Search Results (18)

The so-called “counterfeit monks and nuns” 僧尼偽濫 is regarded as an important reason for the “Huichang Persecution of Buddhism” 會昌滅佛, but it reflects the central views of the Tang Dynasty. When we delve into the local society of the Mid-to-Late Tang period, we find that they developed their own narrative logic. From the perspective of the imperial court, Li Deyu 李德裕 criticized Wang Zhixing 王智興 for establishing an ordination altar in Sizhou 泗州 for personal gain. However, in the biographical inscription of monk Mingyuan 明遠 in Sizhou, Wang Zhixing is portrayed as a key figure who collaborated with Mingyuan to ensure the survival of the Kaiyuan Monastery 開元寺, with the inauguration of the ordination altar 戒壇 serving as a necessary means to obtain financial resources. In fact, Mingyuan had previously undertaken a similar operation at the Lingju Monastery 靈居寺 in Liuhe County 六合縣, Yangzhou 揚州. The inscription of the Lingju Monastery Stele 大唐揚州六合縣靈居寺碑 reflects the cooperation between local monks and secular people at that time. During the process of rebuilding the monasteries, Mingyuan cleverly exploited the cult of the divine monk Sengqie 僧伽 within the Society of Jianghuai 江淮. The cult of Sengqie had become a national belief during the Mid-to-Late Tang period, and the existence of the Sengqie pagoda 僧伽塔 made the Kaiyuan Monastery in Sizhou uniquely significant. Later on, Youxuan 幽玄 also carried out similar initiatives by establishing an ordination altar for the restoration at the Baoli Monastery 寶曆寺 in Hongzhou 洪州. If we set aside the shadow of the overarching theme of the Huichang Persecution of Buddhism on the history of Buddhism during the Mid-to-Late Tang period, we may uncover a more vibrant picture of local Buddhism. Full article

Contemporary biopolitical discourse around fundamental rights and societal representations has increasingly weaponized moral-based attitudes and personal feelings, eschewing informed, factual opinions grounded in observation, data analysis, and scientific research. This trend is evident in the treatment of the queer community—used here as an umbrella term for non-cisgender, non-heterosexual individuals. Over recent years, the group has become the primary target of negationist critiques aimed at undermining the very existence of the community and challenging its rights. This article argues that the rise of depersonalized interactions and individualism, particularly through social media (where superficial and sensationalist content thrives, often at the expense of nuanced, data-driven discourse), the cult of the self and power (which prioritizes individual success, sidelining the collective struggles and rights of marginalized groups), and misinformation, is strategically employed by those in power and reverberated through the general public. These elements serve as a translucent veil, enabling the conscious choice to avoid engaging in structured, complex, and informed discussions about queer people’s rights and their existence. Consequently, the strategic deployment of these tactics, with the aim of shaping public opinion based on falsehoods and emotional appeals, undermines the capacity for informed dialog and perpetuates the marginalization of the queer community. Full article

This article offers a pedagogical approach to introducing undergraduate students to hagiology by comparing medieval sanctity to modern celebrity. The bodies of saints and celebrities are important loci for the transmission of sanctity or celebrity from a person to the public and for the continuity of identity. Examples include St. Faith, St. Cuthbert, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. Using a comparative method allows students who are non-religious to better apprehend the unfamiliar practices and beliefs around the cult of saints and relics. Full article

Books are complex objects. They have an undeniable material dimension, because they are artifacts characterized by a refined technology that has evolved over the centuries, and at the same time, they are vectors of intellectual products, consisting of the work(s) that they convey. However, books may also have a third dimension, since they embody the sacrality of a cult, belong to a performing rite, are offered to god(s) for the salvation of a soul, etc. Therefore, they incorporate an intrinsic sacredness for the simple reasons that they contain certain texts and are used on certain occasions to perform a certain rite. This paper explores the sacred aspect of Coptic codices and their third dimension, analyzing in particular the special case of books buried with a deceased person. Full article

The cult of the body has become a universal phenomenon, and many adolescents feel frustrated and disappointed with their own bodies for not matching the prevailing beauty standards. An empirical-quantitative cross-sectional investigation was carried out to understand perspectives of body image among Spanish youngsters of both sexes in three evolutionary substages (pre-adolescence, early adolescence, and middle adolescence) in the four factors that make up the Multidimensional Body Self Relations Questionnaire adapted to Spanish pre-adolescents and adolescents (MBSRQ-S_A-a) and their relationship with the time that they spend partaking in extracurricular sports. The results show that both boys and girls do not consider physical activity as an instrument to improve health. On the other hand, girls differ from boys regarding a more unstable and convulsive pattern of body image, characterized by a disconnect between physical activity and satisfaction with body image, where weight loss diets could acquire greater relevance. This research demonstrates two things: first, that the MBSRQ-S_A-a is a valid instrument to assess the body image pattern of adolescents, and second, that it opens the possibility of being able to identify adolescents who are at risk (physical, psychological, social); therefore, it is also capable of helping to prevent dramatic results and protecting the Sustainable Personal Development of adolescents. Full article

The rapid development of big data technology and mobile intelligent devices has led to the development of location-based social networks (LBSNs). To understand users’ behavioral patterns and improve the accuracy of location-based services, point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task. In contrast to the general task of product recommendation, POI recommendation faces the problems of the sparsity and weak semantics of user check-in data. To address these issues, an increasing number of studies have improved the accuracy of POI recommendations by introducing contextual information such as geographical, temporal, textual, and social relations. However, the rich context also brings great challenges to POI recommendation, such as the low utilization rate of context information, difficulty in balancing the richness of contextual information, and the complexity of the recommendation matrix. Considering that similar users have more interest preferences in common than users generally have, the check-in information of similar users has greater reference meaning. Thus, we propose a personalized POI recommendation method named CULT-TF, which incorporates similar users’ contextual information into the tensor factorization model. First, we present a user activity model and a user similarity model, which integrate contextual information to calculate the user activity and similarity between users. According to user activity, the most representative active users are selected as user clustering centers, and then users are clustered based on user similarity into several similar user clusters (C). Next, we construct a third-order tensor (user-location-time matrix) for each user cluster by using user activity, POI popularity, and time slot popularity as the eigenvalues in the user (U), location (L), and time (T) dimensions, and the eigenvalue of each dimension is modeled by integrating contextual information of users’ check-in behavior at the user, location, and time levels. Similar user clustering reduces the number of users in tensor modeling, reducing the U dimension. To further reduce the complexity of the recommendation matrix, the reduction of the L dimension is achieved through ROI (region of interest) clustering, and the reduction of the T dimension is achieved through time slot encoding. Then, we use tensor factorization (TF) to obtain the recommendation results. Our method decreases the complexity of the tensor matrix and integrates rich contextual information on users’ check-in behavior. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation of CULT-TF using real-world LBSN datasets from Brightkite. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs much better than other recommendation methods in terms of precision and recall. Full article

Even though Turkey’s ruling party’s (Justice and Development Party, the AKP) nation-building and desired citizen creation policies have been studied, its use of necropolitical narratives and propaganda in education has not been investigated. This paper addresses this gap by examining how the Turkish state ruled by the AKP has propagated its religious necropolitical narrative through the national curriculum and Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in school textbooks, and magazines and comic books for children. The paper shows that these texts and comics try to indoctrinate children into a religious cult of martyrdom in different ways by encouraging them to view tragic death and getting killed for the nation as a positive event. This paper argues that these propaganda efforts are part of a religious necropolitical indoctrination campaign that seeks to create a new Islamist and jihadist generation of lifelong supporters of the AKP, which portrays itself in the educational texts as the embodiment of Islam, the Muslim Turkish nation and even the global Muslim community (ummah). This new religious generation is expected to believe that dying for the Islamist populist authoritarian regime is the greatest honour a person can bring upon themselves. This paper contributes to the necropolitics literature by showing that not only adults but also children have been targeted by authoritarian rulers’ necropolitical propaganda attempts to create desired citizens who are ready to die for the regime, believing this is a religious obligation. Further research is needed to assess if and to what extent this propaganda has an impact on children. Full article

This article opens up a new scholarly subfield (royal-assassination-attempt commemoration) within the long-neglected field of annual (especially, provincial) ruler festivities in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. It does so by subjecting an array of untapped, geographically dispersed sources to a systematic, highly theoretically underwritten analysis. As a result, the article generates many insights into the principles and pathways of pious thought and action of Russian imperial subjects from all walks of life vis-à-vis their monarch. In the process, it provides a methodological template for future studies of the intersections between belief and belonging going into the modern age, not only in Russia, but across the world. Full article

This paper shows that the early Qing Chinese Buddhist monk Zaisan Hongzan’s belief in Maitreya and Tuṣita Heaven pure lands, as reflected in his collection of miracle tales and biographies, should be understood in a broader socio-religious context of Chan decline and monastic revival in late imperial China. It is important to notice that instead of advocating for the combination of Chan and Amitābha’s Pure Land of Bliss practice, Hongzan proposed the most severe criticism of the Chinese Chan tradition since the Song dynasty. Through both his personal doctrinal writings and the narrative strategies applied in his Tuṣita Heaven miracle tales, Hongzan vividly displayed his concerns about literary Chan practice and argued for the pivotal and urgent need for Vinaya among monastic communities. Hongzan’s personal anti-Chan sentiment and his intention to reestablish the study and practice of Buddhist Vinaya disciplines in a time of alleged “crisis” of Chinese Buddhism strongly influenced how he composed and transcribed eminent monks’ biographies related to the cult of Maitreya and Tuṣita Heaven. A “hagiographic” reading of Hongzan’s miracle tale collections is necessary to understand his religious discourse in this special historical stage in China. Full article

Drawing upon a wide variety of personality cults in religion, culture and politics from Ancient Egypt to our times, the author attempts to present a summary view of this phenomenon from a communicative standpoint. Personality cult is seen as an attribution of universal and eternal socio-cultural significance to certain beings, messages and interaction scenarios in defiance of changes in and diversity of the surrounding reality. The communicative implementation of such a cult involves the suspension of some of the most basic mechanisms of social coordination. Thus, deification of political, cultural or religious leaders eliminates the subordination of individuals to their social roles, whereas canonization severs the ties of certain selected texts with the contexts of their production and reception. Last, but not least, random signaling between the subject of cultic adoration and his or her subordinates runs counter the standard cooperation rules in interaction (‘turn-taking’). Illustrating these points, the article points out at specific communicative pathologies accompanying personality cults and jeopardizing the stability of their socio-cultural environments. Full article

This article explores the advantages of viewing intelligence not as a fixed trait residing within an individual, but rather as a person × task × situation interaction. The emphasis in the article is on the role of persons solving tasks embedded in situations involving learning, intellectual abilities, and competencies. The article opens with a consideration of the role of situations in intelligent behavior. The article then discusses how intelligence is more similar to creativity and wisdom, in terms of the role of situations, than many psychologists have realized. Then the article reviews the role of situations in identity-based and irrational thinking and in conspiratorial thinking and cults. Next the article discusses the demonstrated importance of situations in assessment, but also notes the difficulties in sampling situations. Finally, the article draws conclusions, in particular, that, given our lack of situation-based tests, we need to be more modest in our interpretations results from conventional tests of intelligence. Full article

This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish–Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–1484)—whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century—as a case study, taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case, the retroactive refashioning into a venerable medieval saint. The article investigates these questions across a transcultural Italo–Baltic context through the activities of principal agents of the saint’s re-fashioning as a venerable saint during the late seventeenth century: the Pacowie from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Medici from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, during a watershed period of Tuscan–Lithuanian bidirectional interest. During this period, the two dynasties were entangled not only by means of the shared division of Jagiellończyk’s bodily remains through translatio—the ritual relocation of relics of saints and holy persons—but also self-representational strategies that furthered their religio-political agendas and retroactively constructed their houses’ venerable medieval roots back through antiquity. Drawing on distinct genres of textual, visual, and material sources, the article analyzes the Tuscan–Lithuanian refashioning of Kazimierz against a series of precious reliquaries made to translate holy remains between Vilnius to Florence to offer a contribution to the entangled histories of sanctity, art and material culture, and conceptual geography within the transtemporal and transcultural neocolonial context interconnecting the Middle Ages, Age of Reformations, and the Counter-Reformation between Italy and Baltic Europe. Full article

In the more recent scholarly literature on media, pop culture or celebrity studies, there has been a growing tendency to identify media, stardom and other pop culture forms of cult with religion. An increasing number of concepts have sprung up such as “media as religion” or “stardom as religion”. However, these concepts need to be critically scrutinized as to whether the use of specific theological terms in those concepts is sound and consistent—or, as the case may be, superficial. The primary aim of this paper is to examine whether there are essential intrinsic similarities between religion and media. To answer this question, we have examined the structural similarities between media and religion (by comparing their use of ritual and liturgy; emotions; cosmology; myth and archetype; and the cult of individualism in particular). Subsequently, we have analyzed the key terms that have emerged from those comparisons (religion and faith; God; emotions; community; liturgy; cosmology; archetypes; saints; individualism). The term religion is used in its broad sense; however, the subject is examined in detail within the context of Christian theology. We came to the conclusion that media religion is a non-theistic religio without God, with an exclusive emphasis on social cohesion. The absence of verticality, lack of transcendence to eternity as well as the non-existing relationship with God as a person—have determined the remaining partial conclusions presented herein. Full article

F.M. Dostoevsky (1821–1881) never translated Shakespeare’s works into Russian, at least not in the common sense. His fascination, however, with Hamlet and his choices, led him to interrogate the cult of Hamlet in his own culture to better understand the political and philosophical schism of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, torn between Western and Populist ideals. Translatio, in the broader sense of “carrying over” Hamlet’s character, caught on a threshold, into the Russian context represents an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s re-interpretation of modern ethics. More immediately, this translatio is a call to the “old morality” of the 1840s generation of Russian intellectuals, who rejected notions of rational egoism and of the means justifying the ends. Dostoevsky’s schismatic hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, is Dostoevsky’s reimagining of his own culture’s translation of Hamlet that produced extreme and radical forms of Hamlet. Raskolnikov mimics Hamlet’s conscience-stricken personality at war with itself but achieves a more ambiguous ending typical of Dostoevsky’s regenerative paradigm. Full article

This paper sets out to demonstrate the changes that post-Holocaust fiction has been undergoing since around the turn of the new millennium. It analyzes the highly innovative and often provocative approaches to the Holocaust and its memory found in Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust—a scathing satire on the personal and institutional exploitation of Holocaust commemoration, manifested in the commodification of the historical trauma in what has been termed “Shoah business”. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the Holocaust by popular culture. This paper focuses on Reich’s critical response to the cult of victimhood and the unhealthy competition for Holocaust primacy, corresponding with the growth of a “victim culture”. It also explores other thematic aspects of the author’s satire—the abuse of the term “Holocaust” for personal, political and ideological purposes; attempts to capitalize on the suffering of millions of victims; the trivialization of this tragedy; conflicts between particularists and universalists in their attitude to the Shoah; and criticism of Holocaust-centered Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to show how Tova Reich has enriched post-Holocaust fiction by presenting a comic treatment of false victimary discourse, embodied by a fraudulent survivor and a whole gallery of inauthentic characters. This paper highlights the novel’s originality, which enables it to step outside the frame of traditional Holocaust fiction. Full article