2025 May - 123 articles
“If it wasn’t for the women” is a common refrain in Black Church culture, made most popular by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’ sociology of religion work in the 1990s. As conversations grow around a perceived disconnection from the ch...
This paper aims to advance sociological theory by systematizing the concept of “limit situation”, a term that Berger employs throughout his work, though only in a hinted and unsystematic manner. To achieve this objective, the paper develo...
During the Meiji period, the relationship between Confucianism and the indigenous Japanese religion of Shinto became more complex within the context of national culture and policy. The integration of Confucianism and Shinto became an important part o...
The article seeks to read the contribution of religious practices in prison education within the broader framework of spirituality as a search for meaning in life. It argues that religious engagement can foster cognitive and emotional development, pr...
The First Epistle of Peter is a writing that addresses a new way of understanding and practicing worship among the followers of Jesus. The Christians, recipients of the letter, due to the imminent identity distinction from the Jews and their distanci...
The rapid growth in interfaith peacebuilding has elevated the prominence of religion in theoretical and practical discourse, highlighting its importance in conflict dynamics. In dialogue-based encounters between distinct identity groups, religion oft...
Miracle tales are almost the sole source for the investigation of the emergence and spread of the relic cult in the early phase of Chinese Buddhism. The earliest excavated relic casket dates back to 453 CE, over four centuries after Buddhism was intr...
This article defines estranged sorrow as a category of trauma that cannot be grieved because it was never consciously experienced. As a domain of grief prevented from moving into conscious awareness, estranged sorrow becomes an underlying, chronic so...
This article examines the assumption that, in order to respond adequately to the question in the title, one must have the classical concept of God in mind. Classical theism is criticized and neoclassical/process theism is briefly defended. Specifical...
Despite its ancient and foreign origin, the Bible has managed to integrate so seamlessly into the contemporary Nordic countries that it is seen to form the basis of specifically Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish identity and values. This paper will empl...
This study explores the publication and dissemination of the Pilu Canon 《毗盧藏》, engraved by followers of Bao’en Wanshou Hall in Houshan Village, Fujian, during the Yanyou reign of the Yuan Dynasty. Funded throu...
What does it mean for a culture to include, or exclude, ancestors as active members? How do Indigenous cultures and traditions cast light on the role of ancestors? Those are the central questions in this article. It begins by offering a general accou...
The present study looks at how gentilics, usually attested in traditional biblical topoi from the Pentateuch, are re-contextualized in Ezekiel to provide a mental map of the peoples of the known Earth during the Exilic period. The basic constituents...
Overcoming its self-referential preoccupations, theology today is urged to exit into the public square characterized by multiple types of diversity. One of the crucial public domains in which religions have played a significant role is education. In...
There was an error in the original publication (Ku 2025) [...]
In contemporary societies, increasing diversity is often accompanied by intensified conflicts across various public domains. While respecting differences is commonly proposed as a solution, this necessarily narrows the scope of shared values, which c...
Energy healing refers to a globalising market of healing rituals that aim to stimulate the clients’ self-healing process. In the context of healing, the term ‘energy’ has multi-layered meanings and may denote physical, psychological...
Given the highly contested nature of the debate over secularization in modern literature, this paper examines the ways in which four contemporary French novelists address questions of human and divine absence in their fiction, focusing on Joël E...
Many new psychedelic religious organizations have recently emerged in the United States. These psychedelic churches operate in a legal gray area, which provides job opportunities not just for lawyers but also for philosophers of religion. To gain leg...
This article engages the concept of death as a revolutionary transformation within the contexts of mind uploading (MU) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theology of the Omega Point. The focus is not on the Omega Point itself as a conceptual endp...
Victims of domestic violence who bring their experiences to the attention of their spiritual communities and faith leaders have experienced both betrayal and courage from their religious institutions. There is much hurt in the betrayal and much to ce...
This article investigates a distinctive discursive space within Soviet society where scientific inquiry and mystical thought coexisted, despite the state’s official commitment to atheism. Referred to as the mystified unknown, this space provide...
This study offers a comparative analysis of preparatory practices in Buddhist meditation, focusing on the Tiantai tradition of medieval China and the Nyingma tradition of tenth-century Tibet. Challenging the view of meditation as solely a mental expe...
This article examines four block-printed Mahāpratisarā dhāraṇī amulets from late Tang to early Song China, highlighting how Sanskrit-script texts circulated in everyday religious life. Through a philological and visual analy...
Between 1008 and 1016, for several times Emperor Zhenzong (968–1022, r. 997–1022) distributed Zhicao (Ganoderma Lucidum), acquired during the Fengshan 封禪 rituals. These grand-scale activities from central to local levels wer...
“Illness itself is emptiness”, says Vīmalakīrti, in a statement that appears to reflect on the nature of sickness and disease. However, Vimalakīrti’s approach of non-duality may not satisfy the rising interest in Budd...
A conundrum in the cognitive, evolutionary, and anthropological study of religion is how to propose descriptions and explanatory models of the structure and functions of supernatural dreaming and its relationship to action imagery, the use of experie...
In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein articulated a radical conception of the structure of rational evaluation, one that had arational hinge commitments at its heart. This proposal has recently been extended to the religious...
Modern society, dominated by rationalism, has led to the hollowing out of life’s meaning. In response to this predicament, the question of how to transcend instrumental rationality and reconstruct an understanding of human conditions becomes cr...
This paper investigates how the layout strategies of Xuanying’s Yiqiejing yinyi (mid-7th c.), the earliest surviving Chinese Buddhist glossary, evolved across manuscripts, Buddhist Canon editions, and Qing-era scholarly reprints from the 7th to...
This paper, through a detailed textual analysis of Laozi zhigui 老子指歸, examines Yan Zun’s sophisticated intertextual strategies in elucidating the Daodejing 道德經 and explores the eclectic and inclu...
While digital religion and digital protest can ideally serve the common good, religious nationalist and fundamentalist movements have exploited these tools to disrupt the social fabric and create dangerous political outcomes. This paper examines how...
The core focus of the study of Patristics (generally also called Patrology) has been the teachings and practices of the so-called Fathers and Mothers of the early Christian Church (or the leading exponents of the Christian Faith, primarily from after...
In the past sixty years the institutions of religious life (perhaps now more broadly and accurately named “consecrated life”) within the Roman Catholic world have experienced something of a crisis. In the midst of this crisis, many have c...
His baptismal name, Fernando de Bulhões (1195–1231), may say little to many people, but his religious name, St. Anthony, certainly says a lot, especially to the Portuguese. In fact, the cult of St. Anthony is indelibly inscribed in the r...
Youth pastoral care is a part of the Church’s pastoral mission directed towards men and women who can be categorised as young people. Young people were the central theme of the 15th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held in Rom...
For various religious and political reasons, the idea of divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) has found support in many Islamic movements and discourses between the 1940s and the 1980s throughout the Muslim world. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, the...
The philosophy of the Huayan school is founded on the dharmadhātu (法界) as its fundamental ontology, embodying the boundless truth of the cosmos and human existence. It seamlessly integrates the philosophical doctrine of the “...
Many pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers are isolated and under-connected to communities of praxis that can accompany them as they go about their social change work, helping them to ground their organizing in their faith lives. There is...
Taking as its point of departure Pope Benedict XVI’s comment that ‘[e]ach of us is the result of a thought of God’, this article explores how the divine idea of the self bears promise for enabling a Catholic theological response to...
In the twentieth century and into the present one, scholars working in the field of Christian pastoral care have concentrated their efforts in both well-established and emerging areas. Traditionally, thinking about pastoral care has been oriented to...
Drawing from narrative interviews with eight Protestant pastors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper explores community-building under the conditions of late modernity through the lenses of individualization and sensemaking. Exploring pastoral approach...
This article focuses on the Christian ecclesiastical footing and moorings of nationalist thought and pursuits within colonial Nyasaland and its postindependence iteration as the nation of Malawi. Attention is paid to foundational influences and the i...
“Moral shocks” are unexpected events or pieces of information that so deeply challenge one’s basic values and sense of the world that they profoundly reorient a person’s understanding of life and even self. Yet those who exper...
The Old Assyrian archive from Kanesh, dated to ca. 1950–1850 BCE, has yielded a letter that refers to the consultation of the spirits of the dead (eṭemmū), thus making it the world’s oldest actual attestation of necromancy. How...
This article examines the emotional and intellectual dimensions of Torah study in contemporary Lithuanian Haredi Judaism in Israel by analyzing the cultural construction of ahavat ha-Torah (love of Torah). While scholarly discussions of religious lov...
The very latest scholarship on the Swiss Reformation has urged us to resituate the conceptual origins and first articulations of a Reformed Covenant theology in the Zurich of Zwingli, Jud, Pellikan, and Bullinger, rather than in the Geneva of Calvin...
This paper re-examines consciousness through Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and contemporary neo-materialism, arguing that traditional views overstate its importance and that retreating to the subconscious is inadequate. Using a moth infestation metaphor,...
Rome, historically regarded as a monumental center of Catholic Christendom, now stands as a multi-layered environment shaped by diverse religious communities whose overlapping architectures, rites, and narratives expand the city’s cultural memo...
This paper critically addresses the pervasive neglect of indigenous approaches to social transformation within the field of international development cooperation. It shows how commonly used evaluation frameworks—shaped by Western assumptions ab...
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