2018 March - 25 articles
(1) Background: Obesity is strongly associated with poor mental-health. Spiritual and religious wellbeing is associated with improved mental well-being and reduced emotional eating. “Taste & See”, a church based programme to help develop a health...
In recent years, a number of incidents have pitted Islam against secularism and liberal democracy. This essay examines the Danish publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in order to examine the deployment of rationality as a litmus test for poli...
At the Singapore Science Centre in 2010, I went to Body Worlds, an exhibit set up by the Institute for Plastination, founded by Gunther von Hagens. As I later learned, he pioneered plastination—the art, science, and technique of preserving entire bod...
In the last 50 years, measures of religious constructs have been the subject of much scientific attention. Cross-cultural considerations necessitate that empirical claims on assessments about religion are validated by local data. While religion is ty...
The Moral Injury Symptom Scale-Military Version (MISS-M) is a 45-item measure of moral injury (MI) symptoms designed to use in Veterans and Active Duty Military with PTSD. This paper reviews the psychometric properties of the MISS-M identified in a p...
This paper examines the relationship between Comparative Theology, Religious Studies and Theology of Religions and questions whether Comparative Theology is an alternative to the last two. Comparative Theology, a faith seeking understanding practice,...
This paper challenges the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) category as a methodological artifact caused by interacting two closed-ended survey items into binary combinations. Employing a theoretically rich approach, this study maps the multiple w...
The Camino de Santiago has witnessed an unprecedented number of walkers in recent years. Traditionalists feel that the Camino is suffering from excess—too many visitors and too much strain on the infrastructure, accompanied by an ignorance of what it...
This essay addresses the question of the relationship between Aesthetics and Tantra, in the world-view and life-world of Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (ca. 975–1025 C.E.) and his tradition. I respond to a classic work on Abhinavagupta’s under...
This article suggests that Pentecostalism constitutes a genuine type of religion we can label as play. In order to identify the particular elements of this type, the article makes use of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis to organize Pentecostal theolog...
Indic rites of purification aim to negate the law of karma by removing the residues of malignant past actions from their patrons. This principle is exemplified in the Kahika Mela, a rarely studied religious festival of the West Himalayan highlands (H...
The term kairos has been used to mean, alternatively, right timing or proportion in Ancient Greek rhetoric, by Jesus to refer to the Christian eschaton and by Paul Tillich and modern liberation theologians to refer to the breakthrough of the divine i...
Much ink has been spilled over the significance, the risks and benefits, and even the very possibility of comparison in the study of religion, but few scholars have reflected on how comparison actually works. [...]
The Liber Exemplorum, a collection of preachers’ tales, was compiled c.1275 by an English Franciscan working in Ireland, and is the earliest Franciscan example of its type. Out of 213 exempla which survive in this manuscript, some 26 of these are fou...
In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, a woman’s social identity changed when her husband died. She became both a symbol of his loss, and a living monument to his legacy—an ambassador between the living and the dead. Responsible not only for...
Can religious epistemology aid in the transformation of the world to the same effect as Marxist Theory? Utilizing an approach derived from Louis Althusser’s isolation of the radical implications of the epistemological break of Karl Marx, from his Feu...
The role of religion in the environment has yet to be empirically investigated in the country with the largest atheist population across the globe. Using data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2013, we examined the effects of religious beliefs o...
Jonah 1:13 has a delaying function in the narrative, introducing a pause between Jonah’s demand to be thrown in the sea (1:12) and the event’s occurrence (1:15). Most commentators discuss only the events of 1:13 and their causes. In this article, I s...
Religion as a protective factor against suicide was introduced in Durkheim’s theory of suicide and analysed from various perspectives in multiple studies. The Lithuanian case is intriguing because before WWII, along with Catholic Poland, it showed mu...
Aims: Numerous measures exist that assess dimensions of spirituality and religiosity in health, theological and social settings. In this review, we aim to identify and evaluate measures assessing factors relating to spirituality and religiosity in cl...
This research addresses the impact of working with spirituality from the perspective of the addiction worker with five separate interviews conducted with people who have been working in the area of addiction for ten years or more. Interview transcrip...
Many of the spiritual texts produced in the early modern period were written by nuns. To teach these texts adequately, it is not sufficient to study the work itself or the biography of the author. Effective exegesis of the texts requires detailed att...
This article explores how Jeff Astley’s work on ordinary theology can enrich historical study of late medieval lay religion. Ordinary theology provides scholars with a new set of vocabulary and methodological approaches for accessing the religious di...
In industrialized countries, population ageing is associated with intense discussions on the issue of dying with dignity. Some countries have legalized assisted suicide and authorized physicians to provide the knowledge and/or means for suffering pat...
Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524), a mystic and Franciscan nun, spent most of her life in Camerino in east-central Italy. Now a saint—since 17 October 2010—she composed two autobiographical treatises across a ten-year period mid-way through a li...
