2019 June - 57 articles
Relationships between religion and comics are generally unexplored in the academic literature. This article provides a brief history of Black religions in comic books, cartoons, animation, and newspaper strips, looking at African American Christianit...
This essay examines the means by which African American poet Phillis Wheatley uses her evangelical Christianity to engage issues of race in revolutionary America. In her poetry and other writings, she addresses and even instructs white men of privile...
This article introduces the Religions issue on Latin American religiosity exploring sociological perspectives on the Latin American religious situation, from a Latin American perspective. The Secularization Theory proposes “the more modernity,...
The following essay is presented as part of a long-term project concerned with the theory and practice of modern Jewish thinkers as interpreters of the Bible. The recent Bible commentaries of Eliezer Schweid, who is one of the foremost Jewish scholar...
There are few empirical studies on the Catholic Church’s loss of followers in the state of Rio de Janeiro and, more generally, on the decline of Catholicism in Brazil. Drawing from the Weberian theses of disenchantment and religious rationalization,...
An extensive review of the psychological literature shows that interactions between religious/spiritual (R/S) struggles and other aspects of human functioning are complex and affected by “third” factors. Still, we have only a few studies...
The new millennium has seen increased hostility to Israel among many progressive constituencies, including several mainline Protestant churches. The evangelical community in the US remains steadfastly Zionist, so overall support for financial aid to...
Starting from Fehige’s and Polkinghorne’s analyses of the analogies between theological and scientific thought experiments (TEs), the main aim of this paper is to clarify the distinctive character of theological TEs. For this purpose, we...
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” th...
Tracing the devotional beliefs and practices of everyday people during the late Middle Ages through documents is tricky, as most were written with other purposes in mind. To make up for this, it is necessary to examine the abundant material culture t...
Although traditionally associated with Eastern Christianity, the practice of venerating icons became deeply rooted in the Catholic societies of the broad Adriatic region from the Late Middle Ages onwards and was an indispensable part of everyday popu...
In this article, I examine the possible thought experimenting qualities of Søren Kierkegaard’s novel Fear and Trembling and in which way (if any) it can be explanatory. Kierkegaard’s preference for pseudonyms, indirect communicatio...
In Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum argues against the claim that the suffering of the wrongdoer restores, or partially restores, what was damaged by the wrongdoing. Making this mental mistake sets a person on “the road of payback,”...
Religious notions have long played a role in epistemology. Theological thought experiments, in particular, have been effective in a wide range of situations in the sciences. Some of these are merely picturesque, others have been heuristically importa...
Recent research on Daoism has distinguished various models of self-cultivation present in the tradition, in particular those which aim at returning humanity to a natural, spontaneous form of existence (often associated with early pre-Qin “philo...
The eminent scholar-nun Chŏng Suok (1902–1966) traveled from colonial Korea to Imperial Japan from 1937 to 1939 and wrote a travelogue that provides an important first-hand account from a woman’s perspective on the state of Japanese and K...
In the seventeenth century, a common saying in parts of rural Sweden when discussing someone lacking in piety was that they went to neither church nor cross. This reflects the practice of placing shrines in the fields, along the roads and in the wood...
The Constitution of India through an amendment of 1976 prescribes a Fundamental Duty ‘to have compassion for living creatures’. The use of this notion in actual legal practice, gathered from various judgments, provides a glimpse of the cu...
This article is about sahaja-jñāna, or ‘innate intuition’, as a form of Brahmo and Vaiṣṇava epistemology—a foundational invention within the development of modern Hinduism. I examine its nineteenth-century intellectual histor...
Hindu goddesses have been mobilized as powerful symbols by various groups of activists in both visual and verbal campaigns in India. Although these mobilizations have different motivations and goals, they have frequently emphasized the theological as...
Posthumanist critics such as Braidotti—informed by the antihumanisms of Foucault, Irigaray, and Deleuze—seek to respond to advanced capitalism by promoting what they take to be a radical transformation of what it means to be “human,...
In many religious education classrooms, the meaning of a sacred text is treated as something stable and authoritative. A teacher’s job is to transmit that meaning to students. This study reports on a year-long intervention conducted in a sevent...
Recent research on student epistemology has shifted from seeing epistemology as a stable entity possessed by individuals to a collection of more situated cognitive resources that individuals may employ differently depending on the context. Much of th...
This article introduces the life and medical histories of the luminary Khalkha Mongolian monk, Lungrik Tendar (Tib. Lung rigs bstan dar; Mon. Lungrigdandar, c. 1842–1915). Well known for his exegesis of received medical works from Central Tibet...
A large majority of Japanese people describe themselves as mushūkyō, ‘non-religious’, even though they participate in several religious-related cultural practices that socialize them to accept spiritual attitudes without the mediation of...
Outside of core curriculum programs or Great Books classes, few undergraduates who are not literature majors read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy. This paper describes the redesign of a course in the history of Christian theology as a model f...
This article draws upon recent historiography to critique the concept of “civil religion”, and argues that it should be replaced by nationalism. Its central point is that there is indeed a dominant language of American nationalism and one...
This paper focuses on how Buddhist medicine in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia was defined, restricted, regulated, and transformed under different ruling political regimes since the fall of the Qing empire in 1911 to the 1980s. The paper argues that...
In Tibetan history and culture, horses were among the most important animals, if not the most important of all. Horses were the mounts that provided transport, particularly for the nobility and kings, allowing them to travel more quickly and comforta...
This contribution explores a peculiar kind of annotation in Arabic multiple-text manuscripts. These manuscripts were often compiled as a personal ‘one-volume library’, containing copies and excerpts of a unique selection of texts. Further...
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the practice of private confession to a priest was a mainstay of Catholic parish life in the United States. By the 1970s, Catholics had largely abandoned the practice of private confession. One dominant nar...
This article aims to explain the ideas and the significance of Dr. Bilal Philips, a prominent ‘Salafi‘preacher, a major proponent of Neo-Traditional Salafism, and how his writings and activities can aid us in understanding the dynamics re...
Implicit in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on real...
As recent research on the former bhaṭṭāraka lineages of Western and Central India has shown, the early modern Digambara tradition, rather than constituting a distinct, and defective, ‘bhaṭṭāraka era’, shows much similarity to contemporary...
This essay considers the importance of the transspecies imagination for moral cultivation in contemporary Chinese Buddhism. Drawing on scriptural, theoretical, and fieldwork-based ethnographic data, it argues that olfaction—often considered the...
The term religious socialization has become a pressing issue in the context of religious socialization research. It also raises the question whether religious transmission can be interpreted through the reproduction or constructivist approach. Previo...
In this article, we pursue a double mission: First, we will demonstrate the unique nature of dynamic group facilitation as it emerges from the concept of the unity of opposites and its relation to situations of conflict, as well as the pedagogical ch...
The paper argues for the continued importance and usefulness of the term “civil religion” in light of the (West) German discussion and the situation in Europe. For non-Americans, and especially for Germans for whom terms like “polit...
Low competitiveness is a common denominator of historically Roman Catholic countries. In contrast, historically Protestant countries generally perform better in education, social progress, and competitiveness. Jesus Christ described the true and fals...
In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind...
The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the most popular translated novels in China from the late 19th until the 20th century. In this paper, I argue that one of the main reasons for the book’s success in China lies in an intricate rhetoric of...
This article argues that in postcolonial and post-secular Australia, a country in which Christianity has been imported from Europe in the process of colonization in the eighteenth century by the British Empire, institutional Christianity is waning in...
The image of “straw dogs” (chugou 刍狗) is a simile used in chapter five of the Laozi (老子), in a passage generally understood as an explicit Daoist rejection of kind acts (or benevolence as ren 仁 was translated for a long time), well known...
This paper examines the way thinkers in the pre-Buddhist world in China viewed the animal-human divide. It argues that the boundaries between humans and animals were porous. The only unique capacities that human beings are credited with were first (w...
The study of religious freedom has not received sufficient empirical attention from sociologists of religion, despite significant theoretical discussion of the governance of religious freedom. This article suggests empirical findings about the views...
The notion of “living religion” is helpful in exploring how individuals and communities have across time and culture engaged their other-than-human neighbors in a local place as a response to the fact that each human individual clearly li...
In this article, I argue that “mindfulness of death” (maraṇasati) can be a tool to induce mortality salience and can have a positive psychological impact. The mindfulness of death is described in detail in the early Buddhist texts Aṅgutta...
According to some sociologists, one of the hallmarks of modernity is the end of ‘pre-determined’ identities and its replacement with bricolage projects in which people literally create ‘do-it-yourself’ identities. This has als...
Scholars have long known that Jain authors from the early centuries of the common era composed their own versions of the story of Rāma, prince of Ayodhyā. Further, the differences between Jain and Brahminical versions of the narrative are well docume...
This paper focuses on the relationship between clothing and identity—specifically, on Islamic dress as shaping the identity of Dutch Muslim women. How do these Dutch Muslim women shape their identity in a way that it is both Dutch and Muslim? D...
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