In recent decades, prominent political theorists have responded to perceived flaws in liberalism by proposing more “radical” forms of democracy. What might a radically democratic state look like? I argue that we can find one answer, count...
This article reviews recent (2015–2021) English-language publications that focus on music in/as/about religion (broadly defined)—including world, folk, and indigenous religious traditions. While research related to Euro–American-based Christian music...
Using a discussion of the etymology of re-lig-io as a starting point, this essay begins by considering the problem of religion—of understanding God, and of language as an instrument for achieving the ends of religion and that understanding&mdas...
This article explores what religious frameworks and institutions have to contribute to college-in-prison. We first provide an historical overview of higher education programs in American prisons. Then, we limn the role religion can play in motivating...
Language and religion are two main cultural markers of collective identities and articulating factors at play in the majority-minority game. However, from a legal and political point of view, language and religion work very differently as factors for...
This study examines the role of Buddhism in the vitality of local languages as an asset of indigenous traditions, focusing on two geographically disconnected minority language communities: Tai Phake in the state of Assam, India, and Wutun (Ngandehua)...
This paper forwards the claim that our early human ancestors had protosacred experiences long before they had languages, architecture, or religions. A mountain may create feelings of awe while a grove in the forest may create feelings of serenity. In...
In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the m...
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...
There is little knowledge regarding the exchange of academic information on religious contexts. The objective of this informational study was to perform an overall analysis of all Buddhism-related communications collected in the Web of Science (WoS)...
This article discusses Arabic expressions referring to God, such as inshallah, mashallah, and alhamdulillah in the 2014 season of the Arab version of the talent show The Voice. It discusses the question to what extent these expressions are used by th...
What triggered the emergence of uniquely human behaviors (language, religion, music) some 100,000 years ago? A non-circular, speculative theory based on the mother-infant relationship is presented. Infant “cuteness” evokes the infant sche...
This paper examines some historical, cultural, and institutional processes involving a Jewish minority from the Russian and Azerbaijani Caucasus, now mostly displaced in the huge and multiethnic Moscow: the Mountain Jews, or Juhuro. These Jews were s...
Sanctuaries are common spaces of interaction between humankind and the gods. In many religious systems, mountains and other elevated topographical features are known to have formed part of these privileged spaces of communication. It is not surprisin...
Much has been written about the Our Father (also referred to as the Lord’s Prayer) as it represents a personal and public dialogue with God in daily prayer and liturgy. While its theological and spiritual aspects have been thoroughly investigat...
This paper studies the views of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on religion and Christianity, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis is based on Viktor Orbán’s speeches in Băile Tușnad,...
Through a case study of images generated by Swedish artist Steph Maj Swanson using an AI text-to-image (T2I) model, this article explores the strategy of negative weight prompting in T2I models as a phenomenon of apophasis. Apophasis is a linguistic...
This paper examines the persistence of intergenerational ties within Latinx Protestant Congregations (LPCs) and the implications these ties have for the persistence of LPCs as distinctly ethnic institutions. Though studies of generational transitions...
Recent scholarship on both ancient and modern Judaism has criticized the identification of Judaism as a religion. From the perspective of the modern period, what has remained unaddressed is the very peculiar religion that Jewish philosophers and theo...
This article presents a theological–literary response to a concern in contemporary theory with heeding and articulating the speech of nonhuman things. Drawing from Rowan Williams’ metaphysics of poetic addition, I argue that an ‘ecotheological’ liter...
Contemporary philosophy of religion is often focused, at a theoretical level, on the epistemic value of religious doctrines, and at a practical level, on the possible impact of organized religion on secular society and politics. However, the cultic d...
It has become commonplace to mention that Wittgenstein’s philosophy has an ethical point, and to consider how this contributes to his conception of philosophical method. Less attention has been given to how his admission to not being able to &l...
A distinctive feature of the study of religion in Australia and Oceania concerns the influence of European culture. While often associated with private interiority, the European concept of religion was deeply reliant upon the materiality of printed p...
Wittgenstein’s philosophy has influenced the philosophy of religion quite considerably. This is hardly due to his rather few remarks on religion. Instead, Wittgenstein’s influence seems to be connected to a certain, without doubt common,...
After 1945, the Republic of Poland appeared to be an ethnic monolith. However, this was (is) not the case for the Kashubians, who now live in northern Poland on the Baltic Sea. Presently, Kashubians do not have official status; they are not considere...
In 1967, Robert Bellah argued that America’s “founding myth”, what he called American civil religion, helps bind American society together by providing its citizens with a sense of origin, direction, and meaning. For evidence, Bella...
Past findings and theory in the sociology of religion support two opposing perspectives concerning the influence of religion on American politics. Looking from within the United States, the commanding influence of religion on political rhetoric and v...
11 January 2022
Religion can have a favorable impact on individual-level health. The influence of religion on population health, however, remains less clear. This study investigated the association between religion and mortality at the population-level. Using county...
This article draws upon recent historiography to critique the concept of “civil religion”, and argues that it should be replaced by nationalism. Its central point is that there is indeed a dominant language of American nationalism and one...
When Wittgenstein (2009, § 116) writes that “[w]hat we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”, many will presumably read this is an anti-religious statement. According to the everyday use of the word...
Sound and silence in nature intensify our perception of the non-anthropogenic world, of that which seems unaffected by humans and has been considered transcendent, eternal, and sacred. This is especially true in mountain settings. Mountain wilderness...
We analyze the Google matrix of directed networks of Wikipedia articles related to eight recent Wikipedia language editions representing different cultures (English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese). Using the reduced Googl...
Religion is one of the most important factors in architectural shaping. The concepts or sub-concepts that make up religion have a different language that each designer wants to explain. This language is presented semantically and syntactically throug...
This article provides a way to think through the division between religious and secular approaches to contemporary society through the use of rival myths. Myths are narrative structures that invite the interplay of language and the imagination, resul...
This paper attempts to explore the public dimension of religion in Korea. First, it examines the Western and East Asian contexts on the concept of ’public’, noting that the gap in notions of public is large between East Asian and Western...
In this paper, I will propose an intertextual theology of religions from a non-Western cultural perspective through the works in The True Light Review, an official magazine of Chinese Baptist churches, and Yue Hua, a prominent and long-lived Muslim m...
A large majority of Japanese people describe themselves as mushūkyō, ‘non-religious’, even though they participate in several religious-related cultural practices that socialize them to accept spiritual attitudes without the mediation of...
In You Shall Be as Gods, Erich Fromm (1900–1980) defines his position as nontheistic mysticism. This research clarifies the term, considers its importance within Fromm’s humanism, and explores its potential origins. The nontheistic mystic...
This paper analyzes the model of theology of religions elaborated by the Romanian Orthodox theologian Dorin Oancea and highlights the possibilities for openness towards other religious realms and for real theological validation of non-Christian relig...
In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or ‘race’ in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzin...
The books of Ezekiel and Daniel, specifically Ezek 4.9 and Daniel 1, 3, and 6, are now being used to market healthy eating and diet plans to Christians, especially evangelical Christians, in ways that are the opposite of how the texts appear in their...
Kant marks a fundamental break in the history of philosophy of religion and the concept of God. God is no longer interpreted as a being necessary to understand the existence of a rational universe, but as an idea that makes sense of our morality. Coh...
Embodied, enactive cognition, which is also embedded or emplaced cognition and extended cognition through tools, including language, presents various challenges to the standard model of the cognitive science of religion. In its focus on unconscious b...
This study examines the strategic deployment of religion as a political tool in contemporary Turkey through a comparative analysis of two ideologically distinct Islamic movements: the Gülen movement (Hizmet) and the movement of Adnan Oktar. Desp...
In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typi...
Modern religious plurality invites religious and non-religious people to navigate four interreligious dialogical problems: (1) the inability to fully articulate faith, (2) the lack of persuasive religious language, (3) the reality of violence among t...
The birth of modern aesthetics cannot be separated from the emergence of a new, non-dogmatic conception of religion and theology. Friedrich Schlegel advocated ‘art as new religion’ while Friedrich Schleiermacher developed a vision on reli...
This piece recommends the implicit as a resource for examining normativity within the study of religion. Attention to the implicit serves at least two purposes toward this end. First, it gives the scholar of religion a clearer sense of the norms of t...
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how two distinct but deeply related literary genres, which had become especially prominent in the 7th century Nile-to-Oxus region, have left an enduring impression on the form and contents of the Quran. By...
“The Theology of Dog Training” demonstrates the rich and surprising ways in which religion plays a primary role in how people make sense of their relationships with their companion animals. In the first sustained analysis of Adam’s...
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