2021 January - 65 articles
Despite is global popularity in recent decades, the Divine Mercy devotion has received scant scrutiny from scholars. This article examines its historical development and evolving appeal, with an eye toward how this nuances our understanding of Cathol...
Islamic higher education finds itself at the cross-roads of a variety of developments: it oscillates between the ‘teaching into’ approach of Theology and the ‘teaching about’ approach of Religious Studies, between the security...
In his recent book Is a Good God Logically Possible? and article by the same name, James Sterba argued that the existence of significant and horrendous evils, both moral and natural, is incompatible with the existence of God. He advances the discussi...
This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneousl...
Global histories commonly attribute the secularization of the state exclusively to Europe. However, the church state conflict over these issues has been an important thread in much of Latin America. In Mexico, questions about the role of religion and...
Death anxiety is a common phenomenon that humans experience. It is multidimensional. There has been an upsurged interest around the discussion on death anxiety across the globe, however, much of the literature focuses on the concept of death anxiety,...
Ambiguities and uncertainties about defining bivocational ministry are an opportunity for theological reflection and religious education. This article begins by acknowledging a context of anxiety about congregational vitality in North American mainli...
Relationships between text and image in pre-modern South Asia1 have been both ignored and exploited throughout the history of western scholarship [...]
Founded in Birmingham, England in 1984, Islamic Relief is today the world’s largest and most-recognized Western-based Islamically-inspired non-governmental organization. Framed by an analysis of processes of racialization, I argue that Islamic...
Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the inten...
This article aims to unravel the why and the how of the imaginary profile of the emerging sacrificial victim in late modern societies. To do this, first, under the influence of the formulations proposed by the French School of Sociology, the nature a...
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a multi-racial and multi-religious nation, with Muslims being in the majority. Its 1973 Constitution guarantees religious freedom to all religious minorities, including Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs. This is mainly...
Considering the “relativization of identity”, “the positive recognition of the other”, “the mutual evaluation of cultures”, and the “creation of a normative world culture” as “four main kinds of c...
Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles are relatively common human experiences and refer to pain, anger, fear, doubt, or confusion related to religious and spiritual beliefs, experiences, and practices (Exline 2013; Pargament et al [...]
Agnosticism has always had its fair amount of criticism. Religious believers often described the first agnostics as infidels and it is not uncommon to see them described as somewhat dull fence-sitters. Moreover, the undecided agnostic stance on belie...
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is currently the most potent threat to educational systems, a crisis that may become disastrous. For the current study, a qualitative design within a case study tradition was implemented to investigate instructiona...
How to deal with religious ideas in religious history (and in history in general) has recently become a matter of discussion. In particular, a number of authors have framed their work around the concept of ‘sacramental ontology,’ that is,...
The advent of the 1990s marked, among other things, the restructuring of the Muslim world in its relation to Islam. This new context has proved to be extremely favorable to the emergence of scholars who define themselves as reformists or modernists....
This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understa...
This article explores how two seemingly contradictory global trends—scientific rationality and religious expressiveness—intersect and are negotiated in people’s lives in Nordic countries. We focus on Finland and Sweden, both countri...
The main challenge of theology is the adequate manner of the transmission of what is sacred and belongs to the transcendent order by means of appropriate categories of immanent religious language. In history, there was a debate between the univocal a...
Research in Jewish studies as well as key passages from Judaism’s sacred texts describe teaching and learning as being among the most important, efficacious and sacred of God’s commandments. However, while this description is well-documen...
During the early years of the Civil Wars in England, from February 1642 to July 1643, Puritan parishioners in conjunction with the parliament in London set up approximately 150 divines as weekly preachers, or lecturers, in the city and the provinces....
Although the pro-democracy agenda of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) gained significant domestic and international credibility throughout the early 2000s, the party has, since approximately 2010, experie...
Since the 1990s, there has been conflictual interactions between Orthodox Christian churches and human rights in South Eastern Europe, especially during the process of European integration. In this work, I shall concentrate on the case of the Romania...
The aim of this article is to trace the origins of some of the key concepts of Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics and cosmology in earlier Andalusian Sufi masters. Within the context of the seminal works on Ibn Arabi’s cosmology and metaphysics prod...
This article seeks to provide a framework for rereading the works of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn Asadābādī/Afghani in accordance with the main characteristics of “post-Islamism”, which was coined and conceptualized by Asef Bayat. Although the ter...
There has been much speculation as to the type of calendar that was used by the pre-Islamic Arabs and the early Muslim community. The Hijrī calendar is said to have been adopted by ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb during his Caliphate despite evidence sugge...
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has generated public debate and private discussion about systemic racism in contemporary U.S. society and the ill preparedness and misdirected focus of clergy responding to this crisis. Later research will reveal reas...
Forgiving others may play an important role in achieving meaning in life as it offers a valuable platform for deliberate moral acts of acceptance of positive affect, behaviour, and cognition towards a transgressor. The aim of this paper was to analys...
The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) is one of the five pillars of Islam and a duty which Muslims must perform—once in a lifetime—if they are physically and financially able to do so. In Morocco, from where thousands of pilgrims travel t...
This article investigates religious transformations in contemporary Turkey through the case of women’s unveiling. Drawing on 10 in-depth interviews with university-educated urban women who have recently stopped wearing the veil, the article exa...
The contemporary social moment in the United States has affirmed the critical importance of racial justice, and especially claims to justice informed by the contributions of structural and institutional forces connected with the nation’s origin...
Many philosophers and scholars in the West have a negative view of shame. In much of post-classical Western ethical thought, shame is compared negatively with guilt, as shame is associated with the “outer”, how one appears before others (...
The Doctor of Ministry is a professional degree accredited by the Association of Theological Schools. As delineated by ATS, the theological program requires to meet specific learning outcomes in a minimum of 30 credit hours with a culminating project...
Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the...
A “homeless vagrant” was the term used by Protestant clergy of the first half of the twentieth century for a man without name, family or history who died on the street. Clergy were asked to perform a funeral for him, but as his religious...
The question of LGBTQ+ inclusion in churches is rapidly becoming an open conversation in congregations and denominations seeking answers in policy and practice. As society is engaging the question of LGBTQ+ rights in the courts, denominations are add...
Montesquieu wrote that “China is a despotic state whose principle is fear”. And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 (“freedom”), on the other. These const...
Articles on “Spirituality and Health” have multiplied considerably in Brazil in the last decade. More recently, however, research groups created specifically to investigate this topic have emerged. This study aims to provide an overview o...
Objectives: Previously, authors found high personal importance of religion/spirituality (R/S) in early adulthood to predict a 75% decreased risk of recurrence of major depression in middle adulthood. Here, the authors follow up the original study sam...
This article analyzes the recently formed transnational networks of Islamic education between Turkey and Africa south of the Sahara through the study of the neglected case of Erenköy Cemaati. The expansion of the schools affiliated with Erenk&ou...
This article addresses the main argument in James Sterba’s book, an argument which claims that the existence of a good God is logically incompatible with the evil in the world. I claim to show that his main premise, MEPRI, is implausible and is...
The spiritual dimension of patients has progressively gained more relevance in healthcare in the last decades. However, the term “spiritual” is an open, fluid concept and, for health purposes, no definition of spirituality is universally...
Background: Many individuals participate in spiritual retreats to enhance their sense of spirituality or to improve their overall mental and spiritual well-being. We are not aware of any studies specifically evaluating changes in functional connectiv...
Japanese Shinto shrines are popular pilgrimage sites not only for religious reasons, but also because of their connections to popular culture. This study discusses how tourism is involved in the construction of the shrine space by focusing on the mat...
Since the 1980s, discourse on religious piety has taken many different forms, from mosque lessons by lay preachers—such as `Amr Khalid—to religious TV programmes and leisure activities. Within this widespread religious culture and cultiva...
Humans last walked on the Moon in 1972. We not only have gone no further with in-person expeditions to places off Planet Earth, we have not even been back to the Moon. The main motive for getting to the Moon back then, Cold War competition, may have...
At first sight, Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival seems to provide a fairly standard science fiction narrative about the landing of aliens on earth and the panic that ensues, featuring aggressive soldiers, a suspicious CIA man, brilliant scientis...
This study traces the trajectory of the Wenshu Monastery’s revival during the reform era of China. In this special but duplicable case, we generalize three key strategies employed by the Wenshu Monastery to enhance its reputation and status&mda...
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