Religions, Volume 13, Issue 5

This article explores the capacity for narrating the name of God as a way to liberate the suffering of the world. The first section of this article offers a brief overview of Walter Benjamin’s linguistic theory as it relates to the issue of lit...

Consistent with the teachings in various religious traditions of finding meaning amidst suffering, we suspected that Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) would have a buffering effect on attachment insecurity and psychosocial outcomes. We examined the effects...

The rapid ageing of Singapore’s population has led to the phenomenon of more elderly spending more total years in nursing homes. This study aimed to explore the meaning of Joy in Living to elderly residents of nursing homes in Singapore, the en...

This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members r...

The special issue of which this article forms a part looks at human violence and tries to investigate religious potentials to strengthen the case for nonviolence as the preferred method of social change. This article’s focus is on Gandhi’...

Kierkegaard was deeply biased and his philosophy is marred by these biases. The argument of this article is that we need to address Kierkegaard’s biases in order to bring out the relevance of his work on human identity in the 21st century. Rath...

Studies from the United States (U.S.) show that opposition to climate policy is strong among some Christian groups, especially White evangelical Protestants. Much of this opposition is channelled through organisations such as the Cornwall Alliance, w...

This paper addresses the ritual of Neolithic Malta in its island context drawing on recent research by the FRAGSUS project. Ritualised club houses placed in horticultural enclosures formed the focal point of the prehistoric Maltese landscape in the f...

Religion, in the context of healing and health, has a long history reaching back through the millennia influencing, and being influenced by cultures and societies. More recently, spirituality has become more widely recognised as a real component of h...

Our work presents a meta-synthesis of 76 peer-reviewed, qualitative-research journal articles related to our research interest in the spiritual care training available for relatives and friends of people living with dementia. A total of 244 articles...

An estimated five hundred million Muslims—close to a third of the global Muslim population and half of the African population—live on the African continent [...]

I argue that arguments for the existence of God provide indirect support for the existence of other supernatural beings such as spirits. I defend three arguments: (i) the existence of spirits is more likely if there is a supernatural realm; (ii) an o...

The present study examines the ways in which the Filipino Christian value of pakikipagkapwa (fellowship) can be seen and experienced in modern society. Using empirical phenomenology, this paper aims to (re)imagine the ways of cultivating ways of dial...

This study examines the use, adaptation, modification and omission of astronomical and calendrical elements in early Japanese Mikkyō (ninth century) in large part from the perspective of exact sciences. Shingon and Tendai inherited a Sinicized s...

Animals teach each other. For humans open to trans-species and inter-species dialogue and interaction, animal-others offer important insights into, invocations of and models for diverse and alternative modes of perceiving, experiencing, relating, and...

Most beef cattle in the United States start their lives on pasture and finish them in crowded feedlots, releasing hundreds of pounds of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, before they are transported to a slaughterhouse, where they are ki...

Religion–state relations in Israel have been defined as following the status-quo agreement. This agreement, going back to the founding of Israel, allows recognized religious groups a monopoly regarding issues of personal status, and promises re...

While other authors in this special issue analyze the nature of narrative theology, I highlight the narratives of the sisters of the Brahma Vidya Mandir ashram, a group of women followers of M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and his disciple, friend, an...

Religion plays an important role in making sense of adversity, and individuals hold varying beliefs about God’s role in suffering (theodicy). This study examined the association between individuals’ theodicies at the beginning of the COVI...

It is widely recognized that the animal suffering of the evolutionary past is a problem for believers in a good and just God. However, this problem is not insuperable if the intrinsic value of nonhuman flourishing is recognized as integral to the Cre...

Potential spiritual impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven Assistive Technologies (AT) for older adults are absent in most ethics conversations. Intelligent Assistive Technology (IAT) is the term used to describe the spectrum of Assistive Tec...

Indonesia receives a high religious harmony index every year; however, intolerance and religious radicalism threaten this harmony. Moderate Islam (Islamic religious moderation) has become a national policy as a solution to prevent intolerance and rad...

In this article I propose that questions about the nature of contemporary Sufism, especially in Western contexts, can be addressed with further precision and nuance by shifting the focus from Sufism’s relationship to Islam, to its relationship...

The Universal Peace Federation or UPF is a United Nations-affiliated NGO launched in 2005 by the late Mun Sŏn-myŏng, self-proclaimed Messiah and founder of the South Korean Unification Movement. Mun considered the UPF as the pinnacle of Uni...

This article focuses on the Dādūpanth, a religious community centered on the teachings of Dādū Dayāl (1544–1603), a Sant poet of Rajasthan. The aim of the text is to analyze how various forms of patronage affected the f...

Despite its global rise, theoretical frameworks to capture populism have been derived primarily from case studies in the Western hemisphere. To assess if and how the premises of populism travel across different contexts, we offer a comparative analys...

Over his long and distinguished career as a historian of modern Jewish thought, Paul Mendes-Flohr has followed his great subject, Martin Buber, in striving for unity among the many subjects and spheres of Jewish life in modernity (politics, economics...

We pursue a multi-leveled phenomenological exploration of revenge. Revenge’s puzzle is to give an account of what exactly revenge accomplishes when it apparently cannot alter the past or remedy the initiating harm. The structure of revenge cons...

Conflicts over large-scale mining in Latin America have received growing scholarly attention. Whereas this scholarship has provided very valuable insights into the anatomies of these conflicts, the role of religious ideas and actors has received scan...

(1) Background: Religious involvement and spirituality have proven to be sources of well-being for individuals at different moments in life and are also associated with a decrease in depression, anxiety, and substance use. Therefore, these could be p...

Muslims are often accused of being antisemitic and for being a major source of attacks and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. Research also finds variation in Muslim orientations toward Jews at the aggregate, cross-national level, with lo...

This article investigates two issues regarding the Buddhism of premodern Japanese martial arts. The first issue concerns the historical channels through which Buddhist elements were adopted into martial lineages, and the second pertains to the genera...

The portrait statue of Fujiwara Kamatari (614–669) enshrined at Tōnomine is well known for its agency and mantic powers. Known to crack whenever the stability of the clan was under threat, the icon was carefully observed and cared for. How...

I propose a new reading of a selection of continental philosophical interpretations of the nature of existentialism after the dialogical turn. This analysis will focus on the particular case study of the biblical character of Abraham as a case in poi...

This paper examines the spaces where Buddhist spiritual activity—specifically mindfulness practice—takes place, exploring how contemporary urban Buddhist contemplative places may benefit people’s mindful experience. Historical Buddh...

Researchers within New Testament Studies have attempted in recent years to articulate the multifaceted identity of a broad discipline. The place of New Testament Theology (NTT) remains disputed within the guild. Some would like to remove NTT from fie...

This article examines two aspects of the ubiquitous, but oft-overlooked, set of paratexts known as the Euthalian Apparatus. The Euthalian apparatus supplements Acts, the Pauline Epistles, and the Catholic Epistles in a variety of manuscripts, framing...

A suggestion is made about a possible but hitherto unnoticed Jacob–Esau allusion in the Petrine vision of Acts 10. This not only fits well with the dense scriptural intertexture already observed for the passage but may further illuminate the te...

The question of the authorship of the Daodejing, otherwise known as the Laozi, is a hotly contested debate, and one’s stance on the existence and role of the author can have potential implications for one’s interpretation of the text. Thi...

The mandate for women’s silence in 1 Corinthians 14.34-35 is an incongruity within Paul’s undisputed writings. Critical scholars expressed doubts about these verses’ authorship beginning in the nineteenth century. The consensus of egalitarian Paulist...

This article examines a talismanic culture in Japanese religions through the case of the Chintaku reifu 鎮宅霊符 (“numinous talismans for the stabilization of residences”). Whereas previous scholarship viewed the s...

This article examines the role of hope relative to the unexplored potential of narrative theology as a particular mode of thinking. The first section provides a brief introduction. The second section begins by discussing the world of experience as po...

A number of religious terrorism acts closely related to the 9/11 event had happened in Indonesia and disrupted the nation’s stability and harmony. The hard-power approach that the Indonesian government had hitherto employed to curb terrorism ha...

Kōfuku no Kagaku is a most visible new religious actor in contemporary Japan thanks to the vast publishing activities of its founder and its widespread professional use of new media. This paper examines how Kōfuku no Kagaku engages with the...

The aim of this article is to show that victims of spiritual abuse are not guilty of what they have undergone and that, in the Catholic setting, the Church has an institutional responsibility for it. With this objective, after the Introduction (1), t...

This article explores how ancient rhetorical theories about the improvement of human memory were applied to manuscripts in the form of paratextual ordering systems. It then considers the intellectual implications of these technological changes in the...

In February 2017, Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, acknowledged in an interview that some 70 “new spiritual movements” were under investigation for abusive behav...

The 19th and 20th centuries were times of great change and transformation for the Muslim world. The salvation of the ummah—which is getting politically, militarily, and economically more backward against the West, terms such as revival (ihya),...

This paper deals with the question, to what extent, in the German context, have biblical didactic implications and systemic requirements in religious education led to social inequality in heterogeneous classrooms. Based on four different case studies...

Religious secularity and Islam have not often been considered in the West as comfortable bedfellows, yet the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 questioned assumptions about the appropriateness of separate spheres for religion and politics. However, w...