The Sacred and the Secular: Perspectives and Methodologies in Religious Studies

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to the Special Issue, "The Sacred and the Secular: Perspectives and Methodologies in Religious Studies." The relationship between the sacred and the secular remains a foundational issue in the study of religion, shaping inquiries into moral experience, political authority, textual interpretation, cultural practice and the construction of meaning within diverse social contexts. Contemporary scholarship increasingly recognizes that the sacred and the secular are not fixed oppositions but dynamic categories that evolve historically through intellectual reflection, cultural interaction and lived religious understanding. This Special Issue encourages innovative approaches that reconsider these categories and explore how they operate across different religious, historical and cultural environments.

This Special Issue seeks to examine how the sacred-secular distinction is constructed, interpreted and transformed within religious traditions and how this distinction influences religious knowledge, identity and practice. We welcome contributions that engage critically with methodological perspectives in religious studies, including hermeneutics, textual analysis, historical inquiry, anthropological approaches and comparative frameworks. The Special Issue invites scholars to explore how notions of sacredness and secularity emerge, shift and intersect within diverse forms of religious thought and expression.

We particularly encourage submissions that foreground the theme of ‘the sacred and the secular.’ Suggested areas include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical and methodological approaches to the sacred–secular distinction
• Hermeneutical interpretation of sacred and secular meanings
• Texts, language and the shifting boundaries of the sacred and the mundane
• Sacred authority, political power and sociocultural legitimacy
• Myth, memory and the construction of sacred origins
• Secularization, pluralism and religious transformation
• Intercultural encounters and reinterpretations of sacred concepts
• Comparative studies of sacredness across traditions

We hope that this Special Issue will stimulate new research that revisits established categories in the study of religion and promotes dialogue across diverse methodological and theoretical approaches. By gathering studies that illuminate the dynamic interplay between sacred meanings and secular contexts, the Special Issue aims to enrich ongoing academic discussions and offer new insights into religious change, conceptual innovation and cultural negotiation.

We request that authors submit a proposed title and a 200 to 300-word abstract prior to sending the full manuscript. Please forward abstracts to the Guest Editor or the Assistant Editor of Religions Ms. Moira Li <moira.li@mdpi.com>. Abstracts will be reviewed to ensure thematic fit. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Kai Sheng
Dr. Yifeng Liu
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-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.

• sacred and secular
• religious methodology
• religious anthropology
• myth and history
• hermeneutics of religion
• political theology
• comparative religion