Self-Organized Religious Life: The Jiangnan Region as a Case Study

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite contributions to the Special Issue “Self-Organized Religious Life: The Jiangnan Region as a Case Study” in Religions. This Special Issue is devoted to forms of religious life that take shape through local practices, shared cultural traditions, and everyday religious activities, beyond centralized doctrinal frameworks or formal institutional authority.

From the Six Dynasties period onward, the Jiangnan region of China has sustained a richly layered religious landscape in which Confucian lineage culture, Daoist ritual traditions, Buddhist practices, and diverse forms of folk belief have long coexisted and interacted. These traditions did not converge into a unified system; instead, they developed through continuous negotiation and adaptation, producing flexible patterns of belief and practice deeply embedded in local society. Religious life in Jiangnan has been maintained through the circulation of texts, the repetition of ritual practices, the transmission of narratives, the formation of symbolic repertoires, and the use of material and spatial resources in everyday contexts. As such, Jiangnan offers a particularly revealing case for examining how religious life organizes itself from within.

The aim of this Special Issue is to examine the conditions and processes through which self-organized religious life emerges and operates in regional settings. By taking Jiangnan as a case study, the Special Issue fits well within the scope of Religions, engaging ongoing discussions of lived religion, popular religion, religious pluralism, and non-institutional forms of religious organization. While the contributions are grounded in specific historical and cultural materials, they are expected to address questions of broader relevance, including the formation of religious authority outside centralized institutions, the role of cultural media in shaping religious imagination, and the ways ritual practices mediate ethical tension and emotional life within communities.

In this Special Issue, original research articles, theoretical contributions, and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Translation and transmission of religious texts in regional and local contexts;
• The role of literary, artistic, and narrative media in constructing religious imagination;
• The historical formation and transformation of folk religious symbols;
• Ritual technologies for managing ethical conflict and emotional life;
• Self-organized ritual practices and local religious order;
• Sacred space, landscape, and material practices in lived religion;
• Interactions among Buddhism, Daoism, Confucian traditions, and folk religion.

We hope that this Special Issue will stimulate new research on religion as a dynamic, socially embedded process that unfolds through everyday practices, symbolic forms, and communal interactions. By foregrounding self-organization as an analytical perspective, the Special Issue seeks to complement existing studies centered on doctrine, institution, or state regulation, and to offer comparative insights relevant to scholars working on religion in other cultural and historical settings.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an ab-stract of 200-300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, or to the Assistant Editor (bella.xu@mdpi.com) of Religions. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Yun Wang
Prof. Dr. Peter Trawny
Dr. Zhejia Tang
Guest Editors

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-anonymized 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.

• self-organized religion
• lived religion
• folk religion
• religious texts and translation
• religions imagination
• ritual practice
• sacred space
• religious pluralism