2020 June - 49 articles
This article presents the results of a qualitative study of Anthroposophic meditation, which arose in the German-speaking world in the early 20th Century focusing on cognition, self-development, and pro-social action. The objective was to explore thi...
Research has shown that the mental activation of concepts related to supernatural agents (e.g., God, ghost) is capable of altering one’s moral behaviours. Based on the supernatural monitoring hypothesis, two experiments were conducted to invest...
Alfred Russel Wallace’s conception of evolution and its relation to natural theology is examined. That conception is described as intelligent evolution—directed, detectably designed, and purposeful common descent. This essay extends discu...
From October 2016 to March 2019, the Catholic Church engaged in a lengthy journey together with young people. Over these two and a half years, some important documents were produced, including the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christus Vivit by...
The three papers which follow were originally presented at the triennial Unitarian Universalist Convocation in 2016, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society and Collegium, an Association for Liberal Religious Studies [...]
The fate of a ‘correlational’ approach to truth, which defines contemporary epistemological theories of knowledge, is described as inescapable by Quentin Meillasoux. If Meillasoux is right, then we are far from being able to hope in truth...
The world is currently gripped by pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges [...]
Drawing on the work of Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, this essay proposes utilizing hagiographies from the The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian collection of saints’ lives, to explore various aspect...
Background: spiritual care by nurses may be omitted from clinical practice when not structurally embedded in daily professional care routines. Method: a mixed method study was designed to measure qualitative and quantitative outcomes of a “link...
This paper focuses on the move towards “academization” of Islamic religious education in private institutes belonging to the reform movement in Brussels. An attempt is made to think through this move in terms of the sacred knowledge conce...
This paper explores the female line in the Bible that Joseph Ratzinger identifies as running in parallel to, and being indispensable for, the male line in the Bible. This female line expands the understanding of Salvation History as described by Dei ...
This paper proposes to reconsider agnosticism by taking a step onto a meta-level, investigating agnosticism not as an epistemic stance regarding the choice between theism and atheism, but as a stance toward the question concerning the cognitive meani...
This paper is concerned with the rights of refugees. The refugee issue has been an acutely charged item on the political agenda for several years. Although the great waves of influx have flattened out, people are continually venturing into Europe. Eu...
In 2018, Nick Cave launched The Red Hand Files website, where fans ask personal questions and the artist responds. This ongoing dialogue presents a unique iteration of religious visibility at the nexus of religion and the arts. Here, Cave articulates...
This article examines the emergence of the Black Theology movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the religiously diverse milieu of Black political movements during the same period. In particular, the theology of the Nation of Is...
Starting with a speech by Theodor Adorno, the essay analyzes some thematic parallels between political and religious populism regarding the view on gender and feminism. In both certain traditional Catholic circles and right-wing political parties, an...
This paper discusses an aspect of Ham Sok Hon’s philosophy, which the author argues would reflect, and contribute to enriching, the theory of cosmopolitanism. Ham was arguably one of the 20th century’s most influential, yet controversial,...
The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of Eng...
It is often assumed that direction and purpose in nature—teleology—is a dead relic of the past, a result of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871). But teleology has had a long and complex relationship w...
Much research considers group differences in religious belonging, behaving, and/or believing by gender, race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality. This study, however, considers all these factors at once, providing the first comprehensive snapshot of reli...
This article synthesizes and clarifies the significance of the last half-century’s developments in Bhutan’s politics within the frame of Buddhist political thought. During this time, Bhutan has held a curious position in the international...
This essay builds upon recent work in the environmental humanities, and that of various writers and journalists, on the emerging topic of environmental grief and mourning. I consider a spectrum of responses to Anthropocene-era crises like climate cha...
Drawing on auto-ethnographic descriptions from four decades of my own work as a Jewish guide for Christian Holy Land pilgrims, I examine how overlapping faiths are expressed in guide–group exchanges at Biblical sites on Evangelical pilgrimages....
The article takes up the biblical category of “headship,” one of the “third rails” for Christians in a context dominated by the limited conceptions of equality, especially those assumed by “second wave” and “...
Israelite religion has always fascinated scholars [...]
The marginalised research field of populism and religion has mainly focused on the positive aspects of how religion and populism can be combined with mutual benefits for both parties, whereas the critical potential and limitations that religion and t...
Rituals are embedded in a particular time and space, and so are their objects and meanings. The ‘chronotope’ we focus on here is the occasional—partly self-chosen, partly societally forced—ritual death of Hindu widows along wi...
The aim of the current investigation was to identify universal profiles of lived spirituality. A study on a large sample of participants (N = 5512) across three countries, India, China, and the United States, suggested there are at least five cross-c...
This study aims to examine Islamic narratives heard at mosques and in study groups in the greater metropolitan area of Jakarta, Indonesia. The article asks if youth and leaders of youth organizations in Jakarta are receptive to radical/terrorist disc...
What constitutes ‘relevant’ and ‘apt’ Islamic knowledge and expert education of future Islamic authorities in Western Europe? This central point of departure of this Special Issue is a burdened question in the current public a...
This study investigates the lived-experience of spiritual life in contemporary USA, India, and China. A qualitative coding frame was constructed based on participant responses to open-ended questions regarding spirituality. Qualitative analysis was f...
Research has increasingly highlighted the importance of business leaders allowing people to bring their whole selves to work. And religion is an important part of the whole self for many. However, we lack the large-scale national data needed to explo...
Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra is an Indian Buddhist sutra dating to the first half of the first millennium. Chapter 7 of the sutra consists of a very long meditation on the body, unusual in Buddhist literature for its anatomical, especially osteologic...
(1) Background: The role of culture in secular, spiritual, and religious coping methods is important, but needs more attention in research. The aim has been to (1) investigate the meaning-making coping methods among cancer patients in Turkey and (2)...
Interfaith relationships offer particular potential for creating religious coexistence; they also play out very differently in domestic space than in public and civic spaces, with the result that interfaith marriage becomes an important, yet unique,...
Is it ever permissible for the state to formally recognize one religion? This article focuses on just one aspect of this complex question. To be specific, a critical examination is conducted of what will be called the alienation argument against esta...
This article sheds light on the sophisticated funeral process set up by the Cao Đài religion (or Caodaism), combining both a theological and an ethnographical analysis. After introducing how Cao Đài theology represents both the body and...
What is the role of hope in the climate crisis? What type of hope does this crisis demand? How can we sustain hope, in order to resist falling into fatalistic despair or paralyzing fear, whilst always guarding against hope giving way to happy complac...
In this paper, I examine how clergy’s value orientations and congregations’ relationships to the superordinate organizations in their institutional environment are reflected in congregations’ organizational cultures. My analysis of...
The Korea Christian Action Organization for Urban Industrial Mission (Hanguk-gyohoe-sahoeseongyo-hyeubuihoe (Saseon)) was an organization which devoted itself not only to the Korean democratization movement against the military dictatorship, but also...
This study explores the ways in which the born-again traditional leaders in Zambia are redefining neo-Pentecostal interaction with nonhuman creation. It demonstrates their attempts to rapture new religious imaginations in interstitial spaces between...
The response of churches to the challenges presented by the global COVID-19 pandemic invites a closer examination of the relationships between virtual and embodied religious communities during a time of social distancing. The speed and the scale of t...
This article examines the paintings on the five surviving illuminated palm-leaf folios and the interiors of the two wooden covers of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s almost complete Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, or the Aṣṭasāhasrik...
This article examines how Edith Stein’s philosophical and theological anthropology is foundational to the “new feminism” that both Paul VI and John Paul II called for in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. In particular, this ar...
In Islamic primary education the subject of Islamic Religious Education (IRE) has a prominent place in the curriculum. In knowledge transfer and in behaving as a ‘good muslim’, aspects can be in conflict with generally accepted knowledge...
The period from the Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) until the fall of the Korean Empire (1897–1910) is commonly characterized as a period of kaehwa—Enlightenment—in which the Chosŏn state strived to reform and modernize. This article compl...
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is applied in various fields such as medicine, cognitive science, business, and education. The mindfulness of Buddhism is at the center of MBSR, and this means that Buddhist meditation has a great effect on m...
Today, artefacts of the past have immense value for Sámi shamans, artists, and custodians of culture who are reengaging with their spiritual traditions. A cultural revival is taking place through various applications and approaches. Henceforth...
This paper aims to examine the ambiguity of faith in the intersection of religion and state violence. I pay attention to the state-operated system of apartheid in South Africa and critically analyze the Afrikaner community’s faith that motivate...
