Stewart Elliott Guthrie
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Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Ph.D., Anthropology Emeritus, Fordham University
Stewart Guthrie grew up in a mango grove among pine lands and palmettos south of Miami. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1976. His dissertation, on a Japanese “New Religion” was based on ethnographic fieldwork in a single farming community in the mountains of Honshū. He has been writing on cognitive and evolutionary aspects of religion ever since, starting with the 1980 publication “A Cognitive Theory of Religion”, several of whose key arguments have become widely adopted in his field.
In his book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Stewart Elliott Guthrie theorizes that all religions are anthropomorphisms that originate due to the brain's tendency to detect the presence or vestiges of other humans in natural phenomena.