Eva Kundtová Klocová has a chapter (in collaboration with Armin W. Geertz) on "Ritual and Embodied Cognition" in a brand new The Oxford Handbook on Early Christian Ritual (OUP).
In their chapter, Eva and Armin explore the "4E approach" to cognition that understands the cognitive system as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. The chapter focuses on interactions between bodily actions, human thinking, and the cultural embeddedness of human cognition and its implications for the study of rituals. The authors also provide a sketch of systematic approach to the study of religious rituals based on those theoretical stances and empirical evidence.
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
