2019 November - 50 articles
The neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena requires the development of methodologies that can target both the biological as well as the subjective dimensions of such phenomena. The purpose of the current study was to compare vario...
When American evangelicals sought to use the tools of sport for religious outreach in the mid-twentieth century, they began to wonder if the essential features of sport—competition and hierarchy—conflicted with their approach to salvation...
Controversy has swirled round the writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh in the Dasam Granth, for not all Sikhs agree that he composed the entire text. Disputes about the Dasam Granth and its status have addressed the fact that many of the text&rsq...
Eagerly venerated and able to perform miracles, medieval relics and religious artefacts in the Latin West would occasionally also be subject to sensorial and tactile devotional practices. Evidenced by various reports, artefacts were grasped and strok...
This article sheds light on the way in which activities such as the production and consumption of wealth are conceptualized, interpreted and put into practice within quietist Salafist communities in France. Unlike their jihadi and politicized counter...
From proclaiming the equality of all life forms to the stringent emphasis placed upon nonviolent behavior (ahimsa), and once more to the pronounced intention for limiting one’s possessions (aparigraha), Jainism has often been pointed to for its...
Religious and spiritual experiences have implications for many aspects of development across the lifespan, including during early childhood. A focus on religion and spirituality expands beyond a discrete domain of social science (e.g., cognitive deve...
The recent debate on the relation between certain religious traditions and violence has offered us multiple perspectives on this issue. Some scholars accept the conflictual image of religion in the contemporary time projected by the media, seeking th...
Kierkegaard scholars have traditionally chosen to read Kierkegaard as either a theologian or a philosopher. As a result, his corpus is bifurcated as theologians and philosophers lean on their preferred texts. Beneath this practice is an underlying as...
Human culture has modernized at a much faster pace than has theology and religion. We are at the point where many moderns apparently think that religion is losing relevance. Satisfying the need for relevance and ecumenical harmony requires more reaso...
The Hasmonean period (167–63 BCE) is increasingly seen in current scholarship as formative for Samaritan identity and, in particular, as the moment when the Samaritans emerged as a self-contained group separate from the Jews. The first aim of t...
This paper examines the reversals of gender in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s play The Virgin Martyr (1622) in light of early modern scientific notions of the female body. Like well-known female martyrs from the period, such as Anne Askew...
For China today, environmentalism is central. The socialist doctrine of “Xi Jinping Thought” prioritizes transitioning to sustainability in the goal of building an “Ecological Civilization”. This creates unprecedented opportun...
This paper examines the theme of relational theology in the Blade Runner science fiction franchise by exploring the symbolism of eyes and sight in the films. Using the work of ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague, we explore the contrast between the...
The recent deaths of unarmed black people, especially at the hands of law enforcement, have generated a troubling new ritual, in which the media publically asks family members if they will forgive their loved ones’ killers. The first task of th...
This paper is an attempt to understand the appropriation of spaces of Dalits by Sindhi progressive activists and short story writers in Pakistan as they construct, or rather undermine, caste at the anvil of religion and gender to reframe their own th...
The training of Imams and Muslim religious leaders has received much interest in the post-9/11 era, resulting in a vast amount of research and publications on the topic. The present work explores this literature with the aim of analysing key debates...
This article looks at the relationship between the U.S. military and CrossFit, a functional fitness training method and sport, and focuses on how their affinities coalesce around the idea of preparedness. CrossFit makes a sport and spectacle out of p...
The commercialization of Buddhist philosophy has led to decontextualization and indoctrinating issues across groups, as well as abuse and trauma in that context. Methodologically, from an interdisciplinary approach, based on the current situation in...
The Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical Hindu scripture in which the god Krishna imparts lessons to the warrior prince Arjuna about sacred duty (dharma) and the path to spiritual liberation (moksha). This classical scripture has had a long and active in...
This article suggests that reading John Cameron Mitchell’s musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch as a religious classic undermines the logic of complementarity within Catholic theological anthropology, particularly the Theology of the Body of John...
The objective of this study was to analyze individual differences of reification in an intercultural-community-based society while considering the variables of religion and sex in a sample of 1120 Spanish individuals: 810 women (72.5%) and 310 men (2...
In sports literature, women’s participation in physical activities has always been characterized as “problematic.” Muslim women’s participation is often considered to be limited by their culture and religion, which also affect...
This essay takes a fresh approach to a traditional Western philosophical account of anger, according to which anger is best defined as a desire for payback, namely, a desire to make an offender pay a price, in the currency of unwanted pain, for the p...
This study examines the multidimensionality of spirituality by comparing the applicability of two models—the five-dimensional model of religiosity by Huber that we have extended with a sixth dimension of ethics and the three-dimensional spiritu...
This article considers the process of identity formation among soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who were born into the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (AHIJ), more commonly known as the Black Hebrews. The AHIJ are a sect of African...
Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural co...
This article explores historical shifts in the ways the Muslim barbers of South Asia are viewed and the intertwined ways they are conceptualised. Tracing various concepts, such as caste identity, and their multiple links to contempt, labour and Islam...
This article examines how the engagement of diverse religious organisations and individuals in grassroots politics impacts the nature of politics and coalition building through a case study of an urban grassroots political coalition in Australia: the...
This article presents data from our investigations in Kristiansand, the largest city in Southern Norway, an area sometimes called Norway’s ‘Bible belt’. We investigate how social media is reshaping social relations in the city, look...
The physician Giovan Battista Codronchi (1547–1628) is a key figure of sixteenth-century medicine. A study of his main work De morbis veneficis ac veneficiis (1595) and his letters sent to the Congregation of the Index in Rome (1597) can teach...
Hillsong Church has received significant scholarly attention, which has observed the church’s rapid local and global growth. Several other Australian-based Pentecostal churches demonstrate a similar growth trajectory to Hillsong Church, namely:...
Inclusive religious interpretations accept that a salvation beyond their teachings can be found. Whether Islam accepts inclusive religious interpretations or not, constitutes one of the most debated issues related to Islam in our days. In this paper...
This essay attempts to determine whether Daisaku Ikeda can be seen as a Jamesian psychologist of religion. Concerning the development of this essay, it first focuses on a common concern that exists if we look at the work of William James and the Psyc...
The aim of this paper is to examine the exchange of practices that developed when treating the bodies of ordinary laymen and those of saints. Body parts that had been obtained in unorthodox ways were used in private households in a manner strongly re...
In a context of increasing ethnic and religious diversity, Australia’s future prosperity may depend, in part, on the ability to maintain social cohesion. Drawing on the framework developed by the Scanlon Foundation Social Cohesion Research Prog...
Although the academic study of hagiography continues to flourish, the role of comparative methods within the study of sanctity and the saints remains underutilized. Similarly, while much valuable work on saints and sanctity relies on materialist meth...
This article is about a new publicly visible generation of female Islamic authorities in the UK and the ways in which they make sense of what it means to be a female authority within largely male-dominated structures of knowledge production. These au...
Religious transformations in modern societies are not merely a discursive or demographic phenomenon, they also relate to religious architecture in urban space and affect the built environment at its core. Many churches, for instance, are in the proce...
A late medieval paper amulet containing prayers to St. Dorothy and the Holy Cross was found in a demolished part of a medieval wooden stave church in Torpo, Norway. This article examines the content and the function of this textual amulet by placing...
The “spirit” in spiritual ecology is an active political force deserving sustained scholarly analysis and public recognition. This article reports on 15 years of field research on “animate landscapes,” associated with gods and...
Reverend Dr. James Hal Cone has unquestionably been a key architect in defining Black liberation theology. Trained in the Western theological tradition at Garrett Theological Seminary, Cone became an expert on the theology of Twentieth-century Swiss-...
This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the...
In order to examine gender and identity within Sikh literature and culture and to understand the construction of gender and the practice of Sikhi within the contemporary Sikh diaspora in the US, I analyze a selection from creative non-fiction pieces,...
Spiritual distress may ascend from unmet spiritual needs. The use of instruments to measure spiritual distress seems to facilitate the approach to spirituality, such as the Spiritual Distress Scale (SDS) that has been used worldwide. No instrument to...
The number of students from other religious traditions is increasing in Christian seminaries in the United States. However, seminaries have different motivations, visions, and rationales that determine whether and how they accept these students. The...
In order to advance their argument that Imām ‘Alī was the divinely and prophetically designated spiritual and political successor of the Prophet Muḥammad, Shī‘ite Muslim scholars have primarily drawn evidence from the Qur’ān and Ḥad...
The dual concern of this article is to present the vision of the church articulated by the renowned generation of Catholic ressourcement thinkers in the mid-twentieth century, and to demonstrate its continued fecundity in the pluralist, multi-cultura...
This article reviews the historical sources and archeological finds concerning the cult in Shiloh in the Roman-Byzantine period. The study examines the transition to the Byzantine period and attempts to follow the conversion to Christianity in the re...
Since the end of the 20th century, Korean churches have awakened to the fact that pop culture is enjoyed by a large segment of the population and thus provides a natural bridge between Christians and non-Christians. As a result, many Korean churches...
