Religions, Volume 11, Issue 4

In 2016, Canada legalized Bill C-14, which removed from the Criminal Code medical assistance in dying (MAID) under certain circumstances. In essence, the Bill legalized what is commonly described as euthanasia, under the provisions that the patient h...

In liberal democracies, fundamental rights and freedoms can conflict, and if they do, it is not always clear which right the state should prioritize. Should the right of parents to choose education in line with their own convictions prevail, or shoul...

This study presents a review about what great figures of history thought about the existence of God and a worldwide comparison between religious believers and non-believers using the World Social Survey (WSS) database, comprising a sample of 90,350 r...

This paper looks at the interactions between Buddhism and Confucianism in the late Chosŏn era through a case study of Kwanŭm (Avalokiteśvara) divination and, thereby, attempts to demonstrate how Buddhist monks navigated their religion in a Confucian-...

The following essay begins by outlining the pragmatist link between truth claims and democratic deliberations. To this end, special attention will be paid to Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatist enfranchisement of religious citizens. Stout defends a deli...

Due to its specific history, Saudi Arabia’s domestic and international politics are inextricably linked together. In the shaping and implementation of the kingdom’s essentially defensive international behavior, Islam has kept a central po...

Faith undergirds the Refuge for World Truths, a multireligious heritage-scape that emerged out of an old Spanish land grant adjacent to the Wild West mining and ranching town of Crestone, Colorado. Established by an entrepreneurial husband-and-wife t...

Terrorism is commonly considered to be a controversial issue in religious education (RE). RE teachers find it a challenging topic to address, and many avoid it altogether. This article explores the question of addressing terrorism in RE by analysing...

Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and oth...

Living in a time of urgent ecological crisis, Christians need outdoor ritual experience of their faith: of what is wild, of the living Earth, stranger faces of the divine: taking eco-alienated people out of the building and into the streets, the rive...

The purpose of this essay is to examine depictions of interior peace, as well as exterior peacemaking in the world, in representative works by Ramon Llull, written during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. I will show how Llull&rsqu...

Religions in Jeju, South Korea, have sometimes been in conflict with each other, but have generally coexisted peacefully. In a situation where diverse religions share an island that is isolated from the mainland, they have emphasized that they are si...

Originating as a Punjabi male dance, bhangra, reinvented as a genre of music in the 1980s, reiterated religious, gender, and caste hierarchies at the discursive as well as the performative level. Although the strong feminine presence of trailblazing...

In the Philippines, popular belief has it that the image of the Virgen de Caysasay was fished out of the Pansipit River in 1603. Since then, many miraculous healing events, mostly involving water, have been credited to it. The prevalence of water hig...

British foreign policy in the Middle East has been well researched. However, there are still aspects of Britain’s approach towards the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that have yet to be researched. One such aspect is Britain’s encoun...

This article refers to a Cairo Genizah fragment related to Bavli, Tractate Eruvin 102b-104a, identified as Cambridge, UL T-S F2 (2) 23. FGP No. C 98948. In the fragment, there are two words, “mor” and “yabolet”, which were wri...

With the development of the modern social economy, temple tourism has become a lucrative industry. Because of their distinct architecture, rituals, and history, temples have become an important part of the sustainable development of temple economies....

Las Santas Casas de Misericórdias (The Holy Houses of Mercy) are institutions of Portuguese origin that emerged in the late fifteenth century and that, over time, have expanded beyond the territories of the Portuguese Empire, including to Spai...

This article examines one of Juana of Castile’s books of hours (London, BL Add. MS 18852) comparing it with those written for members of Juana’s family and seeking to discern how it was used, in order to reassess her peers’ evaluati...

This paper is the first part of a cycle comprising five texts on the marketing use of social media by nationwide opinion-forming Catholic weeklies in Poland. Considering the state of the research so far, it is not completely clear how to classify Cat...

This paper explores the eclecticism of Bojo Jinul (1158–1210 CE), who is arguably the most influential historic figure in establishing and developing the Buddhist monastic institution of Korea. As a great harmonizer of the conflicting Buddhist...

In the period now being called the Anthropocene, the fatal vulnerabilities of the modern way of constructing selfhood are becoming ever more evident. Joanna Macy, who writes from a Buddhist perspective, has argued for the need to “green”...

A growing number of researchers are testing potential problematic forms of religiousness that denote anxieties regarding sacred matters. However, only a few studies have assessed how religious/spiritual struggle is associated with positive outcomes....

Clemson University head football coach Dabo Swinney was asked to respond to Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police killings of unarmed black men and women by kneeling for the national anthem. Swinney’s response was surprisingly comprehensiv...

Faith in the Anthropocene requires a re-imagined account of Christian hope. Research on the emergence of eco-anxiety disorder shows that climate crisis and ecological destruction have psychological and emotional effects on persons and communities, pr...

Witchcraft and magic are topics of enduring interest for many reasons [...]

The worldwide expansion of cultural and heritage tourism presents several opportunities for destination development, but also poses significant challenges in terms of management. This is especially true when different, overlapping, and potentially co...

How can the writings of Søren Kierkegaard address contemporary issues in the theology of disability? For while it is surely true that Kierkegaard had ‘no concept of “disability” in the contemporary sense’ of the term, I...

Ethics of care is a relatively new approach to morality, first developed as a feminist ethical theory in the 1980s by Carol Gilligan, Sara Ruddick, and Nel Noddings. It is based on the experience and responsibility of providing care and is distinct f...

There is little question that the diagnosis and treatment of cancer increase existential and spiritual needs and that these needs relate to how patients adjust to their experience. This Special Issue of Religions focusses on studies examining spiritu...

The classical account of the Brahmin priestly class and its role in Indian religion has seen remarkable continuity during the past two centuries. Its core claims appear to remain unaffected, despite the major shifts that occurred in the theorizing of...

The purpose of this research is to propose a new company style based on a systematic review of literature, taking the Matthean beatitudes as a reference in relation to the actual needs of organizations. To such end, we searched for scientific article...

The final 15 folios of the Nepalese illuminated palm-leaf manuscript of the Sanskrit Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra of c. 1100 have more paintings per page, larger picture planes, and different types of scenes than are found on the leaves surviving from the first...

This paper considers the nature and definition of controversial issues in primary education, exploring how they may be deemed controversial in different ways according to context. Drawing on research undertaken with student teachers in their final ye...

Military rabbis in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are an integral part of the army and currently posted in almost all army units. The role of the military rabbi has undergone fundamental changes since the founding of the State and the IDF, most nota...

The long history of the Jewish and Christian use of separatist rhetoric and universal ideals reveals their negative consequences. The Hebrew Bible’s rhetoric about Israel as a people separated from the Egyptians and Canaanites is connected to I...

From books to movies, the media is now flush with spiritual and wellness tourist-related images, films, and fiction (which are primarily produced in the West) about Southeast Asia. Combined with the positive effects of spiritual practices, greater nu...

Background: Sometimes prayer life can be difficult even for very religious persons, who may experience phases of “spiritual dryness”, which may have a negative effect on their well-being. Methods: To address this topic, we analyzed three...

For decades, Sikhs have made the choice to migrate to the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), or Canada, as these countries are held in high esteem by Sikh communities and appear to afford prestige in socio-cultural terms to thos...

To attain peace after state-on-state war, there must be a belligerent occupation to establish control and security of a defeated state—but that is not enough. There is the concept of jus post bellum concerning the vanquished, which is criticall...

This article addresses issues and questions at the intersection of religion and theatrical drama from the perspective of Muslim-Christian comparative theology. A case study approaching an actual performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet fro...

Motivated by a patriotic zeal for the national salvation of China, in the 1910s, US-trained Chinese intellectuals like Francis Wei and T. C. Chao embraced a progressive version of Protestantism. While Christian colleges established by liberal mission...

By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England’s godly “errand into the wilderness.” In election sermons they mourned the community’s b...

Violence is a characteristic that has somewhat become definitional for the Hindu goddess Kālī. But looking at it through the lens of folk narrative and the popular, devotion-infused and highly personalised opinions of her devotees shows that not only...

This article examines how the literary evidence corroborates with the visual evidence for the unusual presence of Brahmā with the Buddha at the Ajapāla banyan tree of the goatherd symbolizing the Fifth of the Seven Weeks after the Enlightenment of th...

The technologies of the Anthropocene are based upon Modern certainties. These technologies of a reductive and productive model of science create the worlds in which we live, in the image of a particular human being: the modern, western anthropos (wit...

Recent scholarly and media perspectives on religion and youth have often depicted young people as being apathetic when it comes to religion. The methods used in research on religion are also typically informed by outdated, fixed idea of religious ide...

Faith-based actors are often recognised as contributors to both conflict and peace. However, their work to prevent violent conflict, rather than bring an end to or recover from it, is largely unexplored. This is despite the growth of conflict prevent...

The article explores the implications the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) had on the international order and the salafi-jihadi movement. The main argument is that at the height of its activity (2014–2016) IS was a de facto revoluti...

Embedded in a critically adapted version of Jürgen Habermas’ postsecular approach, this article analyzes empirically and evaluates normatively the role of religion in the Middle East. Integrating and adapting William Connolly’s under...