Symbolic Hermeneutics: Interpretations, Imaginaries, and Surpluses of Meaning

Dear Colleagues,

Far from being limited to an interpretive methodology, contemporary hermeneutics has become an epistemological and existential horizon that questions the very condition of meaning. In its most fruitful development, symbolic hermeneutics has its roots in the religious soil of human culture: it arises from the gesture of interpreting the world as meaningful revelation, as sacred text, or as a manifestation of mystery. Before it became a science or a method, hermeneutics was—and continues to be—a spiritual practice of understanding, a way of reconnecting (re-ligare) the visible with the invisible, language with being, and man with the divine.

From ancient exegetical traditions and symbolic readings of myths and scriptures to the philosophical formulations of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Gadamer, hermeneutics retains that original impulse to search for meaning in the sacred and the human. The religious dimension is not restricted to confessionality, but rather designates a universal experience: that of a world that, through its symbols, offers itself as a mediation of the transcendent.

The symbol—a living form of union between the visible and the invisible—constitutes the heart of this horizon. Through it, cultures have expressed their worldviews, their hopes, and their fears, shaping the imaginaries that structure religious rites, artistic works, social practices, and scientific cosmologies. In each symbol beats the intuition that reality is not exhausted in its factuality, but rather refers to an excess of meaning, to an immanent transcendence that has historically nourished all religious experience.

In recent decades, the expansion of instrumental rationality, technical languages, and fragmented forms of life has eroded this symbolic link with the sacred, generating a void of meaning that cuts across both religions and secular cultures. Symbolic hermeneutics then emerges as a task of spiritual and critical re-reading of the present: understanding how symbols, myths, and rites continue to articulate, even in contexts of secularization, the forms of the divine, the communal, and the existential.

Faced with the contemporary tendency to reduce the world to calculation or consumption, symbolic hermeneutics proposes to recover the spiritual density of meaning: the symbol serves not as an archaic remnant, but as a space of revelation and as a language that reopens the dimension of the sacred in human life. From Cassirer, Jung, and Ricoeur to Eliade, Durand, Corbin, Ortiz-Osés, and Beuchot, the hermeneutic tradition shows that the symbol is the soul of every culture and the way in which the mystery of the world becomes understandable.

Thus, this Special Issue of Religions starts from a common conviction that all authentic hermeneutics is, at heart, a theology of meaning, and that the symbol constitutes its essential mediation. Rereading culture, religion, and human experience from this symbolic–hermeneutical root means reconnecting with the spiritual source of understanding and reopening the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between thought, faith, art, and life.

• Objectives and scope

The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore symbolic hermeneutics as a cross-cutting approach to understanding the relationship between meaning, religion, and culture, integrating philosophical, anthropological, sociological, esthetic, and theological perspectives.

We seek works that investigate how symbols, myths, imaginaries, and ritual forms operate as structures of interpretation and mediation between human beings, the sacred, and the community. In this context, symbols are understood as the language of mystery, a vehicle for spiritual knowledge, and a matrix of meaning for contemporary cultures.

• Suggested themes and article types for submissions.

Guiding questions include, among others, the following:

• How can symbolic hermeneutics renew the understanding of religion from a critical, anthropological, and philosophical perspective?
• How do symbols and myths articulate collective experiences of meaning in contexts of crisis, plurality, or secularization?
• What role do images, stories, and artistic forms play in the symbolic elaboration of the sacred?
• What does symbolic hermeneutics contribute to our understanding of contemporary processes of religious and cultural disenchantment and re-enchantment?
• Religion and symbols in everyday life, social movements, and digital cultures.
• Body, emotion, and symbolic rituality.
• Hermeneutics of the sacred: myth, ritual, and religious experience.
• Symbolic hermeneutics and poetic thought.
• Symbolic hermeneutics and non-dual thinking: sapiential and interreligious horizons.
• Symbol and truth: Human reality as a symbol.
• Poetic language and symbolic thought in literature and the arts.
• Theoretical foundations and genealogies of symbolic hermeneutics (Cassirer, Jung, Bachelard, Durand, Corbin, Ricoeur, Eliade, Ortiz-Osés, Beuchot, among others).
• Symbolism, memory, and religious and cultural transmission.
• Intercultural and interreligious perspectives on symbols.
• Symbolic hermeneutics and ecological or cosmological spirituality.

• Expected Impact.

This Special Issue seeks to reopen the space of symbolism as a hermeneutic key to understanding the religious, cultural, and spiritual complexity of the present. It aims to consolidate a field of dialogue among researchers who, from different intellectual traditions, explore symbolic forms as mediations of meaning and as interpretive structures of religious and human experience.

We invite scholars of religion, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, art historians, and specialists in literature, aesthetics, or culture to submit their proposals. Contributions that articulate symbolic analysis with contemporary issues of secularization, pluralism, ecology, identity, technology, and spirituality, and that propose critical and creative readings on the symbolic function in today's world, will be especially valued.

Interested authors should submit a title and abstract (200–300 words) indicating the focus and main contribution of their work.

Proposals should be sent to the Guest Editors or the Special Issue Editor of Religions, Rudy Miao (rudy.miao@mdpi.com).

Abstracts will be evaluated by the editors of the Special Issue to ensure their suitability for the thematic scope, and full manuscripts will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

We look forward to your contributions to this Special Issue, which aims to open up a space for pluralistic reflection on symbolic hermeneutics as a way of understanding religion, culture, and the contemporary imagination, and as a means of restoring the unity between symbol, transcendence, and meaning in human experience.

Prof. Dr. Joaquín Esteban Ortega
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.