Search Results (143)

This article examines the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional legacy of Caterina Vigri (1413–1463) and the formation of a “school of holiness” within the Poor Clare monastery of Corpus Domini in Bologna. Through the analysis of key texts produced within the monastic milieu—including the Libro devoto (later known as The Seven Spiritual Weapons), the Ordinazioni, the epistolary Formulario, and the Book of Visions and Revelations by Valeria Campanazzi—the study explores how Vigri’s teachings were transmitted, received, and reworked across generations of nuns. Particular attention is devoted to the centrality of obedience as the defining principle of monastic life, which marks a significant shift from earlier Franciscan emphases on poverty. The article highlights the pedagogical dimension of these writings, their grounding in Sacred Scripture, and their role in shaping a collective religious identity within an Observant context. At the same time, it situates Vigri’s spiritual program within broader developments in late medieval and early modern Christianity, including the institutional consolidation of religious life and the circulation of diverse spiritual influences. By tracing both continuity and transformation within the Corpus Domini community, the study demonstrates the existence of a sustained intellectual and devotional tradition that extended well beyond the founder’s lifetime. The “school of Caterina” thus emerges as a dynamic space of female religious authority, literary production, and theological formation. Full article

Buddhist Sunday schools were modeled on the Christian Sunday school, a form of religious education that emerged in late eighteenth-century Britain to provide literacy and moral instruction for impoverished children. Following the Meiji Restoration, Japanese Buddhism institutionalized Buddhist Sunday schools (佛敎日曜學校) for children’s moral cultivation by adapting Christian methodologies, expanding them nationwide during the 1920s and 1930s through standardized curricula. In Korea, Buddhist Sunday schools were introduced from the 1920s onward in response to the expansion of propagation centers (p’ogyo-dang, 布敎堂), the growing demand for youth propagation, and the exclusion of religious education from public schools under the Japanese colonial system. This article examines the comprehensive educational vision and operational principles of these schools—integrating graded administration, teacher qualifications, worship, and recreational activities for children—with a focus on “佛敎 日曜學校案” [Proposals for Buddhist Sunday Schools] written by Ra Un-hyang (羅雲鄕) in 1940. It further analyzes the nationwide distribution of these schools in 1940, identifying limitations such as financial precariousness, personnel shortages, and a lack of societal recognition. Nevertheless, Buddhist Sunday schools represent a significant historical milestone, as they served as a practical site where the popularization of modern Buddhism was realized and as a strategic effort for the cultivation of children and youth as future religious adherents. Full article

In the history as well as historiography of Chinese Buddhism, the tradition has often been closely associated with death-related cultural practices and ideas, an association that has frequently carried negative connotations. Early twentieth-century reformers such as Taixu famously criticized Buddhism as a religion of ghosts and funerals and sought to redirect Mahāyāna Buddhism toward engagement with an urban, modernizing society. Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhists have realized many aspects of this socially engaged vision. Yet concern with death remains deeply embedded in Buddhist life. Far from standing in contradiction to social engagement, this concern has become one of its central expressions, most visibly in the emergence of modern Buddhist palliative care. Focusing on the writings of the scholar-monk Shi Huimin, this article examines the development of Buddhist palliative care in Taiwan in response to a secular, multireligious, and rapidly aging society, with primary attention to Huimin’s conceptual work. Rather than treating death in isolation, Huimin situates dying within a broader ethical horizon that links good death to good aging, good living, and community formation. Through his reinterpretation of the Five Śīlas and his notion of a Community Pure Land, he extends prevailing concerns with dying well toward a more comprehensive reflection on everyday moral cultivation, healthy lifestyles, and communal responsibility. In this sense, the study reads Buddhist palliative care as a site that “provincializes” dominant Euro-American frameworks of spiritual and palliative care, highlighting their particular historical and Christian-inflected origins while tracing how they are reconfigured and made productive in a multireligious, secular context. By foregrounding Huimin’s conceptual contributions, this study highlights how palliative and spiritual care are localized and reworked within Taiwanese Buddhism, connecting end-of-life care to broader questions of life, aging, and community well-being. Full article

This article explores the Qurʾānic transformation of poetic travel, situating it within the broader cultural and religious context of Late Antiquity. By examining the Qurʾān’s repeated injunctions to travel and observe the landscape, the study reveals how travel is reconfigured from a poetic act of nostalgic vision into a religious epistemic practice of witnessing divine truth. It compares pre-Islamic Arabic poetic traditions, particularly the qasīda, with Late Antique Christian pilgrimage practices to demonstrate how the Qurʾān synthesizes and reshapes these modes of journeying into a vision-centered theology of travel. Full article

Christian Orthodox iconography is a fundamental element of the religious cultural heritage of many countries. Iconoclasm, vandalism, and the passage of time ruined the appearance of icons, making it difficult to recognize the depicted saints. This work aims to test the performance of 13 state-of-the-art deep learning models for the task of Christian Orthodox saints’ recognition from images of preserved wooden hand-painted icons, which has never before been reported in the literature. Additionally, this work introduces the first public image dataset (ICONSAINT—ICONographic SAINT Recognition Dataset) of saint icons for classification tasks, including 2730 annotated images of 546 icons of 123 classes. All models were tested in three experimental setups, involving a balanced part of the dataset of six classes, an imbalanced part of the dataset of 12 classes and a medium-imbalanced part of the dataset of eight classes, reporting accuracy of up to 89% with VGG19 for the balanced data, of up to 78% for MobileNet with the imbalanced data, and of up to 87% with DenseNet201 for the medium-imbalanced data. Moreover, Class Activation Maps (CAMs) were considered to highlight the regions of the input image that mostly influenced the decision of the models towards adding valuable explainability to the results through visual explanations. Full article

Introduction: The ureteral access sheath (UAS) is commonly used in retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS) to improve vision, lower intrarenal pressure (IRP), and facilitate access. However, concerns regarding ureteral injury remain. We conducted this study to evaluate the surgical efficacy and safety of a selective omission strategy for UAS use during RIRS in patients with small renal stones (<10 mm) or in cases where UAS placement is technically difficult. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included consecutive patients who underwent single-surgeon RIRS at Changhua Christian Hospital between October 2020 and April 2023 for renal or upper ureteral stones. Sheathless RIRS was performed in patients with stones < 10 mm, or in whom insertion of a 10/12 Fr UAS was unsuccessful despite successful advancement of an 8 Fr semirigid ureteroscope, and when the surgeon estimated the procedure could be completed within 2 h. All procedures used a holmium laser with a 9 Fr or 7.5 Fr flexible ureteroscope. No patients were pre-stented, and all received postoperative double-J stenting. Results: Among 55 patients, 18 (32.7%) underwent sheathless RIRS and 37 (67.3%) underwent UAS-assisted RIRS. Stone size was significantly smaller in the sheathless group (12 mm vs. 17 mm, p = 0.001). The 3-month stone-free rate (SFR) was 66.7% in the sheathless group and 62.2% in the UAS group (p = 0.745). Operative time was similar between groups (77 vs. 85 min, p = 0.154), with no statistically significant differences in postoperative pain or length of hospital stay. In the UAS-assisted group, six patients developed febrile urinary tract infection, of whom two progressed to sepsis; all recovered after antibiotic therapy. No fever or sepsis occurred in the sheathless group. On multivariable analysis, lower calyceal stone location was independently associated with SFR, whereas UAS use was not. Conclusions: In a selected cohort (stones < 10 mm or difficult UAS insertion with an expected operative time < 2 h), sheathless RIRS was feasible and showed no statistically significant differences in SFR or perioperative outcomes compared with UAS-assisted RIRS. However, due to selection bias, stone-size imbalance, and limited statistical power, these findings should not be interpreted as procedural equivalence and require confirmation in adequately powered studies with stratified/adjusted analyses. Full article

This article argues that John Calvin’s account of the church in Institutes of the Christian Religion IV is best read through the formative logic of worship. Calvin famously identifies preaching the Word and administering the sacraments as the marks of the visible church. Rather than regarding these marks merely as identifiers, this study interprets them as worship practices that shape Christian life “in-between” church and society. First, the preached Word is not simply received as information but functions as the medium through which faith is generated and sustained, forming a community tasked to bear truth publicly. Second, the sacraments operate as embodied theology: baptism initiates believers into ecclesial belonging through cleansing, renewal, and confession, while the Lord’s Supper repeatedly schools the church in remembrance, thanksgiving, unity, and mutual love. Finally, by situating the Word and sacrament within the church’s maternal nurture and the ministry of reconciliation, the article shows how worship extends beyond the sanctuary, cultivating conscience and communal practices oriented toward public peace and responsibility. In Calvin’s Reformation vision, worship is thus the hinge that links ecclesiology to social ethics without collapsing the distinction between the church and civil society. Full article

Avery Dulles, in The Catholicity of the Church, conceptualizes catholicity in terms of its vertical dimension and its horizontal dimension, articulating the principles necessary to preserve catholicity in ecumenical contexts. His work redefines the relationship between catholicity and Catholicism. In Models of the Church, Dulles integrates these two aspects through a dual ecclesiological model: the Church as Sacrament and as Community of Disciples. His ecclesiology enables the Church to engage with the secular society through concrete discipleship and public witness. Dulles’s vision, when expanded through Moltmann’s insights, offers a compelling theological model for contemporary ecumenism. Transcending mere doctrinal convergence, this model fosters a united Christian witness against secular atheism. This integrated approach advances a renewed understanding of ecclesial identity, rooted in discipleship, sacramentality, and social responsibility. Full article

This article examines how Internet technologies reconfigure human sensory experience and induce decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and theological anthropology, the study demonstrates that digital immersion amplifies certain senses (vision, hearing) while anesthetizing others (touch, kinesthesia), disrupting the sensory balance essential to integrated human perception. This sensory reconfiguration, combined with prolonged physical stasis before screens, produces a dualistic self-experience wherein consciousness appears detached from bodily existence. The analysis identifies ideological support for this phenomenon in transhumanist philosophies that reconceptualize personhood as information rather than embodied reality. Against these neo-gnostic visions, the article proposes a techno-realist framework grounded in Christian theological anthropology that affirms both technology’s formative power and the irreducible significance of embodied existence, calling for technological asceticism and practices preserving psychosomatic unity. Full article

This study reinterprets Father Rodrigues’s apostasy in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence not as a religious failure, but as a process of Christianity’s “Japanization,” analyzed within the context of postwar Japanese intellectual history. Where existing criticism often falls into the binary opposition between martyrdom and betrayal, this study introduces the perspective of individual conviction versus organizational authority. First, Rodrigues’s act resonates with Yoshimoto Takaaki’s tenkō (ideological conversion) theory, specifically defined as the “third form of tenkō.” This form represents the choice to pursue the integrity of personal conviction over obedience to an organization. This links Rodrigues’s action to the spiritual continuity of the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), arguing that the essence of his apostasy is a betrayal of the Church institution, not of faith itself. Furthermore, through the theme of the dialectic of everyday life, the study demonstrates that salvation is discovered not in the glorious death of martyrdom, but within the secular fabric of daily existence. Rodrigues’s paradoxical condition of being both weak and strong as Okada San’emon after the fumie is an extension of the Kakure Kirishitan’s survival, who maintained their faith amid secular labor. In conclusion, Endō’s literature serves as a testimony for the “cowards” and a plea for the grace to go on living. It illuminates the process through which individual faith transcends institutional authority and takes root in the indigenous Japanese way of life, thereby completing the vision of Christianity’s “Japanization.” Full article

Contemporary interpretations of psychedelic spirituality are dominated by the “mystical experience model,” which emphasizes that psychedelics can lead to well-being through bringing about ego dissolution and a unitive mystical experience. Rooted in perennialist and dualist assumptions—often derived from Christian mysticism, Vedanta, and Plotinian Neoplatonism—this framework has shaped both scientific discourse and popular understanding of psychedelic states. However, the mystical experience model is controversial: (1) secular critics consider it as too religious; (2) it is a form of mystical exceptionalism, narrowly focusing on only certain extraordinary experiences; (3) its ontological assumptions include a Cartesian separation between internal experience and external reality and a perennialist focus on ultimate reality; (4) it neglects psychedelic learning processes; (5) in the ritual and ceremonial use of psychedelics, shared intentionality and practices of sacred participation are more important than the induction of individual mystical experiences. This article proposes an alternative and complementary model grounded in theurgy, based on the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and the participatory ontological pluralism of Bruno Latour. Unlike the mystical experience model, which privileges individual unitary experiences, theurgy affirms ritual mediation, ritual competence, and both individual and collective transformation. Theurgic ritual practice makes room for the encounter with autonomous entities (framed by Latour as “beings of religion”) that are often reported by participants in psychedelic ceremonies. By examining how the theurgic framework can expand our understanding of psychedelic spirituality in a way that is truer to psychedelic phenomenology, especially the presence of autonomous entities, imaginal realms, and the centrality of intention and ritual, this article argues that theurgy offers a nuanced and experientially congruent framework that complements the mystical experience model. Framing psychedelic spirituality through theurgic lenses opens space for a vision of the sacred that is not about escaping the world into undifferentiated unity, but about individual and collective transformation in communion with a living, differentiated cosmos. Full article

From the late seventeenth century onward, the central aim of missionary Christianity in the British Atlantic was to Christianize slavery; that is, to render the institution morally and theologically acceptable within a Christian framework. This work of “amelioration” was envisioned as a gradual process, with missionaries from both the established Church of England and a host of dissenting denominations playing a central role in its advancement. Collectively, they promoted a discourse of Christian slavery that aimed both to reassure slaveowners of the compatibility between slavery and Christianity and to frame the conversion of enslaved people as a means of producing a more obedient, industrious, and morally disciplined labor force. To be sure, in promoting a Christianized vision of slavery, missionary societies were deeply complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans. Yet, ironically, the very tools they employed to pacify and discipline (biblical instruction and literacy) were repurposed to articulate a platform of resistance, ultimately contributing to slavery’s undoing. This essay employs critical discourse analysis to examine how these dynamics unfolded in two pivotal uprisings in the British Atlantic world: the Demerara Rebellion of 1823 and the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica. In both cases, missionary endeavors contributed to the counter-discursive appropriation of biblical theology that played a critical role in transforming enslaved people into agents of political change. Still, reimagining scripture was only part of the story. Crucially, it was the alignment of a new religious consciousness with unfolding political events, that transformed simmering discontent into open revolt. Full article

Adopting the theoretical traditions and methodological approaches of Chinese religious studies, this paper systematically reviews the scholarly development, theoretical contributions, and methodological characteristics of research on Korean Christianity conducted by Chinese scholars. Through an in-depth analysis of the academic literature spanning the past five decades, the study unveils the developmental logic, theoretical innovations, and prospective research directions within this field. It finds that Chinese scholarship has progressed through distinct phases—from preliminary exploration to diversified inquiry—marked by an increasingly expansive academic vision. Core findings include: in-depth interpretations of mechanisms underlying the indigenization of foreign religions, nuanced examinations of the complex interplay between religion and socio-cultural dynamics, and the construction of theoretical models for cross-cultural religious transmission. The study also highlights current methodological limitations and proposes future research strategies such as interdisciplinary integration, empirical approaches, and theoretical innovation. These efforts aim to offer fresh perspectives for the study of religious history in East Asia. Full article

In the past few decades, a growing body of literature focused on the ‘return of religion’ has added important nuance to the discussion of pluralism, religion, and violence. This paper explores these postsecular critiques through the ancient parable of the Blind People and the Elephant. It argues that secularism maintains an ontology that assumes violence which forecloses the possibility of pluralism. Recent reappraisals of mysticism are at pains to highlight its ethical and political implications. This paper puts these bodies of literature in conversation to offer a mystical basis for pluralist ethics. To this end, a particular western Christian mystic, Nicholas of Cusa, in his work The Vision of God (1453) is shown to provide a theoretical and ethical basis for pluralism. The decision to focus on his mystical work The Vision of God is because the metatheoretical question of pluralism is addressed here in how unity with the divine means unity between the members of a community, which is worked out in an ethical practice of dialogue. By engaging Cusa’s mysticism in the context of postsecular critical theory, an alternate basis for pluralism is offered that sharply contrasts with that offered by secularism. Full article

This study explores Eastern Orthodox aesthetics through a parallax lens, situating it at the intersection of theology, anthropology, and cultural practice to move beyond the icon-centric discourse. It examines how Orthodox aesthetics, rooted in the theological vision of beauty as divine disclosure, manifests in liturgical ethos, material culture, and secular artistic expression. The analysis draws on Christos Yannaras’ ethos of liturgical art, Chrysostomos Stamoulis’ exercise in philokalic aesthetics, and Timothy Carroll’s ethnographic material ecology of Orthodox Christianity, revealing beauty as an ontological event of communion and transformation. A parallax shift to Dionysis Savvopoulos’ lyrics uncovers an aesthetic eschatology, or an aesthetics of eschatology, where Orthodox themes of resurrection and festivity permeate non-ecclesial Greek culture. Employing a comparative, interdisciplinary methodology, the study integrates theological reflection, ethnographic insights, and cultural analysis. It concludes that Orthodox aesthetics is a dynamic field where beauty, truth, and eschatological hope converge, extending beyond the sanctuary into everyday practices and popular art—“incarnated” in material reality. This transdisciplinary approach reconfigures Orthodox aesthetics as a theological anthropology, offering fresh perspectives on its role in contemporary discourse and its diffusion into the public sphere, while advocating for material culture as a critical lens for future exploration. Full article