Several controversial features of radical interpretation in relation to religious beliefs provide the subject of the chapters in Part II by Catherine Bell, Thomas Lawson, and Maurice Bloch. Is the category of “belief” so associated with a Western and Christian bias that it has lost any value as an interpretive category? How much empirical or ethnographic evidence is there for the “coherence” that holism ascribes to the web of beliefs? Should explanation supplant “interpretation” in the study of religion? Can cognitive science models explain the inferential reasoning that leads to religious beliefs and their transmission? Should one label this inferential reasoning “counter-intuitive,” as many social scientists tend to do? The answers suggested in the chapters by Bell, Lawson, and Bloch represent new research directions for these three authors, all regarded as experts on ritual. Here their overlapping interests converge on questions about cultural variations and the findings of cognitive science.

Catherine Bell's work was cited by Terry Godlove in his chapter in Part I as an example of the current tilt in favor of materiality over mentality, perhaps to counter the longstanding tilt in reverse. One of the foremost scholars of ritualization and ritual practice, Bell has contributed to the study of religion both a comprehensive historical overview of ritual theory in Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997) and a critical appraisal of that theory in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992).