Search Results (143)

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. Full article

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. Full article

Janus nanoparticles (JNPs), named after the bi-faced Roman God has emerged as a hot topic in the present era of nanoscience because of their chemical, structural and physical uniqueness. These particles stand out in the crowd as they are composed of two or more faces with contrasting functional properties in the same molecule. The need for two or more functions in a single molecule that can be used in chemical, biological or physical fields, such as delivering drugs combined with imaging, is the need of the hour and JNPs open gates for addressing this issue as these self-tailored particles have found their application in various in vivo and in vitro domains. However, despite their vivid application, a larger sector of application still needs to be explored. Synthesis methods involve masking, self-assembly and microfluidics, and comparative analysis of these methods, listing their pros and cons, would assist in overcoming the difficulties in the commercialisation of these particles. Moreover, the systematic analysis of differences in their structure with reference to their functionality and characterisation methods would lead us to a better understanding of the subject. This review discusses the various synthesis strategies and their comparison, the anisotropic nature of the JNPs conferring various distinguished properties, their application in emulsion stabilisation, bio-imaging, drug-targeting, drug-delivery, and biosensing domains, the characterisation methods involved, challenges and future aspects. The future aspects section maps a few hypotheses that might be useful in expanding the horizons of usage. The novelty of this review lies in the critical analyses of the synthesis methods and characterisation. Each type of JNP has been analysed for its advantages and limitations, and probable hypotheses to address the existing challenges have been jotted down. Full article

Contemporary cinema increasingly portrays believing women as active moral agents rather than passive figures confined by patriarchal or religious stereotypes. However, scholarship on religion and film has predominantly focused on male religious figures, leaving the representation of believing women comparatively underexplored, especially in films directed by women in the twenty-first century. This paper addresses this gap by examining how female agency, religious identity, and peacebuilding are represented in three contemporary films directed by women: Wadjda (2012, Saudi Arabia), God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya (2019, North Macedonia), and Women Talking (2022, USA). These films were selected because, despite originating from distinct religious and cultural contexts—Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Protestant Mennonite tradition—they share female protagonists who negotiate patriarchal religious structures through nonviolent, relational strategies of action. Drawing on feminist film theory and the distinction between negative and positive peace, the analysis demonstrates that these protagonists move beyond stereotypical portrayals of religious women as passive or marginalized, instead enacting agency through persistence, dialogue, solidarity, and nonviolent resistance. The paper argues that contemporary women-directed cinema can function as a space for reimagining women’s religious identities and for articulating more inclusive, peace-oriented models of social transformation. Full article

This article explores spiritual formation in Scripture through moments of divine–human encounter marked by mutual availability—what the Hebrew Bible names as hineni (“Here I am”). Through a theological and narrative reading of four representative figures, Abraham, Hagar, Mary, and Paul, it argues that formation unfolds not in abstraction but within concrete, storied contexts where divine presence meets human openness and reorients identity. While hineni is a Hebrew term, this study demonstrates that the posture it names continues across the biblical canon, moving from covenantal summons and divine initiative in the Old Testament to embodied consent and conversional surrender in the New Testament. Attending to the triadic pattern of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, the article shows how place functions as a mediating context for encounter without displacing God as the primary agent of formation. Together, these narratives reveal a consistent biblical grammar of availability in which God’s prior “Here I am” evokes human response, shaping identity, vocation, and participation in God’s redemptive work. Full article

Suffering and theodicy are two interconnected concepts: while the former indicates the embodied personal experience of pain, the latter represents the theological effort to explain the existence of suffering and evil by reconciling them with the idea of a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God. From a sociological perspective, the first scholar to address the problematic relationship between these two concepts was Max Weber. The problem of suffering in Weber was linked, first of all, to the process of social rationalization, that is, to the growing predominance of formal rationality in Western social life, the ultimate outcome of which he famously described through the metaphor of the “iron cage” as the existential suffering of modern Western humanity. Subsequently, in his Sociology of Religion, he adopted the concept of “disenchantment” to refer to the cultural rationalization of worldviews as a process characterizing most Asian religions within a broader universal perspective. According to Weber’s comparative investigation, at the origin of all attempts at religious rationalization lies the same universal problem of theodicy, namely the search for an explanation capable of justifying the unequal distribution of the goods of happiness among human beings and the resulting suffering, perceived as unjust. For Weber, the paradox of theodicy consists in the fact that the rationalization of thought (worldviews) and action (conducts of life), in an attempt to confer meaning on and alleviate suffering on the basis of one of the two conceptions of salvation (rebirth or redemption), instead produces the unintended consequence of making the human condition even more vulnerable to the experience of suffering, since it comes to be regarded as morally more outrageous and intellectually more unacceptable. Later, the founders of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, essentially took up and expanded the Weberian thesis of the paradox of theodicy by showing that the second disenchantment brought about by modernity affected the rationalization of metaphysical–religious worldviews through the return of the irrational mythical–magical forces that had once been subjugated and turned into myth by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, the loss of individual freedom, reduced to a mere functional response within modern political and economic bureaucratic systems, comes to coincide with the loss of meaning of any autonomous cultural framework rationally grounded in value orientations. Habermas further developed Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom by situating the process of social rationalization within a broader paradox that illustrates the contemporary inability of colonized lifeworlds, now completely bureaucratized and technicized, to confer meaning on the subjective experience of suffering. More recently, in the so-called Anthropocene, a non-linear and non-unidirectional dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment has emerged, in which the two coexist as constitutive processes of modernity, allowing the paradox of theodicy and suffering to be reconsidered in terms of a new anthropodicy. Full article

Catullus invokes the love gods Venus and Cupid/Amor some twenty times within the relatively exiguous corpus of his surviving poems. On occasion, their names seem to be little more than metonyms for love, desire or sexual attractiveness; but the modern reader may wonder what we should make of apparently more personalized references, such as the allusion to the ‘two-faced goddess’ in poem 68, or—still more so—the despairing appeal to the gods in general that concludes poem 76. To what extent do the poems presuppose the existence of personal deities who exert control over human affairs? Or are the traditional divine names mere façons de parler, serving only as vehicles for the representation of what we would call emotions or drives? This article approaches these questions from two interrelated perspectives. Catullus’ poetry is contextualized within the intellectual currents of his era, as represented in the works of Cicero and Lucretius, both of whom are—in rather different ways—sceptical as regards traditional modes of representing the divine, but also testify to the persistence and continuing importance of the beliefs that they critique. Against this background, I consider two conflicting models of love and desire with which Catullus can be seen to operate: as a freely chosen foedus (‘pact’), for which the human partners are fully responsible; and as a divinely inflicted disease, against which the mortal sufferer has no recourse except prayer. This latter, more traditional model, I will suggest, reflects persisting ways of thinking about desire and the other passions, to which both Epicureanism and Stoicism are opposed. Full article

Unchecked artificial intelligence strengthened by large language models poses a crisis that reaches past ethics into ontology, and it demands that we reconfigure the basic categories of anthropological theology. Working by a hermeneutical–constructive method that places biblical exegesis in dialogue with philosophical thinking, this article advances three interconnected theses. The first is that contemporary AI is reminiscent of the theological hubris of the Tower of Babel narrative (Genesis 11:1–9); both instantiate a closed system of signification that forecloses transcendence by collapsing the distinction between naming and being named. The second concerns what algorithmic governance produces—what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life, a condition the biblical theology of nakedness in Genesis 2–3 can inversely illuminate, and which Simone Weil’s analysis of attention as decreative receptivity sharpens by exposing algorithmic distractedness as the spiritual antipode of contemplative openness. The third is christological: Agamben’s potentiality–impotentiality and Weil’s attention and décréation converge with the kenosis of Philippians 2:5–11 to ground an anthropology of voluntary self-emptying instead of replicable capacity. Reading imago Dei with Paul Ricœur as a dynamic process and drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, I argue that authentic existence in the algorithmic age requires a “second nakedness”, a deliberate refusal of egotistical self-assertion that reopens creaturely dependence, so that God’s grace becomes operative in the common life of humanity. Full article

The thrust of this article is to examine three key manifestations of the criteria for identifying and evaluating the status of a prophet in Jewish polemic. The first is a survey and analysis of the use by medieval Jewish and Christian polemicists of the Deuteronomic verses, setting forth these criteria with the objective of demonstrating or disproving the messianic status of Jesus. The second is the Jewish affirmation of the primacy of Mosaic prophecy, with its implications for the doctrine that the Torah will never be superseded. Here there are consequences for polemic with both Christians and Muslims. This discussion will lead us to examine the Jewish affirmation that Moses is unique as the sole prophet of Torah with primary attention to a problem that has elicited much discussion among scholars of medieval Jewish philosophy. How is it that Gersonides (1288–1344), who denied that God knows particulars, including specific human beings, was able to affirm without qualification that no prophet other than Moses would be able to achieve the status of Torah prophet? In this context, we shall be impelled to raise questions about the parameters of Gersonides’ basic position regarding divine responsiveness or non-responsiveness to human stimuli and the degree to which exegetical and theological pressures might have led him to deviate from it. In light of his uncompromising position affirming the uniqueness of Moses as a Torah prophet, we shall also have to address his atypical and apparently problematic understanding of what is arguably the most important Biblical passage in the medieval Jewish-Christian debate. Christians maintained that the so-called suffering servant in Isaiah 52:13–53:12 is the Messiah and that the description there accords perfectly with his redemptive mission. Most medieval Jews, especially in Christian Europe, responded to the Christian reading by identifying the serv-ant as the prophet, another prophet, or, most commonly, the Jewish collective. Maimonides, who lived in a Muslim environment, does use the terminology of Isaiah 52:13 in describing the Messiah; Gersonides who lived among Christians, not only does the same but, unlike Maimonides, asserts that he will be a prophet superior to Moses. Nonetheless, despite this apparently disconcerting acceptance of a position congenial to a Christian understanding, he manages to define the nature of that superiority in a manner fully consistent with the affirmation that Moses is the only possible Torah prophet and even to present it as a reason for the non-Jewish nations to abandon their faiths. Finally, we move to a contemporary development where the criteria for prophecy are invoked in a polemical context, this time that of an intrafaith polemic. Here the purported prophetic status of a messianic figure becomes a central element of the primary evidence that he is the Messiah. The belief of many, almost certainly most, Lubavitch hasidim affirms the messianic identity of the deceased Rebbe. This belief has generated an internal Jewish polemic with echoes of a key element in the historic Jewish–Christian debate. All Jewish believers in a Messianic figure, especially after Maimonides declared that the Messiah will be second only to Moses as a prophet, ascribed prophetic status to their Messiah. However, that status was not a key factor in the evidence that they cited to prove that he was in fact the Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi’s Messiahship was validated by prophecy, but the prophecy was not that of the Messiah himself. Rather, it was an explicit revelation to Nathan of Gaza, whose prophetic credentials were verified through other means, that named Shabbetai Zevi as the redeemer. Lubavitch messianists, on the other hand, have made the Rebbe’s prophetic standing the fundamental component of the proof that he is the Messiah and of the argument that Jewish law requires one to believe this. In their view, he identified himself as a prophet, issued prophecies during the Gulf War that were fulfilled, and affirmed in his capacity as a prophet that he is the Messiah. Since it is a religious obligation (a mitzvah) to accept the words of a prophet, the conclusion that he must be recognized as the Messiah follows inexorably. Full article

This study redefines Christian spirituality as an ontological transformation realized through participation in the divine speech acts of God, articulated as the perlocutionary presence of Christ. Moving beyond dominant approaches that emphasize moral formation, psychological experience, or ritual practice, the article situates spirituality within the linguistic and ontological dynamics attested in Scripture and early Christian tradition. Drawing on speech act theory as developed by J. L. Austin and John Searle, alongside theological interpretations by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Kevin Vanhoozer, the study argues that divine speech operates as a performative event that effects real transformation. Methodologically, it examines biblical narratives of naming, revelation, forgiveness, and healing as instances of performative divine discourse, and engages patristic and monastic sources—including Athanasius, Augustine, and early monastic rules—to demonstrate how early Christian spirituality was understood as participatory formation through the Word. The article proposes an interpretive framework structured by language, action, and being, in which the presence of Christ is understood not as a static metaphysical state but as a transformative event enacted through divine speech. It concludes that this ontological reconfiguration offers a constructive bridge between ancient Christian spirituality and contemporary theological reflection. Full article

Romans 8 contains Paul’s most concentrated reflection on the human person transformed by the Spirit, and at its center stands the rare term φρόνημα. Appearing only four times in the New Testament, all in Romans 8 (6 [x2], 7, 27), φρόνημα is commonly translated as “mindset”, “disposition”, or “attitude”. These translations are useful but insufficient. They risk reducing Paul’s term to a merely psychological state, whereas in Romans 8 φρόνημα names the deep orientation of the human person before God. This study argues that φρόνημα functions as an ethical and anthropological key: it expresses the inner direction of a life either determined by σάρξ or shaped by πνεῦμα. Through linguistic analysis, rhetorical exegesis of Rom 8:5–8 and 8:27, and dialogue with Jewish and Greco-Roman moral discourse, this article proposes that φρόνημα denotes the deep structure of Christian orientation: the Spirit-formed disposition from which perception, desire, obedience, prayer, suffering, and hope are reordered toward God. Full article

Life can be challenging, and for this reason all of humankind requires resilience—a capacity to cope with life’s challenges, which determines whether one can experience quality of life. This was also true for the Christian community in Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey. Paul wrote the first Corinthian letter to deal with a variety of challenges and concerns in the church, and for Paul, all these ongoing challenges and concerns mirrored their being worldly (ὡς σαρκίνοις 1 Corinthians 3:1) and being infants in Christ (ὡς νηπίοις ἐν Χριστῷ 3:1). Being worldly implies that one holds on to worldly wisdom and this is why Paul teaches them about God’s wisdom (2:6–9). He shows in this letter how this can be dealt with, namely by having the Spirit (2:10–16) and having the mind of Christ (2:16)—thus being spiritually intelligent. Later, when Titus arrived with good news about the Corinthian church, Paul wrote the second Corinthian letter to express relief and joy. In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul refers to a new creation (καινὴ κτίσις), being in Christ (ἐν Χριστῷ), and having an identity in Christ. The focus of this article is the blessings of an identity in Christ, and to interpret the Corinthian letters to understand how an identity in Christ can lead to Christian spiritual intelligence, resilience and quality of life. The method of interpretation is multidisciplinary, including socio-historical, lexical–syntactical, and theological analyses, as well as insights gleaned from psychology. It is found that an identity in Christ brings holiness, strengthens the believer, gives access to spiritual gifts, brings unity and divine wisdom, provides hope, love and harmony, and leads to resilience—all contributing to quality of life. The new identity in Christ affects the believer’s calling, values, priorities, behaviour, relationships and response to the world in different ways, which in turn can heal a broken society. Full article

This essay offers a relational reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity through perichoresis, understood as the mutual indwelling communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in which distinction is preserved without separation and unity without domination. More than a technical term of patristic theology, perichoresis names the dynamic communion that constitutes the life of the triune God. Drawing on biblical intuition and patristic formulation and engaging modern Trinitarian theologians in sustained dialogue, this essay develops a historical, contextual and practical approach that incorporates Korean cultural metaphors and Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). It argues that perichoresis functions not merely as a doctrinal safeguard but as a theological grammar that reorients ontology toward relationality and frames Christian life as participatory communion. Rather than remaining a conceptual proposal, this essay ultimately envisions a perichoretic paradigm in which life itself is understood as participation in the living communion of the Trinity. Full article

In Psalm 91, the psalmist implores Jews not to become overwhelmed by fear, promising that God will protect and deliver the faithful from the troubles that threaten them. Foremost among these, as laid out in verse 6, are “pestilences” and “plagues.” Reciting or praying this psalm and this verse has been used for centuries as a way for Jews to remain hopeful in the face of challenges, especially during times of pandemic disease. This paper details how the rabbinic literature understood Psalm 91:6 as a description of a demonic force, and describes how Jews were told to protect themselves from this force, namely through faith and trust in God and through religious observance. The paper also discusses the Jewish experience with pestilential disease, from the 14th century plague pandemic to the 19th century cholera pandemics to the 1918 influenza pandemic and to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the paper lays out how Jews have made use of Psalm 91:6 in responding to the threat of pandemics, especially during COVID-19, including through both prayer and more esoteric applications. Full article

In this paper, I contribute to the recent dialogue between anthropologists and theologians by focusing on the disciplinary self-understanding of the latter. In the first part, I present the results of an analysis of interviews conducted with thirty theologians and religious studies scholars in the Netherlands and in Germany. I argue that the disciplinary coherence of theology found in these interviews is well captured by theology’s overarching purpose of ‘discerning life lived in God’s presence’. In the second part, I try to put more flesh on the bones of this ‘theology as discernment’. I start by introducing the work of Dutch theologian Erik Borgman, whose theology exemplifies what theology as discernment might look like. I then introduce a central discussion within theologically engaged anthropology, namely that on the relationship between description and judgment. Bringing the reflections of my main anthropological interlocutor, Joel Robbins, in dialogue with Borgman’s theology, I suggest that discernment can uniquely bring description and judgment together. In the final section, I return to the first part by reflecting on discernment as theology’s disciplinary coherence, tying this to the description/judgment discussion and drawing conclusions for what this means for the distinction between theology and anthropology. Full article