2017 October - 34 articles
As the title indicates, taken together the thirteen papers in this Special Issue of Religions give a broad view of what might be called the inner and outer life of the Orthodox Church, with each of the papers focusing on a particular area of research...
Deaf Liberation Theology is a branch of theology that has been developed over the past twenty years, with the book Deaf Liberation Theology published by Ashgate in 2007 (Lewis 2007) as a focal point of this development. This article briefly looks at...
Life is plural and diverse, biodiverse. This reality has always provoked philosophy, the sciences, and also theology. But how does theological thinking reflect on this eco-human diversity? What about religious diversity? Are diversity and pluralism t...
This study examined the factor structure of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale (STS) and its relation to clinically significant psychological distress in 644 (445 female) emerging adults from a private, Catholic university. The STS is broadly used in...
Muslim societies are facing the new challenges of cultural and religious diversity. They are experiencing migratory phenomena, or because they are countries of immigration (such as in the Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates) or countries that are be...
Joseph Selling, professor emeritus from KU Leuven, Belgium, recently made a significant contribution towards ethical methodology. It is in fact a continuation of the in-house conversations that have been in vogue about methods in moral reasoning sinc...
Spirituality has been widely considered important for patients’ health and for healthcare practice and is related to connectedness, meaning in life, and transcendence. Research concerning spirituality is growing rapidly, and the implementation of spi...
One of the improvements introduced by the Romans was the public bath-house. This article discusses the formation of Jewish prayers, which were composed during the early rabbinic period, following the dangers of the public baths. Sages from late antiq...
Nurses play a central role in joint decision-making and person-centred care, whereby care is focused on the needs of an individual patient. A key part of person-centred care is the way nurses engage with patients because good communication can impact...
Joseph Selling proposes a contemporary revision of natural law ethics, making it more person-centered. Earlier James Gustafson insisted that natural law ethics was too egoist or anthropocentric, so his work proposed theocentrism as a corrective. Rich...
In this paper, we shall examine how possession is understood in Assam, India. We are aware that the larger northeastern frontier of India retained indigenous practices, religious festivals, and beliefs in a plethora of exotic goddesses, rituals, whic...
American theories of reincarnation have a long and complex history, dating from 1680s to the present. It is the purpose of this paper to highlight the main currents of reincarnation theory in the American context, giving a brief historical survey. So...
The question motivating this essay is how tantric Buddhist practitioners in Japan understood language such as to believe that mantra, dhāraṇī, and related forms are efficacious. “Extraordinary language” is introduced as a cover term for these several...
This article repudiates the common view that the study of religion, in order to qualify as academic, must be descriptively neutral and naturalistic rather than normative or prescriptive. Following philosophers like John McDowell, John Cottingham, and...
This article focuses on rituals of community life within a North American church in which many of the congregants live with psychiatric disabilities and whose participation in religious life is affected by their experiences of poverty and gentrificat...
Much has been debated and written about the translation proviso, its implications, and its rationality. At its core, it is about communication and a transition in religious communication that means it can become secularly engaged. This paper argues t...
A celebration and critical evaluation of Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s brilliant book, Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach. In this groundbreaking work, Timalsina utilizes the lens of cognitive studies to shed interpretive light on the Tantric vis...
Secularism seems to require separation between religion and State. Regarding India, it would be better to speak of ‘equidistance’ between State and religious denominations. Nonetheless a ‘balanced treatment’ towards the religions leaves the question...
Joseph Selling rightly defines human intentions and motivations as part of human nature and an important determinant of the morality of personal actions. The thesis of this paper is that Selling’s view of agency, as focused on the individual, must be...
The feminist queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952–2009) wrote about what it meant to be an “indecent theologian” and claimed that sexual stories from the margins of society can help transform theological issues. What can “indecent theology” m...
What place is there for virtue theory in theological ethics? Many question the normative significance of virtue theory in theological ethics today, leaving it to rule-based ethics to provide action-guidance. There are three key objections to the norm...
In America, no religion better exemplifies the power of the individual than Hoodoo. Within these peripheral communities in the South, enslaved persons created spaces in which individual practitioners could choose which rituals, objects, and beliefs t...
Kingship in early medieval Kāmarūpa (Assam) was influenced by the collision of orthodox and heterodox Brahmanic traditions with various tribal cultures. Since the last part of the Śālastambha period (seventh–tenth century) the royal tutelary deity of...
The Commitment-Reflectivity Circumplex (CRC) model is a structural model of religious orientation that was designed to help organize and clarify measurement of foundational aspect of religiousness. The current study successfully replicated the CRC mo...
Images and narratives of people with disabilities in popular culture shape the perceptions of people with and without disabilities. When these narratives raise philosophical and religious questions emerging from the lives of people with disabilities,...
The prevalence of risk factors for chronic diseases such as smoking, alcohol abuse, low fruit and vegetable consumption, and lack of physical activity is high among young adults. Health behaviours are influenced by many factors and also by religious...
This study arises from the context of current debates in the Catholic Church on the place of rule and law in moral reasoning. I suggest that ethics may be best served by approaches that place the human subject in a teleogical context and that recogni...
This is an editorial of a Special Issue regarding the International Conference of Spirituality in Healthcare held in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland (ROI), on June 2016 (Spirituality Research and Innov...
Through the centuries, scholars and readers have looked through a variety of lenses to discover what might be revealed by the story of Tsipporah’s circumcision of her son in Exodus 4, and to assign meanings to it. The ambiguity of the language and th...
This paper examines the role of the miniature in Buddhist ritual, through analyses of miniature pagodas from middle-period China. Due to the otherworldly sensations they evoked and their theatrical nature, miniatures were often endowed with magical a...
This text represents a summary of the major points developed in the book, Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics, and a brief overview of how the author understands the relation between religion, ethics, and the building of a virtuous community. The m...
The objective of this paper is to examine the Pauline understanding of conscience, with the view of gaining an inspiration from it for the contemporary discussion on the foundations of the Christian ethics. The meaning Paul attaches to it depends on...
This essay explores the pedagogy of Dza Patrul Rinpoche (1808–1887), a well-respected Buddhist teacher from Eastern Tibet, by considering examples where Patrul frames his teachings as oratorical performances. Patrul operates under the guiding pedagog...
The article engages with Joseph Selling’s most recent publication Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics in which he invites theological ethicists to re-think the post-Tridentine development of theological ethics by noting its methodological deficienc...
