Search Results (36)

This study examines the positioning of biblical narratives within international relations scholarship, with particular emphasis on their function as cultural resources shaping identity, geopolitical discourse, and soft power dynamics. Although religion has gained increasing recognition within international relations, the extent to which scriptural narratives are systematically integrated into analytical frameworks remains insufficiently defined. To address this issue, the study employs a mixed-methods research design that combines a systematic literature review with bibliometric analysis. Bibliographic data were retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases through a structured query linking biblical terminology to diplomacy, geopolitics, and religion–politics interactions, and were analyzed using the Bibliometrix package in R. The analysis draws on two datasets comprising 135 publications from Scopus and 88 from Web of Science, spanning 1989 to 2026. The findings indicate that scholarship examining biblical narratives in international relations is moderately developed and interdisciplinary, yet remains fragmented, with geopolitical themes predominating. Biblical narratives are consistently present but are primarily embedded within broader analytical categories such as identity, discourse, and legitimacy, rather than being treated as central variables. The results further suggest that religious content is often incorporated in indirect or implicit forms, reflecting a broader tendency to approach religion as a contextual rather than a constitutive element. Overall, the findings indicate that biblical narratives function primarily as interpretive and symbolic frameworks in international relations, while their analytical potential remains only partially developed, underscoring the need for more systematic integration of cultural and religious analysis in the study of global politics. Full article

This study examines the theological structure of Tengrism, understood here as a heuristic term for the broader Tengri-centered early Turkic belief system, its historical transformation, and its continuity in post-Islamic Turkic culture and folklore from an interdisciplinary perspective. Although the continuity of pre-Islamic Turkic beliefs in later Turkish folk culture has been noted in previous scholarship, the specific mechanisms through which Tengri-centered concepts survived as implicit theological structures within lived religion, folk belief, and Alevi-Bektashi ritual–poetic traditions have not been sufficiently systematized. The research argues that Tengrism should not be understood merely as an archaic remnant of belief but as a comprehensive theological paradigm shaping cosmology, political legitimacy, ethical order, and the perception of sacredness in early Turkic societies. In this context, epic and mythological texts such as the Orkhon Inscriptions, the Epic of Oghuz Khan, the Book of Dede Korkut, and the Epic of Manas constitute the primary textual sources of the study. The research is based on a qualitative design and employs phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches. The phenomenological perspective seeks to understand the theological principles of Tengrism and the perception of sacredness within their own cultural and symbolic universe, while hermeneutic analysis interprets the continuity of symbolic and mythological elements preserved in folkloric narratives. The findings indicate that the Tengri-centered and cosmologically structured character of early Turkic religiosity did not disappear after the adoption of Islam; rather, it persisted through folkloric narratives, popular beliefs, ritual practices, and the Alevi-Bektashi tradition. These findings demonstrate that Tengrism continues to function as a dynamic theological paradigm within Turkish cultural memory and popular religiosity. Full article

The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Two interconnected objectives define the article. The first is to show shows how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,” drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, may contribute to a pluralistic conception of secularity. The second is to furnish concrete instances of secular forms of life in African societies by exploring the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity. In foregrounding African forms of secularity, the article not only challenges Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of social analysis. Ultimately, the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds. Full article

Existential, spiritual, and religious themes often evoke strong emotions in therapy, yet little is known about how clients’ emotion regulation relates to these aspects. Spiritual psychotherapy for inpatient residential and intensive treatment (SPIRIT) integrates meaning in life within a cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) framework in acute and intensive mental health care and provides an appropriate context for examining this. This qualitative study explores: (1) clients’ beliefs about expressing, managing, or suppressing emotions related to meaning in life, spirituality, or religion (MSR); (2) how emotion regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal, acceptance, and distress tolerance) are influenced by addressing MSR in therapy; and (3) whether engaging with MSR activates emotion regulation mechanisms for clients’ experienced distress. We analyzed 118 client evaluation forms and 19 semi-structured client interviews using a thematic approach informed by emotion regulation theory. SPIRIT-CBT made implicit beliefs about (MSR-related) emotion regulation explicit, and group interactions sometimes led to changes. Clients showed various regulation strategies, for example: MSR-based reappraisal, connectedness, reflection, and positive refocusing. However, emotional tension and suppression were also reported. Particularly from the interviews, it emerged that the therapy facilitated regulation mechanisms, including narrative processing, perspective shifting, sense-making, and social belonging. Focusing on MSR and existential themes addresses an important gap in mental health care and may contribute to supporting clients’ emotional recovery and overall well-being. Full article

This article presents a multilevel framework for understanding religion as operating simultaneously at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Drawing on the multilevel theory of gender as a conceptual parallel, it synthesizes existing perspectives in the sociology of religion into a coherent analytical framework. While many sociological theories implicitly recognize multiple levels, empirical research has typically focused on individual religiosity, treating religion primarily through measures of personal belief, behavior, and belonging. The 3I framework—individual, interactional, and institutional—makes this implicit multilevel thinking explicit, providing conceptual scaffolding for both theoretical development and empirical practice. The framework is illustrated through application to contemporary American religious change, revealing how apparently contradictory patterns of religious decline and spiritual persistence reflect differential change across levels. Full article

This article critically examines the evolution of EU migration policy discourse from 1989 to 2024, highlighting the shift from overt securitization to a more humanitarian and managerial framing, which still retains some securitization elements. By analyzing key policy documents, including the Hague and Stockholm Programmes, the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM), and the 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum, this paper demonstrates how migration has been increasingly framed as a technical and economic issue while still maintaining exclusionary logics. Although humanitarian language has softened, policy goals remain focused on containment, selective inclusion, and externalizing responsibility. The second part of the article explores the religious aspect of EU migration policy, arguing that, despite the formal secularism of EU institutions, religious identity, particularly Islam, is implicitly intertwined with discourses of risk, cultural incompatibility, and integration. Drawing on Peter Berger’s theory of pluralism, the paper highlights a fundamental tension between the EU’s normative claims to diversity and its implicit preference for secular Christian frameworks. The analysis examines pathways for integrating religious consultation into EU governance and its potential to address the persistent marginalization of religion as a factor in inclusion and political agency. By linking migration discourse to the often-overlooked role of religion, this article calls for a more coherent, pluralist-informed EU strategy for migration and integration. Full article

This article employs the theoretical framework of religious mediatization and a philosophical–anthropological lens to examine how various religious traditions utilize audiovisual media in the digital age to disseminate their faith and transform the religious experience. By comparing representative film and television cases from Christianity, Islam, and Eastern religions, the study analyzes how digital media reconstruct religious narratives, ritual practices, and identity, and facilitate cross-cultural faith exchange in online spaces. The findings indicate that audiovisual media have become a key arena for contemporary religious practice: they reinforce believers’ identity within their tradition while enabling different faith communities to encounter each other’s narratives, generating new understanding and spiritual experiences. Meanwhile, digital media have fostered virtual religious communities and a fan culture reminiscent of “implicit religion” (secular activities imbued with religious-like devotion), challenging traditional religious authority. Finally, from an interdisciplinary perspective, this article reflects on the opportunities and challenges of religious mediatization in the digital era, highlighting how media shape humanity’s quest for meaning and transcendence in a “liquid modernity” context. It also calls for deeper research into interreligious digital communication. Full article

Both feeling and thought operate largely through a process of associations. Some of these are learned; some seem to be transcultural. In Western art it has long been assumed that certain arrangement of sounds, shapes, and colors evoke particular emotions and ideas. Rudolph Otto applies this idea also to the experience of the “Holy,” the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” This is a unique experience, irreducible to any other. However, there is a “law of associations” by which aesthetic and moral experiences evoke the “numinous” by a kind of analogy. Otto’s analysis raises the question whether there is in fact a specific experience of “the holy.” Is religious consciousness a sui generis experience, or is it rather an interpretation of experience? Is Otto’s notion of the numinous tied to a particular stage of religion? Post-Kantian transcendental theology proposes that “depth” or “limit” experiences are implicit in consciousness, and provide the basis for a variety of associations with the ultimate mystery of existence. The divine is anticipated as infinite transcendence that is at the same time radical immanence. The implicit intentionality of the divine can be implicit or can be formulated at different levels as feeling, image, concept, and transcendental intentionality. The “sacred” is an aesthetic construct signifying heightened awareness of the mystery. Sacred spaces are places consecrated to such awareness; they can be constructed in response to various aspects of communal awareness. All such aesthetic mediations of the sacred have an ambiguous relation to religious conversion. Full article

This study aims to explore the values of character education in the Chinese animated film Three Monks. This film serves as a teaching tool, not only imparting animation principles to university students majoring in animation but also showcasing Chinese cultural philosophy and educational values in implicit, exaggerated, and humorous action design. We employed a descriptive qualitative method. A total of 73 college students majoring in animation watched the film without any prior explanation of animation principles and moral education and then listened to detailed explanations of the character education and animation principles integrated into the film. Through repeated viewing, analysis, and summarization of the storyline, character behaviors, and action design in Three Monks, the values of character education, such as religion, kindness, diligence, independence, responsibility, tolerance, self-reflection, unity and cooperation, and courage to innovate, were embodied. These values are manifested through the film’s storyline, conflicts, character actions, animated performances, and background music. We compared the students’ pre- and post-viewing attitudes based on their discussions, reflections, and course evaluations. The results revealed that conveying moral values through animated films internalized and transmitted character education among university students, shaping cultural identity and social norms. This approach enhanced students’ learning engagement and improved their learning efficiency. Full article

New Zealand has a long history of accepting refugees, with a refugee quota programme in place since 1987. New Zealand does not have a formal legislative structure for refugee resettlement. Its design and practice of the refugee quota programme are guided and determined entirely by cabinet ministers’ discretion. A significant gap in scholarly research on refugee resettlement in the New Zealand context is the highly unarticulated assumption of the secularism of the New Zealand statecraft that underpins the unregulated state–refugee relationship. This paper examines a previously confidential government document, only released at the request of the author, which provides official guidance on refugee quota selection, along with other key ministerial briefings. Interviews were also conducted with a refugee quota selection officer and a policy advisor involved in informing refugee resettlement policies. This is the first research paper that focuses specifically on refugee selection in the New Zealand context from a religious studies’ perspective. I show that the rhetoric of New Zealand’s state secularism has a significant impact on refugee quota selection, which normalizes an implicit but discursive secular order. The paper argues that refugee selection by a secular state does not necessarily mean a complete absence of the scrutiny of religion. Instead, the statecraft of a secular host country in the West could be so potent that the constant modelling of religious thinking and practices managed by the state could still end up normalizing the exclusion of Judeo-Christian others. Full article

Creating a conceptual unity is an important starting point for understanding a subject. It is more difficult to find a common definition if the concept in question is ‘religion, religiosity, secularism’, which can vary according to the field of the person making the definition, where he/she positions himself/herself in relation to religion, the characteristics of the religion he/she believes in (or does not believe in), and many other parameters. In order to draw the boundaries of this research correctly, it is necessary to clarify the development and changes in the concept of ‘religion’ and the related concepts of ‘religiosity and secularism’ in the historical process. Among the places where the effectiveness of these concepts at the theoretical level can be examined are the textbooks taught in Anatolian Imam Hatip High Schools. The nature or content of the fiqh textbooks taught in Imam Hatip High Schools, which can be exemplified as an educational institution of religious culture reinforcement in Turkey, is within the scope of this study. In connection with this subject, the aim of this study is to analyse the fiqh and fiqh reading textbooks taught in Anatolian Imam Hatip High Schools from the perspective of religiosity and secularism. Fiqh, from the perspective of Islamic theology, contains normative principles that govern personal and social practices. As textbooks, fiqh and fiqh readings were chosen because they are likely to provide data on the subject. This research employs a qualitative approach, utilising document analysis as its primary method to investigate these textbooks. The analysis is based on textbooks that were approved by the Ministry of National Education and taught during the 2023–2024 academic year. For the purposes of this study, only explicit verbal content was considered, while implicit messages were excluded. As a result of this study, it is understood that both books have a religiosity-centred perspective and that there are chapters in which changes are taken into consideration rather than secularism. Full article

This paper explores two paths that depth psychology, particularly the work of C. G. Jung, offers to the project of decolonizing knowledge. Jung was a complex intellectual pioneer who embodied and projected the limiting colonialist scientific presuppositions of his time also spent much of his career attempting to become familiar with the undisciplined domain of the Unconscious that offered access to ways of thinking that erased disciplinary boundaries that would separate psychology, religion, and science. Offering a close reading of Jung’s early work demonstrates how colonizing forms of knowledge perpetuate themselves through a self-legitimating mythic structure. Acknowledging Jung’s later work, which explored psyche as both “material” and “spiritual”, illustrates the potential that depth psychology offers for an undisciplined approach to thinking and reality. The focus throughout will be on the Shadow, one of the core archetypes in Jungian psychology. The first section, which associates Jung’s colonial bias with his ideas about rational consciousness, is followed by a second section that provides a critique of Jung’s colonialism, highlighting the implicit violence that accompanies Jung’s story about rationality. The third section provides an overview of different ways that shadows can be used, building on other depth psychological modes of exploring the unconscious. The paper concludes with a description of how embracing Shadow invites the concept of an undisciplined playfulness back into a decolonized, experiential approach to knowledge. This presents an improved version of the Shadow based on a framework of participation, rather than polarization, which opens a mode of belonging that bridges rifts that colonialism created. This demonstrates how depth psychology opens a path toward decolonizing knowledge and moving toward a consciously undisciplined form of experiential understanding. Full article

This study explores the manifestation of implicit religion in climate change activism on social media, focusing on Extinction Rebellion (XR) in The Netherlands between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2023. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to examine how XR’s activism on X (Twitter) embodies quasi-religious elements such as shared beliefs, moral imperatives, and collective identity. Drawing on Edward Bailey’s concept of implicit religion and Meerten Ter Borg’s framework, the research reveals how XR’s activism blends secular environmental concerns with spiritual commitment, positioning climate activism as a moral duty. The study identifies six key themes in XR’s discourse: shared beliefs and values, transcendent purposes, commitment and devotion, community and collective identity, meaning and purpose, and hope and overcoming uncertainty. These themes are framed as sacred responsibilities, fostering a community united by transcendent purposes. This research contributes to the sociology of religion by highlighting how implicit religious elements permeate modern secular movements, particularly through digital platforms. It also provides insights into how climate activism mobilizes individuals through quasi-religious rhetoric and practices, shaping both individual and collective responses to the environmental crisis. Full article

Cardinal Bessarion (1408–1472), in the second chapter of the first book of his influential work In calumniatorem Platonis, attempted to reply to Georgios Trapezuntios’ (1396–1474) criticism against Plato in the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis. Bessarion investigates why the Athenian philosopher maintained, in several dialogues, that the sacred truths should not be communicated to the general public and argued in favor of the value of oral transmission of knowledge, largely based on his theory about the cognitive processes. Recently, Fr. Bessarion Kouotsis has argued that Cardinal Bessarion’s reasoning draws primarily on the “Disciplina Arcani”, i.e., the rule of secrecy, which was an established practice of the Early Christian Church, aimed at protecting and preserving the core elements of the religion from outsiders. While I find Kouotsis’ approach interesting and thought-provoking—for instance, the idea that Bessarion’s argumentation was likely influenced by Eastern Christian views on the rule of secrecy—I intend, first of all, to discuss why Bessarion did not explicitly mention it. Moreover, I would like to argue that Bessarion’s good knowledge of the long Platonic tradition and Eastern mysticism, encompassing both pagan and Christian elements, should also be considered a significant source. Furthermore, I would like to question Kouotsis’ implicit argument that Bessarion’s views were dominated by his training in Orthodox theology and discuss the possibility that Pletho’s (1355–1454) teaching was the obvious influence for Bessarion’s defense of secrecy. After all, we should bear in mind that Anastos has already pointed out Pletho’s reverence for the rule of secrecy. Finally, I would like to support that Bessarion, in the specific text, focused predominantly on the epistemological and cognitive aspects of oral teaching, resorting to the rule of secrecy only to enhance his views. Full article

The increasing societal diversity of religions and worldviews (R&W) in Swedish preschools affects what competencies today’s preschool teachers need and what needs to be taught in Swedish Preschool Teacher Education (PTE). The study aims to investigate the content and discursive norms regarding religion and worldviews in Swedish PTEs on a national policy level and contribute to knowledge in the research field of Religious Studies and Higher Education. The PTE curricula of all the twenty Higher Education institutions offering PTE in Sweden in 2022 are investigated using text-centred discourse analysis, together with a theoretical and analytical tool for analyzing different dimensions of the PTEs and the potential for them to function as socially sustainable communities of care. The results show that even though there might be implicit incentives for teaching about R&W, all but one of the educational curricula of the twenty PTEs in Sweden lack explicit mention of ‘religion’. Based on the results, we can see that at a national policy level, the content of the educational curricula reproduces liberal secular and humanist worldviews as norms for the PTEs. There is also a lack of explicit policy-related incentives for the PTEs to promote social sustainability regarding equipping students with proper knowledge and skills for developing care-centered and norm-critical R&W literacy. Full article