2018 April - 48 articles
Narratives, i.e., stories told by suicidal people, describing personal experiences and meanings given to these experiences, play an important role in understanding suicidal behaviour. The aim of the current study was to analyse suicidal processes tha...
The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire (SpNQ), originally written in the German language, was translated and validated into 11 languages, but not Latin languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese. This study aimed to determine the psychometric properties of t...
In this article, we present the results of our research, which aims to comprehend how the relationship between religion and the use of drugs operates in various contexts, but especially in the context of a prohibitionist paradigm. On the one hand, th...
The main research issue of this article is to determine the extent to which Western esotericism influences the formation of computer game plots. The methodological framework is the occultural bricolage theory (C. Partridge). This article looks at how...
This qualitative article explores the impact of faith-based interventions through the lens of a self-identified practicing Christian: Joanna. For over a decade, Joanna has visited several prisons in the United Kingdom in a faith-based capacity: suppo...
Moral decision making systems have long been a popular and widely discussed part of computer games; especially in—but not limited to—role-playing games and other games with strong narrative elements. In this article, an attempt will be ma...
This paper argues that, although Margaret Cavendish’s main philosophical contributions are not in philosophy of religion, she makes a case for a defense of God, in spite of the worst sorts of harms being present in the world. Her arguments abou...
The game The Binding of Isaac is an excellent example of a game that incorporates criticism of religion. Isaac is a roguelike dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons. Both from the perspective of narrative and of game design, McMillen built...
Interdisciplinary dialogues find researchers seeking better understandings of theories and concepts, such colonialism and capitalism, and the means through which these concepts impact both local and global cultures. The results of explorations such a...
The present analysis contributes to the existing literature on religion and suicide in three interrelated ways: (1) providing an analysis of suicide completions whereas most research is based on non-lethal levels of suicidality; (2) assessing the rel...
What might a sense of decolonisation (not)/be? Or, what comes after the logic of the coloniser? This question is at the centre of many debates in South Africa and extends to all countries worldwide who are faced with the challenge of self-determinati...
What do a bionic supersoldier, space stations and religious fanaticism have in common? They are all vital elements of the plot in Halo, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Games. One of the interestin...
The integration of spiritual and emotional health is key for the development of a comprehensive public health approach to suicide prevention. Faith communities play a unique and powerful role in shaping this integration. This case study investigated...
This article examines the filmmaking of writer and director Khyentse Norbu (Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche), a Tibetan-Bhutanese lama with major responsibilities as a senior Vajrayana teacher, and recognized as the third incarnation of the founde...
Though recent years have seen a critical reappraisal of Buddhist texts from the angle of performance and gender studies, examinations of Zen Buddhist encounter dialogues (better known under their edited form as “koan”) within this framework are rare....
At the turn of the twentieth century, Western missionaries and mission organizations sought to develop financial strategies that would facilitate the further expansion of the Western mission enterprise. Three such strategies emerged: an increasingly...
Religious communities influence health-related behaviors of adherents in important ways for public health promotion. Questions remain about the processes involved and resultant health promotion actions of the religious adherents. This study applied a...
Recent decades have seen the rediscovery of a significant number of texts authored by Italian women between 1560 and 1630. And yet the commonplace that the Counter-Reformation silenced women writers has persisted. One figure useful for teaching a mor...
The procession known as “Lord of Miracles” is a massive religious phenomenon that takes place in various cities around the world in October. The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze certain elements of the procession, which champion not o...
Amidst both a resurgent interest in the impact of religion on social problems like crime, including its contextual effects, as well as scholarship directed toward the immigration-crime intersection, the current study examines how different religious...
Self-transcendent feelings such as gratitude, compassion, and awe are highly relevant for human societies. So far, empirical research has focused more on the relational aspects of these feelings (concrete persons), and less on the spiritual aspects r...
This article argues that Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and the impartial spectator in his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] connects the individual to society. In this work, Smith’s economics are far more complex than mere self-interest as...
For my invited contribution to this special issue of Religions on “Feminisms and the Study of ‘Religions,’” I focus on philosophy of religion and contestations over its relevance to the academic field of Religious Studies. I amplify some feminist phi...
Emmanuel Levinas declares that we have reached the end of theodicy, but we have not reached the end of discussions and books and special issues on theodicy, and people continue to ask, and answer, the questions “Why?” and “Why me?” about their suffer...
When the Cold War was ended in 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote, three years later, his very well-known book proposing a quite original thesis. He argues that the end of fascism and of communism means the triumph of Eastern liberalism in history. Followi...
Recent research in the Huntington archive provides new information for assessing the importance of Eliza Sharples’s meaning as a radical feminist, critiquing and using Christianity and pagan female Gods to establish her authority and further he...
“Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. I am all of this for the Other with no hope of changing it.” Thus wrote Sartre in his Being and Nothingness. But was not Sartre the major advocate of existential freedom, w...
This article explores individual and collective pilgrimages to the Mumbai-based cremation ground (samādhi) of Bhimrao Ramji (Babasaheb) Ambedkar (1891–1956), a renowned economist and lawyer, academician and philosopher, political leader and social re...
Drawing upon inscriptional, art historical, as well as largely unstudied and unpublished textual evidence, this paper examines the conceptualization of religious diversity in the Medieval Deccan prior to the Islamic invasions. What our archive sugges...
This paper examines how Franciscan apologetics and polemics over the status of St. Francis and the Rule of 1223 created a climate of inquisitorial suspicion over prophecy and prophetic claims.
This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity...
This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundati...
This paper uses the feeling thermometer toward Jews on the American National Election (ANES) surveys from 1964 through 2016 to track trends in Americans’ attitudes toward Jews. The feeling thermometer is one of the longest continuous time series stud...
This essay consists of philosophical and comparative theological reflections on the topic of rebirth, or reincarnation. Informed by the work of William James, John Hick, and Francis X. Clooney, the essay first establishes the author’s stance that rei...
As part of an integrated studies curriculum at the author’s college, all juniors must take a Reflections course in which students consider personal values and analyze familiar and unfamiliar systems of thought and belief, in order to explore their ow...
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory proposes that the person seeks protection and security with his or her caregiver, establishing a significant bond, which Bowlby characterizes as “attachment relationship”. The relationship with God can also be understood as...
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the accounts offered by individuals (n = 7) convicted of a sexual offense who describe themselves as Buddhists. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews within a custodial environment and an...
Using ethnographic research and interviews, this article explored the construction of gender equality among students and faculty members at the Asbury Theological Seminary. The institution constructed an unusual blend of egalitarianism and anti-femin...
This article evaluates the actual impact and potential implications of feminist pedagogy for Religious Studies in universities and Religious Education in schools. It is based on the authors’ experience in the UK, including some international comparis...
From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings s...
In this paper, we discuss the reasons why urban Christians choose certain sites for religious activities and explain the rapid development of house churches in urban areas in China from the perspective of individual Christians, through survey data ob...
This paper seeks to locate the kind of knowledge that is relevant for African development in the twenty-first century African cultural context and to propose the paradigm for achieving such knowledge. To do this, it advances the view that the concept...
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How to define and measure secularization is among the most fervent discussions in the literature on the sociology of religion. The perception of secularization only in terms of change in the social prestige and influence of religion has confined the...
Through a systematic investigation—the first attempt of this kind—into the recently released 2016 Australian census data, this article presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the religious identity of the Chinese Community in contemporary...
Female non-Buddhists have been writing detailed descriptions of their personal experiences in vipassanā meditation retreats since the 1960s. These memoirists relate to the English-speaking world their experience of the retreat process and self-transf...
This article focuses on the implications of Sunni persecution of Ahmadiyyat by analyzing texts by the movement’s founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, to identify the epistemological basis of his claims to prophecy in 19th century India. Rather than situating...
