Religion of the Apes

Published: July 26, 2007, 12:54 pm

That's the grabber headline for an interesting essay from "Sightings," the online religion column of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School: Sightings 7/26/07 Religion of the Apes -- Christian Sheppard Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo recently hosted a conference on chimpanzee cognition and culture, "The Mind of the Chimpanzee." The most recent research confirms that chimpanzees possess a sense of self, a theory of mind, strong memory, empathy, politics, and culture. One further question to ask is whether our fellow apes also possess religion. Jane Goodall has posed this question. She observed long ago that, during the rainy season, male chimpanzees display before the storm's thunder, lightning, wind, and rain by beating their chests, pulling down branches, and shaking the limbs and trunks of trees while hooting and screaming. Such displays usually mean to convey strength to rivals. Goodall speculates that this "rain dance" behavior might be

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