Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091043

Authors: Benjamin D. Giffone

The cultic practices of ancient Israel, specifically with respect to ritual eating and sex, serve jointly as a unifying motif for 1 Corinthians 8–11. Eating and sexual intercourse are viewed as sacred acts because of their generative capacity. Sex and food were highly regulated in ancient Israel, yet eating was an essential part of Israelite ritual, while sex was forbidden. Paul’s discussion of various issues in 1 Corinthians 8–11 is linked in his discourse by the common thread of the generative and communicative power of food and sex.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091042

Authors: Brad E. Kelle

Walter Brueggemann’s work on the Hebrew Bible prophets generally and on the book of Hosea specifically focused on rhetoric, metaphor, and imagination. His emphases on the role of prophetic metaphor in the construction of views of God and on the debate over contested communal identity provide the starting point for this essay. I place these insights into dialogue with emerging work on trauma hermeneutics and Hosea, especially the concept of communal trauma. The imaginative power of Hosea’s rhetoric and metaphors comes into new perspective when seen within the struggle for theological identity and defining practices that follows experiences of communal trauma like the emergence of expanding Neo-Assyrian imperialism assumed by the book’s literary setting.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091041

Authors: J. Clinton McCann

Taking inspiration from the pioneering work of Ellen F. Davis, especially her Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, this article will offer an agrarian reading of the book of Micah, focusing upon Mic 2:1–5, 3:1–12; 4:1–5, and 6:8. The 8th century BCE core of Micah, especially chapters 2 and 3, levels a stinging critique of Judean royal policy (supported by a corrupt religious establishment) that resulted in the loss of land and livelihood by farmers and farm families. Micah called for justice, and he warned that the absence of justice would lead to harsh consequences (see especially 3:12). But the major transition at 4:1 suggests that judgment will not be the final word; and 4:1–5 presents, in distinctly agrarian terms, a transformed future where all are fed, as divine justice intends (see Psalm 72). The final section of the article suggests that our contemporary situation involves realities not unlike those faced by Micah and the other 8th century BCE prophets. The juxtaposition of prophetic critique and the vision of a transformed future conforms to Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the Hebrew Prophets in his The Prophetic Imagination.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091040

Authors: Stephen L. Cook

Walter Brueggemann’s account of prophetic imagination has illuminated how Israel’s prophets contest dominant cultural assumptions by evoking an alternative consciousness. This essay explores the dynamics behind the prophet’s capacity to perceive and proclaim such an alternative. Through close readings of Zechariah’s first two night visions (Zech 1:7–21), informed by form-critical study of symbolic vision, research on the interpreting-angel motif, and Israel’s priestly and holiness traditions, the essay examines revelation as a pedagogy of perception. The first vision exposes Persian imperial tranquility as a theological stasis by opening Zechariah’s sight to heavenly reconnaissance and God’s renewed movement toward Zion. The second reactivates the covenantal symbolism of altar horns and artisans, disclosing political violence, accumulated impurity, and divine restoration within a cosmic frame. The interpreting angel does not merely decode obscure imagery but guides the prophet more deeply into the vision, while Israel’s inherited temple iconography supplies the symbolic grammar through which its meaning becomes perceptible. I conclude that prophetic imagination is not primarily a creative invention or the communication of new information. It is covenant memory becoming climactic and eschatological through the re-education of perception, enabling the prophet and community to align local practices with God’s larger work of cosmic renewal.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091039

Authors: Yanfei Zhao

In the history of Chinese Buddhist translation, Xuanzang has conventionally been associated with a “new translation” style, indicating a departure from earlier “old” translations. This study reconsiders the nature of this “newness” through a corpus-based comparison of Xuanzang’s translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra with two earlier versions by Kumārajīva and Zhi Qian. The analysis reveals greater textual continuity between Xuanzang and Kumārajīva, with a higher LCS retention rate (61.68%) than that between Zhi Qian and Kumārajīva (48.71%). A symmetric LCS check preserves the direction of this result but substantially narrows the contrast. That said, textual continuity should not be equated with direct borrowing. Xuanzang often reworked inherited formulations through expansion and lexical revision, producing a translation marked by greater semantic and conceptual precision. This study argues that Xuanzang’s translation strategies were jointly shaped by target cultural norms, ideological and textual contexts, and his own translation poetics. The “newness” of his translation thus lay less in a complete break with earlier versions than in the selective preservation, expansion, and reconfiguration of inherited textual resources.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091038

Authors: Antonello Canzano Giansante Alessandra De Luca

Building on Juan Linz’s well-known distinction between political religion and politicized religion, this contribution adopts the latter perspective, which involves the instrumentalization of religion for political purposes. Within this framework, the article advances the hypothesis that a new form of religiosity is emerging from the communicative practices of certain conservative right-wing and far-right party formations. Their narratives display a strong appeal to religious values by evoking forms of identification and belonging that are largely detached from lived religious practice. Drawing on three corpora comprising electoral programs, political discourses, and interview excerpts from Fratelli d’Italia (Italy), Alternative für Deutschland (Germany), and Vox (Spain), the analysis combines a keyword-in-context approach with qualitative content analysis. The resulting communicative frame is composed of terms and concepts that function as symbolic realities similar to those of traditional religion, such as religion itself, the family, and the homeland, which are rearticulated within fully secularized contexts. This symbolic and narrative reactivation of such elements not only constitutes a strategic use of religious references but also points to the emergence of a distinctively political form of religiosity, which operates both as a stimulus for electoral behavior and as a cohesive force for highly identity-oriented party communities.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091037

Authors: Avinoam Rosenak

The field of Jewish thought seeks recognition as a distinct discipline: What is Jewish about “Jewish thought”—its language, canon, contents, or historical affiliations? A prevalent scholarly paradigm presents Jewish thought as arising from an ongoing “encounter” between Jewish elements—“internal” factors—and philosophies, sciences, and cultures—“external” factors. This article argues that the paradigm of “encounter”—however important—overlooks a constitutive dimension of Jewish thought: its character as an educational project. Its texts are oriented toward a community and audience, and toward “translation” between traditions and beliefs and changing social and cultural conditions. Argument, language, metaphor, genre, and the distinction between what may be said openly and what must remain concealed are therefore inseparable from questions of audience, identity, and communal continuity. The article proposes incorporating tools from the philosophy of education into the study of Jewish thought. It focuses on three concepts: “translation”; the tension between “authenticity” and “relevance”; and the development from “language” into “literature.” It first reexamines the paradigm of “encounter” and its reductive and creative possibilities. It then presents these educational concepts as tools for interpreting texts of Jewish thought. Finally, it reconsiders the customary distinction between objective and distanced “second-order” scholarly discourse and the more immediate “first-order” discourse of teaching and education. The argument advanced here is that the educational dimension is constitutive of Jewish thought and must therefore be taken into account in its scholarly research and teaching, with broader implications for the humanities and social sciences.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091036

Authors: Minbo Sun Zhiwen Zheng

Contemporary debates over whether Confucianism should be regarded as a religion are often constrained by the Western binary opposition between philosophy and religion. Rather than remaining within this classificatory framework, this article shifts attention to the question of how the religious dimension of Confucianism is concretely grounded and sustained. By comparing the “li (理)–mind/nature (心/性)” paradigm of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism with Wang Fuzhi’s “qi (气)–history (史)” paradigm, the article argues that the former relies primarily on inward moral experience and the self-cultivation of mind and nature, a mode that can effectively uphold a meaningful order under relatively stable historical conditions. By contrast, in response to the rupture of the Ming-Qing transition, Wang Fuzhi relocates ultimate normativity within the dynamic process of qi (气) transformation and historical practice. Through four interrelated formulations—“li (理) resides in qi (气),” “nature (性) is the principle of life,” “principle is to be pursued in concrete affairs,” and “historical reflection as verification”—he provides moral and value judgments with a stronger grounding in lived reality and historical testing. In this way, Wang effects a significant transformation in the religious dimension of Confucianism, shifting it from a mode of inward justification to one of worldly verification. His thought thus offers a more historically resilient account of how Confucian meaning can endure amid times of profound upheaval.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091035

Authors: Aikaterini Drosia

The historical institution of the female diaconate represents a critical, yet frequently marginalized, paradigm of gender inclusion and ecclesiastical leadership within early and Byzantine Christianity. This study offers a critical, interdisciplinary synthesis of biblical, canonical, liturgical, and epigraphical testimonies from the first to the twelfth century to reconstruct the sacramental status and pastoral agency of ordained women. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology, we integrate text-critical analysis of early Byzantine Euchologia such as Codex Barberini gr. 336, with social history and epigraphical data from Jerusalem and Delphi. The research demonstrates that the setting apart of these women constituted a full sacramental ordination (cheirotonia) into the major orders, rather than a minor administrative blessing (cheirothesia). The findings illustrate that deaconesses wielded distinct administrative, instructional, and philanthropic authority, operating as essential pastoral mediators. Furthermore, we argue that the historical waning (atonia) of this parish-oriented office was driven by pragmatic liturgical mutations, specifically the rise of infant baptism and geopolitical shifts, rather than dogmatic prohibitions. Recovering this institutional memory provides a historically and spiritually validated framework for contemporary dialogues aimed at reviving the female diaconate to foster equitable, participatory, and socially engaged community practices today.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091034

Authors: Małgorzata Doroz-Turek Aleksandra Repelewicz

Sacred buildings have constituted a distinctive element of urban space for centuries. Catholic churches have consistently exhibited a monumental character, regardless of the period in which they were constructed. The form of these buildings has been shaped by prevailing architectural styles, ecclesiastical guidelines, and the political context. This was also the case in Poland, especially during the most recent historical period—the post-war period, encompassing the second half of the 20th century and the early 21th century. During this time, the most significant changes in both the external form and functional organization of churches can be observed. This diversity resulted, among other factors, from the complex socio-economic and political conditions of the communist and post-communist periods, as well as from the revolutionary provisions of the Second Vatican Council. This study presents sacred architecture in two centrally located Polish cities of comparable size—Kielce and Częstochowa. An analysis was carried out of the number of churches and their forms in order to identify similarities and differences.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091033

Authors: Jacob Copeman

AI-mediated forms of guruship are proliferating across South Asia and beyond, yet they have scarcely begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. This article takes their emergence as an occasion to revisit the conceptual vocabulary through which guruship has been understood, asking what becomes of ‘guru logics’ after artificial intelligence. AI gurus are not merely technological curiosities; nor are they straightforward successors to human gurus. This article treats them as analytic provocations through which longstanding conceptions of guruship can themselves be reconsidered. Guru studies had already been grappling with many of the problems that AI now makes newly conspicuous: imitation and performativity; presence in absence; distributed and non-human personhood; the mediation of charisma; embodiment and its displacement; succession and charismatic continuity. AI therefore strains an existing conceptual repertoire while also showing what it can still do. The article develops the notions of ‘code-born syncretism’ and ‘ambient guruship’, alongside ‘Transhuman Guru Worlding’ and ‘guru cosmoi’, to explore what happens when the guru becomes generative and responsive. ‘Doctrine by interface’ further draws attention to the ways theological possibilities are shaped through the design and affordances of AI systems, while ‘simulation as method’ considers what experimental encounters with such systems might contribute to the ethnographic study of guruship. These concepts are developed through discussions of devotional recombination, embodiment, programmed continuity of the guru after death or exile, and the political economies within which AI gurus are made and encountered. The article takes up histories in which the guru has already exceeded the bounded human body, becoming distributed through multiple material and mediated forms, and examines how generative interaction and recombination rework these inherited guru logics, while letting these forms scale and personalise in novel ways. What emerges is therefore neither unprecedented rupture nor straightforward continuity, but a recursive transformation of existing forms of guruship through computational mediation. The article offers a conceptual framework and analytic repertoire for an emerging field of ethnographic inquiry rather than a completed ethnography of AI guruship. Its larger proposition is that AI gurus matter for more than what they might tell us about religion in an age of artificial intelligence. They also provide an unusual vantage point from which to return to the conceptual problems that have long animated guru studies and to ask what artificial intelligence allows us to see differently about guruship itself.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091032

Authors: Üsame Bozkurt Eyyüp Akyüz

This article offers a thematic classification of traditions attributed to the Companions (ṣaḥāba), the Successors (tābiʿūn), and early Islamic scholars and rulers concerning ring engravings, situating these inscriptions within the framework of aniconism in early Islamic culture. It should be stressed at the outset that the evidence examined here consists of later hadith compilations and ṭabaqāt (biographical) works rather than dated artefacts; the study therefore analyses how the Companions, Successors, and early authorities were remembered and portrayed within a textual tradition committed to writing in subsequent generations, not the objective material history of the earliest Muslim community. The study argues that such engravings were not merely expressions of individual preference, but rather constituted a cultural practice shaped by the aesthetic constraints generated by hadith literature’s cautious stance toward figural representation, a practice that became a shared, collective idiom. The inscriptions are examined under four thematic headings: religious expressions, reminders of death and the transience of worldly life, inscriptions conveying identity and moral counsel, and figural symbols. The expressions and symbols found on rings are then subjected to a sociological reading drawing on the concepts of collective memory, symbolic capital, and productive constraint, within the paradigm of material religion. The findings indicate that figural motifs were at least partially present in the early period, and that written inscriptions subsequently came to occupy a dominant position. This transformation demonstrates that the aniconism in hadith did not merely suppress visual imagery, but functioned as the generative force behind a distinctive symbolic idiom centered on the letter and the word. Furthermore, drawing on Birgit Meyer’s notion of sensational forms, it argues that the ring bound the sacred to sensory experience through legally regulated matter: the prophetic preference for silver over gold, copper, and iron; the Abyssinian stone; the turning of the bezel toward the palm; and the pressure of the seal into clay. Aniconism thus operated not only as a rule about images but as a regime governing the material, tactile, and even olfactory life of a wearable object. While scholarship on Islamic aniconism has focused primarily on monumental art, architecture, and manuscript illustration, this study redirects attention to ring inscriptions as an underexplored domain of material culture, showing that ring inscriptions, though largely overlooked, are informative witnesses to Islamic culture and theology at the most intimate scale of everyday devotional and political life.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091031

Authors: Alfredo Culleton

The journal retracts the article titled “Loving Sorcery (Hechiceria) in the Andes of the 18th Century” (Culleton 2026), cited above [...]

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091030

Authors: Laura Nuño Gómez Lara Martínez de Aragón López

This article analyses female genital mutilation (FGM) from an interdisciplinary perspective, with particular attention to its identity-related dimension and to the interaction between culture, religion, exclusion, and legal responses to violence against women. The study examines the evolution of its treatment and public perception, from the relative invisibility characteristic of early anthropological approaches within Western public and political agendas to its progressive recognition as an extreme form of gender-based violence. Methodologically, it is based on a documentary and comparative analysis of normative instruments, institutional reports, and specialised academic literature. As a specific contribution, the article develops the category of “absolute or totalising otherness” to explain identity-based exclusion and the particular vulnerability of women and girls simultaneously exposed to forms of exclusion based on sex, culture, race, religion, and migration status. The analysis identifies several barriers to eradication, including the lack of comparable data capable of assessing its actual prevalence, proposals advocating the medicalisation of FGM as a purported lesser evil, and dynamics of exclusion in host countries that may reinforce reactive identities and re-signify the value of identity-based rites of passage. The findings further suggest that the persistence of FGM depends not only on these factors, but also on the narratives that sustain or challenge the practice, within which religious discourse acquires particular significance. However, the position adopted by religious spokespersons, leaders, and institutions remains ambivalent: they may provide an argument or alibi that sacralises the rite or, conversely, serve to challenge the false belief that it constitutes a religious mandate, thereby excluding the practice from the moral and religious order.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091029

Authors: Scott Edward Hendrix Meghri Doumanian

In the modern world, free will as it is understood in Christian traditions is a complicated and contested topic. These debates are often reflective of those Islamic scholars had in the early centuries of the faith. In ninth-century Baghdad, these discussions were intimately connected to debates about celestial influence and predictive astrology, which had an indirect impact on the Latin West; when it came time for Christian scholars to recover the learning of Antiquity through contact with their Islamic neighbors, they were immediately drawn to astrology—which meant they had to contend with the rejection of the discipline by Patristic writers such as Origen and Augustine on the grounds that it conflicted with free will. Therefore, scholars such as Albert the Great turned to Islamic writers such as Abu Ma’shar, Al Kindi, and Ibn Sina to construct a defense of a discipline seen as too valuable to give up. This defense proved effective, safeguarding the study—and practice—of astrology for centuries to come in the West, down to the time of the Scientific Revolution.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091028

Authors: Miriam Rafai

This paper argues that Sacks’ approach to the environmental crisis is deeply interwoven with his critique of the individualistic society that erodes a shared sense of morality. Against this cultural climate change, the shift from “we” to “I,” he mobilises the collective powers of covenant, hope, and responsibility. By building strong communal bonds of mutual support, he insists that society can move to a covenantal society that takes responsibility for mending the world. His emphasis on a necessary yet achievable transformation lies at the heart of his environmental ethics. It is not merely our abstract task to preserve biodiversity and planetary resources for future generations. Environmental ethics also call for changing our characters and habits. In the Halakhah, he finds a religious personality matrix that calls for personal change and development, as well as a balancing approach between two extreme ideas concerning the environmental issue, an ultra-conservationist and an ultra-exploitative approach towards nature, as formulated in the Hebrew Bible and discussed in rabbinic thought.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091027

Authors: Ozgur Koca

Is ethics without God possible? This enduring question, I argue, depends in part upon a more fundamental metaphysical distinction: whether God is conceived as a being—however supreme and perfect—or as Being itself. If God is understood as a being who possesses moral perfections such as goodness, justice, and compassion, a conceptual distinction remains possible between God and the qualities attributed to Him. One may then ask whether these qualities possess an intelligibility and normative force independent of God. Within such a framework, morality can conceivably constitute an autonomous domain, opening the possibility of ethics without God. The situation changes, however, if God is understood not as a being who possesses goodness but as Being itself, and goodness as intrinsic to the actuality and perfection of Being itself. On this account, moral goodness is neither an external standard to which God conforms nor a property added to the divine essence; rather, it is grounded in the very reality of God as Being itself. Moral value and action therefore cannot be metaphysically independent of God, even when it is recognized and enacted without explicit reference to God. Ethical action—whether or not the agent recognizes its metaphysical ground—remains possible only within and through the reality of Being as such that makes agency, value, and moral intelligibility possible in the first place. This distinction allows us to separate two questions often conflated in debates about the foundations of morality: whether an ethical life is possible without belief in God, and whether ethics is metaphysically possible without God. While the former may be possible, the latter is not, if God is understood as Being itself that is intrinsically related to moral goodness. Drawing primarily on Ibn ʿArabī and the broader Akbarian tradition, this article develops this ontological approach to moral value and, in its final section, critically examines James Sterba’s arguments for the possibility of ethics without God.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091026

Authors: Arife Ünal Süngü

In Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist philosophy, riyāḍa (ascetic discipline) is generally treated as a moral and Sufi practice of purification; yet within his account of knowledge and being, it carries a more comprehensive meaning. This study examines how, within Illuminationist philosophy, riyāḍa is grounded as an epistemological and ontological necessity for the cognition of truth, the soul’s relation to the realm of lights, and the human being’s existential perfection, rather than as a merely moral–practical method of purification. The article evaluates riyāḍa as a transformative process that restricts bodily desires, reduces sensory preoccupations, prepares the soul for witnessing, and directs it from representational knowledge toward presential knowledge. Within this scope, Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, al-Talwīḥāt, al-Mashāriʿ wa-l-Muṭāraḥāt, Kalimat al-Taṣawwuf, Hayākil al-Nūr, and other related works are examined through a text-centered, conceptual, and philosophical method. Riyāḍa is discussed in relation to the distinction between baḥth and taʾalluh, presential knowledge, witnessing, tranquility, annihilation, felicity, and orientation toward the Light of Lights. The study further argues that practices such as hunger, fasting, reduced sleep, dhikr, seclusion, and silence carry a meaning beyond the regulation of conduct; they redirect cognition from the sensory domain toward inner awareness. The study concludes that, in Illuminationist philosophy, riyāḍa is conceived as an essential preparatory process for the cognition of truth, the soul’s openness to light, and human existential perfection.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091025

Authors: Craig D. Atwood

In the ancient world, the Greek word hairesis (heresy) connoted an option or school of thought, but with the rise of the Christian church it took on the meaning of false teaching, and in the Middle Ages it was redefined as willful opposition to the Catholic Church’s authority, often equated with treason. In 1415 the Czech reformer Jan Hus was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake, primarily because of his persistent refusal to acknowledge the authority of popes and councils to define orthodoxy. During the Protestant Reformation, confessional statements established new norms for orthodoxy and declared other churches heretical, and by the time of the Thirty Years War, accusations of heresy were a way to establish one’s political and religious identity. One exception was the Bohemian Brethren (also known as the Moravian Church), which emerged after the Hussite wars and faced persecution but never claimed to be the one true church. Their rejection of confessional exclusivity and state-sponsored religious persecution made them suspicious to many churches in the late medieval and early modern period. They played key roles in the two most famous ecumenical statements of the Reformation era: the Consensus of Sandomierz in Poland and the Confessio Bohemica in Bohemia. In the seventeenth century, the internationally known Moravian bishop John Amos Comenius continued to promote the Moravians’ practical ecumenism as part of his larger program of social reform and peace-making. In the eighteenth century, the Moravian Church was revived under the leadership of the Lutheran nobleman Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, who was often accused of heresy on both sides of the Atlantic in large part because of his ecumenism. Although the Moravians repeatedly affirmed their agreement with the ancient statements of Christian orthodoxy and Luther’s Augsburg Confession, their efforts to promote Christian union without violence was seen as dangerous to the social order. This paper will argue that much of the opposition to the Moravian Church in the early modern period stemmed from their irenic and ecumenical approach to Christian doctrine.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091024

Authors: Zheng Wang

The Chinese binome zhiguan 止觀 is conventionally associated with śamatha-vipaśyanā. In Chinese breath-meditation texts, however, it also refers to fixing the mind and observing the breath. Related Indic materials use sthāna/sthāpanā and upalakṣaṇā for comparable functions, although precise source terms cannot always be established. Here “translation-induced polysemy” denotes the accumulation of related translation-based associations in one Chinese expression. The native range of zhi—“to cease” and “to abide”—facilitated their overlap; the Chengshi lun’s equation of zhiguan with dinghui was a later exegetical reclassification. This article traces these developments through early Chinese meditation texts, the Chengshi lun, and the Chengshi lun yiji preserved in Haneda 182. Comparison with the Kongō-ji Anban shouyi jing and an Aṅguttara Nikāya parallel shows how “zhi means concentration, guan means wisdom” recast a procedural pair as a hierarchy of temporary suppression and definitive eradication. Haneda 182 foregrounds the treatise’s emptiness discourse in practical glosses and correlates zhiguan with scholastic path categories. This manuscript-level operation is consistent with, but does not independently establish, broader reconstructions of Mahāyāna reframing. The commentary’s uncertain date precludes a demonstrated genealogy with Zhiyi. Comparison with the Xiao zhiguan makes a Chengshi precedent plausible but nonexclusive, indicating selective convergence rather than Chengshi affiliation or direct transmission. These materials show how translation-induced polysemy supported divergent medieval accounts of meditation and liberation.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091023

Authors: Zhejia Tang Yuehua Chen

Prior to the twentieth century, Chinese academia lacked the modern concept of “religion” [...]

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091022

Authors: Sema Ülper Oktar Fehmi Ünsalan Erdal Ünal

Naming the divine exposes a structural tension: language makes the transcendent intelligible only by confining it within humanly constructed measures. Jean-Luc Marion identifies this risk as conceptual idolatry, opposing the conceptual idol to the icon, a sign that directs the gaze beyond itself rather than arresting it. This article adopts Marion’s distinction not as a genealogical claim but as a heuristic framework for examining how different traditions navigate the limits of naming, tracing how the divine name shifts from a restrictive boundary to an open threshold across three registers: philosophical negation, name and letter mysticism, and repetitive invocation. Two dimensions emerge from this typology. Philosophical negation, rooted in Greek thought and Christian apophaticism, dismantles the predicative structure that produces the conceptual idol. Name and letter mysticism and repetitive invocation, drawing on Jewish and Islamic letter mysticism and the invocatory practices of dhikr, mantra, and Hesychasm, converge instead on a different mechanism: semantic exhaustion, the progressive suspension of a word’s referential function through sustained rhythmic repetition. By placing these practices in dialogue, the article identifies structural affinities that are difficult to see from within any single tradition’s own resources, suggesting that this convergence reflects an independent structural response to a shared linguistic aporia rather than doctrinal borrowing.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091021

Authors: Sihan Wu

Faced with the crisis of self-orientation brought about by modernity, some Chinese scholars in recent years have taken jia 家 (family/home) as a core element of Confucian thought to construct a philosophy. This outlook seeks to open a possible path out of the predicament supported by Chinese cultural tradition. In this paper, we employ philosophical anthropology as a methodological platform, using the concept of the primordial phenomenon as its primary analytical tool to demonstrate that jia is the primordial phenomenon in Confucian thought, thereby articulating the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western cultures. By comparing Heidegger’s and Levinas’s discussions of the home, this paper shows that jia as a primordial phenomenon overturns the presupposition of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) in fundamental ontology and re-conceives the human being as a non-punctiform structural being, namely Jia-sein. Moreover, the two fundamental kinds of experience within jia, intimate experience and transcendental experience, reveal jia as a unified field of tension that transcends the opposition between interiority and exteriority, whereby sheng-sheng 生生 (life begetting life) is interpreted as a principle of transcendence. The world disclosed by jia is an affective cosmos grounded in the primordial trust inherent in qinqin 亲亲 (familial love) and situated in a positive fundamental mood—thus, it is an existential space that remains open to the Other and to the co-existence of the self and Other. This paper concludes that jia is a primordial phenomenon of Chinese culture; its emphasis on integration means it has never appeared in the Western intellectual tradition, which begins with separation; therefore, jia is an untranslatable concept.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091020

Authors: Zohar Maor

This essay argues that the key to understanding Franz Rosenzweig’s complex oscillation between enclosed and dialogical models of identity lies in his sustained intellectual dialogue with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Through a close reading of their 1916 correspondence and the works each produced in its wake, the essay shows that Rosenzweig’s philosophy of identity in The Star of Redemption was decisively shaped by Rosenstock’s emerging dialogical and linguistic insights, just as Rosenstock’s postwar writings were deeply informed by Rosenzweig’s conception of inherited, generational identity. Their exchange reveals a mutually formative conversation in which each thinker both appropriated and resisted elements of the other’s position. Rosenzweig retained a tension between enclosed and communicative identity, while Rosenstock sought to universalize and open the inherited Jewish model he found in Rosenzweig, purging it of its non-dialogical edges. By tracing this reciprocal influence across anthropology, theology, and theories of truth, the essay demonstrates that Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s interwar debate constitutes not a one-sided influence but a shared intellectual project. Their struggle to balance historical rootedness with openness to others offers a valuable conceptual resource for contemporary discussions of nationalism, multiculturalism, and the status of truth in polarized societies.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091019

Authors: Alexia Salvatierra

The concept of faith-based sanctuary—congregations providing hospitality and protection to those who have broken unjust laws—has its roots in the biblical passages mandating the creation of Cities of Refuge in ancient Israel. Since the early 1980s, sanctuary movements in the United States have provided refuge to asylum seekers and other immigrants facing potential deportation. The majority of those who have received sanctuary have fled the human rights crisis in Latin America. These movements have been pivotal in achieving regulatory changes in federal policy that saved thousands of lives in the 1980’s as well as saving immigrant families from separation through deportation on an ongoing basis. The popular narrative of the sanctuary movements has tended to focus on white citizens with privilege rescuing Latino/a victims. However, an in-depth examination shows that both Latino/a residents and Latino/a immigrants have played an essential and central role. Current faith responses to mass deportation efforts also involve increasingly important leadership by Latino/a residents and immigrants, largely without broader public awareness or understanding of their role. This paper focuses primarily on the contribution of migrants in the sanctuary movement, but with a particular emphasis on the majority of migrants who receive sanctuary—Latin Americans. It also notes the contribution of Latino/a U.S. residents. The reasons for including the role of Latino/a residents are twofold. First, the broader Latino/a church and community in the United States is roughly 30% immigrant; Latino/a residents are often intimately involved with the Latin American migrant community, and their contributions are intertwined. Secondly, Latino/a engagement in the sanctuary and similar movements, whether by residents or migrants, is also often unarticulated or marginalized. The reality that Latino/a resident and immigrant contributions to sanctuary movements are often invisible in the broader public narrative supports a theological distortion with negative consequences for mission and ministry. In many popular Christian education resources focused on immigration and immigrant ministry, the call to the church to witness to the love of God for the stranger is often framed as an act of hospitality While hospitality is a biblical value, a well-meaning emphasis on hospitality as the key biblical response to immigration obscures the actual and potential contributions of migrants to God’s broader mission in and through migration. This message lowers the likelihood of full collaboration between immigrant and non-immigrant leaders and churches. When the narrative is that the privileged are the savior, the leadership of the marginalized is discouraged and opportunities are missed. Conversely, 1 Corinthians 12:26–30 lays out a pattern in which God utilizes the contributions of the marginalized to inspire the church and world. When we see migrants’ engagement in risky advocacy in sanctuary movements, we see a faith that is radically dependent on God and marvelously courageous. The conversion of victims of injustice into God’s agents for transformation becomes a testimony to the power of the living God. When the world can see Christian migrants and citizens working together in power-sharing mutuality, Paul’s vision of the Body of Christ becomes visible. Applying these theological lenses to a fuller portrayal of shared leadership in the sanctuary movements can undo the damage caused by a distorted image of the sanctuary movements and can increase their positive impact. This paper utilizes a non-traditional and decolonial methodology in its inclusion of personal testimony by the author, a leader in North American sanctuary movements over the past forty-five years, in the broader context of an historical and theological analysis.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091018

Authors: Owen Anderson

This article argues that Charles Hodge’s account of free will offers a neglected alternative to the dominant contemporary binary between determinism and libertarian freedom. Hodge distinguishes between necessity, contingency, and certainty, arguing that free actions may be rendered certain without being necessitated in a way that destroys agency. Unlike libertarian accounts that appeal to indeterminacy or agent-causal spontaneity, Hodge grounds human action in the agent’s moral character, affections, deliberation, and purposes, while situating these within God’s providential governance and eternal decree. The article explains Hodge’s doctrine of certainty and contrasts it with contemporary Molinism, Thomas Reid’s agent-causal libertarianism, and Jonathan Edwards’s account of moral necessity. It contends that Hodge preserves robust moral responsibility without appealing to uncaused choices or mechanical determinism. Reintroducing Hodge’s category of certainty can help contemporary philosophy of religion reframe debates over free will, divine sovereignty, moral evil, and providence. Ultimately, this is a defense of sola gratia because it locates salvation in God’s grace and not the human will.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091017

Authors: Marina Umaschi Bers

This paper examines the Talmud as a rich, enduring source of pedagogical theory and practice. Beyond its role as a canonical legal corpus, the Talmud embeds a sophisticated pedagogical model grounded on situated learning. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it draws on chosen vocabulary to describe the teaching and learning process, identifying seven key Hebrew concepts—שִׁנּוּן (shinun, repetition), שְׁמִיעָה (shmia, attentive listening), הֲבָנָה (habana, understanding), דְרָשׁ (drash, interpretation), חִדּוּשׁ (chidush, innovation), חִנּוּךְ (chinuch, dedication), and מָסַר (masar, to transmit)—and examining their alignment with modern pedagogical theories. Second, through close readings of sugyot (thematic Talmudic units), it reconstructs core practices—chavruta (paired learning in which two learners sharpen one another through dialectical inquiry), sheilot u teshuvot (a structured problem solving technique of posing questions and answers in which meaning is co-created through sustained questioning) and chonchut (mentorship understood not as the transfer of information but as the formation of character through sustained relational encounter)—and shows similarities with contemporary learning environments such as coding playgrounds. Third, the paper organizes these concepts into a learning spiral with three intertwined goals: instruction, education, and formation. The paper argues that Talmudic pedagogy prefigures many insights of modern educational theory—including the situated learning of Lave and Wenger, the constructionism of Papert, and the dialogic pedagogy of Freire and Vygotsky—while maintaining an ethical orientation sometimes absent from secular frameworks. The Talmud, read as a living pedagogy, offers contemporary educators a model in which to learn is to become and to teach is to transform.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091016

Authors: Margaretta Patrick W. Y. Alice Chan Gord Tulloch

In 2024, five non-profits in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, along with the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy, began a study to understand spirituality among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). An earlier phase investigated how staff viewed their roles in supporting adults with IDD to explore their spirituality. The phase discussed in this article engaged with individuals with mild to moderate disabilities. We highlight six insights gleaned from interviews and co-analyst meetings with participants who participated in experiences that supported the exploration of their spirituality. In addition to the six insights, we conclude that participant engagement supports the model of spirituality as connections to self, others, nature, and the transcendent, points to the need for spirituality to be included in the Canadian social determinants of health, and highlights the need for organizations in the community living and disability service sectors to provide more opportunities for the people they serve to engage with and express their spirituality. The study also highlights how adults with IDD reject narratives of fragility and resist hierarchical controls that make decisions for them and prevent them from exploring and expressing this aspect of their lives.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091015

Authors: Qiuli Li

This study examines the relationship between “image” (xiang 象) and “simulation” (xiang2 像) in Qian Yiben’s theory of “simulating images” (xiangxiang 像象) and argues that this relationship constitutes a reconstruction of how cosmic principle (li 理) becomes manifested in human affairs. The central problem this study addresses is the precise meaning of “image” and “simulation” in Qian Yiben’s thought: what does it mean for “images” to “simulate,” and how does this bridge the gap between the hidden dao of Heaven and Earth and human affairs? Qian opposes both the view of taking “images” as “imaginable approximation,” and “principles abstract truths to be grasped apart from images.” Instead, he insists that “images” and “simulation” form a unity: “images” refer to simulations, and “simulation” is the process by which principles are embodied in human life. Therefore, Qian Yiben proposes his theory of “simulating images” on three interconnected perspectives. Cosmologically, “images” are generated throughout the interaction of yin and yang and realized through the human heart/mind (xin 心). From the perspective of cultivation, “knowing images as simulations” guides the practitioner from observation to profound, inscrutable and wondrous insight as divinities. Practically, “simulation” culminates in the practitioner’s active embodiment of the dao through participation in the three powers (sancai 三才, Heaven, Earth, Humanity); one “establishes the dao through oneself” (dao zi wo er li 道自我而立), thereby participating in the ceaseless creation and generation of the cosmos. Qian’s theory thereby reveals the religious and metaphysical dimensions of late-Ming Yijing scholarship.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091014

Authors: Jorge Botelho Moniz Grace Davie

This Special Issue represents an epistemological turning point in the study of secularization in Europe, moving beyond the “subtraction narratives” of classical theory to interrogate the persistent, yet altered, presence of the sacred in this part of the world [...]

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091013

Authors: Szabolcs Nagy

For historical reasons, the Kingdom of Hungary was one of the most confessionally diverse states in Europe. The rapid spread of the Reformation, the exceptional religious pluralism of the Principality of Transylvania, and the Habsburg-era repopulation of territories reconquered from the Ottoman Empire produced a durable multi-confessional society in which different denominations often lived side by side within the same communities. Against this background, the religious affiliation of children born into mixed marriages became one of the most contentious church–state issues in nineteenth-century Hungary. Although Act LIII of 1868 sought to regulate the matter by assigning children to their parents’ denominations according to sex, many Catholic priests continued to follow canon law, requiring reversales or baptizing children contrary to the provisions of civil law. These practices—known in Hungarian public discourse as “re-baptisms” (elkeresztelés)—generated prolonged political, legal, and theological disputes involving the Catholic hierarchy, Protestant churches, the Hungarian government, and the Holy See. This article examines the historical origins of the controversy, the theological foundations of the Catholic position, the development of the reversalis system, and the political conflicts that culminated in the Hungarian Kulturkampf of the 1890s. It argues that the dispute was not merely a denominational conflict but a manifestation of the broader process of secularization, understood here primarily as the renegotiation of the respective competences of church and state in a modern constitutional order. Particular attention is devoted to the resolution of the controversy through the ecclesiastical policy legislation of 1894–1895, which introduced compulsory civil marriage and state civil registration, thereby removing the civil legal consequences of “re-baptisms” while leaving the Catholic Church’s internal doctrinal position fundamentally unchanged.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091012

Authors: Aditi Singh

This paper examines how the Nāṭyaśāstra—a treatise on drama, performance, music, gesture, and theatrical practice (circa 2nd century CE)—integrates ritual into the theory and practice of theatre. Its central argument is that ritual prescriptions in the text have several functions—they authorize performance, protect the theatrical space, and regulate the social order surrounding the stage. The paper focuses on the construction and consecration of the playhouse, the worship of stage deities, the distribution of offerings, the pūrvaraṅga (preliminary rites before performance), and the consequences attached to correct or incorrect ritual performance. By analyzing these passages, the paper shows that the Nāṭyaśāstra treats theatre as a technically complex art whose efficacy depends not only on dramaturgy, music, gesture, and rasa (aesthetic sentiment) but also on ritual acts that confer auspiciousness and guard against obstruction by divine and potentially disruptive beings. The paper, therefore, argues that the Nāṭyaśāstra sacralizes performance while also presenting ritual as one component within a broader śāstric (treatise-based) framework of theatrical practice, rather than as the whole of performance.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091011

Authors: Yunjeong Lee

This article examines Jeong Yak-yong’s reinterpretation of sindok 愼獨 as moral responsibility before Heaven. It argues that hidden intention, Heaven’s scrutiny, admonition through the moral mind, human response, sincerity, and conduct form a single structure of responsibility. Comparison with Zhu Xi shows that Jeong does not discover an inward meaning of du 獨 absent from Neo-Confucianism. His distinctiveness lies in the personal and sovereign character given to Heaven and in the way Heaven’s admonition is mediated through the moral mind. Heaven is presented not as an abstract norm but as a spiritually lucid presence that sees hidden intention, commands and cautions, and is served with reverence; yet its demand becomes known within the agent and does not determine the response. This double structure exemplifies inner transcendence: moral authority exceeds the empirical self while becoming inwardly accessible in cultivation. The article thereby distinguishes Jeong’s account from secular moral self-regulation and from a modern notion of conscience. It also acknowledges possible Christian resonances without equating Sangje 上帝 with the Christian God or reducing Jeong’s argument to Catholic influence.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091010

Authors: Marianne Servaas Wim Vandewiele

This paper argues that the wound—psychological, ecological, and ontological—is the site where human relationality breaks down and also, paradoxically, where its restoration becomes possible. Drawing on trauma theory, Georges Bataille’s anthropology of discontinuity, and Michael Bond’s account of mortality-driven withdrawal from nature, the study shows how disrelating emerges when individuals and societies retreat from the vulnerability that connection entails. Trauma freezes relational fields; fear of death intensifies the human–nature divide; and the denial of our animality produces the ontological wound at the core of human existence. Yet this wound also marks the threshold of relation. Practices of attunement, ecological participation, and collective healing reopen the possibility of continuity—not by bypassing finitude but by inhabiting it. Read alongside Boros Ladislaus’s earth-centered vision of death as belonging, these perspectives reveal the wound as the place where connection is disclosed, where the self becomes porous, and where deeper relationality can emerge. The wound that fractures relation is also the wound that connects.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091009

Authors: Timothy Stanley

The following essay argues that Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, elucidates a corrective to pragmatist deliberative philosophy. First, it begins with the book’s protagonist Rodrigues in his eventual role evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering seventeenth century Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their form of life. Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story navigates the gap between Rodrigues’s visceral suffering and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied affliction. To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. The desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between the characters’ different dispositions towards keeping quiet. In sum, the essay contends that when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091008

Authors: Mustafa Ateş

Islamic intellectual history offers little support for a general conflict between the religious sciences (tafsīr, ḥadīth, fiqh, and kalām) and the rational and natural sciences (mathematics, medicine, astronomy, physics, geography, and philosophy): Muslim scholars typically cultivated both, reading the created world as one of God’s signs (āyāt) alongside the revealed text, and a number of the tradition’s most celebrated figures, Ibn Sīnā, al-Fārābī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Rushd among them, achieved distinction in both domains at once. This article examines, through the biography and corpus of a single fifteenth-century Ottoman scholar, how religious and scientific learning were institutionally and intellectually intertwined in the early Ottoman period. Mollā ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Kutāhī (d. 838/1435) worked at a high level in both fields at once, leaving a commentary that carried Marāgha-school astronomy into Anatolia, the work for which Western scholarship has chiefly known him, and a major Ḥanafī legal commentary; his career is accordingly a direct case study of the relationship between religion and science. The study traces his two works dedicated to Sultan Murad II, the legal al-Ikhtiyārāt fī Sharḥ al-Nuqāya and the astronomical Sharḥ al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-Hayʾa. It proposes a two-stage draft/fair-copy (musawwada/mubayyaḍa) composition model based on a codicological analysis of twenty-four manuscripts of the legal work and a preliminary census of the four known copies of the astronomical commentary. The astronomical work is a commentary on al-Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ, the most widely used Ptolemaic textbook in Islamic education; the same base text was also glossed by Qāḋīzāde al-Rūmī from the same Fanārī milieu, linking ʿAbd al-Wājid to the Samarqand school. The article’s central contribution to debates on religion and science comes from an episode preserved in the Mawlawī hagiography Safīna-yi Nafīsa-yi Mawlawīyān: the Mawlawī shaykh Jalāl al-Dīn Ergun, in conversation with ʿAbd al-Wājid, deliberately invokes astronomy and mathematics (hayʾa, riyāḍiyyāt) to teach that these sciences ultimately belong to the category of “māsiwā” (all that is other than God) and that natural philosophy is a stepping stone toward self-knowledge and, through it, knowledge of God. This primary-source testimony documents a hierarchical, integrative model of natural philosophy within fifteenth-century Ottoman intellectual culture rather than an adversarial one, offering historical evidence against the applicability of the conflict thesis in this Ottoman-Islamic context and a regional, biographically documented instance of the broader integrative pattern that characterizes the classical and post-classical Islamic tradition of learning.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091007

Authors: Panayiotis Thoma

It is commonly accepted by mental health professionals who work in the area of death and grief that both the help which communities may offer to the bereaved and creativity may prove decisive factors in their recovery after loss; the article aims to introduce specific existential films to the discussion about the value of both. Communality and creativity are also key ecclesiological and theological concepts. They are integral parts of the life of ecclesiastical communities, which honor the memory of the dead and have a duty to stand by their mourning members. These concepts may therefore create a bridge between spirituality and psychology/psychiatry, encouraging church leaders and health professionals to cooperate in addressing the needs of the bereaved. In the above-described context, films like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Rachid Buchareb’s London River (2009) and the short animation film Lila (2014) by Carlos Lascano may become valuable resources. Firstly, for challenging questionable religious responses to death while also discovering beauty in natural and community life in spite of/through loss, as well as embracing the memory of the deceased through creativity. As the latter has been characterized by relevant bibliography in death studies as both a form of expressing grief and a therapeutic process, it is also a crucial calling for the faithful to remain creative in the image and likeness of their Creator. In the discussion of the films, these links between theological/spiritual and psychological/mental health perspectives are explored with regard to both preparing for death and responding to it through joint efforts or lessons at schools.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091006

Authors: Alessandro Poletto

This paper focuses on a radical claim that the Lotus Sūtra makes about itself—namely, that it contains the “whole body of the Thus Come One”—and its influence on material expressions of Lotus Sūtra worship in early medieval Japan. Iconographical strategies adopted in some of the copies of the sūtra produced in this period establish the identification between the scripture and relics by, for example, inscribing each character in a stūpa. The practice of burying sūtras, which began in earnest around the second half of the 11th century, extended this logic of identification between scripture and relic. Sūtra tubes, in which sūtra copies were stored before being buried, were at times made to reflect the symbolism of the stūpa, fashioned in the shape of jeweled stūpas or gorintō. These objects—copied sūtras and sūtra receptacles—reveal a great attention paid to discourses present in the Lotus Sūtra concerning the ontological status of the sūtra itself, but also a devotional approach that attempted to project that ontological status of the sūtra as relic onto its material forms of reproduction. The Lotus Sūtra, copied and buried, written and carved, was indeed understood, at least by some, as “the whole body of the Thus Come One.”

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091005

Authors: Andrew Owen

Freemasons in the United States have engaged in music making together to different degrees across the history of the country. Throughout the eighteenth century, it tended to occur at times of refreshment and structured meals as a means of diversion and community building. The nineteenth century gradually saw a transition from convivial songs to ritualistic songs that heightened the experience of initiation. The twentieth-century fraternity’s use of music generally followed that of society, away from communal music making and toward appreciation of recorded music by professionals or spoken word only. This article examines a few representative songs from different eras of American Freemasonry.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091004

Authors: Linda Zampol D’Ortia

This article analyzes the crisis related to garments that characterized the Jesuit mission in Japan during the initial years of the 1570s. It identifies the features of Jesuit masculinity that emerge from one of the few accounts of this crisis, a letter penned by Portuguese missionary Francisco Cabral (1533–1609), highlighting which emotional values and expressions this masculinity envisioned. By analyzing the tenets of Jesuit masculinity in Iberian countries, it then considers how these aspects were framed in relation to possible Japanese counterparts and what objectives this comparison had in the intentions of Francisco Cabral.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091003

Authors: Wenzhen Jin Kang He

The modern Chinese translation of Aristotle’s Peripatētikoi as xiāoyáo (逍遙), a foundational term in the Zhuangzi, brings two independently developed philosophical traditions into unexpected proximity. Such a convergence raises a fundamental question: how can walking and wandering contribute to spiritual transcendence? This article argues that, in both Aristotle and Zhuangzi, walking and wandering are not merely pedagogical techniques or literary metaphors but forms of bodily activity through which spiritual transformation unfolds. For Aristotle, philosophical walking develops through dialogue and habituation toward the contemplative activity of theōria, through which human beings participate in divine rationality while remaining grounded in the conditions of finite existence. For Zhuangzi, wandering unfolds as a graded movement from the natural world through qi (氣) to spiritual wandering and ultimate xiāoyáo. Bodily activity thus develops into a mode of freedom without dependence, in which the human being becomes attuned to the transformations of the Dao. Despite significant differences in their philosophical and cosmological orientations, both traditions understand freedom as a dynamic process grounded in walking and wandering. More specifically, freedom in both traditions is realised through recurrent movement between reflection and practical engagement, through dialogue and responsiveness to others and the world, and through bodily existence as the indispensable condition of spiritual transformation. By comparing Aristotle and Zhuangzi through the shared theme of walking and wandering, this article contributes to cross-cultural dialogue between Greek thought and Chinese philosophy by illuminating both their affinities and their philosophical differences.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091002

Authors: Xiaoyao Ye

Following the Meiji Restoration, Japanese Buddhism underwent a profound transformation as it confronted the rise of State Shinto, the spread of Christianity, and the emergence of modern concepts such as “religion” “civilization” and “philosophy”. Against this background, this paper examines the concept of “world literature” (sekai bungaku 世界文学) within the intellectual context of Meiji Buddhism, with particular attention paid to Ashizu Jitsuzen’s (1850–1921) discussion of the concept in Genuine Philosophy of Killing and Giving Life (1890). The paper first explores the formation of the modern religious order in Meiji Japan and the challenges Buddhism faced in redefining its social and cultural legitimacy. It then examines Ashizu’s religious thought and public activities, focusing on how he articulated the significance of Buddhism within the emerging modern public sphere and global order of knowledge, as well as the relationship between his notion of “world literature” and contemporary discussions of religion, civilization, and the emerging discourse of “world religions”. This paper argues that Ashizu’s notion of “world literature” sought to demonstrate that Buddhist scriptures possessed systematic structures of knowledge, interpretive methods, and mechanisms of transmission, enabling Buddhism to transcend national and regional boundaries and claim universal significance. At the same time, it shows that Ashizu regarded the realization of this potential as requiring Buddhist practitioners to develop new forms of learning, practice, and global propagation. By examining the tension between the inherited textual resources of the Buddhist tradition and modern Buddhism’s efforts toward global engagement, this paper reveals how Meiji Buddhist thinkers sought to reconstruct Buddhism’s position within a rapidly changing modern world order.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091001

Authors: Yaron Pasher

Battlefield preservation is commonly understood as a matter of heritage management, historical education, or cultural tourism. This article argues that its origins and enduring significance lie elsewhere. Modern battlefield preservation emerged as a direct consequence of the transformation of warfare between the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution and the levée en masse, military service became increasingly associated with citizenship, national identity, and mass participation, while industrialization provided the logistical and technological foundations necessary for warfare on an unprecedented scale. As warfare expanded, so too did its human consequences, transforming military death from the experience of a relatively small warrior elite into a shared social reality affecting entire populations. Drawing upon military history, memory studies, sociology, religious studies, and heritage scholarship, this article examines how mass warfare generated new forms of collective bereavement, ritual commemoration, battlefield pilgrimage, and historical preservation. Through case studies ranging from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War, Gettysburg, the World Wars, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, it demonstrates how expanding mobilization, industrialized conflict, and rising casualty rates produced enduring landscapes of memory. The article argues that battlefield preservation developed through a cumulative historical process linking mass warfare, mass casualties, collective trauma, commemorative practices, and the creation of commemorative landscapes. Preserved battlefields are not merely remnants of past conflicts; they are cultural institutions through which societies negotiate memory, identity, and meaning. As traditional sources of collective authority weakened in modern societies, battlefields increasingly acquired functions associated with ritual, pilgrimage, and civil religion. The expansion of warfare produced an expansion of remembrance, and the preserved battlefield emerged as one of the most enduring cultural responses to the human consequences of modern conflict.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17091000

Authors: Tomi Karttunen

This article examines how ministry formation and ecclesial leadership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) are being reshaped by 21st-century dynamics such as secularization, pluralism, and post-Christendom cultural change. As increasing numbers of theology students enter formation with limited prior church experience, the gap between academic theological education and pastoral vocation is widening. The article treats formation and leadership as an integrated analytical lens, showing how ministerial identity, vocational resilience, and leadership capacity emerge from shared theological and pedagogical processes. Comparative insights from Sweden, the Church of England, and Roman Catholic formation models sharpen this analysis. The study proposes a theologically grounded, contextually realistic model that links formation, leadership, and innovation in a mutually reinforcing way. Innovation is conceptualized as targeted, incremental development—deepened theological reflection, collaborative learning, and adaptive practices—rather than large-scale structural reform. This approach aims to be realistic and to increase the capacity of future clergy to lead mission-oriented ministry in complex contemporary conditions.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090999

Authors: Merril Silverstein Woosang Hwang Narges Hadi Seonhwa Lee Maria Teresa Brown

The development of religiosity originates in earlier phases of the family and individual life course, yet few studies have investigated how early exposure to parental religiosity persists into mid- and later life. This investigation uses multigenerational data from 385 baby boom children, ages 16–26, and their parents in 1971, following children’s religious orientations into midlife and old age. Guided by intergenerational transmission and path dependency perspectives, we find that parents’ religious intensity in 1971 strengthened their children’s cognitive and behavioral religiosity in later life, mediated by children’s early and midlife religiosity. Results demonstrate intergenerational transmission followed by durability in religious beliefs and practices across decades of temporal stability. These findings suggest that parental influence creates cumulative religious momentum that carries from young adulthood through old age.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090998

Authors: Shirly Natan-Yulzary

This study explores the poetic formulation of justice and retribution in the Aqhat Epic. ˀIlu, the supreme god of Ugarit, designates the goddess ˁAnatu “impious in heart,” yet he neither prevents her murder of ˀAqhatu nor punishes her overtly. The narrative contains no judicial scene and no central governing deity who assumes the role of explicit divine adjudicator. Nevertheless, one may ask whether the story is shaped by a guiding mechanism of justice, comparable to certain biblical models of retribution, and what conception of retribution emerges from it, illuminating the relationship between gods and humans. The article highlights multiple instances showing that the narrative weaves a complex web linking transgression and consequence, in which acts of violence, desire, and rebellion give rise to corresponding consequences. These consequences manifest not only as visible punishments—such as the loss of the bow, the breaking of wings, and the curses upon implicated agents—but also in subtle reversals and ironic patterns accessible primarily to the audience. The moral order is neither absent nor declarative; rather, it is mediated through poetic formulations. Retribution unfolds on two interrelated levels: through overt narrative events and through a covert rhetorical structure that forges connections by means of repetition, key words, wordplay, and thematic symmetry. The study employs contextual close reading, supplemented by comments on the character roles. The conclusion reached is that the mechanism of measure-for-measure functions in the Aqhat Epic as a structuring narrative device, and that a sense of justice emerges through the convergence of human and divine agency.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090997

Authors: Atila Kartal

This study employs a qualitative research design to examine cultural values concerning marriage and family through Turkish proverbs and to analyze how these values intersect with theological meanings. Situated at the intersection of folklore and Islamic ethics, it explores how oral tradition articulates, transmits, and regulates the values, norms, and moral boundaries associated with marriage and family life. According to the findings, proverbs portray the family as a foundational institution imbued with sacred significance, while marriage is construed as a normative form of life that protects the individual from moral, social, and emotional fragmentation. This discourse accords with Qur’anic and Prophetic principles that encourage marriage and associate family life with a consciousness of servitude to God. The study further indicates that, in Turkish proverbs, women are imagined as central figures who sustain domestic harmony, contribute to family well-being, and shape the moral fabric of the household. One of the study’s most significant findings is that polygyny, although recognized in Islamic law as a conditional legal dispensation, is treated in Turkish proverbs through a reserved and often critical cultural discourse. Recent empirical findings indicate that traditional attitudes retain a notable degree of continuity under modern social conditions. Within this framework, the study examines cultural understandings of marriage and family reflected in Turkish proverbs in relation to religious norms and Islamic family ethics, with particular attention to the relationship between oral culture and religious and moral frameworks of meaning.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090996

Authors: Róbert Paic Gusztáv József Tornóczky Thomas G. Plante Attila Szabo

Background: Census data in Hungary indicate a substantial decline in declared religious affiliation, with Christian identification falling from 74.4% in 2001 to 42.5% in 2022, underscoring the need for culturally validated measures of religious faith. Methods: This study examined the psychometric properties of the Hungarian versions of the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire (SCSORF-10) and its 5-item short form (SCSORF-5) in a cross-sectional online sample of 430 participants (Mage = 22.28, SD = 9.23). Results: Confirmatory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure for both scales, with acceptable support when considering the full pattern of indices, but with elevated RMSEA as a limitation. All models were estimated with the mean- and variance-adjusted weighted least squares estimator (WLSMV) on polychoric correlations, under which fit improved markedly for the SCSORF-10 (CFI = 0.992, TLI = 0.989, SRMR = 0.040, RMSEA = 0.080). Modification indices identified a single interpretable residual covariance between the two explicitly devotional items, which did not alter the solution and was not retained. Measurement invariance across gender was tested with the sequence appropriate to ordered categorical indicators, and configural, threshold, threshold-and-loading, and strict invariance were all supported. Internal consistency was high (SCSORF-10: α = 0.95, ω = 0.95; SCSORF-5: α = 0.89, ω = 0.89). Convergent validity was demonstrated by strong associations with spiritual well-being, while correlations with self-esteem were weak, providing limited discriminant evidence against a conceptually distant construct. Conclusion: The short form showed psychometric properties closely comparable to the full scale; because its items are a subset of the full version, this correspondence is partly expected. Both instruments appear to be reliable and valid for assessing religious faith in Hungary. Known-group evidence was strong: scores separated self-described religious respondents from atheists (d = 1.37) and from believing-but-not-religious respondents (d = 1.17), and the religiosity category accounted for 27.5% of score variance, whereas scores were unrelated to gender and age.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090995

Authors: Minji Jeon

Recent archaeological evidence indicates that Gandhāran wine culture and Buddhist communities shared the same social and material environment. However, surviving evidence does not permit direct reconstruction of lay Buddhists’ drinking practices. Grounded in source criticism, this study combines contextual historical interpretation with comparative textual analysis to examine Gandhāran wine culture, the application of the precept against intoxicants, and the Sarvāstivāda theory of partial undertaking of the five precepts at distinct evidentiary levels. Archaeological evidence situates Buddhist communities within Gandhāra’s wine-producing environment. Vinaya materials clarify criteria of fermentation, intoxicating properties, and intended use. The Abhidharmamahāvibhāṣāśāstra and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya illuminate Gandhāran views on lay status and selective undertaking of individual precepts. The analysis identifies concern with intoxication (mada) and heedlessness (pamāda) as the normative basis for applying the precept and examines how Buddhist affiliation and wine culture could coexist within the same society. It posits no direct causal relationship between wine culture and either relaxation of the precept or debates over partial undertaking, synthesizing independently derived findings only where they are mutually compatible.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090994

Authors: Ariel Gross Leore Sachs-Shmueli

Time governs human experience, yet human beings continually seek to govern time. Within Jewish mysticism, time functions as a foundational and elusive dimension of human experience, serving as a dynamic arena for theosophical speculation, theurgical action, and spiritual transformation. In this context, the influential nineteenth-century Hasidic work Bnei Yissachar by Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Shapira of Dinov (1783–1841) occupies a unique position, offering a systematic and nuanced theology of sacred time. While previous scholarship has recognized the importance of sacred time in his thought, this study uncovers a complex reciprocal temporal mechanism that balances two dialectical poles: cosmic subordination and human mastery. Through a close reading of Shapira’s homilies, this article demonstrates how he navigates the tension between fixed, pre-ordained divine temporal matrices, typified by the linguistic and numerical hidden structure of the Sabbath, and active human agency capable of reshaping the qualitative influx of time, illustrated by the sanctification of the New Moon and the Passover Seder night. By integrating Lurianic kabbalistic frameworks, gematria, and linguistic ontology with embodied ritual practices, Shapira reframes the Jewish calendar as an interactive, experience-oriented relationship between the human and the divine.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090993

Authors: Stine Madsen Kvaløy Oddgeir Synnes Anne Austad

Psychotropic medication is widely used in the treatment of severe mental illness, yet its impact on spirituality—understood as relating to the transcendent—remains underexplored. This qualitative study examines how individuals who have reduced or discontinued medication experience and navigate spirituality. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven former inpatients, and data were analyzed thematically within an existential–phenomenological framework. Participants described diverse spiritual and extraordinary experiences intertwined with symptoms and medication use. They navigated these by managing medication as a double-edged sword that both protected and numbed spirituality; by attempting, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of their experiences within “illness” or “spirituality” frameworks; and by seeking relational support. The findings suggest that tapering psychotropic medication may be not only a pharmaceutical process but also an existential and spiritual one. Mental health services may enhance recovery by acknowledging spirituality, engaging with patients’ meaning-making around extraordinary experiences, and recognizing the complex role of medication while making room for ambiguity, uncertainty, and mystery as sources of existential hope.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17090992

Authors: Clayton Crockett

This article reconstructs ecological theology in terms of energy transformation and proposes a theological ontology in which God is redefined as Change. Here the conception of energy is influenced by New Materialist philosophies of dynamic matter, including newer understandings of physics, thermodynamics and biology. This eco-theology is linked to Korean Minjung theology, where the idea of Minjung as a crowd or mass of people is extended beyond human beings. The article advocates an ontological eco-poetic theology informed by the tradition of American Radical Theology that risks our inherited conceptions of God and works to transform and reconstruct them both poetically and ontologically.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080991

Authors: Mariusz Chrostowski

This article maps research on artificial intelligence (AI) in Christian Religious Education (CRE) during the first phase of rapid development following the widespread adoption of generative AI. A scoping review was conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, the Open Digital Theological Library, and IxTheo, supplemented by Google Scholar. Included were full-text English-language publications from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2026 that addressed AI in Christian educational, catechetical, theological–educational, or formative contexts. The final corpus comprised 23 publications. Data were charted by publication type, geographical and educational context, main topic, and key claims or findings. The results show that the field is recent, methodologically heterogeneous, and not yet well consolidated, but that the emerging debate is organised around four inter-related strands: didactic potential and personalisation, ethical–technical limitations, anthropological–theological reflection, and systemic, institutional, and cultural–geographical conditions. The literature is marked by a tension between AI’s didactic potential and concerns regarding its ethical, theological, anthropological, and institutional implications. The review contributes a thematic synthesis that clarifies why AI integration in CRE requires not only educational innovation but also theologically informed, pedagogically mediated, and context-sensitive frameworks for religious formation. Significant gaps remain, including limited empirical and longitudinal research, insufficient attention to students’ and parents’ perspectives, cultural and linguistic contexts, and a lack of religion-specific, empirically tested didactic models. The review concludes that future research should move toward longitudinal, practice-based, and theologically grounded models for AI use in CRE.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080990

Authors: Hilary Ndu Okeke

The Catholic view of suffering is fundamentally optimistic, rooted in the belief that God uses pain for a purposeful end. In this context, suffering refines character, builds endurance, and fosters hope. Rather than being meaningless, suffering is seen as both an ethical and metaphysical reality. The theology of the Cross provides the foundation for understanding suffering within Christian doctrine and practice. It shows that religious history centres on Christ, even when human expectations differ from the divine will. The Cross is viewed as the ultimate revelation of a God present in suffering, not in worldly power. This perspective challenges efforts to understand God solely through reason or merit and demonstrates that true wisdom may appear as folly to the world. The paradox of the Cross gains existential meaning by transforming an instrument of shame and death into a symbol of divine strength and victory in Christ. This paper argues that suffering serves a redemptive purpose, encourages spiritual growth, and reveals the divine will amid human experience, offering the promise of eternal victory. It also affirms the patristic tradition that suffering is inseparable from humanity’s fallen nature in Adam and from the redemption achieved through the Cross of Christ. Thus, the Cross represents the self-emptying of Christ, or kenosis, and stands as the purest expression of theology, which must remain undiluted.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080989

Authors: Merlijn Verduin

As ecological crises intensify—characterized by the collapse of familiar ecosystems and vanishing of ancestral landscapes—growing numbers of people report experiences of ecological grief: mournful responses to loss of cherished more-than-human lives and environments. This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles existing ontological narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling, and relating. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a liminal state which facilitates spiritual reimagining and renewal. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Heideggerian phenomenology with Dagara and Ubuntu philosophy, the essay conceptualizes ecological grief not as a retreat into despair, but as an invitation to reorient within the more-than-human world, thereby scrutinizing existing and persisting habits of separation and linear progress. It subsequently examines how spiritual and symbolic expressions of eco-grief can help to articulate notions such as affect, reciprocity, and care in an eco-centric manner. By explicitly incorporating underrepresented perspectives and aligning contributions across cultural and spiritual spheres, the paper explores how moments of spatial and existential rupture may be approached in a novel manner, thereby bridging existing eco-grief research gaps and framing spiritual notions as a generative force within the realm of ecological engagement.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080988

Authors: Grzegorz Chojnacki

The article reflects on the care for the work of creation within Benedictine spirituality and within the broader tradition of the Cistercian Order. It seeks to demonstrate that monastic spirituality, though developed in a pre-modern context, contains enduring theological and ethical intuitions that remain relevant for contemporary ecological reflection. The starting point of the analysis is the Rule of Saint Benedict written by Benedict of Nursia, which, although it does not employ the modern vocabulary of ecology or environmental ethics, nevertheless articulates a coherent vision of human life characterized by reverence, moderation, and responsibility toward the created world. Particular attention is given to key spiritual and anthropological dimensions of the Benedictine tradition, such as attentive listening (obsculta), humility, moderation, stability, and responsible work, expressed synthetically in the principle ora et labora. These elements are interpreted not only as monastic disciplines shaping individual and communal life, but also as forming a relational anthropology in which the human person is understood as fundamentally embedded within a network of relationships with God, other people, and creation. In this sense, Benedictine spirituality already implies a non-exploitative attitude toward the natural world. The article then examines how concern for creation has been deepened and concretized in the spirituality, institutional practice, and historical development of the Cistercian Order. Drawing on selected Cistercian documents as well as contemporary monastic reflections, the study shows that care for the natural environment is inseparably linked with spiritual attentiveness to God, interior silence, openness of heart, and readiness to serve. The Cistercian tradition, with its emphasis on simplicity of life, manual labor, and harmonious integration with the surrounding environment, develops these Benedictine intuitions in a particularly concrete and historically embodied form. From this perspective, a pro-ecological attitude is not interpreted merely as a reactive response to contemporary environmental crises, but rather as a structural consequence of a theologically grounded vision of reality. It emerges from a deep relationship with God as Creator and from a sense of entrusted responsibility for creation understood as a gift rather than as an object of domination. Ecological sensitivity is thus presented as an intrinsic dimension of monastic spirituality rather than an external adaptation to modern concerns. The main research question of the article is: to what extent and in what way do Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual traditions provide theological, anthropological, and ethical foundations for an ecological attitude toward creation within the framework of contemporary integral ecology. To address this problem, the study employs qualitative research methods grounded in theological inquiry. The primary method is textual analysis of the Rule of Saint Benedict and selected Cistercian documents, complemented by theological–hermeneutical interpretation aimed at identifying key spiritual principles and their implicit ecological implications. In addition, the study applies a historical–critical perspective in order to situate monastic sources within their original cultural and theological context, as well as a comparative theological approach, which enables a dialogue between classical monastic spirituality and contemporary ecological theology. These methods are used not only to reconstruct historical meanings, but also to interpret monastic texts in light of contemporary debates on integral ecology, sustainability, and the ethics of responsibility for our common home. In this way, the article highlights a significant continuity between monastic wisdom and modern ecological reflection, showing their mutual capacity for enrichment.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080987

Authors: Yaoping Zhang

Book 1 of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia places cult, ritual failure, religious performance, and divine signs at the opening of the collection. This article examines how the book’s received organization guides the evaluation of human action. It argues that Book 1 presents a graded field of religious judgement. Religio and neglecta religio provide the clearest opposition; simulata religio and superstitio are more ambiguous; and auspices, omens, prodigies, dreams, and miracles acquire force through human response, narrative outcome, and public confirmation. The analysis combines structural reading with close examination of key cases. Because 1.2–1.4 survive only in late epitomes, it distinguishes between the explicit evaluation of 1.1, the less secure boundary cases of 1.2–1.4, and the fuller sign narratives of 1.5–1.8. Book 1 thus provides an opening framework in which ritual practice and responses to divine signs become objects of ethical and historical interpretation.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080986

Authors: Rajmund Porada

This article examines the role of theological language in ecumenical dialogue, arguing that Christian division is not only a doctrinal or institutional problem but also a problem of mutual intelligibility. Theological language functions both as a bearer of revelation and as a marker of confessional identity; therefore, concepts such as “justification”, “Church”, “tradition”, “sacrament”, and “communion” often carry historically shaped meanings that may sustain misunderstanding between Christian traditions. Drawing on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the article presents theological language as a dynamic space of interpretation, encounter, and transformation rather than as a fixed system of definitions. It then analyses selected conciliar, bilateral, and study documents, including Unitatis redintegratio, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, and Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today, as differently situated instances in which inherited confessional languages are clarified, recontextualized, or rendered mutually intelligible. Against this background, the article proposes the category of communio linguarum, understood as a communion of theological languages capable of mutually recognizing the same faith without reducing legitimate diversity. The model is tested through differentiated consensus, a shared rereading of contested sources, and the renewed reception of inherited formulations. Its implementation requires hermeneutical humility, semantic discernment, reciprocal translation, and ecclesial reception.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080985

Authors: Mark Joseph Zammit

This article proposes that synodality is grounded in two inseparable theological realities: baptism and ecclesial care. While contemporary studies frequently interpret synodality through the categories of participation and communion, this study argues that care should be recognised as one of its constitutive foundations rather than merely its pastoral expression. Baptism incorporates believers into Christ, establishes the dignity of the People of God, and calls every Christian to participate actively in the Church’s mission through shared discernment and co-responsibility. Care, rooted in God’s saving relationship with humanity and embodied in the ministry of Jesus, gives historical and relational expression to this baptismal identity by shaping communities marked by listening, accompaniment, mercy, and service. Through engagement with the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, the teaching of Pope Francis, and the Augustinian perspective of Pope Leo XIV, the article presents synodality as the Church’s enduring way of living, discerning, and witnessing together in service of the Gospel and the world.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080984

Authors: Merve Yiğitoğlu Mustafa Yiğitoğlu

The question of when human life begins is one of the fundamental issues at the intersection of religious ethics, law, and bioethics. This article examines the legal status of the embryo and abortion in Islamic and Jewish legal traditions through a comparative approach. The study analyzes primary religious sources, including the Qur’an and Hadith in Islam and the Torah and Talmud in Judaism, together with classical legal interpretations and contemporary scholarly debates. Using a comparative legal and textual methodology, it explores key concepts such as the gradual status of the fetus and ensoulment in Islamic law, as well as the position and legal status of the fetus in Jewish law. The findings indicate that both traditions regard the embryo as a developing form of human life worthy of protection, yet they differ regarding the stage at which full legal and moral status is attained. In Islamic law, fetal protection acquires greater significance following ensoulment, while contemporary discussions increasingly emphasize the importance of fertilization. In Jewish law, full legal personhood is generally associated with birth, and the fetus is understood primarily in relation to the mother. These differing approaches lead to distinct legal outcomes in matters such as maternal health and fetal abnormalities. The study concludes that, despite their differences, both traditions seek to balance the protection of fetal life with the preservation of the mother’s life and well-being.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080983

Authors: Chinedu Nwadike

The “Lord’s Prayer” is a popular Christian prayer. Notwithstanding variations between Mtt. 6:9–13 and Lk. 11:2–4, it has traditionally guided and inspired a range of religious and social activities. Its exceptional status is because it was formulated and taught by Jesus Christ. Using a critical textual and non–exegetical approach and by applying theological and sociological analysis in the Catholic/Orthodox tradition between the prayers in Mtt. 6:9–13 (Lk. 11:2–4) and Jn. 17:1–26 (traditionally named the “High Priestly Prayer”), this research shows that the early editor or redactor who titled Mtt. 6:9–13/Lk. 11:2–4 the “Lord’s Prayer” inadvertently bequeathed a misnomer. In contradistinction, the prayer (if that title must go to just one of Jesus’ prayers) that deserves that title is Jn. 17:1–26 because its rich contents encapsulate what Jesus Christ is all about: soteriology, eschatology, and evangelical sociology. Furthermore, the radical social implications of this prayer due to its pragmatic and paradigmatic emphasis on love, unity, collaboration, and mutual acceptance inevitably resonates with the crisis–ridden modern world. It is recommended that Mtt. 6:9–13/Lk. 11:2–4 be re–titled, while Jn. 17:1–26 is rightly crowned the “Lord’s Prayer.” The Lord’s Prayer should also receive more attention in Christian faith–praxis and the Holy Mass.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080982

Authors: Mikael Stæhr Brorson

Does God laugh? This article is a systematic theological discussion of divine laughter and its implications for human laughter. Firstly, I define laughter in contrast to humour and the comical, and I present the most common theories of laughter. Secondly, I use Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to discuss laughter in relation to Christianity, and I hint at a possible concept of divine laughter. Thirdly, I unfold this idea of divine laughter, not least by drawing on the phenomenon of Easter laughter (risus paschalis), and I outline its implications for human laughter and mockery.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080981

Authors: Bon-Su Ku

This study contrasts the Ganhwa Seon (看話禪) practice theories of Dahui Zonggao, Gaofeng Yuanmiao, and Mengshan Deyi with the focused attention/open monitoring (FA/OM) model proposed by Lutz et al. and the three-family model developed by Dahl et al., both of which are meditation classification frameworks based on cognitive mechanisms. Although these two frameworks have served as standard models in comparative meditation research, their criteria are based primarily on the sati tradition of Theravāda Buddhism and on Tibetan meditation and therefore have difficulty fully accounting for the principles of East Asian Seon practice. Using the Dahui Pujue Chanshi Shu, Gaofeng Yuanmiao Chanshi Chanyao, and Mengshan Heshang Fayu Lüelu as primary sources, this study compares Ganhwa Seon with the two meditation frameworks along five axes: attentional structure, core mechanism, the status of faith (信心), patterns of progression, and epistemological premises. The analysis shows that the huatou, as a conceptually irresolvable question, is neither a determinate object of FA nor the absence of an object characteristic of OM. Yiqing (疑情) operates not by stabilizing attention but by continuously deepening the question. The process by which yiqing condenses into a mass of doubt (疑團) eliminates the very separation between observer and object and thus differs from the investigation-based self-inquiry of the deconstructive family. Faith constitutes the basis on which yiqing arises, and therefore classifications organized solely around attentional functions have difficulty capturing this constitutive relationship. Progress in practice likewise has a nonlinear structure, involving not the gradual automatization of a technique but a leap into sudden enlightenment (頓悟) through the crisis of the silver mountain and iron wall. The cognitive crisis here is not an incidental by-product but an intentionally designed mechanism. Furthermore, the Eight Don’ts (八不得), by excluding introspective observation and rational analysis, indicate the need for a new approach to existing research methodologies that have presupposed introspective self-report. In conclusion, this study proposes that Ganhwa Seon be treated as a distinct unit of analysis in comparative meditation research. Rather than replacing existing classification frameworks, this proposal aims to broaden and supplement their attentional-function-based classification axes toward a more pluralistic classification model.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080980

Authors: Tien-Sheng Pan Wei-Hsian Chi

Modern healthcare systems, grounded in the logic of Western natural science, compartmentalize the mind and body, thereby privileging physical phenomena while excluding non-scientific or metaphysical understandings of illness. Within this context, Taiwan’s flourishing body–mind–spirit movements represent an important counter-discourse that challenges biomedical reductionism by reasserting the unity of corporeal and spiritual. Drawing on ethnographic research of the contemporary Taiwanese spiritual organization GW (pseudonym), this study examines how its teachings and practices articulate an alternative ontology of illness and healing. GW interprets certain ailments as manifestations of karmic or spiritual disturbances, and advocates meditative discipline, and bodily training as a means of restoring balance. The group’s framework situates the body not as a passive object of treatment but as an active site of transformation, reviving the Chinese tradition of self-cultivation. The analysis argues that GW exemplifies a modern revival of the tradition of self-cultivation within a scientifically oriented society.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080979

Authors: Gisun Kang

This study explores the role of labor as Buddhist practice within the Korean bhikkhuni sangha, with particular attention to ulryeok (communal labor). Bhikkhuni is not a term for a general female Buddhist practitioner, but a technical Buddhist term referring to a woman who has formally undertaken full ordination (a fully ordained Buddhist nun). Unlike ordinary labor, which is primarily aimed at livelihood, Buddhist labor in the context of the Korean monastic community integrates personal practice with communal life. This study, drawing on the Madhyama Āgama, Vinaya regulations, and Baizhang Huaihai’s maxim “A day without work is a day without food,” examines how the Buddha’s participation in communal labor is depicted in early Buddhist texts and how such practices were institutionalized and interpreted within the Vinaya tradition. Furthermore, by comparing the duty assignment system of the Sarvāstivāda Vinaya with the duty roster system of the Yongsangbang at Unmunsa Monastery, the study explores how traditions of labor practice have been transmitted and reinterpreted within the specific historical and cultural contexts of Chinese and Korean Buddhism. The findings show that communal labor (ullyeok) functions to sustain both communal life and spiritual practice, operating as a form of collective discipline within the Korean monastic tradition. Principles of the early Vinaya tradition remain reflected in Unmunsa’s organizational system today, demonstrating that interpretations of Buddhist labor practice formed in historical contexts continue to shape contemporary Korean monastic culture.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080978

Authors: Hodaya Samet Har Shefi

This article proposes that Levinas’s philosophy of language constitutes a response to the collapse of linguistic structures in the wake of the Holocaust. Instead of attempting to repair or restore a pre-rupture metaphysics, Levinas establishes a new ethical grammar of openness rather than totality. Through a novel interpretive reading of Levinas grounded in Wittgensteinian philosophy, particularly the critique of private language (a connection Levinas does not explicitly articulate), this article argues that the rejection of private language functions as the structural foundation for the recovery of the language of proximity. The article examines three focal points where this ethical grammar is revealed: suffering, memory, and the proper name. Regarding suffering, the cry establishes an appeal constitutive of ethical responsibility; regarding memory, the transition from representational to immemorial grounds meaning in heteronomous command rather than community; regarding names, both God’s and the human names become traces of irreplaceable singularity. The discussion culminates in fecundity as a grammatical solution to linguistic collapse, a structure in which asymmetry becomes the fundamental relation between human being and Other, realized through interpretation and the Oral Torah. Levinas thus demonstrates that responsibility to the Other remains not an external addition to language, but its logical and grammatical foundation.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080977

Authors: Henning Wrogemann

The topic of “intercultural hermeneutics” has gained increasing attention since the 1990s. In the German-speaking world, missiologist and scholar of religion Theo Sundermeier (b. 1935) called for a “hermeneutics of difference” in his book “Den Fremden verstehen” (1996). The present article outlines key concepts of Sundermeier’s approach but identifies a significant gap regarding the theory of power. While a theory of power is absent from Sundermeier’s hermeneutics, the author has developed intercultural hermeneutics as “discourse semiotics”, which he further elaborates in this essay. The author argues that Michel Foucault’s theory of power—specifically its emphasis on the diffuse nature of power—has led to the introduction of stereotypes within various postcolonial studies approaches (like Edward Said in his book Orientalism); the assertion of “Othering” has, in effect, made understanding the “stranger” nearly impossible. Drawing on the work of Herbert Paul Grice and James S. Coleman, the article calls for a theory of power grounded in action theory and illustrates the significance of this approach through an example. The thesis is that a theory of power grounded in action theory is required as a basis for an intercultural and interreligious hermeneutics in order to falsify and avoid postcolonial stereotyping.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080976

Authors: Serhat Gültaş

One of the most fundamental and debated issues in the history of Sufism concerns not only the nature of mystical experience but also its epistemic value, its authority-generating capacity, and its normative legitimacy. Experiences expressed through kashf (unveiling), ilhām (inspiration), presence, witnessing, and annihilation have never been entirely rejected within Islamic thought, yet they have never been considered an unlimited or uncontrolled source of truth. This dual stance has shaped both internal Sufi debates and external critiques. Classical kalām and legal traditions approached mystical experience cautiously, emphasizing its subjectivity, fallibility, and non-generalizability. In contrast, the Sufi tradition defended unveiling and inspiration as integral to religious life. Modern scholarship, however, has often examined Sufism through universal theories of mystical experience or metaphysical and institutional frameworks, leaving its epistemological limits underexplored. The Naqshbandī tradition is notable for framing mystical experience within a tawḥīd-centered ontology, a cautious epistemology, and disciplined adherence to the Sharīʿa. This framework also allows reconsideration of the relationship between Sufism and ethics, presenting mystical experience as a bridge between transcendence and practical action. This article examines early modern Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī thought through Khwāja Bāqī Billāh (d. 1603). Drawing on his own writings, it analyzes the onto-epistemological structure of mystical experience, arguing that Bāqī Billāh grounds it in a tawḥīd-centered ontology, treats it as fallible and non-binding knowledge, and preserves the Sharīʿa as an indispensable normative criterion. Thus, Sufism emerges as a disciplined ethical horizon connecting transcendence and moral action.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080975

Authors: Dimitri Kepreotes

This article examines the understanding of paideia in the writings of Photios of Constantinople (c. 810–893) and argues that his educational vision cannot be reduced to literary cultivation or the preservation of classical learning. While modern scholarship has frequently emphasised Photios’ role in transmitting the intellectual heritage of antiquity, less attention has been given to the anthropological and theological framework within which he interpreted that inheritance. Through an analysis of his Myriobiblos, Amphilochia, letters and homilies, this study demonstrates that Photios understood education as the complete formation of the human person through the harmonious cooperation of body and soul. Classical philosophy, literature and aesthetics are valued not as autonomous disciplines but as instruments serving a higher theological purpose. In Photios’ thought, the Hellenic ideal of paideia undergoes a thorough Christian adaptation, recalibrated by doctrines of creation, incarnation, resurrection and deification. His anthropology is reflected in his understanding of virtue, ascetic discipline, beauty and cultural inheritance. The article argues that Photios’ engagement with the classical tradition was neither antiquarian nor merely apologetic but rather one of the most sophisticated syntheses of classical culture and revealed theology in the middle Byzantine period.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080974

Authors: Brian Siu Kit Chiu

Contemporary pastoral theology has increasingly absorbed the categories and methods of counseling psychology, yet this turn often leaves unexplained the theological ontology of the pastoral caregiver. This article develops a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between Pauline theology, counseling psychology, and the pastoral theology of Witness Lee (1905–1997), proposing an ontological-participatory account of Christian shepherding. After surveying the therapeutic turn and major psychology–Christianity integration models, the study examines Lee’s reading of Paul’s pastoral pattern—nursing mother, exhorting father, and slave of Christ—and his interpretation of “shepherding according to God” (κατὰ Θεόν) in 1 Peter 5:2 as participation in the life, nature, and shepherding activity of the Triune God. Building on Lee’s doctrine of practical deification—believers becoming “God in life, nature, expression, and function, but not in the Godhead”—this article argues that pastoral care is mediated through persons constituted with Christ who minister divine life through cherishing, nourishing, and mutual shepherding. Placed into dialogue with counseling psychology, this vision yields convergences in empathy, presence, and holistic care, alongside tensions concerning anthropology and the telos of human transformation. The article offers an ontological-participatory framework that situates the descriptive achievements of the human sciences within a richer Pauline vision of participation in the Triune God’s ongoing shepherding ministry.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080973

Authors: Tanya White

Irving Greenberg (b. 1933), among the most influential American Jewish theologians responding to the Holocaust, consistently describes his theological approach as “postmodern”—emphasising the breakdown of absolutes, fragmentation, and the failure of modern certainties. This article argues that the label is misleading. Through a reading of Greenberg’s foundational concepts—the voluntary covenant, tzelem Elokim, the assumption of power, and tikkun olam—set against the conceptual apparatus of continental postmodernism and classical American pragmatism, we will show that Greenberg’s theological method and normative conclusions align far more closely with the pragmatist tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Where continental postmodernism tends toward deconstruction and the dissolution of normative claims, Greenberg’s thought exhibits characteristic pragmatist motifs: fallibilism without nihilism, pluralism without relativism, and a robust meliorism oriented toward world repair. His dictum that “pluralism is an absolutism that knows its limits” echoes William James’s pluralism rather than Derridean deconstruction, and his post-Holocaust ethic of power directly resists postmodern suspicion of agency. Reading Greenberg through the lens of American pragmatism offers a new perspective on post-Holocaust Jewish theology and clarifies how distinct intellectual traditions shape theological responses to catastrophe.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080972

Authors: Haiyan Xing Shuyi Jia Dongzhi Sangji

This article examines how patients and their relatives in contemporary Xibo families come to understand whether shamanic healing has “worked.” Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2026 in Qapqal Xibo Autonomous County, Yili, Xinjiang, it analyzes two closely observed healing rituals performed by the same shaman for two members of one family: a mother suffering from severe emotional distress and her adolescent son during a period of intense educational pressure. Drawing on Thomas Csordas’s tripartite framework of procedure, process, and outcome, the article relocates the analysis of ritual efficacy from the individual patient to the family as a relational unit. Three arguments follow. First, participation in healing is driven less by individual belief than by family responsibility, obligation, and affective reciprocity. Second, the family does not merely host the ritual but actively organizes, sustains, and helps confirm it. Third, efficacy is recognized incrementally through shared observation, retrospective interpretation, and everyday relational adjustment in the months and years following the ritual, rather than being determined now the ritual ends. Understood in this way, contemporary Xibo shamanic healing persists not as a survival of premodern medicine, but as a family-borne mode of acting, waiting, and making sense of uncertainty.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080971

Authors: Carl O’Brien

Augustine’s writings are characterized by his opposition to (primarily) three heretical and schismatic groups: the Manichaeans, the Donatists and the Pelagians (although De Haeresibus addresses a much greater range of heresies), as well as criticism of Jerome (within his own communion). This provides the opportunity to demonstrate that Augustine did not adopt a consistent approach towards different heretical groups. Starting with his determination of what constitutes a heretic in De Haeresibus, this article analyzes Augustine’s concept of the Church’s unity and the ecumenical approaches which he adopts towards certain heretical groups to preserve that unity. The article analyses a range of Augustine’s writings, including his correspondence with Jerome, considering the manner in which he engages with his religious opponents, the communication strategies which he adopts in order to further his agenda and how this functions against the background of Augustine’s view of ecclesiastical unity (particularly his understanding of the Church as the body of Christ). The article demonstrates Augustine’s ecumenical overtures to his opponents and his pursuit of “charitable correction” and how this relates to his attempts to employ religious coercion against them with support from the secular authorities, while also demonstrating how Augustine subjected himself to the type of rigorous self-examination which he demanded from his opponents.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080970

Authors: Lionnell Smith

This essay theorizes Black prophetic soundwork as a rhetorical framework through which sonic Blackness operates prophetically—not merely as cultural expression or aesthetic resistance, but as a sacred technology of ancestral communion and communal transformation. Drawing on scholarship centered on sonic Blackness, African cosmological frameworks, and the Black prophetic tradition, the author argues that Black sound, music, and musical instruments function as prophetic vessels that transgress linear time, invoke ancestral presence, and contest the spiritual colonization enacted by white Christian hegemony. Through an analysis of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (2024) and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), the essay demonstrates how Black prophetic soundwork enacts two defining rhetorical moves: prophetic rupture, through which sound collapses colonial temporality and makes ancestral presence experientially real, and prophetic witness, through which sound contests white Christian hegemony and affirms African spiritual traditions as living, authoritative forms of Black agency. Ultimately, the author introduces Black prophetic soundwork as an original contribution to Black rhetorical theory that expands existing scholarship on Black prophetic rhetoric into the sonic domain, offering scholars a heuristic for examining how Black sonic practices function prophetically across diverse cultural contexts.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080969

Authors: Alexander G. K. Salakpi

It has become taboo for a parent today to say “no” to a child. Children grow in this “supposed” freedom and child rights, and then some assume an attitude of always having their own way, a character devoid of “home wisdom”, also called “common sense”. It is only their way that matters; others must bow to them. They become arrogant, proud, selfish, insensitive, irresponsible, and lack initiative; simply put, they mold themselves into “beasts”. It is only when this beast of a child turns on their parents that they realize something went wrong and needs to be corrected, which is often too late. This adage has already applied: “it is easier to bend a tender tree than an old one”. In this sacred text, Luke 15:11–32, a father displayed an attitude, which causes the mind to inquire why he consented. Why did the father allow the son to have his way, knowing quite well that the son’s reasoning was wrong? Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm of the day. In the text, the son returned, but today, many children are so consumed in pride, self-righteousness, and arrogance that even when confronted, they will not agree that they are wrong. Others, who realize their abject situation, fail to make amends for fear of being laughed at, which is pride, and they perish in the process. This paper uses narrative criticism within the context of African biblical hermeneutics to explore the reason behind the father’s attitude and the wisdom behind the son’s final acceptance of his situation that motivates him to return. These reasons, this paper hopes, will help serve as a remedy.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080968

Authors: Menghang Yang Kuifeng Zhai

Jigan (寂感), derived from the Book of Changes, which states “when remaining in serene stillness without stirring, it attains universal penetration once stirred by resonance (jiran budong ganer suitong 寂然不動感而遂通).” It describes the profound subtlety of the Zhouyi. On the other hand, Jizhao (寂照) is a Sinicized Buddhist interpretation denoting the non-dual integration of true suchness and prajñā wisdom. Jigan developed into an ontological framework during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), while jizhao took shape during the Wei-Jin period. Philosophically, both manifest a non-dual substance-function structure “quiescence as resonance” and “quiescence as illumination.” They jointly serve as the foundational model for mind-nature cultivation and spiritual transcendence. From this theory of cultivation, however, divergent spiritual aspirations of Confucianism and Buddhism. Confucianism elucidates the principle of universal oneness of all things through quietude-resonance, pursuing the spiritual realm of sagehood. By contrast, Buddhism penetrates through self-attachment and dharma-attachment via quiescent illumination, thereby detaching from all karmic conditions, and manifests Prajñā. Confucianism integrates the practice of jigan into its ritual education, sacrificial ceremonies and daily disciplinary norms, rendering it a practical pathway for sustaining the cosmic-ethical order and generating ritual authority. Buddhism implements jizhao in meditation, precepts, and monastic life, constructing an enlightenment-oriented sacred community. Jigan and jizhao represent two distinct paths of religious transformation and spiritual attainment. This paper compares how both emanate from the ontological state of “serene stillness without stirring” into practical cultivation manifested as “resonance penetrating all things” or “simultaneity of illumination and function”, and ultimately shape divergent modes of sacredness and forms of social integration. While jigan and jizhao reveal a structural convergence in the cultivation theories of Confucianism and Buddhism, they also demonstrate disparate orientations in their spiritual aspirations.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080967

Authors: Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar

While intercultural and interfaith dialogue in education is often framed in terms of tolerance, mutual understanding, active listening, and coexistence, these approaches often remain pedagogically underdeveloped. They do not sufficiently address the interpretive processes through which individuals negotiate meaning across cultural and religious differences. This article explores Ta’wil (تأويل) as a pedagogical hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue. Rooted in Arabic Islamic intellectual traditions, Ta’wil is reconceptualized not merely as a method of textual interpretation but as a hermeneutics of return that seeks to recover the underlying purpose, first principle, or Ḥaqiqa that gives coherence to meaning. Through conceptual analysis, the study traces the etymological, philosophical, and Qur’anic foundations of Ta’wil. It draws on classical Muslim scholars, including Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, as well as the Qur’anic narrative of Moses and Al-Khiḍr. It argues that Ta’wil functions as a dialogical practice that moves beyond literalism by negotiating ambiguity and reconciling competing perspectives. How can Ta’wil be reconceptualized as a pedagogical hermeneutic for intercultural and interfaith dialogue in higher education? The article further situates Ta’wil within broader intercultural and interfaith conversations by identifying its resonance with parallel philosophical and theological traditions concerned with first principles, teleology, and the pursuit of truth. The paper advances a pedagogical model that operationalizes Ta’wil for higher education through three epistemological anchors: textual evidence, contextual teleological coherence, and intended meaning. The article proposes a pedagogical model with learning outcomes, implementation guidelines, and an assessment rubric. It concludes that Ta’wil contributes to a culturally responsible pedagogy through which educational encounters can move from the narrow paths of tension and misunderstanding toward the open terrains of deliberation, negotiated meaning, and deeper forms of understanding.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080966

Authors: Euclides Eslava Jonathan Acosta

This article reconstructs the historical–theological genealogy linking the Second Vatican Council to the synodality promoted by Francis and continued by Leo XIV, through two fundamental mediations: the conciliar reception carried out at the Second General Conference of CELAM, held in Medellín in 1968, and the development of the Theology of the People within the Argentine Episcopal Conference. The central thesis holds that the contemporary origins of synodality—understood as a way of being Church rather than a management method—can be traced back to Vatican II and have taken on distinctive features in the Latin American pastoral and theological itinerary. The study employs two complementary methodological approaches: a genealogical historical–theological method for the first two sections, based on intertextual criticism of primary sources, and a theological-systematic method for the third, oriented toward analyzing the challenges of the synodal process in its dimensions of sensus fidei fidelium, decision-making, and structural conversion. The results show that the categories of the Theology of the People—people, culture, history, and popular piety—offer specific hermeneutical resources for articulating the participation of the faithful in ecclesial processes of discernment that inform decision-making within the Church, and that the Latin American tradition constitutes a contribution to the contemporary ecclesiological debate on synodality.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080965

Authors: Doha S. Abdelgawad

Is an Islamic modern polity attainable? How is it perceived, and how is it possible to accommodate a transcendental reference within modern political structures? Where is the line between the political and the religious to be drawn? This article examines these puzzles through the narratives of 48 members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. With reference to a growing literature on the notion of secularism and post-Islamism, the article examines two critical issues that are at the heart of the debate over the secularization of Islamists: (1) the stance towards the limits of the state’s legal intervention in the personal sphere, and (2) the notion of popular sovereignty and the transcendental reference of the state. By shifting attention from movement ideologues to grassroots actors, the article shows how “post-Islamist” adaptation can reflect an internally reasoned negotiation of sovereignty, morality, and authority rather than a retreat of religion from public life. It also examines that participants’ political reasoning functions not merely as an internalization of Islamic imperatives, but as a critical engagement with the limits of modern secular-democratic governance itself.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080964

Authors: Kris Ramlan Nuriyatul Lailiyah

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is entering religious communication not only through chatbots and generated text, but also through images and reels on social media. Yet research in this field has paid limited attention to what images contribute beyond their accompanying words. This article examines how AI-assisted visuals are incorporated into Indonesian Muslim Instagram accounts linked to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and what communicative work they perform. Informed by the Religious Social Shaping of Technology framework and visual-culture scholarship, the study combines qualitative digital observation with content and multimodal analysis of eleven posts from three accounts and sampled comments. The visuals were adopted selectively within established organisational, humour-oriented, and preacher-led modes of address. AI functioned through amplification: synthetic construction gave bodily and spatial form to themes of national belonging, moral criticism, santri conduct, and interreligious engagement, while enabling encounters that could not readily be photographed. These moral positions became legible through familiar signs, but authority remained with the organisation, collective voice, or public persona through which the images were framed and circulated. AI-assisted imagery is therefore best understood as situated visual mediation: it expands what religious communicators can picture without independently determining the meaning or authority of what is pictured.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080963

Authors: Weixi Li

Lin Chao-en founded the San-yi Teaching (三一教) during the late Ming Dynasty, passing down the unique Inner Alchemy practice known as “the Nine Stages of Heart–Mind Cultivation” (九序心法), also referred to as “the Confucian System of Heart–Mind Cultivation” (孔門心法). Analysis shows that the Nine Stages of Heart–Mind Cultivation and the Confucian System of Heart–Mind Cultivation both overlap and differ, with the latter covering a broader scope. Centered on the genbei (艮背, stilling the back), the Nine Stages of Heart–Mind Cultivation and the Confucian System of Heart–Mind Cultivation present a relationship of convergence and dispersion. The cultivation method of the San-yi Teaching takes the Confucian System of Heart–Mind Cultivation as its framework and the Nine Stages of Heart–Mind Cultivation as its specific operational approach, which is a creative interpretation of the classic Confucian maxim “(the superior man) does not allow his thoughts to go beyond his position.” 思不出其位. The Nine Stages of Heart–Mind Cultivation distinctly resonates with the characteristics of Inner Alchemy in the Ming Dynasty, providing an important sample for understanding the diversity of Inner Alchemy forms during this period and a valuable reference for academic research on Ming Dynasty Inner Alchemy.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080962

Authors: Santhosh-Kumar Appu

There is a widespread interest in Gen Z today. From a religious perspective, Gen Z tend to, firstly, disaffiliate themselves from institutionalized religion, secondly, find it incompatible with reason, and thirdly, find it exclusivist. In this context, the Tamil epic Neelakesi can be read hermeneutically alongside the three phenomena mentioned above. Firstly, this epic can provide inspiration to Gen Z, who live in a quick-paced world that deprives them of inner peace. Secondly, it inspires religions to intellectually engage with the youth. Thirdly, Neelakesi calls for social justice, overcoming casteism and patriarchal demons that commodify women. This interdisciplinary study uses the hermeneutical method. Firstly, the three elements are drawn from Neelakesi. Secondly, theological foundations, reasonable to the public, are given. Lastly, the discussion is taken up to provide perspectives on how Catholic parishes, and youth groups in particular, can foster better religious practices among Gen Z.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080961

Authors: Gaetano Sabetta

This article explores Christian mission and Islamic daʿwah fī sabīl Allāh as two distinct yet structurally comparable forms of theological engagement with the world. While both concepts have traditionally been studied in relation to religious transmission, doctrinal fidelity, and institutional expansion, contemporary scholarship increasingly recognizes their broader significance as practices of ethical responsibility, public witness, and interreligious encounter. The study proposes a comparative theological framework that goes beyond descriptive comparisons to examine the underlying structures that shape mission and daʿwah. Both traditions are approached as embodied practices through which religious communities cultivate specific forms of moral agency, religious subjectivity and interaction with others. From this perspective, mission and daʿwah are not merely understood as communicative activities, but as expressions of lived socio-ethical and theological commitments. The article posits that both traditions are organized around three interconnected dimensions: divine agency, human mediation, and epistemic orientation. These dimensions provide a common analytical framework while preserving the theological distinctiveness of Christianity and Islam. By developing this comparative axis, the study contributes to comparative theology in three ways: it offers a new conceptual framework for analysis; it highlights the dynamic and self-reflective nature of both traditions; and it demonstrates how mission and daʿwah can serve as platforms for interreligious understanding, fostering meaningful dialogue and deepening theological self-awareness through engagement with religious diversity.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080960

Authors: Daniel Jesse

This article argues that The Chosen offers a popular affective Christology by transmediating the Gospel story through a sustained grammar of lament, fatigue, embodied vulnerability, and grief. Rather than treating Jesus’ sorrow as an occasional dramatic accent, the series makes tears, exhaustion, silence, withdrawal, and prayer into theological signs shaped by serial streaming and digital circulation. Using close viewing as a theological method, the article analyzes performance, pacing, mise-en-scène (the arrangement of bodies, objects, lighting, and space within the frame), sound, and gesture to show how sparse Gospel cues are expanded into a devotional portrait of Christ’s humanity. Theologically, this portrait presses on questions of incarnation, lament, divine solidarity, and the relation between Christ’s human affect and divine holiness. Read within Jesus-film scholarship, biblical transmediation, and debates over passibility and impassibility, The Chosen demonstrates how contemporary religious media can form moral and theological imagination by inviting viewers to imagine what holiness may look, sound, and feel like under conditions of grief.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080959

Authors: Edith H. G. C. Dumon

Faith-based organizations are significant but underexplored sites of cross-cultural integration in migration contexts. While scholarship has focused on migrants’ experiences, less attention has been paid to how receiving institutions navigate their own religious identity when migration-driven diversity enters their midst. This article addresses this gap by introducing the Identity in Diversity (IDiD) framework, an instrument for assessing organizational orientations toward diversity and collective identity. Rooted in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his concepts of le visage (the face of the Other) and le tiers (the third party), the framework proposes four organizational identity styles (achromatic, monochrome, rainbow, kaleidoscopic) reflecting different orientations toward difference, from functional indifference through formal tolerance to transformative encounter. The scale was validated across five studies (n > 2000) and applied in a mixed-methods study within a Catholic diocesan institution in Australia where 56.6% of staff have a migration background. Findings reveal a significant aspirational gap—staff strongly prefer the kaleidoscopic style (+0.74), while normative scores for rainbow and achromatic styles decline, indicating a demand for transformative inclusion grounded in shared vocation rather than formal tolerance. We conclude that Levinasian ethics, extended through le tiers to institutional contexts, offers a philosophically robust and empirically operationalizable foundation for rethinking how faith-based organizations respond to the ethical demands of migration.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080958

Authors: Chenye Lu

In the history of Buddhist literature, there have been two texts sharing the title Jātakastava (Birth Stories Hymn), one in Khotanese and the other in Sanskrit and Tibetan. These two texts exhibit similarities in genre, framework structure, thematic selection, and narrative logic, while diverging in the arrangement of specific materials, textual length, authorship, dissemination regions, and translation approaches. This study examines the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava—a text that has received limited scholarly attention—and undertakes a comparative analysis with the Khotanese Jātakastava to reassess the relationship between these two texts bearing the same title, as well as their associated authors and translators. Through the inclusion of stories such as the Elephant King Leaping off a Cliff and King Maitrībala sacrificing his flesh to feed the rākṣasas, the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava reinforces the sequence of the six perfections (pāramitās) and exhibits a more pronounced thematic progression in its arrangement, thus representing a concise model of classical Sanskrit hymns. The Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual text is attributed to Jñānayaśas, who may be associated with the Northern Zhou translator Shénà Yēshě 闍那耶舍. The text was translated into Tibetan by the scholar Chos skyong bzang po of the Zhwa lu school, whose word-for-word rendering style possibly reflects a grammatical and commentarial approach characteristic of the Zhwa lu school’s linguistic studies. The Khotanese Jātakastava may be seen as an expanded recension of this Buddhist hymn tradition as it existed in Dunhuang around the tenth century, while the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual version represents an abridged form that reached Tibet in the fifteenth century. The similarities and differences between the two texts reveal the inherent tension between localized dissemination and standardized compilation in the transmission of Jātaka narratives.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080957

Authors: Thinandavha Derrick Mashau

South African cities are marked by deepening social and spatial inequalities that produce exclusion, vulnerability, and contested forms of belonging. In this article, these inequalities are understood as the result of historically entrenched processes of colonialism, apartheid spatial planning, and contemporary economic exclusion that continue to shape urban life. These realities not only shape the socio-historical context of Christian mission but also expose the inadequacy of specific ecclesial forms—such as racially and linguistically differentiated synodical structures, centralised theological training institutions, and the historical distinction between “kerk” (church) and “sending” (mission), including mission paradigms characterised by a movement from institutional centers to marginalised communities under paternalistic control. This article argues that faithful participation in the missio Dei, understood here as the Triune God’s redemptive and transformative activity in the world, into which the church is called to participate rather than initiate, requires a reimagined missional ecclesiology shaped in, with, and from the margins. Framed by a broader transforming missiological paradigm and drawing on qualitative literature, this article critically engages key streams within African urban theology, missional ecclesiology, and discourses of power and marginalisation, patriarchy, and ecclesial control to interrogate how churches often reproduce dependency, paternalism, and unequal agency in urban spaces. Using the Reformed Churches in South Africa (RCSAs) as an illustrative case, this article demonstrates how inherited missionary structures have constrained the theological and missional agency of so-called mission churches—that is, churches established among Black and Coloured communities under conditions of financial, administrative, and theological dependence on historically white “mother churches”.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080956

Authors: Hyuk-in Kwon

This article reconsiders the medieval Japanese theory of the waka deity (kashinron 歌神論) through a sustained comparison of Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204) and the Tendai prelate Jien (1155–1225). Previous scholarship has tended to treat the two poets within separate analytical frames—Shunzei within Buddhist poetics, Jien within Tendai doctrinal history—leaving the structural transformation that links them largely unexamined. This study argues that Jien’s hundred-poem Sumiyoshi sequence in the Shūgyokushū can be read as enacting a systematic interiorization of the external authority structure that Shunzei articulated in the preface to the Senzai wakashū, and that this transformation can be reconstructed as a coherent religious phenomenology. Through close reading of the full hundred-poem sequence, this study proposes a heuristic sevenfold phenomenological model—Light, Voice, Wind, Wave, Knowledge, Silence, Eternity—traversed by four interlocking dimensions: the deity as soteriological consummation of the Dharma, kannō (感応, sympathetic resonance) as internal faith, hōraku (法楽) as total entrustment, and the auditory phenomenology of shinjin kōkan (神人交感). The study further proposes that this sevenfold structure can be understood as the temporal unfolding of the godai-gogyō (五大・五行) cosmology that Jien posits as inscribed in the 5-7-5-7-7 form of waka, offering a structural analogy between the pentadic grid of the verse and the experiential arc of the sequence. By grounding Jien’s kashinron in the prosodic form of waka, this study opens new methodological horizons for the comparative study of medieval poetic–religious thought.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080955

Authors: Congmin Ma Yaoping Liu

This article argues that “compassion” in the worship of Guanyin in metropolitan Bangkok is not an unchanging category as one might assume, but a religious construction generated by the dialectic of devotion, images, and the urban religious architecture. Based on a consideration of Guanyin devotion in various locations around Bangkok and the larger metropolitan area, the following study illustrates the construction, mediation, and stabilization of compassion through devotee practices, images of Guanyin, and spatial configurations necessary for access to, presence within, and experiential encounter with the religious site. Although Guanyin devotion occurs within Mahayana networks, the Chinese diaspora community, and non-monastic devotional settings, each site analyzed here can be understood as a living space where issues of religious authority, visual judgment, spatial accessibility, and bodily experience meet. Through ethnography, visual analysis, and a focus on concepts of lived and material religion, it is demonstrated that the concept of compassion does not arise from theological discourse; rather, the definition of compassion is created locally through the dynamic interrelationship between bodies, images, spatial configurations, and lived experience.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080954

Authors: Michael Mookie C. Manalili Steven J. Sandage

Spiritual care is summoned by suffering—by ‘wounds’ that are psychological, relational, spiritual, embodied, and political at once. As disciplines continue to be entrenched and siloed amidst the growing sociopolitical tensions and global crises in a decolonial age, what is at stake is the ability to care for each suffering Other in their complexity. This article offers a selective genealogy and relational integration of psychoanalysis and spiritual care (in a decolonial age). Against both clinical reductionisms and theological certainty, we argue for renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and spiritual care through a relational integration framework, both as an ethical stance and hermeneutic framework. We first trace how pastoral and practical theology have approached each ‘wound’ in spiritual care through clinical pastoral education, psychoanalytic pastoral care, practical–theological hermeneutics, and liberationist, intercultural, postcolonial, and decolonial turns. We then consider how psychoanalysis itself has undergone significant transformations through object relations, relational–intersubjective theories, existential–phenomenological approaches, and feminist, intercultural, liberationist, and decolonial critiques. Finally, we propose embodied, hermeneutical, developmental, and intercultural commitments for relational integration, further clarified through spiritual dwelling, seeking, and crucibles of transformation. These commitments orient practitioners toward more accountable forms of interdisciplinary formation, witness, healing, justice, and liberation with the suffering Other.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080953

Authors: Lyudmila Milanova Klasanova

The Buddhist Wheel of Life (bhavacakra) circulated from Tibet to Europe through Catholic missionary scholarship, becoming part of wider intellectual and artistic exchanges between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This study examines the depiction of the Wheel of Life in Agostino Giorgi’s Alphabetum Tibetanum (1762) and its possible influence on Zahari Zograf’s Wheel of Life mural (1849–1850) at the Transfiguration Monastery in Bulgaria. The presence of a copy of Giorgi’s engraving in Zograf’s collection raises questions concerning the transmission of Buddhist iconographic motifs and their role within Orthodox visual culture. The study employs an interdisciplinary approach combining historical, theological, and iconographical analysis with cross-religious comparison, informed by Raimon Panikkar’s concept of homeomorphic equivalence. The findings demonstrate that a historical channel of transmission between Tibet, Italy, and Bulgaria can be documented and that notable formal and compositional parallels exist between the Buddhist and Orthodox Wheels of Life. However, the available evidence is insufficient to establish direct artistic influence. Instead, the comparison shows that the two images function as homeomorphic equivalents, fulfilling analogous cosmological, moral, eschatological, and soteriological roles within different religious traditions. The case study further demonstrates how religious iconographic motifs circulated across cultural boundaries while preserving their distinct doctrinal identities.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080952

Authors: Nicole Danielle McDonald

Rhetorical theology, a term coined by Andre E. Johnson, is religious rhetoric grounded in the context of lived experience that produces constructs of God concerned with the practical implications of religious doctrine. For example, Johnson argues that Henry McNeal Turner’s rhetoric, “God is a Negro,” takes seriously the harmful psychological implications of the Black community serving a white God, thus illustrating how theology emerges from the lived consequences of belief. Building on Johnson’s framework, this paper proposes rhetorical theology as a pedagogical approach to build bridges of understanding when engaging with contentious topics of sex and sexuality in higher education. Students are assigned a rhetorical theology paper on a topic, such as gender roles, transgender identity, homosexuality, masturbation, or polyamory. Students argue two contradictory perspectives of the topic by applying rhetorical theology’s four key assumptions to each position: faithful persuasion, implications of doctrine, contextuality, and the invitation of the rhetor. The process develops critical thinking by examining the theological claims, socio-political contextual realities, and the practical implications of each position, regardless of the students’ personal convictions. This pedagogical practice fosters bridge-building across divergent perspectives while equipping students to engage in conversations about sex and sexuality with greater nuance, understanding, and awareness of theology’s social and political consequences.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080951

Authors: Krzysztof Leśniewski

This article examines the Filioque controversy as a thousand-year-old aporia in Roman Catholic–Orthodox relations, focusing on the 1995 Vatican Clarification, The Greek and Latin Traditions about the Procession of the Holy Spirit. It explores whether the dispute is a fundamental ontological disagreement regarding the hypostatic origin of the Spirit or a linguistic byproduct of translating the Greek term ekporeusis into the Latin processio. The study analyzes diverse theological responses to “the Clarification”. Roman Catholic perspectives investigate contemporary “reconceptions”—including simultaneous, nonsequential models and nonlinear geometric metaphors—while attempting to reconcile the “Monarchy of the Father” with the dogmatic authority of the Councils of Lyon II and Florence. Conversely, Orthodox theologians emphasize patristic rigor, insisting on a strict distinction between “Theology” (eternal life) and “Economy” (historical actions) while rejecting “Rahner’s Rule”. Ultimately, the research highlights that the unilateral canonical addition of the Filioque remains the primary ecclesiological barrier to unity. The article asserts that only deep, synodal dialogue, rather than administrative clarifications, can resolve this historical impasse and restore a common confession of faith.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080950

Authors: Nisha Daga George Kodimattam Joseph

Contemporary society grapples with diverse values and socio-economic structural differences. These differences extend beyond subtle contextual nuances and strategic considerations, intruding into one’s first-person account and preferences. From its first-order mooring, these divergences ascend to higher-order manifestations, expressing themselves in distinct political perspectives, cultural practices, and religious beliefs. While such differences inevitably give rise to conflicts, a deeper analysis reveals that the core of rising conflict often lies in sectarian differences. Although various conflict resolution mechanisms have been employed to settle disputes, they often fail to yield enduring results. In this regard, the paper proposes interfaith dialogue as a promising approach for conflict resolution and reconciliation. The paper argues that interfaith dialogue is neither a debate nor a negotiation, but a sustained endeavour to break down the walls of difference. Furthermore, to ensure substantive outcomes, the dialogue must be firmly grounded in philosophical foundations that are value-laden and universally acknowledged. Against this backdrop, the paper introduces the Jaina philosophical tradition, specifically the principle of ‘non-absolutism’ (anekāntavāda) and the doctrine of ‘qualified assertion’ (syādvāda), as a coherent framework for dialogical engagements. Focusing on epistemic decentring, conditional articulation, and non-violent involvement, the Jaina framework pushes interfaith dialogue beyond conflict resolution towards conflict transformation.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080949

Authors: Tracey Rowland

Against the backdrop of the new pontificate of the Augustinian Leo XIV, this paper offers a survey of the ideas of the leading Catholic Augustinian political theorists of the past half century who have shared an opposition to the project of synthesizing the Thomist and Liberal political traditions. The paper is not asserting that Pope Leo XIV himself holds such positions, merely that given his Augustinian affinities, and given the contemporary interest in post-liberal political thought, it may be timely to consider the Augustinian “minor voice” in Catholic and high church Anglican social theory. The paper also highlights the work of little-known or overlooked contemporary thinkers from Central Europe. Key themes are the foundations of human rights and the socio-political order.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080948

Authors: Bin You Wenjunyi Duan Timothy Knepper

Through deep intertextual analysis of Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie (Explanations on the Incarnation of God, hereafter, Jingjie), a late Ming Dynasty work by Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni, this paper explores three levels at which the text creatively interprets Confucian and Daoist thought in the inculturation of Catholic spirituality in China, also drawing implications of Aleni’s historical inculturation for the contemporary inculturation of Christianity in China today. At the Christological level, Jingjie’s opening hymn champions the “Cosmic Christ” as a universal sage-king who creates all things with benevolence, thereby establishing an ontological foundation for its spiritual theory. At the spiritual level, Jingjie’s discourse on “proclaiming benevolence for the universal edification” characterizes the “Cosmic Christ” as a sage-king or “person of ren” (仁人), thereby acculturating the moral focus of Christian “imitatio Christi” within the Chinese tradition of spiritual cultivation. And at the level of praxis, Jingjie employs the “Dao-Vessel” distinction from the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes) and the “spiritual wandering” concept from the Zhuangzi to interpret the practice of “contemplating images” (观像) as a path of “proceeding from the traces below-form to explore the spirit above-form,” transcending the pictorial medium to attain a state of “wandering with creation.” Jingjie is therefore not only a richly illustrated narrative work but also a deeply practical spiritual guide that systematically interprets Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia Spiritualia through the lens of Chinese heart–mind cultivation, offering a valuable historical case study for the profound integration of Catholic theology and Chinese culture in contemporary China.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080947

Authors: James Duncan Gentry

For Buddhists, preserving the Word of the Buddha has been intimately linked to the astrological notion of a “degenerate age,” marked foremost by the decline of Buddhism in our world and increased incidence of crises such as epidemics, famines, and wars. A tantric scripture called the Only Child of the Teachings (Bstan pa bu gcig), one of the root tantras of the Tibetan Great Perfection Heart Essence tradition, presents itself as not only the offspring of the teachings but also as “the ember of the teachings” that can reignite Buddhism during the degenerate age and, when copied, worn, and ritually recited, confront symptomatic calamities, liberate the deceased from bad destinies, and even hasten the realization of awakening. Properly enlisting the Only Child toward these aims requires careful consideration of another tantra, called Ascertaining the Crucial Point of Timing (Dus gnad nges pa), which serves as the user’s manual for the Only Child by specifying the astrological, material, and ritual elements for the Only Child’s reproduction, wearing, and efficacious deployment. This paper examines the content of Ascertaining the Crucial Point of Timing in its broader context as a lens into understanding how scriptures can generate the reproduction, preservation, and ritual use of other scriptures, particularly during times of crisis, and what this generativity between texts implies about the creation and revitalization of tradition more broadly. It includes in an appendix a preliminary Tibetan edition and English translation of Ascertaining the Crucial Point of Timing.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080946

Authors: Wiesław Przygoda

The dynamic sociocultural changes occurring in contemporary society necessitate a continuous updating of formation models and programmes for current and future pastoral workers across all Christian Churches. While the origins of artificial intelligence (AI) date back to the 1950s, its pervasive integration into the daily lives of billions globally has accelerated dramatically in the 21st century. Concurrently, digital exclusion is gradually diminishing, and virtual reality significantly impacts the spiritual practices of both individual believers and ecclesiastical communities worldwide. Since the pontificate of John Paul II, the Catholic Church has maintained a dual perspective on digital technologies, viewing them both as a potential threat to faith and as an unprecedented opportunity for evangelization. Pope Francis further intensified this dynamic approach, which continues under Pope Leo XIV, as confirmed by the encyclical ‘Magnifica humanitas’, published on 25 May 2026. This article aims to address the following research question: What constitutes the contemporary model of digital formation for Catholic pastoral workers? A substantive analysis of official 21st-century magisterial documents was conducted to address this issue. The analysis yielded a proposed framework for the required digital formation of Catholic ministers. This study is limited by the absence of empirical verification regarding the practical application of the proposed model, presenting an essential avenue for future social research.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080945

Authors: Pavel Hanes Benjamin Uhrin

This article examines how theology can engage meaningfully with secular academic and cultural contexts, focusing on the possibility of public theology within the modern university. Emerging from societies where religion was long marginalized or privatized under communist regimes, the discussion highlights the renewed struggle to reintegrate theological discourse into public intellectual life. It argues that public theology must learn to “speak faith publicly”—that is, to express religious convictions in ways that contribute to shared intellectual and moral discourse without resorting to confessional exclusivity. By comparing public theology to public philosophy, the authors highlight both the similarities and tensions between the two. While both seek to address common human questions concerning truth, value, and meaning, public theology must navigate the added complexity of grounding its insights in faith traditions while remaining open to secular dialogue. The article argues that the Beatitudes and the concept of middle axioms provide complementary theological and methodological resources for communicating Christian faith within secular higher education, as illustrated by a qualitative case study conducted at a public university in Slovakia.

Religions doi: 10.3390/rel17080944

Authors: Miriam Feldmann-Kaye

This article argues that Edith Stein, a Jewish-born philosopher who was murdered in Auschwitz despite her conversion to Christianity, has much to contribute to Bible interpretation. Rarely discussed in Jewish Studies, Stein’s Philosophy of Empathy (Einfühlung) deserves a central place in contemporary discussions of Jewish ethics and Biblical interpretation. This article makes two related claims. First, it proposes that Stein anticipated Levinas in her account of the move from philosophy to ethics. Working within the framework of phenomenology, Stein refused the idea of a ‘self’ separate from society and community. Empathy, in her analysis, is an ethical mode of access to others, which can (and should) acknowledge the other as subject. In this way, Stein proposes a thought-based foundation for responsibility that does not require an ‘exit’ from phenomenology itself. Levinas later radicalized the ethical implications of this move by describing the importance of ethical obligation, yet Stein had already shown that human responsibility ethics should become part of what religious thought should be. The article shows how Stein’s idea of empathy can guide biblical interpretation, placing her alongside Levinas and Heschel, and arguing that Empathy can be integrated into Jewish thought after Auschwitz, the site of non-Empathy, in contemporary Jewish discourse.