The discipline of apologetics has always been somewhat controversial in Christian theology. In the early church, the Greek-speaking apologists were often opposed for their attempts to express the gospel in the terms of Greek thought. In more recent t...
This study addresses a lacuna in Buddhist modernism scholarship, which has extensively examined Buddhists’ employment of science as an instrument for Buddhist apologetics across Theravada, Yogacara, Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, yet has...
The present study aspires to catch a glimpse of a peculiar phenomenon in the history of religions, namely, the competitive character of early Christian apologetic literature in its attempt to confront head-on the non-Christian ideological life-world...
Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in...
This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized...
Public moral discourse encompasses open discussions in which moral concepts of good and right are brought to bear on questions of public policy and on broader issues of basic rights and the goals and rules that guide social institutions. These public...
This article is concerned with the academic use and definitions of terms such as “radical” and “extreme” as well as “Islam” and “Muslim(s)”. Some scholars hold that such terms ought to be avoided, but the author argues to the contrary. The article pr...
This article discusses Buddhist apologetics in Tibet by examining the formation, revision, and reception of the most renowned literary apologia ever written in defense of the Old School of Tibetan Buddhism: Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen’s early 17th-centur...
This article uses two case studies to promote the idea that British evangelicalism is sometimes marked by the denial of inconvenient facts. First, it takes a critical look at the apologetic impulse to explain away the problems that Scripture sometime...
19 October 2021
The current study explored the relationship between the intrinsic saliency of apologetic strategies and the effects of implicit learning. Seventeen Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners with intermediate proficiency participated in t...
The prominent Australian earth scientist, Tim Flannery, closes his recent book Here on Earth: A New Beginning with the words “… if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further progress is...
This study delves into the apologetic discourse put forward by Poon Chung-kwong 潘宗光 (b. 1940), who is both a scientist and a lay Buddhist of contemporary Hong Kong, concerning the compatibility of Pure Land Buddhism and natural s...
The conflict over Jesus Christ, the ‘Son of God’, is not new. Thousands of years ago, the disciples faced similar trials; however, the challenge to solve this tension was not based on debates or natural theology but rather to show the wor...
The vision of Albert Maria Weiß on Catholic anti-modernism and his bitter fight against the tendency of adapting Catholic doctrine to the changing world’s expectations was esteemed by Pius X, but his legacy was long forgotten by the Holy...
This article explores the apologetic discourse towards the convergence between Pure Land Buddhism and theoretical physics of the contemporary Chinese Buddhist monk, Da An (1959- ). Faced with the formidable challenge posed by contemporary science tow...
The transmission of the Christian faith is severely broken in many western European countries. This does not bode well for the future of Christianity in these regions. In the face of this situation, Christians might be tempted either to “retrea...
The different contexts of America and Europe have a significant impact on the development of comparative theology, especially in the German-speaking countries. The latter have found other solutions to the problem of religious pluralism that are not r...
A more complete understanding of the Dalai Lama’s intellectual milieu and mental framework serves to contextualize and appraise his contributions to the discourse on Buddhism and Science in general, and the so-called Mind and Life Dialogues in partic...
Christian philosophers, theologians, and artists regularly claim that experiences of beauty in art can function (i) as a road to God and (ii) as an encounter with God. These claims are well motivated by various Biblical texts and sophisticated theist...
A prominent contemporary cultural trope is the use of humour by the critics of theism against their opponents, in the form of satire, sarcasm, ‘zingers,’ whimsy, and ridicule. The journalist Christopher Hitchens and the philosophers Danie...
This article offers a fresh reading of Alonso de Oropesa’s Lumen ad revelationem gentium (1465) and of the pro-converso theology of this Hieronymite friar, through a close reading of a specific and largely neglected section of the treatise. Thi...
This unique and rich volume is the culmination of a Special Issue of Religions with a focus on “God and Ethics”, a topic both rich with historical significance and of special contemporary importance in light of the recent resurgence of in...
John Hare argues that Kant, in his Third Critique, offers an aesthetic argument for God’s existence that shares premises with his famous moral argument. Karl Ameriks demurs, expressing skepticism that this is so. In this paper, I stake out an i...
This paper examines how Franciscan apologetics and polemics over the status of St. Francis and the Rule of 1223 created a climate of inquisitorial suspicion over prophecy and prophetic claims.
As a discipline taught and debated in universities and seminaries, philosophy of religion has traditionally been understood as a form of apologetics: that is, it pursues with concentrated effort what proof for the existence of God the human mind can...
Moving away from both the apologetic and polemical frames that have become ubiquitous in public discourses about Islam and Muslims, I position Salafism within the interpretative battles of the mainstream Sunni tradition. Through that analysis, I also...
This study analyzes confessionally conditioned self-image and mutual perception of the Catholic and Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Upper Hungary in the context of the second confessionalization process. Based on comparative research...
This article offers an assessment of the current state of scholarship on animal ethics in Islam. It first discusses a group of texts that share the preoccupation of demonstrating the superiority of Islam’s animal teachings, thus exhibiting a cl...
1 January 2010
During the last decades of the twentieth century scholars have proposed “neurotheology” as a new subdiscipline of the neurosciences. This article presents a review and discussion of different interpretations placed on neurotheology, and attempts to e...
This article reflects upon how LGBTQIA+ Christians and their allies within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its predecessor denominations ‘called the question’ on their right to and responsibility for membership, ordination, and marri...
This article presents the first English translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s preface to Huldrych Zwingli’s Opus articulorum of 1535. This source, which has received little attention in previous scholarship; is placed in the context of effo...
How to deal with religious ideas in religious history (and in history in general) has recently become a matter of discussion. In particular, a number of authors have framed their work around the concept of ‘sacramental ontology,’ that is,...
Recent work in the cognitive science of religion has challenged some of the explanatory assumptions of previous research in the field. Nonetheless, some of the practitioners of the new cognitive science of religion theorize in the same skeptical spir...
The “second law of ecology”—that all matter remains part of the earthly ecosystem—poses a theological challenge to Jewish monotheisms. Climate change has further underscored the urgency of understanding and acting in light of...
The idea that the Qur’an is miraculous is common in Islamic apologetics, but has received little attention in Western philosophy of religion. Despite the common claim that the supposed miracle of the Qur’an is distinct in not requiring te...
The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is perhaps the most logically structured and inspired work not only in the oeuvre of the seventh-to-eighth-century theologian John Damascene, but most likely throughout the entire Greek Patristic literature....
The main focus of this paper is on the marketing approach of the use of Facebook by the Polish nationwide Catholic opinion-forming weeklies. The aim of the research is to analyse how the selected media use Facebook (FB) to create a media product, dis...
In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of scholarship in general and, more specifically, to the emergence of critical historical and anthropological literature from and within ecclesiastical scholarship. Howev...
Around 1632, while stationed in Shanxi Province (China), the Italian Jesuit Alfonso Vagnone published a pedagogical treatise entitled On the Education of Children (Tongyou jiaoyu) on which he had worked for several years. The book achieves a carefull...
This essay contrasts scholarship on printed authority within buccaneer ethnographies, contemporary apologetics for colonial enterprise, and the role of publicity in the delineation of piracy within print to ask: ‘when is a pirate not a pirate?&...
Scholars have made contesting claims about the nature and scale of works on religions by Muslim scholars before modern times. The present paper explores various primary and secondary sources, especially the classical bibliographical indexes that the...
The focus of this paper is a suite of Latin papers from 1685, some of which are still unpublished, in which Leibniz writes in the guise of a Catholic in order to defend Catholicism and counter Protestant objections, and this despite him being a lifel...
A major plank in the Evangelical apologetics platform (especially for the Jewish witness) has always been the predictive prophecy about Jesus in the Hebrew Bible. The number of these prophecies or “predictions” varies widely among Conserv...
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 moder...
After criticizing the three traditional proofs of divine existence in the first Critique, Kant fills this void with an apologetic argument based on his practical philosophy. However, this moral–religious project has long been charged with vario...
This study reintroduces the Christian theology of religions to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of religion as an acquired moral virtue. Aquinas’s treatment of religion as a moral virtue challenges the norm of revelation-centric theological...
This article delves into the perception of monastics from Larung Gar Buddhist Academy of Western China concerning the intertwining relationship between Buddhism and science, along with the impact of this perception on their worldview and life traject...
The panda’s thumb argument, championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, stands as one of the most famous polemics for common ancestry. In this essay, I analyze Gould’s argument in several steps. First, I attempt to reconstruct the argument...
The transformation of religious authority in the digital age is shaped by the interactions between human actors, digital media and algorithmic systems. This study uses digital ethnography to examine how religious authority is constructed and negotiat...
The Boxer Rebellion, as a significant historical episode in modern Chinese history, has been primarily studied through official archives and Boxer propaganda Posters. Chinese Christian literature remain underutilized in current scholarship. Quan Huo ...
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