Religions

In the first quarter of the 21st Century, Western Europe witnessed a proliferation of various types of interreligious initiatives. In the meantime, a new paradigm of local management of religious diversity has become increasingly popular in many parts of the continent. This new approach focuses on the involvement of religious actors in policy making, in a bottom-up “governance” perspective, rather than on old-style directive and top-down “government”. As a consequence, interreligious bodies and initiatives have started playing not only a social but also a political role, in some cases even formally sanctioned at the institutional level. However, considering that most part of the existing literature on the local management of religious diversity adopts a sociology or religious studies perspective, a thorough assessment of the political meaning of this phenomenon is still lacking. The present article tries to contribute to fill this gap by assessing the main points of the existing literature, sketching a typology of interreligious initiatives and their political/institutional roles, and, finally, drafting a new research agenda in order to improve our comprehension of the role of interreligious bodies in local governance and how to enhance their democratic and participative nature.

This paper builds on Tomoko Masuzawa’s influential critique in The Invention of World Religions by analyzing how colonial and theological frameworks shaped Western representations of Pure Land Buddhism. While Masuzawa exposed the Eurocentric foundations of religious studies, this study examines a specific dimension of that legacy: Christian theological interpretations of Pure Land Buddhism. Sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Japan described Pure Land Buddhism through Protestant analogies, framing it as a distorted counterpart to Christianity. This characterization persisted into the twentieth century, notably in Joseph Dahlmann’s writings, which cast Pure Land Buddhism as counterfeit Christianity and an illegitimate form of Buddhism. Later, theologians Karl Barth and Henri de Lubac reinforced this comparative lens, arguing that although Pure Land Buddhism shares certain features with Protestantism, it ultimately falls short of Christian theological standards. By interrogating these misrepresentations and their impact on academic discourse, this paper demonstrates how Western scholars and theologians constructed narratives that misrepresented Pure Land Buddhism and shaped its reception in Western intellectual history.

This article investigates how Job 1–3 may be read as a single narrative–dramatic unit shaped by a ritual process of mourning, with particular attention to the transition from the prose tale (Job 1–2) to the poetic imprecation (Job 3). The enquiry proceeds by means of a comparative analysis of the prologues of the Ugaritic epics Keret (KTU 1.14 I:1–II:5) and Aqhat (KTU 1.17 I:1–47), texts frequently invoked for contextualising Job within Ancient West Asia. In a first stage, close reading of these Ugaritic prologues identifies narrative techniques for signalling ritual practices—especially lament and incubatio—while remaining largely allusive rather than descriptive. In a second stage, the study turns to the canonical form of Job 1–3 and re-examines its scene arrangement, pacing, and speech-acts against that epic model, including the function of framing formulae and temporal markers. The analysis is intentionally confined to the present form of the text. The paper thus offers a controlled methodological work in comparative poetics and ritual analysis, asking how far Ugaritic epic conventions can illuminate continuity across genre and register at the opening of Job.