2019 March - 91 articles
The citizen creates the alien. The apparatus of citizenship establishes the criteria to determine who should be counted as undocumentable and therefore alien to lawful existence in this geographical territory. Detention centers extend the carceral im...
Confucian rituals have constituted the foundation of religious practice in the traditional societies of East Asia. Paying attention to the Confucian ritual, this article explores the way Confucianism constructs its symbolic system based on people’s n...
Undergraduate students in the United States of America are increasingly less religious, and this decline in religiosity is felt not only at secular colleges and universities, but also at those with a religious affiliation. This article seeks to answe...
Hospital chaplaincy must reconcile competing epistemologies of health and salvation (Christian, clinical, holistic, etc.), but when done in interfaith situations this task becomes more difficult. As current models of spiritual care are insufficient,...
This study examines depression among Latter-day Saint teens, particularly how religiosity and the parent–child relationship are associated with depressive symptomology. Although there is an abundance of research on adolescent depression and on adoles...
The paper presents Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the first systematic attempt to claim that the normal methods of testing belief and opinion for clarity, consistence, coherence, and how they stand to the facts are powerless when...
This article presents the results of a fieldwork project from January to April 2017 in Spanish mosques, an on-the-ground investigation using interviews with female Muslim teachers who constitute a sort of women’s movement within Islamic educati...
As Dante explains in his epistle to Can Grande, the purpose of the Comedy is to move the reader from a state of misery to a state of happiness. The poet himself testifies that the poem was written as a work of moral philosophy oriented to the achieve...
The Trump administration’s controversial immigration policy has provoked significant opposition, including against a 35-day partial shutdown of the federal government over Trump’s insistence on a “wall,” but the most outrage w...
Buddhist literature in Pāli presents a world that is rich in animal imagery, with some animals carrying largely positive associations and other animals seen in a consistently negative light. Among the many species that populate the Pāli imaginaire, t...
The interest in the topic of spirituality as a more or less independent dimension of quality of life is continuously growing [...]
The paper discusses the connection between rhythm and meaning based on Augustine’s De musica. This central topic is illuminated by the analysis of other particular aesthetic concepts that one can find in Augustine (such as sentience and desire,...
The transition from ethics to politics still lacks a proper understanding. I propose thinking of this transition in terms of a politics of aesthetics. However, thinking about a politics of aesthetics means also thinking about images and their prohibi...
This is the first stand-alone glossary of New Testament narrative-critical terms in the English language. It is an alphabetical listing of prominent terms, concepts, and techniques of narrative criticism with illustrations and cross-references. Commo...
A large quantity of past research in philosophical Daoism has been dedicated to the authenticity of “dao”; this essay shifts the focus to the authenticity of the “myriad things 萬物 (wanwu)” in the Zhuangzi. The concept of &ldqu...
As a practical theologian and researcher in the field of ‘natural’ disasters, as well as being a disaster responder chaplain, I am often confronted by, and have to confront, the nexus between theology/philosophy and “real life&rdquo...
Metaphysical modelling is a method in (epistemologically enlightened) metaphysics. It uses models for the philosophical analysis of metaphysico-epistemological situations. In this paper, the method is applied to a set of metaphysical questions that c...
The pluralistic turn in modern Hindu thought corresponds with the rise of an emphasis on direct experience of divine realities in this tradition. Both pluralism and a focus on experience have precedents in premodern Hindu traditions, but have become...
The discovery of early Hebrew inscriptions at the site of Kuntillet ʿAjrud has generated considerable discussion among scholars over the past few decades. The fact that the inscriptions contain explicitly religious themes led some to conclude that th...
The new religious movements (NRMs) initially emerged in the regional societies of East Asia in the middle nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including Joseon (Korea). The socio-political transformation from feudalism to modernisation emaciated...
The growing diversity of U.S. communities has led scholars to explore how racial/ethnic diversity effects social capital, civic engagement, and social trust. Less is known about the relationship between diversity and the work of community-based organ...
In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it. However, in the early fourteenth c...
Throughout the globe (particularly in the global South), religious orthodoxy and their discriminatory intolerances are negatively impacting religious freedom of underserved populations, particularly those who practice/follow alternate spiritual praxi...
This essay explores the core Daoist concept of ziran (commonly translated as spontaneity, naturalness, or self-so) and its relationship to authenticity and authority. Modern scholarship has often followed the interpretation of Guo Xiang (d. 312) in t...
Ancient books on East Asian mathematics introduced to the Korean Peninsula enrich our understanding of the arithmetic notions that mold the creative thought processes of the ancients. They believed that all objects in the universe could be composed o...
“What is suffering? What is hope?” These are questions I have asked for years with classes full of students training for Christian ministry. Now, I ask these questions in classes with Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and ‘spirit...
In its declaration of principles, the 1987 Philippine Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State. While the principle honors distinctions between temporal and spiritual functions, both Church and State maintain a unique and cooperat...
1 Kings preserves a long and detailed description of the construction of a temple and palace in Jerusalem by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE. Previous generations of scholars accepted this description as an authentic account. Accordingly, much l...
This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism—as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference—across Indig...
This essay explores the impacts of Italy’s socio-religious tendencies on the Shi’a rituals of Muḥarram and Ṣafar. Ethnography and semi-structured interviews were the main methods adopted for the performance of this research. The implicati...
The article aims to uncover a deep ambivalence in the figure of Job, as it is presented in the book of the same title, especially in the latter’s “poetry” or dialogue section. This ambivalence corresponds to and in fact emerges from...
Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the demonstrations or “public mourning” of January 11th, 2015 were heralded by many as the return of the republican sacred, the re-crystallization of a long dormant people, and the resurrection of Fren...
In the context of undergraduate education, “Teaching Dante” often means reading selected cantos from the Divine Comedy, most, if not all of them, taken from the Inferno. I suggest, however, that Dante’s aims in the Divine Comedy, as...
With the notion of advancing a modern Stoic environmental ethical framework, we explore the philosophy’s call to “living according to Nature”, as derived from ancient Stoic theology. We do this by evaluating the orthodox (ancient) viewpoint and the c...
On February 8, 1971, Michel Foucault announced the formation of Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group [GIP]), a group of activist intellectuals who worked to amplify the voices of those with firsthand knowledge...
Following Rowland’s and Foucault’s respective observations that apocalypses are not necessarily temporal, and that historical analyses have diverted attention unduly from spatial phenomena, this paper examines Revelation using a spatial h...
In the early 20th century, Dievturība, a reconstructed form of paganism, laid claim to the status of an indigenous religious tradition in Latvia. Having experienced various changes over the course of the century, Dievturība has not disappeared from t...
This study examines how Chinese evangelical Protestant employees view work and the workplace, through the lens of their religion, and how they seek to influence the broader society, in a highly restrictive religious domain in China. Using the concept...
While Shi’a Muslims remain in the minority in Europe, including within universities, the past decade has witnessed the growing profile of Shi’ism on university campuses, especially in Britain. In particular, there has been an emphasis on...
In this paper, I interpret the story of the Apostle Paul’s circumcision of Timothy in the New Testament text The Acts of the Apostles (16:1–5) from a womanist perspective. My approach is intersectional and inter(con)textual. I construct a...
Many professors who teach Dante’s Divine Comedy, or any great text, in the general education classroom see in it an opportunity to teach their students to humble themselves before texts older and greater than students’ own personal views...
This article explores the hermeneutical challenges to understand religious belonging and religious identity in the East Asian context. In East Asia, religious identities have not always been as exclusively delineated, as is the case in Western models...
This paper focuses on stories from the 13th century Rasavāhinī in which feeding a starving dog is described as an act of great merit, equal even to the care of a monk or the Buddha. It begins with a reevaluation of passages from Buddhist texts that h...
Decades ago, feminist theologians emphasized the importance of “naming” in achieving justice. They argued not having a name for something makes it more difficult to understand its influence on our lives. Naming elements of our lived reali...
Religious and spiritual beliefs enable some bereaved women to cope better with the devastating effects of the loss of a baby through miscarriage. The aim of this study is to explore the experiences of women’s utilization of religious and spirit...
Materialist accounts of artistic development emphasize the ongoing revolution of media in the progress of history. Amongst the most popular accounts of modernity are Walter Benjamin’s essays on the relationship of photography to traditional art...
Mahāmudrā—an Indo-Tibetan phenomenon of Buddhist spirituality—constitutes in its systematic presentation a path that maps out the mystical quest for direct experience of ultimate reality. Despite the post-15th century bKa’-brgyud at...
Whereas much recent research has tried to understand the role of sectarianism in the Syrian conflict, few studies address the issue from a bottom-up viewpoint as seen from people’s everyday and lived experiences. This article seeks to access tr...
The European continent appears as a new transcultural environment at the heart of globalization in which religious subjectivities are developed. I observe this more specifically in the socioreligious trajectories of the descendants of Muslim migrants...
This study examined the extent to which 164 married heterosexuals’ reports of the sanctification of marriage and spiritual intimacy during pregnancy predicted the trajectory of the couples’ observed intimacy skills during late pregnancy a...
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