2020 July - 59 articles
The aim of this article is to philosophically explore the tension between “the God of the philosophers” and “the God of religious experience.” This exploration will focus on the mystical theology of the 16th c. Spanish mystic...
This article explores the interplay between content, narrator, and lifeworld in narrative constructions concerning the meanings of pilgrimage to Mecca by studying the hajj stories of second-generation Moroccan-Dutch women. By adopting a ‘dialog...
Rastafari is a Pan-African socio-spiritual movement and way of life that was created by indigent Black people in the grip of British colonialism in 1930s Jamaica. Although Rastafari is often studied as a Jamaican phenomenon, I center the ways the mov...
This article offers an intercultural interpretation of the sense of the sacred in the practice of yage shamanism in Colombia. This practice is based on the ritual use of a plant medicine which for centuries has been the basis of the medical, spiritua...
This article studies the intersection of religion, materiality and violence. I will argue that pictures of violated bodies can contribute substantially to imageries of religious bonding. By directing attention towards the relation between pictures of...
Religion and spirituality are difficult to define and elusive to capture by standard scientific methods. Despite these challenges, the researchers aim to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the psychology of religion by investigating the r...
Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African...
This article, based on an open-question survey completed in 2018, engages with McAdams and Manczak’s approaches to life stories (2015) and Mayer’s ten elements of the shaman myth (2008) to explore the way contemporary people based in the...
Myths provide hagiographic and iconographic accounts of the gods, which shape rituals that are performed in cults associated with these gods. In the realization of iconographies and ritualization of narratives in myths, material objects play an activ...
A proper name individualizes a person, the lack of it making him or her less noticeable. This insight is apt in regard to the nameless women in the Hebrew Bible, a resolutely androcentric work. As Judaism traditionally barred women from studying, man...
This article examines two ambitious enactments of the Rama story or Rāmāyaṇa, side by side: the 17th-century painted Mewar Rāmāyaṇa and Vālmīki’s epic poem (ca. 750–500 BCE). Through a formal analysis of two crucial episodes of the tale,...
The television series The Good Place (2016–2020), created by Michael Schur revolves around four humans who—after their deaths—end up in what they believe to be heaven: the “Good Place”. In reality, however, they are in a...
Many Chinese temples in Singapore provide live streaming of getai (English: a stage for songs) during the Hungry Ghost Month as well as deities’ birthday celebrations and spirit possessions—a recent phenomenon. For instance, Sheng Hong Te...
In the past several decades, numerous scholars have contended that Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu supremacist in the guise of a liberal preacher of the harmony of all religions. Jyotirmaya Sharma follows their lead in his provocative book, A Restateme...
The confrontation between good and evil is one of the essential aspects of the fantasy genre. In George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF, 1996–2011), he approaches this conception from a critical poin...
This research emphasizes the nurse’s role in incorporating Islamic teaching through the care practices provided in order to promote spiritual well-being in Muslim women with breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy. In addition, religion and spiritualit...
This article analyzes the “conversion” of Anthony Uzodimma Obinna, an Igbo schoolteacher from the town of Aboh Mbaise in Imo State, and his extended family to Mormonism in southeastern Nigeria between the 1960s and the 1980s, from a histo...
This article provides an analysis of a public protest by the far-right group Pegida-Netherlands, where the participants attempted to demonstratively eat pork near a mosque in Eindhoven on 26 May 2019. This led to fierce responses: hundreds of young M...
This paper examines the interaction between state power and the everyday life of ordinary Chinese Singaporeans by looking at the Hungry Ghost Festival as a contested category. The paper first develops a theoretical framework building on previous scho...
This review essay examines Khyati Y. Joshi’s new book, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. With attention to relevant historiography on religion and race, as well as reflection on contemporary white Christi...
This article deals with Catholic Charismatics in Italy. The brief description of the case study gives a chance to make some more general comments on what is happening under the sacred canopy of Global Catholicism where the Spirit blows, and furthermo...
The present study sets out to shed light on R. Yaakov Moshe Harlap (1882–1951), Kabbalist, head of the Merkaz Ha-Rav yeshivah, in his understanding of ontological theology—material labor, meaning the basic life pattern, in which one gets...
Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrou...
The term Machinekin denotes a sub-group of a larger Internet subculture known as Otherkin: while recognizing they have a human body and mind, these people nevertheless identify as being other-than-human. Machinekin therefore identify as a machine of...
Scientists are often assumed to be irreligious and little research has examined the role of religion and spirituality in their lives. Recent research shows that many scientists do articulate a commitment to the sacred and see religion and spiritualit...
Waxing “biblical,” Donald Trump has described the COVID-19 pandemic as a “plague.” In a different but related register, millions of Christians worldwide have interpreted the pandemic as one of the eschatological plagues prophe...
Very little research has examined the emergence of Western Muslims into the elite professions that are central to the operation of the capitalist free market and that serve as a central location of economic and political power. Less research still ha...
Scholars in critical race and the sociology of religion have independently drawn attention to the ways in which cultural ideologies drive beliefs about inequalities between groups. Critical race work on “abstract liberalism” highlights no...
Shui Wei Sheng Niang (水尾圣娘) Temple is located within a united temple at 109a, Hougang Avenue 5, Singapore. Shui Wei Sheng Niang is a Hainanese goddess, the worship of whom is widespread in Hainanese communities in South East Asia. This paper examines...
Space for religious use is highly regulated in Singapore. Specific plots of land are reserved for religious groups to bid for, and create, “official” spaces of worship. However, religious practices continue to exist within “unoffici...
An anthropogenically caused climate crisis threatens the Earth and humanity. As such, religion’s engagement is of increasing importance. This paper critically evaluates the significance of the East Asian context regarding the climate crisis, ar...
Arctic Shaman Circle was founded in Oslo in November 2018. This article discusses what the Circle’s founding document refers to as “spiritual activism”, and how this was translated into action over the year that followed. I will fol...
Social reconciliation has received much attention in Christian churches since the late 1980s. Both the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway initiated reconciliation processes with the Saami (also “Sami” or “Sámi”),...
This Special Issue is composed of the articles that were presented at the first World Religion Forum held 7–8 October 2019 by the World Religious Peace Committee (세계종교평화협의회, hereafter WRPC) [...]
This essay utilizes Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology of the universality of sin to analyze institutional racism, using the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a case study. Contrary to the conventional interpretation of the riots as a conflict between African...
This article, which is part of a larger ongoing project, examines relationships, friendships and levels of belonging in Dutch society, as well as in the Dutch Muslim community in narratives of women converted to Islam. The ethnicity of these women is...
This article discusses the Islamic juristic position of virtual currencies. In the classical period, jurists differed on the reason behind Islam’s prohibition of usury when dealing with precious metals and their derivatives, with the majority a...
Transhumanism is a cultural and philosophical movement that advocates human enhancement through technological means. Seeking to eradicate suffering and death and transcend the limits of biology, transhumanists celebrate the power of technology to tra...
Increasingly more older people are now being cared for in their own homes. Furthermore, it has become more common that people stay at home to receive end-of-life care. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we analyzed the religious ex...
Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning growth of international schools in Qatar, where Islamic Studies is a statutory subject for all schools. This paper aims to investigate how Islamic Studies teachers navigate an internationalized setting where...
Given their stability, their ability to influence public attitudes and capacity to mobilise human resources, it seems likely that many faith communities can have a significant impact on the wellbeing of people living with dementia (PLWD) and their ca...
This article introduces a digital platform for collaborative research on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, focusing on networks of Chinese temples and associations extending from Southeast China to the various port cities of Southeast Asia. The...
The college experience can be a critically important and enriching time for personal as well as academic growth and development. For many students, college is their first foray into a more independent world and lifestyle no longer under the careful,...
Studies of popular Chinese religions in Singapore have mostly focused on the relationship between Chinese religious practitioners and state regulations delimiting land for religious uses. Local scholars have also studied the state’s active cons...
The hope of Abraham was “hope against hope,” the apostle Paul notes in a famous passage in his letter to the Romans 4:18. Such is the hope of the underdog, whose hope is not backed up by the powers that be, manifest by the prevalent empir...
Despite predictions of decline, religion has featured prominently in the public sphere and the media since the events of 11 September 2001. Previous research on media and religion in Australia post-September 11 has focused largely on its negative imp...
Recently, there have been some attempts to reframe the Augustinian view of political realism in terms of the Foucauldian concept of resistance and discipline; attempts which resonate with another Foucauldian, post-colonial understanding of Augustine....
Without a doubt, an overenthusiastic focus on rupture, as a way of coping with neoliberal trauma, has shaped the conversation about recent religious change in Africa. Yet, rupture remains at the heart of what African charismatics understand themselve...
This essay offers in-depth analysis of Guru Nanak’s works, collectively known as the Bābar-vāņī (“arrow-like utterances concerning Babur”), in the context of the memoirs of the first Mughal emperor Babur (1483–1530). It extend...
Religious and spiritual (R/S) struggles are tensions or conflicts one experiences in relationship to what is considered sacred or transcendent. In this study, we tested competing causal models of psychological distress as it relates to personality an...
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