While this book's primary intended audience is clearly scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity, it is of considerable value for all those interested in the study of ritual in the Roman world. Uro offers an extremely impressive analytical synthesis of the self-declared Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), especially its approaches to the study of ritual, which is admirable for its clarity. Despite the expressed desire to ‘science-up’ religious studies, his approach is largely free of the excessively positivist claims made by some historians who have applied CSR to the ancient world (e.g. L. H. Martin in H. Whitehouse and L. H. Martin, Theorizing Religions Past (2004), 7–16). This is in line with other recent approaches to religion and cognition, both historical and contemporary, most notably Ann Taves (Religious Experience Reconsidered (2011)), whose work U. unfortunately does not address. While many will find the claim of ‘testable theories’ controversial when applied to ancient sources, his commitment to ‘theoretical pluralism’ and ‘multilevel analysis’ backgrounds one of the best articulated of any current approaches to understanding religions. U. situates ‘socio-cognitive’ analysis of ritual as ‘operating at both the social/cultural and the cognitive/biological level … it assumes that causation between the social and the cognitive occurs in both directions’ (61).

Ch. 1, ‘Ritual Theory and Early Christian Studies’, discusses the importance of ritual for the early development and spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, reviewing two independent scholarly approaches that have recognised this (the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and liturgical studies). According to U., this and later work has rarely engaged with the emerging field of ritual studies; cognitive studies represents a promising approach to fill this methodological gap. In proposing this, he focuses on work within CSR, and does not address other promising interdisciplinary work with cognitive studies, as represented for instance by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who explores the interface of universal properties of human minds and specific cultural practices (e.g. When God Talks Back (2012)). Ch. 2, ‘Ritual, Culture and the Human Mind: A Socio-Cognitive Approach’, is a brilliant synthesis of the cognitive science of religion as it relates to the ancient world. U. discusses various theoretical approaches within CSR, including evolutionary psychology/modularity, behavioural ecology and cultural evolution. He then identifies three cognitive perspectives on ritual: Ritual and Action, as outlined in McCauley and Lawson's theory of ritual competency, according to which humans are hardwired to understand the ritual grammar of an ‘agent’ acting upon a ‘patient’, including superhuman participants; Ritual and Cooperation, based on Commitment Signalling Theory, in which ‘costly’ rituals demonstrate a participant's commitment to the group; and Ritual and Religious Knowledge, drawing on Harvey Whitehouse's typology of ‘imagistic’ and ‘doctrinal’ rituals, which activate participants’ episodic and semantic memory, respectively.

Ch. 3, ‘“I Baptize You With Water”: Ritual and the Rise of Religious Movements’, identifies Christian baptism as a ritual innovation from Jewish practices of purification by highlighting its structure in terms of Ritual Competence Theory: a ‘special agent ritual’, in which God as divine agent is understood to act directly upon the baptisand (the patient). Ch. 4, ‘“Are Any Among You Sick?”: Ritual, Possession, and Healing’, builds upon various comparative anthropological studies which have identified Jesus as a ‘medium’ or ‘shaman’. U. invokes the anthropologist Emma Cohen's cognitive typology of spirit possession to contextualise the healings and exorcisms performed by Jesus in the Gospels and within the early Church, including baptismal rites. Ch. 5, ‘“When You Come Together”: Ritual and Cooperation’, uses Cognitive Signalling Theory to evaluate scholarly claims that the rituals in Paul's Corinthian community promoted group solidarity; for example, Ristro suggests that such high-arousal rituals as glossolalia involved difficult-to-fake displays of emotion, a ‘costly’ practice for participants who thus demonstrated their commitment. Ch. 6, ‘“Baptizing … and Teaching”: Ritual and Religious Knowledge’, explores the ways in which rituals create and transmit common knowledge, for example baptismal creeds. U. emphasises the ritual production of embodied knowledge, while also appealing to theories of extended cognition, in which thinking interacts with the environment. Thus, images of Jesus's baptism functioned as ‘cognitive tools’ which shaped the viewer's experience.

U.’s chapters on early Christian ritual are exploratory, not only from the formal perspective of theoretical pluralism, but also in the sense that he is making a case for the usefulness of CSR to test previous scholarly theories and to propose new ones. There is no doubt he has succeeded admirably in this. The Cognitive Science of Religion represents an approach of immense promise to Roman Studies, and the ancient world more generally, alongside other areas of cognitive studies, such as the application of cognitive linguistics to literary texts, one of many approaches in the emerging sub-discipline of Classics and Cognitive Theory (the title of a forthcoming Routledge volume edited by P. Meineck, W. Short and J. Devereaux).