Religions, Volume 11, Issue 2

Using anthropological and theological perspectives and secondary literature, this paper argues that the scientific study of culture by professional anthropologists and social scientists is an essential component in the Catholic Church’s mission...

Reading Measure for Measure through the logic of substitution has been a long-standing critical tradition; the play seems to invite topical, political, and religious parallels at every turn. What if the logic of substitution in the play goes beyond e...

This article addresses the way the book of Ezra-Nehemiah on one hand and Chronicles on the other reflect the relationship between Samaria and Judah in the postexilic period. With regard to Ezra-Nehemiah, the focus is placed on Ezra 4:1–5, 6&nda...

A new fatwa was announced by the British National Health Service (NHS) in June 2019 to clarify the Islamic position on organ donation. Additionally, the NHS promotional material presents brief arguments for and against organ donation in Islam. Howeve...

This article attempts to shed light on the challenges confronting relevant actors (state and non-state) in countering the threat of terrorism recruitment by focusing on the Boko Haram terrorist organization, whose presence and activities threaten the...

Humanity is currently faced with deadly dangers that could bring about the breakdown of civilization, and even the end of human life on earth in short order. The Marxist and Green thinker Rudolf Bahro spoke of a ‘logic of salvation’, whic...

Sikhism is widely understood and celebrated as san egalitarian religion. This follows from its interpretation as a challenge to the caste schema of Hinduism as well as readings which suggest its gender equality. This paper explores the intersection o...

This paper argues for a reconsideration of social cohesion as an analytical concept and a policy goal in response to increasing levels of religious diversity in contemporary Australia. In recent decades, Australian has seen a revitalization of religi...

This article, part of an evolving and large project, examines the relationship between clothing, freedom and choice, and specifically Islamic dress in shaping the identity of Dutch Muslim women after the Burka Ban that was voted into law on 1 August...

This essay explores theatrical drama alongside aspects of religious dimensionality David Tracy analyzes in terms of limit experience, limit language, and limit questions. The claim is that metatheatrical forms can correlate with limit dimensions, a c...

This Special Issue of Religions is about the encounter between thought experiments and theology [...]

The paper reflects on the role of women in Sikhism in theory and social practice, starting from a case study in northern Italy. Although the normative discourse widely shared in mainstream Sikhism affirms the equality between man and woman and the sa...

During China’s Republican Era (1912–1949), the True Jesus Church, comprising one of the largest indigenous Pentecostal/charismatic churches in China, created a whole set of exclusive salvation doctrines based on its unique biblical interp...

Women’s position, identity, and value in Islam have been affected by androcentric interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith throughout Islamic history. Women’s roles in society, as well as their position vis-à-vis Islamic sour...

The Samaritans form a community of about 810 people split between Mount Gerizim (West Bank) and Holon (Israel). Through tourism of holy sites and cultural heritage promotion, this article examines different ways in which religion can be used as a cul...

This paper will look at the way the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have utilised the theological narrative of marginalisation in their quest for identity and self-determination. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are an expatriate bla...

The research we will present is based on interviews conducted with the Latin American immigrant population and the indigenous population of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC hereafter). We seek to identify religious features tracing similarities a...

This article discusses the main differences between the Samaritan and the Jewish versions of the Pentateuch. The Samaritan Bible consists of the Torah—that is, the Five Books of Moses—also called the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP). The Jewish...

Reading Luther from a feminist perspective reveals paradoxes and ambiguities in Luther’s writings related to language and sex, but we cannot make sense of Luther without important historical information, particularly the history of the meaning...

This introduction to the Special Issue “Teaching Dante” summarizes the volume’s essays and discusses the conference at which they were initially presented.

‘Religion’ still occupies and maintains a position of formal and informal privilege in many current societies. It retains these privileges despite the increasing numbers of people who label themselves ‘non-religious’. There is...

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed re...

It is the aim of this article to constructively discuss some of the feminist critique that has been raised against the sixteenth century reformer, Martin Luther, and concomitantly to demonstrate the complexity, and primarily liberal aspects, of his v...

In this article, I argue that in Works of Love Søren Kierkegaard stays true to his Lutheran roots in detailing an ethic of neighbor love that draws deeply on and unfolds the implications of the inseparable realities of justification and Christ...

Given the strong link between religiousness and hope, we sought to further understand the relations of these potentially powerful resources for youth living in adversity. Although existing research suggests that religiousness might be associated with...

Environmental issues and problems are serious; some are getting worse, and occasionally new ones are still being discovered (Flannery 2010; Meyers and Kent 2005; Ripple et al [...]

Since the 1990s, the Sikh community in India has entered a phase of considerable socioeconomic and demographic transformation that is caused by the large-scale practice of female feticide, the spread of higher education among women, and the mass emig...

Was the Yahweh temple on Mount Gerizim modelled after the temple in Jerusalem? This question is important for our understanding of the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim and the people who worshipped there in the Persian and Hellenistic period; if the Gerizi...

This article by the guest editor introduces the theme of this special issue of Religions, reveals some of his underlying convictions and assumptions regarding the task of reenvisioning Christian ethics, and introduces each of the eight articles in th...

In this paper, I take issue with the theory and practice of inter-religious competence, based on a case-study of the Samaritans of Nablus. I take as a starting point the contemporary observation that inter-religious relations in Nablus are relatively...

I want to know whether Chan masters and students depicted in classical Chan transmission literature can be interpreted as asking open (or what I will call “genuine”) questions. My task is significant because asking genuine questions appea...

The problem of recognizing the true motivations of secular pilgrims is often experienced on the Camino de Santiago. The faith of pilgrims seems to be hidden under the cover of many behaviors of contemporary pilgrims. At the same time on the Camino de...

The Seged is a pilgrimage holiday celebrated by the Jews of Ethiopia on 29 November. Its purpose is to reconstruct a renewal of the covenant between the Jewish People and God in Jerusalem and at Sinai and to strengthen their religious belief. The res...

Radicalisation of Muslim youth is a hot item in the Netherlands. Deradicalisation is therefore high on the agenda. In our view, however, the deradicalisation processes begin at a moment ‘when it is too late to lock the stable door, because the horse...

The purpose of this article is to provide a broad but comprehensive review of the current scholarship on Martin Luther and women. Luther’s thoughts and actions still play an important role as witnessed by the recent events commemorating the fiv...

In this paper, I attempt an approach to the ‘historical Pilate.’ I aim to present the sources referring to him as well as to point out their rhetorical tendencies. However, the approach is selective: whereas all references to Pilate in Ph...

In premodern warrior societies, religions often provided the institutional basis for an ethics and soteriology for warriors, for whom fighting was a social role. This paper examines a Buddhist case in ancient India. I focus particularly on the discou...

In this article, we deal with the topic of the Samaria papyri from Wadi Daliyeh in three main parts implied by the title. First, we briefly summarize the basic data related to the manuscripts. Second, we analyze their significance for the history of...

The centrality of religiosity scale (CRS) is a measure of the importance of religious constructs in personality. The Polish CRS has been applied in more than 40 published studies on the psychology of religion, with over 18,000 total participants. How...

Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the...

The Upaniṣads (ca. 800 BCE) were composed during a transitional time period in Hinduism when Vedic ritual and cosmogonic ideas began to give way to new worldviews. The intriguing Upaniṣadic notions of time have received little attention in the schola...

This paper analyses the Japanese influence upon Taiwanese Buddhist communities during the Colonial Period. I will discuss the interplay between monasticism, education, and politics by examining the process of institutionalisation of monastics and Bud...

Two of the earliest Muslim communities in Britain evolved around the first mosques in Liverpool and Woking (both—1889). The history of these early British Muslims is being recovered but little is known about the women (usually converts) in thes...

What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific...

This study presents the validation of the short forms of Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) in Georgia. This country offers a unique Christian orthodox context with a long-lasting religious tradition and strong affiliation to churches. Translated...

In the 2016 movie Arrival, aliens with advanced technology appear on Earth in spaceships reminiscent of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film presents this arrival as a serious problem to be solved, with the future of human life and in...

This article will offer some criteria for evaluating a contemporary feminist engagement with Martin Luther’s work. The key theory and method is intersectionality: where Luther’s theology has resonance with intersectionality is where his w...

By the end of the 1920s, more than 100 anti-religious museums had been opened in the Soviet Union. In addition, anti-religious departments appeared in the exhibitions of many local historical museums. In Moscow, the Central Anti-Religious Museum was...