Religions, Volume 14, Issue 2

This article aims to highlight the rich doctrinal meanings underlying the textual and iconic designation of the Virgin Mary as the gate of Heaven, a highly brilliant metaphor used by writers and artists to symbolize her saving mediation before her di...

Looking at early Indian Buddhist texts and inscriptions, we can generally find gender pairing within the terminology deployed, a situation which is replicated in many texts related to monastic discipline (Vinaya) and in teachings addressed by the Bud...

The grounds of religious diversity and pluralism have mainly been sought out from without, i.e., from outside the human mind. A striking example is Hick’s idea of the one ultimate reality, which is posited to embrace all the semi-ultimate reali...

Many Chinese and Western scholars have looked into the relation between Daoist and Greek thought, implementing Greek philosophical vocabularies to explain or highlight the distinctness of Daoist terms. This paper offers a view of an alternative and u...

A specific framework of spirituality is presented to direct this dialog between psychoanalysis and religion. The focus is on spirituality as a common and important area of interest. A cognitive-behavioral-theory-based exploration of spirituality iden...

This paper proposes a new narrative of the life of nineteenth-century American Baptist missionary, activist, and scientist Adele Fielde. In the common historical narrative, her separation from the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU) after over t...

We demonstrate that, in comparison to religious groups showing reliable, contemporary voting tendencies (e.g., white evangelical Protestants voting Republican, Jews and Muslims voting Democratic), Roman Catholics show far less consistency in supporti...

In this paper, I discuss the evolution of Buddhist civilisational populism in modern Sri Lankan politics and civil society. I do this by historicising early forms of Buddhist civilisational populism in the country, during its occupation by the Britis...

As indicated by numerous sociological reports, the morality of young people is currently undergoing dynamic changes, and this applies especially to morality in the sphere of sexuality. The purpose of this article is to analyze the opinions on sexual...

During the COVID-19 pandemic most people had to cope with the negative implications of the lockdowns, and perceived times of social isolation and loneliness, and thus low wellbeing. Among the best predictors of positive changes of pandemic related at...

This article begins by explaining the importance of Mariology for Catholic theology. It provides an overview of a 2015–2016 survey of 32 Catholic seminaries in the USA on how Mariology is covered in the curriculum. It then examines documents of...

‘The crucified people’ became a key theological concern in the writings of Jon Sobrino SJ in the 1990s. This article examines how and why Sobrino made this concern a central element in his theology at the time. Section 2 discusses what So...

In the early 1990s, two of Taiwan’s humanistic Buddhist groups—Buddhist Tzu Chi Compassionate Relief Foundation (Tzu Chi) and Dharma Drum Mountain (DDM)—began incorporating modern environmentalism as a major component in their relig...

This article explores the process of creeping radicalization within the Georgian Orthodox Church and its implications for building societal resilience in the country. In doing so, it aims to fill the gap in the literature on the role of dominant reli...

Proponents of greater European political unity through the development of the European Union (EU) have long sought to foster a “European” identity among citizens as a way of advancing their cause. And there is now a substantial body of sc...

This theological reflection is a motivation to walk in the footsteps of Marcella Althaus-Reid to discover the disruptive principles of Latin American Queer Theology. Between tangos and popular music, libertine evocations and dissident stories, prosth...

In Western Australia (WA), Religious Education (RE) is a mandated learning area within the compulsory years of the Catholic school sector. RE is advocated as a curriculum subject, timetabled for and assessed alongside other subjects and focussed on d...

Populism and civilizationism have transformed the politics of many countries. Many scholars consider them the biggest challenges to democracy since the rise of fascism and communism in the first half of the last century. The close affinity between po...

I explore the view that the imago Dei is essential to us as humans but accidental to us as persons. To image God is to resemble God, and resemblance comes in degrees. This has the straightforward—and perhaps disturbing—implication that we...

This paper explores the 18th-century Joseon Confucian scholar Seongho 星湖 Yi Ik’s 李瀷 (1681~1763) theory on philosophical anthropology in the context of Confucianism through his theory of the heart-mind 心論...

The debate about whether, and in what sense, there is ‘spiritual intelligence’ remains unresolved. We suggest it will be helpful to make a distinction between strong and weak versions of the claim. The strong version proposes that there i...

With the advent of ‘the virtual world,’ we have naturally gauged the ‘reality’ of the virtual in terms of how close it comes to empirical experience. However, the common association of the virtual to simulation depends on a re...

In the translation history of late imperial China, the Jesuit enterprise played a significant role in translating Western scientific knowledge, a role they performed in tandem with proselytization. The Jesuit Figurists’ re-interpreting and re-w...

The Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) (1897–1909) and the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC) (1910–1940) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) worked in Korea from 1897 to 1940. Their work used a distinctive mi...

This article reexamines Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook’s (1865–1935) approach to Zionism, by proposing a reading of Kook’s Zionism through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie (The Philosophy of Life) of the French philosopher Henri...

The child is a trust from Allah and the ornament of the worldly life. In the early childhood period, which includes the preschool period, the child asks many questions, wants to understand everything around them, and shows an inexhaustible desire to...

The geography, histories, and ethnic composition of the Latin American continent pose a great challenge when attempting to identify and describe the region’s constitutive religious traditions and experiences. This task is further complexified b...

This chapter seeks to answer the question as to why, even though subsistence conditions militated against continuing to eke out an existence on unproductive holdings, many inhabitants in Ireland’s western counties did just that. Particularly in...

Research on migration and religion reports the significance of religion to migrants, particularly those who self-identify as religious. In particular, migrant churches have served as a sanctuary, a venue for social networking, and a community support...

This article explores how Christian faith communities respond to challenges in health care. These challenges are described, and a broader context is sketched, through an exploration of an ethics of care. Subsequently, two examples of Christian commun...

This article examines the thought of Yi Ik 李瀷 (1681–1763), a prominent Confucian scholar in the late period of the Joseon 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1910). In a broader context of the Confucian classics, as well as in th...

The article seeks to address and answer two questions: “What is Religion?” and “What is the Philosophy of Religion”? It gives a definition of the first and defends it. It places its arguments on the second in relation to a num...

The aim of this article is to present some results of a study conducted in Italy exploring interfaith dialogue during and after the 2020 lockdown. To continue ritual practices during the COVID-19 emergency, several religious communities rethought all...

The present study assessed the frequency and nature of parent–child communication about death and identified predictors of such communication. The sample comprised 24 families who had recently lost a family member. Parents completed survey meas...

The relationship between religion(s) and politics, i.e., religious communities and political authorities, in Montenegro has varied and taken different forms throughout the country’s history. Available research, mostly historical in nature, is p...

The Bahá’í Faith is an important case for a discussion on dignity, religion and human rights. Beyond the notions of dignity enshrined in its basic teachings, a core concern of the Bahá’í community is how to bui...

This article aims to analyze the ideas of health and illness in ancient Buddhism, making use of the theoretical tools of medical anthropology and historical–philological inquiry. As a contribution to the conceptual history of medicine in Buddhi...

This paper relies on the dataset “Historical Social Network of Chinese Buddhism” (Ver. 2021-06). The focus is on the period between c. 1570 and 1700 CE. We argue that the actor who was most influential for institutional Buddhism in the 17...

Once a niche part of the cyber community, video games today represent one of the major industries and “the combination of technology and spiritualist narratives”. In the cyberspace dedicated to video game trivia, we can find intimate repo...

China’s religious social services complement the statutory welfare. Clarifying the situations and characteristics of different types of religious social services is conducive to promoting their better integration into public welfare. With the h...

Social justice is often identified as a central commitment in mainline Protestant churches in North America. However, it is often approached as a public-facing issue that engages broader society, rather than as a comprehensive value that also informs...

The historiography of the crusade and reconquest in the Iberian Peninsula, and Portugal in particular, dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the 1920s, it has been assumed that the reconquest was an output of the crusade in the Ibe...

Religion can influence the realization of happiness in older adults. However, the relationship between religious belief and happiness of older adults and its mechanisms are not very clear. Using 5177 individuals aged ≥ 60 years in China for empiri...

Scholars have observed that Korean Buddhist nuns have a relatively high social status compared to nuns of other Asian countries, much like their sisters in Taiwan. It is a source of great pride for many Korean bhikṣuṇīs that their co...

This article explores an age-old form of dialogical learning, havruta, which has been employed by Jews throughout the centuries to study the Torah and the Talmud, and evaluates the experiment of extending havruta from a couple of fellow students (hav...

This article examines the case of Israeli Jews who choose to marry in ceremonies outside the state-authorized rabbinical establishment. Formally speaking, these private marriages are not recognized by the State. We focus on the ways in which these ma...

To curb the spread of COVID-19, houses of worship in the State of New York were legally required to limit attendance at religious ceremonies. Two religious communities—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish organization,...

Despite his impeccable academic pedigree, a protégé of Josiah Royce and a friend and student of William James, John Elof Boodin is nearly forgotten today among American philosophers; hence, an essential aspect of his thought lost to his...

Desire is an important philosophical topic that deeply impacts everyday life. Philosophical practice is an emerging trend that uses philosophical theories and methods as a guide to living a eudaimonic life. In this paper, we define desire philosophic...

Scholars have long recognized how Romans 1–2 is replete with resonances of Stoic traditions as they have referred to specific similarities in Seneca’s writings and the impact on the interpretation of the letter. Nevertheless, a significan...