Religions

The Fangbian Xin Lun 方便心論 (*Upāyahṛdaya, T 1632), rendered into Chinese in 472, is the earliest extant Buddhist manual of debate. Because it trains its reader chiefly to object, it is readily read as instruction in refutation alone. This paper argues that the treatise instead distributes distinct burdens and entitlements between proponent and objector. Four features show this. Its epistemology ranks perception above scripture. Its objector advances a positive thesis, though only after the opponent’s alternative has failed. Its catalogue of defeat penalizes failures of understanding as well as failures of speaking. And its procedural rules bind both parties, denying a debater who has himself erred the standing to press his opponent’s error. The argument-forms it licenses as proper responses (相應), the Nyāyasūtra classifies as erroneous objections (jāti). What separates the two texts is not a repertoire but an allocation of burdens.

Growing religious and cultural pluralism has placed dialogue at the centre of the international debate on Religious Education (RE). Contemporary scholarship has emphasised its importance for the study of religions, personal development, freedom of conscience, democratic citizenship, and intercultural coexistence. Less attention has been paid to the relationship between the dialogical quality of RE and the epistemological structure of the school subject itself. This concept paper develops a theoretical and foundational argument through focused critical analysis of scholarship in Religious Education, curriculum theory, sociology of religion, and relevant theological and magisterial sources. Catholic Religious Education in Italy (Insegnamento della Religione Cattolica, IRC) serves as a conceptual laboratory for examining epistemological and pedagogical identity. The article interprets theology as the scientia rectrix of IRC and argues that the Christian understanding of Revelation as relational, dialogue with culture and the sciences, and recognition of religious otherness give the subject an intrinsically dialogical epistemological structure. Through pedagogical mediation, this structure gives rise to three educational implications: identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality as the pedagogical form of dialogicality. The Italian case offers a theoretical lens for reconsidering the relationship among disciplinary identity, dialogue, and pluralism across contemporary models of Religious Education.

The Turkish Civil Code of 1926, received from Switzerland, established a secular family law resting on numerus clausus and a broadly mandatory structure; yet mahr, an institution of Islamic family law, has persisted in social practice and, since the binding unification-of-case-law decision of the Court of Cassation of 2 December 1959, has been characterized as a donation contract governed by the law of obligations. This article analyzes that characterization doctrinally, distinguishing whether mahr is agreed without a civil marriage, before it, or at or after it, and testing it against Turkish statutory law and reported case law, with comparative reference to German, Swiss, Italian, English, Canadian, United States and New Zealand practice. The analysis keeps three levels of material distinct: classical Ḥanafī doctrine and its Qurʾānic basis, the later positivization of mahr in the codes of Muslim-majority states, and its contemporary reconstruction in scholarship and in Turkish case law. Functional resemblance across these levels is not taken for identity, and the central claim is that Turkish law has taken it for identity. The donation characterization proves internally inconsistent: it misdescribes the parties’ concurring intentions; imposes form requirements unknown to Islamic law; exposes the wife to revocation and restitution; and distorts the concepts of divorce and consummation. In matrimonial property, damages, poverty alimony and subject-matter jurisdiction, the outcomes follow the premise of gratuitousness rather than the structure of mahr, and fall out erratically, sometimes to the wife’s advantage and sometimes against her. So long as the existing secular regime is maintained, mahr is better treated as an imperfect (natural) obligation under Article 78(2) of the Turkish Code of Obligations; the binding force of the 1959 decision, confined to a question of transitional law, does not preclude this reinterpretation.