2025 September - 131 articles
This essay examines mass castration allegations within the North Indian guru movement Dera Sacha Sauda. Drawing on court records, public commentary, and prior fieldwork, it traces how surgical procedures served as a mechanism of enforced proximity an...
For millennia, since Homer to postmodern theatre, the world has been imagined as a stage and life as a play. The truth of this metaphor, however, rests on mere assertions. This essay assesses the validity of this metaphor by examining drama as enactm...
A necessary condition for the success of the 7 October 2023 Hamas deadly incursion into Israel was the absence of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from that region. The IDF was involved in helping the settlers in their conflicts with Palestinians on t...
This study investigates the gendered effects of political violence on women (and children) from a church leader perspective. This paper critically examines the role of church leadership in protecting vulnerable groups in society (particularly women a...
Using Demeterio’s modified ideological spectrum, this article examines the dominant political ideologies reflected in the pastoral statements of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) under the administrations of Ferdinand Marcos...
This article treats the familiar triad “Gold, God, and Glory” as a heuristic to track how commercial, missionary, and reputational aims were configured within overlapping jurisdictions of the Portuguese world. Through three cases—th...
The article analyses the correlations between Latin American liberation theology and 19th-century Russian novel. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘threshold chronotype’, it contextualises the aesthetic and theological language of...
The article analyzes the responsory O vis eternitatis, the symbolic opening of Hildegard von Bingen’s primary music collection, to show how Hildegard’s musical choices support the key words and concepts of the composition. It examines usu...
This paper offers a critical analysis of traditional Muslim sexual morality and questions its validity in the present. It focuses on two elements: (1) nikāḥ as a legal marriage contract characterized by asymmetrical gender roles and (2) hi...
This study aims to examine Anthony de Mello’s Sadhana practice from a religious–psychological perspective, applying Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology and views on the Spiritual Exercises. The analysis reveals that Sadhana, wh...
This paper critically interrogates the French model of secularism (laïcité) and its implications for Muslim women’s rights in contemporary France, particularly within post-colonial and post-secular contexts. It explores how historic...
The Tibetan Kanjur has long been recognized as both a symbolic embodiment of the Buddhist canonical literature and as a ritual object, resulting in the production of various versions that differ in content, arrangement, and specific textual formulati...
Religion and spirituality (R/S) may be associated with better cognitive health, yet most published studies have been conducted in primarily White populations without investigating association variations by gender and race. A cross-sectional analysis...
The theological rendering of economics in the Bahá’í Faith—particularly from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—advocated progressive taxation, a strong welfare state, the abolition of trusts, and the redistribution of we...
In the context of global modernization, both the United States and China faced major challenges in rural social development. In the early twentieth century, the American federal government launched the Country Life Movement, during which Christianity...
The study distinguishes three principal forms of desire: bodily desires, desires for perfection, and desires entailed in value-responses. By distinguishing between the self-centered, acquisitive desires for perfection and the inherently self-transcen...
Psychedelic drugs show promise in treating a wide range of mental health conditions. These drugs are beneficial in part because they disrupt prior ideas and patterns of behavior and because they increase neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. It is import...
The study begins with the questions “Where was Paradise?” and “How was the Garden cultivated?”, and the relationship between different modes of interpretation. It compares the biblical data (Gen. 2) with patristic testimonies...
By examining two very different manifestations of Chinese Buddhism in Italy, this paper seeks to build upon and add a new dimension to Dessì’s “Glocal Buddhas” project and, more broadly, offer a rare insight into Chinese Budd...
This article aims to understand Muslim voting trends in the United Kingdom through a study of the movement that called itself The Muslim Vote. Drawing on interviews and other publicly available primary material, it uses Social Movement Theory to anal...
Migration issues remain one of the most contentious topics in contemporary social discourse. This paper reinterprets key Old Testament figures who can be identified as asylum seekers or political migrants. The central question is the following: who r...
Exploring the reality of women with cancer involves acknowledging the pressures of conformity and loneliness that often lead to silence. It is a silence that hides women’s experiences, emotions, and reflections on suffering, death, and despair,...
As a representative form of popular religion in southern Fujian (Minnan 闽南), the Sanping Patriarch (Sanping Zushi 三平祖師) belief exhibits distinct transregional and cross-cultural characteristics in its dissemi...
The Bahá’í doctrine of progressive revelation, while universal in principle, has been limited, in scope and application, by what has previously been described as “Arya-Semiticentrism”—with a paradigmatic focus on...
This article examines how populist radical right parties (PRR) in three contrasting European contexts—Slovenia, France, and Poland—strategically instrumentalize Christianity within their anti-immigration agendas. Rather than using religio...
This article examines how two contemporary Zen Buddhist communities in Germany—Zen Peacemakers Germany and Akazienzendo Berlin—engage in ecological activism through the lens of eco-Buddhism. Drawing on eco-Buddhism, the study investigates...
This article critically examines the evolution of EU migration policy discourse from 1989 to 2024, highlighting the shift from overt securitization to a more humanitarian and managerial framing, which still retains some securitization elements. By an...
(1) Background: From a post-secular perspective, the relationship between religions in the public sphere is conceived as an exchange in which religious beliefs, when formulated as rational arguments, contribute to building a shared public culture and...
Roger Scruton identified three basic forms of communal loyalties that produce the first-person plural “we”: the national, the tribal, and the credal. Scruton argues that it is the national that maximally permits plurality and difference w...
The present study interprets the indispensable mediating role of religion within Hegel’s monistic system. This study undertakes a systematic investigation of the development of Hegel’s religious thought in different periods, his logical r...
This study examines how selected place names, animal figures, and natural elements are used rhetorically in the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. It explores the rhetorical strategies associated with these elements, their frequency in p...
I briefly address Duncan Pritchard’s ‘parity argument’ and argue that it should be pared down to parity between religious hinges and local hinges. I then object to Pritchard’s notion of ‘honest doubt’ as ‘rel...
Based on the imago Dei theory, this essay attempts to establish a correspondence between the union of natures in Christ and the relationship between man and creation, focusing attention on the communication of idioms and reciprocal indwelling. It com...
In hagiographic accounts, the fictitious Christian saint Judas Kyriakos is made to speak Hebrew-like words. In both his inventio and passio narratives, Judas Kyriakos’ voice is made to transverse the fraught landscape of Jewish conversion, and...
This study examines how theological orientation and institutional culture shape the viability of two historically Black churches in Detroit: Historic King Solomon Baptist Church and Greater King Solomon Baptist Church. Against the backdrop of acceler...
Much attention has been paid to female, pillar-based figurines from Iron II Judah, and the veneration of a major goddess in that territory. Similarly, female figurines throughout the Levant have largely been treated as evidence of goddess-worship, wr...
The Shrine Madonna is a unique form of cult statuary within the wider Madonna and Child tradition, linked to broader Marian iconography. Building on previous scholarship, this article focuses on the visual relationship between the Virgin and the wors...
This paper explores Carl Schmitt’s concepts of the friend and the enemy through the lens of Katechon. Contemporary scholarship often treats Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction as an occasional decision driven by political contingency...
This paper aims to analyze the reception and rephrasing of illustrious Classical literary quotes and five references in Gregory of Nyssa’s παραμυθητικὸς λόγ&o...
Studies of ancient Israelite religion have long assumed that texts played some role in its public expression. This role is often reconstructed using depictions in the Hebrew Bible and ritual texts from neighboring regions or the Bronze Age Levant. Ho...
The body–soul relationship serves as a crucial entry point for exploring the intersection of Plato’s dialogues with ancient Greek religious thought, particular Orphic doctrines. In critically inheriting and reconstructing core elements of...
This article inaugurates a series of scholarly inquiries undertaken by academics from the disciplines of canon law, psychology, and theology, which makes it inherently interdisciplinary. Recognizing the foundations of marital indissolubility, the aut...
This paper argues that the philosophy of Buddhist emptiness not only finds expression in Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart with its two most salient manifestationsdependent origination and impermanence, but is applied to alleviat...
This essay examines the interplay between politics and religion through the lens of correspondence between the future Pope Paul IV and his sister Maria Carafa, largely published in 1670 in Francesco Maria Maggio’s Life of the Venerable Maria Ca...
This article employs the theoretical framework of religious mediatization and a philosophical–anthropological lens to examine how various religious traditions utilize audiovisual media in the digital age to disseminate their faith and transform...
One of the more well-known of Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the nature of religious beliefs is that we go wrong if we try to vindicate or refute religious beliefs in the same way as we do in the sciences. This may make it seem as if Wittgenstei...
Cultural and religious diversity has become a defining feature of societies worldwide. Although religious music serves as a powerful medium for fostering intercultural understanding, it remains underexamined in educational research. This systematic r...
This paper explores the role of voice in the fifteenth-century hagiography of the recluse Pirona, who lived a religious life while voluntarily enclosed in a dwelling attached to the church of St. Nicholas outside the city walls of Mechelen. Her hagio...
This essay argues that female representations at Qusayr Amra reflect a deliberate adaptation of pre-Islamic artistic traditions, expressing evolving Umayyad ideas of beauty, gender, and hierarchy. By analyzing the interplay between visual imagery and...
This article explores an interreligious educational initiative jointly developed by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) and the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), the “Sixteen Sheets on Judaism,” created to support Catholic re...
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