Religions

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.

Pope Francis’ first encyclical, Laudato Si’, set the tone of much of his reflection about the environment. The earth is not considered from a naturalistic scientific perspective, but as the “common home”, where caring for the planet means caring for each other. Eight years later, the Pope issued an exhortation, Laudate Deum in which he again called for mutual care and concern for the environment. This article aims to read and analyze both texts in their expression of Theology of the People’s principles, developed in Argentina in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Exploration, hermeneutic interpretation and an analysis of Pope Francis’ way of textually connecting people and the environment in Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum will show how he was a mystic in the tradition of Theology of the People, who emphasized in his ecological messages people’s faith and their relation with the earth.

This research explores how Chinese youth, most of whom lack formal religious beliefs or affiliations, engage with digital non-traditional religious music, such as electronic adaptations of the Great Compassion Mantra chant, on platforms such as Bilibili. A total of 15 interviews and one year of digital ethnography were conducted to examine how various music mediators, such as music, technology, the environment, and the cultural context, shape youth’s affective states, namely their states of tranquility, trance, and transcendence. This study reinserts musicality into the social and cultural studies of religious music and identifies more fluid, contingent, and processual forms of associations and articulations between different mediators, along with the more emergent and ambient affective states brought about by such mediators, their networks, and related mediation processes. In addition, this study reveals Chinese youth’s hybridized and idiosyncratic practices that combine alternative spiritual elements with secular experiences, highlighting the context-specific ways in which Chinese youth navigate spirituality in the post-secular age.