flashing a spreadsheet and then telling someone traffic is up year-over-year overall but flat month-over-month for the current year is not going to deliver much wow.

How to Get the Storytelling Started with Data Visualization

Creating a narrative, choosing your data set, perfecting your visualization, and adding context are essential for being able to persuade any sort of action or reaction with data. But whether you are using a simple Excel graph or a custom data visualization tool, here are some great tips to get started. 

Tip #1 - Start with your story and frame it for your audience.

Let’s say you’re presenting the results of your most recent marketing campaign to your internal stakeholders. It can be tempting to throw up any data point you can get your hands on, trying to see what sticks. Don’t do that. Your boss probably doesn’t care about how many shares you got on that one blog post or how many seconds someone spent on a video. They care about new prospects, re-engaged prospects, or advocacy. 

Stay laser focused on your objective: What are you trying to achieve with this presentation? A bigger budget? A promotion? A shift in tactics internally? Every data visualization included should tell that story. Too many data points can muddy the narrative and reduce your impact. 

Use your audience’s lens: Focus on the data you know is most important to your audience. Think of previous presentations you’ve done with them. Was there a particular data visualization they loved or one they pushed back on? Edit accordingly. If it’s your first time presenting to this audience, then use what you know based on job titles or culture in your office. 

One mistake it can be easy to make as marketers, is slipping into marketing lingo (e.g. sessions, shares, click-through-rate, bounce-rate). One simple shift if you’re presenting outside of your team, is shift your language to focus on meaningful business metrics. For example:  Instead of saying visitor, say potential prospect. 

Tip #2 - Design for comprehension.

Data visualization is so awesome because it’s able to allow humans to quickly make comparisons and decisions quickly, even with a complex data set.  So create charts with comprehension in mind. If your audience is staring at a graph trying to figure out what it means, they’re probably not listening to your supporting narrative. So make it easy for them to understand. Here are a few things to keep in mind:  Label Everything: This seems straight forward, but nothing is worse than when someone pauses you mid sentence to ask you to clarify your data set. So, label your chart, axes, legend, and so on. Also include a note on time frame and data source. Make sure all labels are visible and not obstructed by other text.  Chart Type: Choose the chart type that most efficiently illustrates your point:

Bar charts are best for comparing discrete values. 

Line charts are intended for a continuous data set.

Pie charts show the element something else is made up of, and are not ideal for comparing values.

Stacked bar charts are best to compare different items and show the composition.

For example, while the pie chart allows us to see a breakdown of traffic sources, the placement of legend, the close color families, and a similar proportion of the individual pieces make it difficult for a true comparison. With the bar chart, however, you can easily see how the traffic sources stack up next to one another.  Color: Incorporating color to help tell your story can be very powerful, but can also lend confusion. A few practical things to consider: 

Don’t choose colors that are low contrast. Consider the fact that you may be presenting on a different monitor and the audience will be further away from the screen. 

Use the same color to represent data from the same grouping or data set (e.g. all points from 2018 are in green and 2019 in yellow.)

Be careful about using colors that have significant meaning on their own (e.g. bright red is always going to set off an alarm bell, whereas green tends to indicate something is good.)

Use accent colors to highlight really key data points. This can draw your audience’s eye immediately and increase comprehension. 

A couple final thoughts here: 

Add call-outs to your slides so you can help your audience understand a data set really quickly (e.g. Sales reached an all time high in June 2019).

Keep your data ordering intuitive such as ordering by value, time period, or alphabetically.

Tip #3 - Create for context.

We should always anticipate, any presentation we create, can and will be passed along for others to consume, without the benefit of our verbal narrative. So, it’s important that your data visualizations have enough context so the impact can be understood with or without verbal support.  What do we mean by context? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Is this good or bad? What would you expect? This is definitely a frequently asked question from marketers as we are evaluating campaign or channel performance. One of the most important contextual markers you can add to a performance slide is a benchmark from previous data or third-party industry data. 

Why? Data visualization can help us understand the current situation, but they can also help us answer the “why” behind a data set. Context in this situation can reveal hidden insights, which can really change the minds of our audience. For example, let’s say you are charting MQLs over time, now plot that against another variables which may drive fluctuations in MQLs, like website traffic, paid investment or frequency of events. This might help you determine whether overall web traffic is irrelevant, but paid investments are critical.

What should we do next? Now that we understand the context for our data and what is driving it, the next question is what should we do next? Always include next steps related to your data visualization. 

Finally, looking at the same data as in our previous visualizations. This example dives into July 2018, with the added context of 2017. In this graph, we can easily see a spike in social caused our July 2018 increase. Now, we can add a call out to shout out to testing a paid social campaign or a contest that was running at that time. 

Tip #4: Be careful not to mislead your audience.

Data can be really powerful, if used wisely. But if we don’t understand or interpret it properly, it can also drive bad decision making. So as a presenter, definitely do these things to keep your data representation free of misleading information:

Start your key at zero (and keep it consistent): It can be tempting to make that 3% increase look like 50%, but don’t change your scale unless it’s really pertinent to the data set, and then call it out. 

Understand your data: If you (or your team) is pulling data from a tool like Google Analytics or Hubspot, be sure you understand the nuance or context of your data points (e.g. what’s included in that site conversion rate, how you’re categorizing a new user, what is the criteria for SQL versus MQL.)

Include context: Be careful not to omit the context or drivers of the data set you’re aware of, even if they don't necessarily fit your narrative. For example, if you had a great Q3 for leads, but the first half of the year was down, don’t omit that context, just to make Q3 appear better. That context will probably change your tactical mix, investment levels, and next steps. 

Show Don’t Tell

To be really effective marketers, we must review and analyze data in order to make our own decisions about a tweak in tactics or a strategy overhaul. Our ability to illustrate to our colleagues, bosses, and customers how data insights inform our decisions ultimately impacts our ability to move forward with our plans.  So practice! Find that colleague who can review your latest graph and see what their first takeaway is. Do your presentation with a smaller group before you bring to your boss. See what they respond well to or question, and edit accordingly.  Data is power. Data visualization is powerful. [bctt tweet="Data is power. Data visualization is powerful. @Alexis5484 #datavisualization #marketing" username="toprank"] Many marketers aren’t using the data they have to its full potential. Set yourself on a path to better data and analytics utilization with these tips for overcoming common barriers.

The post How to Power Marketing Presentations With Data Visualization & Win Over Your Audience appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages https://www.toprankblog.com/2019/07/data-visualization-marketing-presentations/

[antonioferrari]

- The relationships we have with other people are projections of the relationships we have within ourselves. Our external relationships and our internal relationships are in fact the same relationships. They only seem different because we look at them through different lenses.

- The purpose of art history and criticism is to understand social actions through artistic expression itself. They are activities related and follow an objective approach, under scientific methodology and cultural interpretation. At the same time evaluation of artworks, has a subjective aspects. The relation between the work and the viewer is multidimensional and continuously altered, it offers infinite possibilities of personal ideas, and lead to a critical approach of studying the connection between artworks and the world. It can be seen how the message of these artworks is connected to many varied contexts that surround the society, the art and the viewer. Furthermore knowing contextual references in art and design is seen how the past is linked to the work of artists today.

- Fixing your gaze on objects does not necessarily include the idea of focusing on something, you can look around without seeing something, Dorian Gray, young man of extraordinary beauty, receives a paint, he was attracted by its irresistible charm, a marvelous picture, a true ode to beauty. Dorian Gray fell in love with himself and, in front of his picture, unable to bear the idea of growing old and losing his beauty, he expressed the desire of remaining young. He signs of aging and progressive corruption of his soul, was not imprinted on his face, but in the portrait, in which remained the terrifying image of his vices. His portrait can be seen as a mirror, in which he could not see his reflection, but his true self inside. If on one side the mirror can be defined as “faithful”, on the other hand is perceived a meaning of deception and illusion.

In opposition of this principle on the gaze, we can take as examples the works of Margaret Keane, who through the paintings of her big eyes, wanted to express the reflection of soul through the gaze. she wants to make it clear to the viewer that only through the eyes, you can see the spirit and the true feelings. The observer looking to a piece of art, tries to identify himself in the same work to understand the true meaning of it. Like in daily life, there are many perceptions transmitted from the external world, such as from music, from people, objects, from details which makes us feeling involved. it is not only the fact that we like something that responds to our taste, but that it reflects, in a strange unknown way, ourself. In conclusion, in the art contest, gaze is always taken into account and it is also taken under examination in most of the artworks. It can be identify a different meaning or even more in each representation. In the previous examples it is shown how giving an interpretation of gazes could be considered a lens trough which is reflected a personal perception, whether is from the artist or from the viewers.

- “A photograph is often perceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world, a trace of reality skimmed off the very surface of life” (Cartwright and Starken, 2009) Through photography, you can capture reality but not always as you see or imagine it, it seems as though we can impress on a sheet of paper, a thing of our lives or simply an idea. In other words, the photograph is not only a sheet, is not only a chemical appearance, but is also a list of signs processed by the photographer in a way that it composes an intentional message. For example, the thought of photographer Ferdinand Scianna in the book “Visti e Scritti“ can not conceive of the photographic image as a document of almost scientific value, but not even as an expression of the real world. The word defines the object as well, for that matter, also a photograph. Photography is not easy to express concepts, precisely because we are not yet arrived to an understanding, a vision so clear, you can understand perfectly the content of the photograph. If I use any word, I can transmit to those who heard or read the precise meaning of the word allowing a mental representation of the object. While an object in the picture is not entirely clear because there are hidden multiple messages.

- The mirror is considered to be one of the main tools through which the formation of the ego takes place. In the first years of life, the child passes through several stages in which the perception of his own reflected image changes. In addition, the mirror becomes an experience not only visual but tactile: the object is observed, touched by hand, explored, observed in its back.  Unlike the image of the other, our mirror image is connected to us by movement.

- The meaning of the word "art" can not be defined in a unique and absolute way. His definition has varied in the transition from one historical period to another, and from one culture to another. Art is the creation of man competing with God. Asking what art is, is how to ask what the mountain, or the sea is. These are questions that, in my opinion, make no sense. Art, like the sea and the mountain, exists. is the creation of man in competition with God. It is the ability to create life in images, to create life with images. Sculpture, like Michelangelo 'David', is not just a work of art: 'David' is a living person. Art is not for me ... it's for everyone! " In general, art embraces every human activity, either individually or collectively, that leads to forms of creativity and aesthetic expression, relying on technical considerations, innate or acquired abilities and behavioral norms deriving from study and experience. Art is closely linked to the ability to convey subjective emotions and 'messages'. There is no single artistic language or even a single code of interpretation. Art is the aesthetic expression of human interiority. It reflects the views of the artist in the social, moral, cultural, ethical or religious context of his historical period.THE CONCEPT OF BEAUTY AND ART WORKS - Beauty is what moves in the hearts of people a feeling of harmony, of happiness. So beauty is something that pervades, which excites us, as when we are in front of a picture. For aesthetic beauty, therefore, we mean the whole emotional sphere that the vision of a work can touch, stirring in us the most diverse emotions. At this point, what is a work of art?Artwork means manufatum produced by man, of any material, endowed with aesthetic characteristics, that is, that in it we see certain characters that stimulate our vision, capable of arousing emotions and feelings. In general, we can say that a work of art can be divided into three fundamental parts:1. the subject2. the shape3. the content.The first, the subject, is the theme that the work faces. Form is the visible and tactile part of a work. Content is what a work communicates.