Acknowledging the complex redaction history which produced the Book of Job contained in the Jewish and Christian canonical scriptures, this article offers a spiritual interpretation of the text taking due account of its overall structure and major pa...
Despite common Pentecostal rhetoric positioning divine healing as normative and imminent, it remains rare, unpredictable, and temporary. This disconnect creates substantial pastoral and psychological challenges for Pentecostals experiencing chronic d...
As a practical theologian and researcher in the field of ‘natural’ disasters, as well as being a disaster responder chaplain, I am often confronted by, and have to confront, the nexus between theology/philosophy and “real life&rdquo...
Current studies show that the Christian faith is still robust in Philippine society and culture despite the global health crisis. This study investigates how select Filipino Christian youths intuited God’s benevolent love in the time of “...
This is Part I of a triptych. It addresses the latent potential of the imagination in constructing a sense of identity. Included is the role of faith in overcoming the obstacles presented by a social imaginary dominated by literal idolatry that leads...
The purpose of this essay is to make known the personality of one of the most famous Orthodox priests, Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa, who publicly opposed the communist authorities in Romania at the cost of losing his freedom, while the vast majority of...
Throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, religious people and institutions have played a significant role in responding to the challenges that we all have faced. In some instances, religion has been a source of great harm, hindering the global respo...
From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings s...
Western notions of pilgrimage produce images of religious adherence to known beliefs and their ritual expressions. Definitions of pilgrimage have expanded in recent decades to embrace treks to sites unattached to the sacred landscapes of traditional...
Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree is a literary representation of existentialism. The eponymous protagonist seeks his meaning and purpose in a universe that offers none. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism proposes that people must fill the blank slate of the...
In a recent article, Didier Pollefeyt reflected on the worrisome observation that young children seemingly successfully raised in the Christian faith in Catholic schools lose this faith by the end of secondary education. According to him, the combina...
Mourning is the state of grieving the loss of a close relationship. It manifests itself in multi-sided suffering affecting the mourner’s mental, physical and spiritual sphere. A particularly painful form of mourning is the family experience of...
The existence of evil in a world created by God raises very difficult questions to answer. Under the inspiration of Thomistic philosophy, in this article we face this problem first of all “from below”, trying to understand the meaning of...
This article seeks to rethink martyrdom, suffering, and resurrection from the perspective of queer theologies within the Latin American context and in dialogue with the praxis of the first faith communities who witnessed Jesus’ martyrdom. Start...
Repression and persecution by the totalitarian communist regimes have significantly affected the fates of Christian churches and believers in the countries of the “Eastern Bloc”. Many members of the clergy and laypersons were incarcerated, tortured a...
The Camino de Santiago has witnessed an unprecedented number of walkers in recent years. Traditionalists feel that the Camino is suffering from excess—too many visitors and too much strain on the infrastructure, accompanied by an ignorance of what it...
The election of Donald Trump inaugurated a wave of anxiety-bordering-on-despair among various peoples hoping for another, better world. This paper considers whether Trump deserves such acclaim in the sense that Trump is at best a symptom or cipher th...
LLMs suffer from the hallucination problem in knowledge extraction within the campus safety domain, which impairs the accuracy of extracting campus safety entities and relationships. To address this issue, this paper proposes a retrieval-augmented me...
This article, based on 60 in-depth interviews with the descendants of survivors of political repression, aims at finding out how making sense of a collective traumatogenic experience differs in the case of Evangelical (Baptist and Pentecostal) commun...
This article presents data on the phenomenology of delusions of persecution and poisoning in patients with schizophrenia and determines parallels between sociodemographic status and personal religiosity and this type of delusions. We have studied the...
Depression is a common, depleting, and potentially life-threatening disorder. This pilot study examined the feasibility and applicability, reported preliminary evidence for effectiveness, and explored the potential healing mechanisms of a faith-based...
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 ...
Since 2005, a number of European films have emerged examining the legacy of Christianity in Western Europe, and the ways in which men, women and children struggle to negotiate questions of religion and secularity, the personal and the institutional,...
The paper examines the tenability of a project for Islamic liberation theology by exploring the religious lives of Egyptian prisoners—with an emphasis on their encounters with the Qur’an, devotional and contentious contemplation, and theo...
1 May 2022
Introduction: Spiritual care is needed in a clinical setting to improve the patients’ quality of life. Deep connection with another person and delight with the beauty of nature or art and (in some cases) with God are all transcendental experien...
Spirituality can be a crucial resource to draw on to make sense of critical situations that mark a turning point in individual and collective biographies. In these cases, a ritual and symbolic response to the trauma may occur, bringing to the surface...
The American tragedy of slavery and the Civil War provides the backdrop for the exemplary spirituality of Atticus Haygood (1839–1896). The son of a Georgia slaveholder, Haygood served as a chaplain in the Confederate army. At the War’s end, he return...
Background: Spirituality is recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, contributing to adaptation to suffering, vulnerability, and disease progression. Research has predominantly focused on either patients or caregivers separately, whil...
Bullfighting is a controversial sport that continues to be legally permitted in a number of countries around the world, including Portugal. The spectacle has attracted significant attention from animal protectionist groups for many years because of c...
In 2016, Canada legalized Bill C-14, which removed from the Criminal Code medical assistance in dying (MAID) under certain circumstances. In essence, the Bill legalized what is commonly described as euthanasia, under the provisions that the patient h...
This article explores the capacity for narrating the name of God as a way to liberate the suffering of the world. The first section of this article offers a brief overview of Walter Benjamin’s linguistic theory as it relates to the issue of lit...
Although Nostra Aetate is only comprised of five short paragraphs, this document represents a turning point, not just for Catholic-Jewish relations, but also sketches the fundamental aims of embodying the Christian faith in a pluralistic age. There i...
Migration to Germany has been a fact of life for the average German since the 1960s. Immigrants started arriving from countries like Turkey, Spain, Greece, or Italy as a post-war labor force was invited to Germany to address workforce shortages. Many...
“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American im...
After more than a century of neglect of the form, over thirty major concert works with “Passion” within the title have emerged into the choral landscape during the past 50 years. These settings use diverse libretti, drawing from sources both sacred a...
Continuing the long tradition of the allegorical interpretation of the Mass, the seventeenth- and eighteenth century ideal of proper mass attendance was devotion to the suffering Christ, inextricably linked to each step of the liturgy. In this articl...
The topographic features of the seafloor can be observed clearly via high-resolution side-scan sonar imagery. However, the faithful interpretation of a sonar image depends strongly on the accuracy with which the location of the sea bottom line can be...
Acclaimed as one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman is for many an arch-modernist, whose work is characterized by a high degree of self-conscious artistry and by dark, even nihilistic themes. Film critics increasingly identif...
The spillover of the terrorist activities of Boko Haram, a Nigerian jihadi group, into Cameroon’s north has resulted in security challenges and humanitarian activity opportunities for Christian churches. The insurgents have attacked and destroyed chu...
The stream pipeline idiom provides a fluent and composable way to express computations over collections. It gained widespread popularity after its introduction in .NET in 2005, later influencing many platforms, including Java in 2014 with the introdu...
There are few specific studies on the demonic possession of Judas and Mary Magdalene, especially as regards the representation of these demons in medieval art. This article analyses the matter in order to subsequently carry out a comparative analysis...
While Jägerstätter’s life and courageous stand against Hitler and National Socialism are well known and documented, the connections between his reading of scripture, his understanding of the way of the cross, and his conscientious obj...
In the United States, racially diverse, homebound older adults have been among those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During times of disaster, persons impacted tend to turn to their faith to make sense of suffering. COVID-19 has been an unusu...
This paper explores archetypes of femininity associated with Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ in Twelver Shi‘i hagiography through consideration of a broad range of archetypes found in the study of narrative and mythology. Many archetypes...
Violence in relationships is a common experience for a significant number of women. VicHealth (Australia) has noted that one of the underlying and contributing factors towards violence against women is their environment, citing ‘faith-based instituti...
29 January 2022
Hope performs an important role in how patients and their families cope with suffering and stressful events. To better inform practice and theory on hope, palliative care research should include both patients and their family carers, given their stro...
The question of whether artificial intelligence could bear the imago Dei, possess a soul, be a subject of salvation, or suffer in a religiously weighty sense increasingly frames debates at the intersection of AI and faith. Such debates typically rest...
Emotional restraint was the norm for the bereaved during and after the Second World War. Displays of individual grief were discouraged, and overshadowed by a wider concern for mass bereavement. There is limited archival evidence of the suffering that...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic intensified the stressful and already difficult circumstances of communities of color. Yet, there is no current photovoice research highlighting the lived experiences of these communities from two pers...
Personalized image generation has gained significant attention with the advancement of text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively mixing multiple visual attributes, such as structure and appearance, from...
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