Religions, Volume 17, Issue 2

The mechanisms of aim-setting and decision-making in criminal activity as a four-level hierarchical structure were presented for the Russian criminals known as ‘vory v zakonie’. The first level represents a basic concept of saving one&rsq...

During the Joseon Dynasty, Korean Buddhism intentionally negotiated its survival and ongoing relevance in response to the predominance of Neo-Confucian state ideology by aligning Buddhist teaching with Confucian ethical ideals, especially filial piet...

In her excellent volume Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard juxtaposes Socrates’s conclusion that the meaningfulness of life is a function of consistent critical inquiry into existence with Leo Tolstoy’s contra...

The editors first met each other via email in early 2020 [...]

In this paper, I explore the complex relationship between Christianity and secularisation in Britain through the small, but illuminating, window of contemporary Christian worship songs. My focus is on Christian worship songs that utilise battle image...

This study examines the systematic development and philosophical “finalization” of śamatha (止 tranquility) and vipaśyanā (觀 insight) within the foundational texts of the Yogācāra tradition. Central t...

In his Venture of Islam, posthumously published in 1975, Marshall Hodgson presented a grandiose scheme of his view of the history of the Islamic world, in which he opposed the Eurocentric view of history in most contemporary studies of Islam. To supp...

Lushan 廬山 and Wutaishan 五臺山 have long occupied important positions in East Asian Buddhism as sacred sites. The wuhui nianfo 五会念仏 and Pure Land philosophy initiated by Fazhao 法Ģ...

Interpretations of the circumstances that formed the development of the Hermetic texts are still to be debated. However, these difficulties are not only philological in nature but also address the revelatory quality of the texts. The author of the si...

The complex fabric of global cultures, shaped by multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual exchanges, encourages cross-cultural involvement and interchange among many groups. This diversity encourages shared appreciation and the pursuit of univ...

This article examines the conceptual convergence between papal teaching and early Christian democratic political thought on the question of war and peace, focusing on Pope Benedict XV and Luigi Sturzo. While Christian democracy is commonly analyzed t...

In 2000, during the Great Jubilee, the Catholic Church opposed the celebration of the International Gay Pride in Rome. Twenty-five years later, in 2025, the LGBT+ Jubilee pilgrimage was included in the official Jubilee program. This article analyzes...

Nahj al-Balāghah is widely recognized as a foundational and authoritative scripture in Shia Islam. One notable aspect of Nahj al-Balāghah is the deliberate selection and structured arrangement of Ḥadiths. According to the book’s...

James Sterba has recently argued against Divine Command Theory (DCT). Sterba also offers, as a preferable alternative to DCT, a metaethical account which he has developed over a number of years (culminating in Sterba’s 2013 book), which attempt...

In this paper, we present our approach to adding the first layers of syntactic information to an open dataset containing the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch with linguistic annotations. The Samaritan Pentateuch, written in Samaritan Hebrew, is the s...

From past to present, the tree has functioned as a powerful symbol associated with birth, life, death and belief systems across cultures. In relation to cosmic order and divine connection, it has often been conceptualized as a cosmic entity. The tree...

Techno-theology is reconsidered from a standpoint beyond modern dualisms (spirit/matter; human/nonhuman), asking how contemporary technologies come to mediate ultimate concern and thereby reconfigure meaning, agency, and moral responsibility. The art...

This article focuses on the French translation of Fo Guo Ji (佛国记), entitled Foě-kouě-ki, ou Relation des royaumes bouddhiques, co-translated by four scholars, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Julius Klaproth, Ernest Cle...

This study reinterprets a selection of elite tombs at the Majiayuan Cemetery (4th–3rd centuries BCE) as belonging to Xirong ritual specialists. Analysis reveals a stratified ritual system: beaded caps served as widespread elite cosmograms, whil...

The Gonzaga family promoted, in the early seventeenth century, a visual and devotional program aimed at positioning Blessed Luigi Gonzaga as both a spiritual standard-bearer and a political instrument of their dynasty. A comparative analysis of print...

This article examines the concepts of war and peace through the lens of Christian philosophy, integrating anthropological, ethical, and socio-political perspectives. It argues that while conflict is rooted in human biology and social organization, wa...

This article analyzes the governance of religious diversity in public employment through the study of Quebec’s Bill 21. It examines how the State uses neutrality to manage religious symbols, focusing on implications for pluralism and fundamenta...

The pivotal moment of 23 August 1944 thrust Romania into alliance with the Soviet Union and launched over four decades of communist rule. The Romanian Orthodox Church actively resisted communist ideology, but was swiftly targeted by state oppression....

The Israel–Hamas War, which erupted with the horrifying events of 7 October 2023, stands as one of the pivotal breaking points in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since its inception. Both sides have been left battered, pained, and devoid...

This paper examines Wittgenstein’s shifting engagement with religion, from the early emphasis on the limits of the world in the Tractatus to the later attention to the ordinary and to the ways religious expressions inhabit forms of life. An ana...

While divine justice is central to Christian faith, theologians disagree about its nature and dimensions. This study examines Christian belief in a just world (CBJW) as a psychological belief system through which Christian believers construe justice...

Several dozen Chinese scrolls from Dunhuang contain Khotanese writings on the verso. The contents of the Khotanese side are relatively diverse, including drafts letters and reports addressed to the Khotanese court, accounts and contracts, writing exe...

This article analyses the official Catholic Religious Education (CRES) programmes in Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica and Colombia from the perspective of complexity sciences, using the concept of self-organisation as a central analytical axis. Given Latin...

In this contribution, I contend that the divine “spirit, wind” was conceived as moist, wet, and vaporous in nature in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. I adduce support for this view from biological reality and from a number of biblical and...

The Byzantine iconoclastic controversy (726–843) has sparked a debate among Byzantine scholars. The literature on iconoclasm and Byzantine history links the onset of the Iconoclasm period to various indirect factors, including the dual nature o...

Andrea Riccardi is an Italian Catholic historian, university professor, activist, and the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio. His writings mainly deal with contemporary historical topics, with a particular focus on the history of the papac...

The desire to discover the nature of existence and one’s proper role in the universe has been a matter of concern throughout the ages, and individuals have endeavoured to examine the events that occur around them accordingly. In their pursuit,...

This article develops a phenomenological foundation of mystical anthropology through a dialogue between contemporary Spanish philosophy and the sixteenth-century Castilian mystical tradition. Taking Juan Martín Velasco, Miguel García-Ba...

The diversity of religious traditions and the increasing prevalence of religious pluralism, along with critical reflections on scientism and the relationship between philosophy and religion, have stimulated global scholarly discussions on Confucianis...

This article reinterprets modern realist drama as a site of secular spirituality, where aesthetic form sustains the sacred under conditions of modern secularity. Employing a phenomenological–theological framework, it integrates Charles Taylor&r...

This article analyzes the long-term relationship between Islam and media in Indonesia through the lens of mediatization. While most research on the mediatization of religion is grounded in Western secular contexts, this study examines how the process...

Based on leadership narratives collected between 2022 and 2025, this article examines how Ukrainian non-military organizational and community leaders who have remained in the country during the ongoing war interpret, embody, and enact theological mea...

This paper examines Christian icons in Panjab, in northern India, and their relationship to the larger discourse on race, iconoclasm, and decentering Whiteness in the United States. I analyze the appropriation of Panjabi idioms woven into Christian i...

Finally, after more than an hour of impatiently waiting, the wedding couple enters the hall where the reception with 160 guests takes place [...]

Confucian thought inherently contains a religious dimension, with its core concept, “Dao,” serving as its principal expression. The Confucian classical text Yi Zhuan, built upon the Dao of Yin and Yang, presents a system imbued with relig...

Established in 1917, the Spiritual Society (Lingxuehui 灵学会) centered its activities on spirit-writing (fuji 扶乩), constructing a sacred discourse through the Spiritual Chronicles (Lingxue Congzhi 灵学...

This article presents a multilevel framework for understanding religion as operating simultaneously at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Drawing on the multilevel theory of gender as a conceptual parallel, it synthesizes existing p...

This paper reconfigures the theme of divine encounters in the literature by examining the intersection of pantheism, vitalism, and ecological imagination, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Far from depicting the divine as transcendent,...

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is a small place of Saint veneration located in the medina of Casablanca. It is situated near a recently renovated area known as the “Triangle of Tolerance”, which comprises a synagogue, a mosque, and a church. Th...

In this paper, I focus on a major corpus of the earliest Syrian Christian literature, Aphrahat the Persian Sage’s collection of epistles titled Demonstrations (Taḥwyātā; early 4th century), in order to gauge his thoughts on the...

Among the painted wooden tablets found at Dandan Oilik (Khotan), possibly dated to the seventh–eighth century, A. Stein and other scholars pointed to the presence of non-Indian deities that could be rooted in the pre-Buddhist Khotanese religiou...

Between the 15th and 17th centuries, as the Northern Hemisphere entered the Little Ice Age, the scale and frequency of hailstorms increased. In Ming Dynasty China, following the Han Dynasty’s “Interaction Between Heaven and Mankind”...

How do survivors mourn when violence controls movement, speech, and public grief? This article reads lament as a political–theological practice that keeps the dead publicly addressable under forced (im)mobilities—conditions in which some...

Daoist female alchemy (nüdan 女丹) texts articulate a bodily paradigm in which humans and nature mutually enfold one another, and in which yin and yang interact in harmonious complementarity. Through an analysis of three key dimensio...

The Tibetan “Dark Age,” following the collapse of the Tibetan Empire in the mid-ninth century, has traditionally been viewed as a period of cultural and religious decline. This paper reframes that narrative by examining recently excavated...