2019 July - 46 articles
The Chinese government has regulated all religious activity in the public domain for many years. The state has generally considered religious groups as representing a potential challenge to the authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which se...
This article explores the evolution of female religious life within the Catholic Church in China today. Through ethnographic observation, it establishes a spectrum of practices between two main traditions, namely the antique beatas and the modern mis...
Resorting to the supernatural to find something lost is a practice that can be observed over a very large range of times and places. With the affirmation of Christianity, these kinds of habits and beliefs were considered superstitious by the Church....
Birds and beasts often appear in the Zhuangzi, in fables and parables meant to be read analogically as instructions for human thought and behavior. Whereas the analogical significance of some fables is obvious, in others it is obscure and in need of...
The objective of this research is to adapt and validate a useful instrument to diagnose cyberbullying, provoked by intolerance towards cultural and religious diversity, identifying the profile of the aggressor and the victim. The study was carried ou...
South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) has produced some of the greatest Islamic thinkers, such as Shah Wali Allah (sometimes also spelled Waliullah; 1702–1763) who is considered one of the originators of pan-Islamism, Rahmatullah Kairanw...
In this paper, we are interested in extending out the dialectical models of religious ethics and political theology that Reinhold Niebuhr and Emmanuel Levinas began by enacting a conversation between these two theorists. We do this by presenting and...
From megachurches in movie theatres to prayer groups held in living rooms, Pentecostals worldwide are constantly carrying out religious activities that ultimately aim to integrate diverse worshippers into the kingdom of God. Born-again Christians ref...
Transculturation processes and the formation of identity are analyzed in this investigation into the emblematic politics of the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (First new chronicle and good government) of Guamán Poma de Ayala (ca....
By failing to document popular belief in the supernatural attributes of religious sites and by drawing up conservation management plans that fail to attend to such beliefs, current heritage regimes effectively perform a secular translation of them. I...
Extensive empirical research conducted up till now has confirmed that personality represents one of the most significant predictors of life satisfaction. Still, no studies to date have empirically tested the path of influence from personality traits...
In recent years, media theorists stress macroscopic relations between digital communications and religion, through the framing of mediatization theory. In these discussions, media is conceptualized as a social institution, which influences religious...
In this essay, we will explore the variances in Madea’s character and presence on stage and on screen in both productions of Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: The Play and Madea Goes to Jail. Specifically, we examine the multiple and vary...
As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand (only 49 percent of the population said they were Christian in the last census), public space has become more receptive to other forms of religiosity. In pa...
Christian monasticism has an ancient land-based foundation. The desert fathers and later reform movements appealed to the land for sustenance, spiritual metaphor, and as a marker of authentic monastic identity. Contemporary Roman Catholic monastics w...
This paper combines organizational and theological frameworks to address the integration of Christian spirituality at work (SAW). It begins with a brief explanation of SAW, followed by a more narrow description of Christian SAW. The paper then provid...
The present article discusses the ways in which ethnic Japanese Muslim women are perceived and treated in contemporary Japanese society, through a case study of one Japanese female convert. It examines the complexity found in her experiences of margi...
Media representations of Muslims in Britain have often disappointed both faith practitioners and scholars. Imputed failings include distorting beliefs or practices, essentialising the faith, and amplifying voices that are not representative of Islam....
Religious education is a compulsory subject in Pakistani schools in which students learn basic knowledge about Islam without exploring the sectarian differences between each sect of Islam. The division of Muslims into Sunni and Shia and the further d...
Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous population, have a unique connection to the environment (Harris and Tipene 2006). In Māori tradition, Papatūānuku is the land—the earth mother who gives birth to all things, including Māori (Dell 2017). Māo...
With an emphasis on the religious figuration of its heroine’s chaste body, the present essay explores the political dynamics of The Rape of Lucrece. The poem draws on Roman religion and Christianity: Lucrece is an emblem of purity, with echoes...
This essay explores a few of the reasons for the failure of Western theories to capture Chinese religious experiences. It will include Durkheim’s insight that “The sacred … is society in disguised form” and variants of secularization theories in cont...
Monastic vows have been a source of religious controversy at least since the Reformation. Today, new monastic movements recover many elements of the tradition (e.g., community life and prayer, material solidarity and poverty), but vows—understo...
The joint activities of memorising and reciting the Arabic Qur’an are deeply embedded within Islamic tradition, culture and educational practice. Despite this, for many western non-Muslims, particularly those engaged in educational activity the...
Looking at modern monasticism and its role in society one can see how traditional monastic concepts or values find their new forms. On the other hand, art and artists willingly, though not always consciously, use or refer to some monastic themes. In...
Although Muslim leadership in Britain has long been the focus of scholarly attention, discussion has tended to prioritise “official” Muslim leaders (Birt 2006; Geaves 2008; Ahmad and Evergeti 2010). However, what constitutes a “Musl...
The ability of animals to convey meaning, either sacred or profane, features prominently in the dialectic of natural knowledge and sacred histories. Animals, particularly those that exhibited irregularities of nature, symbolised and revealed God&rsqu...
The development of Christian theology in contemporary China can learn much from Chinese fiction beginning with Lu Xun and his dedication to writing for the spirit of the Chinese people. Increasingly, Chinese novelists have reflected the growth of spi...
This essay considers how an expanded understanding of sacramentality is enhanced by engagement with chaos theory and decolonial theory. These unique lenses enlarge traditional Roman Catholic frameworks for considering God’s self-communication t...
This article establishes the framework for a (Christian) theology of fashion, the development of which comes under a research project set up between Luxembourg (Luxembourg School of Religion & Society) and Paris (Collège des Bernardins). T...
In this paper, I will propose an intertextual theology of religions from a non-Western cultural perspective through the works in The True Light Review, an official magazine of Chinese Baptist churches, and Yue Hua, a prominent and long-lived Muslim m...
Yijing benzhi 易經本旨 (original meaning of the Yijing, 1774) constitutes a unique piece of Christian literature produced by the Chinese Catholic believer Lü Liben 呂立本 in the Qing period. Following in the footsteps of Jesuit missionaries such as Joa...
“The Palestinian cause is not about land and soil, but it is about faith and belief,” insist Islamists in their attempts to Islamize the Arab–Israeli conflict. This paper examines the instrumentalization of religion in the conflict...
This paper challenges the Japanese word mushūkyō as it is used to create a collective, non-religious identity that excludes religious practitioners. Mushūkyō, in addition to functioning as the antithesis of religion, produces the homogeneity Japanese...
This essay traces the emergence of new categories of “spiritual writing” in Chinese literature, before offering an interpretation of Bei Cun’s 1992 novel The Baptizing River (Shixi de he 施洗的河) as an exemplar. Bei Cun’s first n...
Interest in religion and spirituality continues to grow among public health practitioners, researchers, and scholars. While there have been several recent landmark publications and efforts to understand the intersections of religion, spirituality, an...
In the post-9/11 world, the use of drone strikes has become a critical aspect of U.S. Military strategy in the War on Terror. While the ethics of drones have been argued from a theological perspective, this essay argues that a deeper, more theoretica...
Opening with a philosophical definition of sacrament(ality) as a mediator (mediation) of the sacred in the concrete world, this article offers pansacramentalism as a promising worldview—especially for those rooted in or emerging from the Christ...
Faith-based programs have been long regarded as influential social approaches to form positive attitudes to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) within the last few decades. However, recent scholars argue that...
Good Times is primarily remembered for the situation comedy that it became, rather than how the series began. As a part of what Means Coleman classifies as “The Lear Era: Social Relevancy and Ridiculed Black Subjectivity,” the series was...
New Monasticism has been interpreted by its protagonists as an answer to the challenges of the future of Christian monasticism. New Monastic Communities can be defined as groups of people (at least some of whom have taken religious vows) living toget...
Leadership and authority were two central themes in the mission statement of the first ever Shariah tribunal to emerge in the UK. When the Islamic Shariah Council was established in 1982, it noted that its founding meeting had been attended by Muslim...
Drawing from long-term ethnographic research with a global network of contemplative Christians, this paper discusses an emerging teaching role for North American monasteries as the numbers of avowed religious decline. Since the Trappist community of...
Georgian polyphonic chant and folk song is beginning to receive scholarly attention outside its homeland, and is a useful case study in several respects. This study focuses on the theological nature of its musical material, examining relevant example...
In 2016 and 2017, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing both won the National Book Award for fiction, the first time that two African-American writers have won the award in consecutive years. T...
In the late twentieth century, interreligious education emerged as a way to transform one’s attitude toward other religions and reduce religious prejudice. This article addresses the philosophical aspects of this practice, in particular the pro...
