Search Results (39)

This paper focuses on the early Qing monk-painter Hongren 弘仁, systematically exploring the pathways through which the Chan Buddhist “emptiness contemplation” is manifested in his landscape paintings. As a representative monk-painter, Hongren produced works that profoundly embody the Chan contemplation of emptiness, yielding a singular style defined by austere coldness, minimalist simplicity, and profound quietude. Transcending conventional stylistic descriptions in art history and essentialist philosophical deductions, this study adopts a comprehensive empirical approach that integrates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals (shi-shu-hua-yin 诗书画印). By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, religion, and art history, this study argues that Hongren’s landscapes are not merely subjective emotional expressions or aesthetic pursuits; rather, they constitute a visual extension and a spiritual externalization of his emptiness contemplation. Through a multi-layered analysis of his form, brushwork, composition, and artistic conception, combined with the mutual corroboration of poetic inscriptions on paintings and textual inscriptions on seals, this paper reveals how the Chan philosophy of “emptiness contemplation” is reflected within his artistic language. While Hongren’s style is the cumulative result of various factors such as the Ming-Qing dynasty transition, his personal life, the inheritance of painting techniques, and the regional culture of Mount Huang, this paper specifically takes Chan thought as its analytical starting point, focusing on its unique expression in his work. Hongren’s path of “Painting-Chan” (hua chan 画禅) not only infused early Qing painting with a sublime spiritual power but also provides a vital religious exegesis of the deep-seated Chinese tradition of “Technique Ascending to the Dao” (ji jin yu dao 技进于道). Full article

Approaching the tension between critical thinking and religious conviction in a modern secular context, this study explores Paul Ricoeur’s theological hermeneutics as a potential metaphoric language for doing contemporary theology. Utilizing Ricoeur’s hermeneutic method of the “long route”—a patient detour through text, symbol, and narrative that refuses the direct existential decoding of myth—the research qualitatively analyzes his interdisciplinary insights across biblical interpretation, revelation, and narrative theory. The analysis reveals that Ricoeur’s integration of philosophical and biblical hermeneutics facilitates what he calls a “second naïveté”: a post-critical posture in which religious symbols can be inhabited again only after, and through, the labour of critique, never before or around it. Such a posture addresses the specifically modern difficulty of making Christian faith argumentatively responsible to contemporary readers, believers and reflective non-believers alike. Key findings highlight the poetic dimension of theological language—its capacity to disclose rather than merely describe—as essential for reconfiguring reality and for redefining revelation as an event that takes place between the “world of the text” (the possible world projected by a biblical text read as discourse) and the “world of the reader.” This reorientation does not dismiss dogmatic-theological formulation; it holds the systematic–speculative and the poetic–hermeneutic together rather than letting either collapse into the other. The study concludes that doing theology through metaphor—specifically through the dialectic between “being” and “being-as” of God—opens a generative hermeneutic perspective for articulating the divine in a post-critical age, where the category “post-critical” designates not a repudiation of critique but the reflective stance that remains possible only on the far side of it. Rather than providing a unified theological system, this perspective preserves the tensions—between philosophy and theology, critique and conviction, metaphor and its ontological reach—that Ricoeur deliberately leaves unresolved. Full article

This article addresses recent critiques of secularisation as a linear explanatory model for religious change in European societies, proposing that contemporary artistic creation is a fertile site for observing new interrelations between the secular and the religious. Focusing on João Madureira’s Missa de Pentecostes (2010), composed for the ensemble ‘Sete Lágrimas’ and part of a cultural project by the Roman Catholic community of ‘Capela do Rato’ (Lisbon), the study analyses how this work creatively reconfigures the traditional Mass form. By juxtaposing the Ordinary sections (e.g., Kyrie, Gloria) with the Proper sections (e.g., Introitus, Sequentia), which incorporate non-canonical Portuguese poetic texts, the composition creates a hybrid space in which ritual and artistic modes interact and mutually re-legitimise each other. Using a heterological interpretative framework inspired by Michel de Certeau, the article highlights the tensions and exchanges between ritual and aesthetic logics. The analysis draws on key theoretical concepts including Jean Rancière’s notions of consensus and dissensus, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ritual and habitus, Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation as hospitality, and Pierre Lévy’s concept of universalism without totality. The findings suggest that Madureira’s work enacts a process of poetic re-signification of religious memory, opening new possibilities for hybrid ritual–artistic practices. These practices transform ritual time-space into an interface that fosters plural and non-totalising forms of spiritual belonging. Full article

This article explores the Qurʾānic transformation of poetic travel, situating it within the broader cultural and religious context of Late Antiquity. By examining the Qurʾān’s repeated injunctions to travel and observe the landscape, the study reveals how travel is reconfigured from a poetic act of nostalgic vision into a religious epistemic practice of witnessing divine truth. It compares pre-Islamic Arabic poetic traditions, particularly the qasīda, with Late Antique Christian pilgrimage practices to demonstrate how the Qurʾān synthesizes and reshapes these modes of journeying into a vision-centered theology of travel. Full article

This article examines how religious experience is articulated through genre in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī (d. 1674), focusing on the striking contrast between his ghazals and non-ghazal compositions. While Neshāṭī’s qaṣīdas, mathnawīs and other formal genres employ an explicit and direct religious language—addressing God, the Prophet, sacred figures, and doctrinal themes—his ghazals are dominated by imagery of wine, love, and the beloved, which at first glance appears markedly profane. Rather than reading this contrast as a sign of secularization or doctrinal inconsistency, the article argues that it reflects a conscious poetic strategy shaped by the expressive style of the ghazal. Through a close reading of Neshāṭī’s Dīwān, the study demonstrates that religious meaning in ghazals is not absent but deliberately rendered implicit. Drawing on motifs such as the mirror, secret (sirr), annihilation (fanāʾ fīʾllāh), and states of spiritual contraction, Neshāṭī transforms the language of human love into a vehicle for divine experience. In this context, the ghazal emerges as a genre particularly suited to conveying religious meaning through ambiguity, emotional intensity, and symbolic indirection rather than overt doctrinal exposition. By situating Neshāṭī within both the Mawlawī tradition and the aesthetics of Sabk-i Hindī, this article highlights how genre manifests religious expression in Ottoman poetry. It proposes that divine encounter in Neshāṭī’s work is realized less through explicit theological discourse than through the affective and symbolic potential of the ghazal. In doing so, the study offers a new reading of Neshāṭī’s poetry and contributes to broader discussions on the relationship between literary/lyrical genre, mysticism, and religious experience in Islamic literary traditions. Full article

This paper reconfigures the theme of divine encounters in the literature by examining the intersection of pantheism, vitalism, and ecological imagination, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Far from depicting the divine as transcendent, Shelley envisions it as an immanent force permeating nature, matter, and life itself. In poems such as “Queen Mab”, “Mont Blanc”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ode to the West Wind”, or “The Cloud” Shelley translates vitalist science into poetic vision, challenging orthodox religious beliefs and contemplating the divine as inherent in natural processes. The study also situates Shelley’s thought within a broader genealogy that extends through John Ruskin’s vitalist aesthetics, Henri Bergson’s élan vital, and into contemporary posthumanist philosophy, neomaterialism and ecocriticism, along with scholars who have contributed to reviving and transforming vitalist traditions, reframing human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. The paper shows the importance of the Romantic period in the development of vitalist approaches in various fields of knowledge, anticipating ecological concerns. The study is framed as a genealogical and epistemological problem attempting to articulate connections while situating poetic practice as a privileged site where vitalism is negotiated. Full article

Classical Arabic poetry played a powerful social role in Arab society, particularly during the Jāhiliyya (pre-Islamic) period, due to its high level of eloquence (faṣāḥa) and balāgha. Within this poetic tradition—shaped around themes such as heroism (ḥamāsah), boasting (fakhr), satire (hijā’), and love (tashbīb)—‘aṣabiyya occupied a central position as a means of constructing and preserving tribal identity through language. Poets exalted their own tribes and disparaged rival ones by employing persuasive and emotionally charged expression. With the revelation of the Qur’an in 610 CE, this literary and cultural heritage, grounded in aesthetic and expressive power, was reconfigured within a new religious framework. The Qur’an’s challenge-oriented discourse entered into direct interaction with existing poetic sensibilities. Against this background, the present study examines the transformation of ‘aṣabiyya in classical Arabic poetry during the early Islamic period. It offers a comparative analysis of lineage-centered ‘aṣabiyya in Jāhiliyya poetry and the emergence of an ummah-centered discourse of unity in Islamic poetry, drawing on poems by different poets from both periods. Using content analysis, rhetorical text analysis, and inductive methods, the study demonstrates that the Qur’an’s influence on Arabic poetry was neither uniform nor one-dimensional but significantly shaped poetic themes and authorial attitudes. By focusing on ‘aṣabiyya, the article aims to contribute to a renewed understanding of the Qur’an–poetry relationship in early Islam. Full article

This article offers a comparative study of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday and İsmet Özel’s “Amentü” to examine how modernist poetry refunctions ritual language as an aesthetic and spiritual response to different modernities. Drawing on world-systems theory and the sociology of secularization, the study argues that Eliot and Özel exemplify two structurally distinct but related modern experiences: Eliot writes from within the West’s internal fragmentation, while Özel speaks from the periphery of an imposed, Westernizing modernity. These divergent contexts produce contrasting religious modernisms—Eliot’s introspective Anglo-Catholic poetics of inward renewal versus Özel’s populist Islamic poetics of collective dissent. Both poets employ modernist form—fragment, refrain, montage—to reassert the sacred within secular conditions, yet with opposing cultural motivations. The comparison demonstrates that religious modernism is a transnational phenomenon, not a Western anomaly, and that literary modernism itself adapts to the asymmetries of global modernity. The article concludes by proposing “religious modernist poetics” as a comparative framework for studying faith and form across literary traditions. Full article

This study examines al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt anthology as a foundational corpus wherein pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic poetry emerged not only as a cultural artifact but as a generative locus for theological reflection. Through a close reading of selected poems and nuanced engagement with the figurative language specifically metaphor, personification, and symbolic narrative, the research situates poetry as a mode of epistemic inquiry that articulates religious meaning alongside Qurʾānic revelation. Drawing on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s theory of semantic structure and metaphor, in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s conception of metaphor as imaginative cognition, the study proposes that poetic discourse operates as a site of “imaginative theology”, i.e., a space wherein the abstract is rendered sensorially legible and metaphysical concepts are dramatized in affective and embodied terms. The analysis reveals how key Qurʾānic themes including divine will, mortality, ethical restraint are anticipated, echoed, and reconfigured through poetic imagery. Thus, al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt is not merely a literary corpus vis-à-vis Islamic scripture but also functions as an active interlocutor in the formation of early Islamic moral and theological imagination. This interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to broader discussions on the interpenetration of poetics and theology as well as on the cognitive capacities of literature to shape religious consciousness. Full article

This article examines how national identity is constructed through religious representations in the poetry of Nikoloz Baratashvili, one of the leading figures of 19th-century Georgian Romanticism. Through a text-centered analysis of four key poems, it explores how a religious memory woven around motifs of sacred silence, divine absence, and sacrificial imagery is transformed into a poetic narrative within a postcolonial context. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Ricoeur, Edward Said, and post-Soviet Georgian thinkers, the study interprets Baratashvili’s poetry as an expression of an existential national narrative. It argues that the poet’s poetics articulate both individual and collective trauma and that the nation is reimagined as a metaphysical community. In this regard, the study offers an interdisciplinary contribution focused on how the Georgian national genealogy is constructed poetically, the role of Orthodox cultural symbolism, and the impact of colonial modernity. Full article

This article explores the literary significance of the bell as an important image in the poetry of Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947), a renowned modern Chinese Buddhist reformer and poet–monk. While the bell has long-held symbolic meaning in Buddhist ritual and Chinese literary traditions, its role in poetry has often been overlooked in favor of material culture studies. This article addresses that discrepancy by examining how Taixu inherited and reinterpreted classical bell imagery to articulate his personal emotions and religious philosophy. Following close analysis of more than sixty of his poems, it argues that Taixu used the bell not merely as a traditional image but also as a vehicle for expressing two core Buddhist concepts: mental purification and transcendence of the mundane. The article also highlights his creative pairing of the bell with other classical Chinese images—such as sunsets, moonlight, mountains, and forests—to form complex imagery groups. Taixu’s skillful execution of this technique exemplifies the considerable literary talent and spiritual insight that enabled him to blend Buddhist doctrine with poetic expression to remarkable effect. Overall, his poetic corpus may be considered as both a continuation and a transformation of classical Chinese poetry traditions, affirming his identity as a modern poet–monk who possessed profound esthetic and philosophical vision. Full article

Vajrayāna teaching places the guru outside space and time, while simultaneously manifest in the teacher’s physical body. Those who regard Danzanravjaa primarily as a Buddhist teacher even today have his poems as a potent source of his teaching and consequently as a catalyst for their own spiritual development. But what can we hear across two centuries, and how can we actively listen to his religious teaching through his singular, aphoristic, and complex poetics? And to what extent can we understand today his nomadic perspective on Buddhist teaching in order better to understand the particular nature of Mongolian Buddhism? This paper will examine Danzanravjaa’s poetry in both Mongolian and Tibetan through the intertwining outer, inner, and secret levels of Tibeto-Mongolian Vajrayāna Buddhism, listening to how his poetic language and down-to-earth themes might have spoken to his contemporaries, as well as how they might speak to us today. In doing so, it presents Danzanravjaa’s poetry in a different light—not in terms of nineteenth century literature but as actionable spiritual wisdom from a teacher who, like any other, presents his own direct apprehension of Buddha nature in a challenging, personal style. Full article

Yinyuan Longqi 隱元隆琦 was a pivotal figure in Sino–Japanese cultural exchange. His journey to Japan to propagate Buddhism, founding of the Ōbaku sect (Huangbo zong 黃檗宗), emphasis on the orthodoxy of his Zen teachings, and crafting of an “authentic” identity profoundly influenced Japanese Buddhism and culture. While existing studies have predominantly explored the socio–historical dimensions of Yinyuan’s construction of “authenticity” (benzhen 本真), his extensive corpus of Zen verses remains understudied. By tracing the “Huangbo” (Ōbaku) 黃檗 imagery in his writings, this study addresses how Yinyuan constructed “authenticity” through his poetic works. Before his journey to Japan, Yinyuan employed “Huangbo” imagery to articulate his personal situation and sentiment, elevating it into a symbolic representation of inner “authenticity”. In the early days after Yinyuan went to Japan, driven by the dual imperatives of promoting orthodox Zen and responding to Japanese expectations of Zen origins, he intricately intertwined “Huangbo” with Zen doctrines, transforming the imagery into a marker of “authenticity” that embodied both orthodox Zen philosophy and sectarian identity. Following the establishment of Kyoto’s Mount Huangbo, Yinyuan further reshaped the “Huangbo” imagery into a trans-geographical and cultural symbol of sectarian dharma lineage, thereby ensuring the spiritual continuity of “authenticity” across Chinese and Japanese Huangbo traditions. This process not only reflects the cross-cultural transmission of Buddhism from China to Japan but also serves as a critical lens for examining the interplay between globalization and localization in religious development. Full article

Drawing from The Temple, a seventeenth-century volume of devotional poems written by George Herbert, this essay sets out to unfold how deliberately choosing constraint can lead to a spiritual experience. Beginning with a formal analysis of Herbert’s shape poem “The Altar” to demonstrate how form and content simultaneously create meaning in lyric poetry, the remainder of the essay focuses on Herbert’s most formally constrained poems: the sonnets. Using Herbert’s treatment of the sonnet form as evidence of deliberately choosing constraint, Herbert’s poetics transform our conceptual understanding of the elements that make up a Christian religious experience. Titled by the same words that provide the foundation for Christian spiritual experience, the sonnets “Prayer”, “Love”, and “Redemption”, among others, renew our understanding of religious experience by refocusing our attention via the constraints of the poetic form. By pairing together key religious concepts with the constrained attentive demands of poetry, Herbert’s sonnets challenge notions of passivity and call instead for a renewed understanding of the Christian experience. Characterized by the need for careful attention and neurological intensification—a specific quality of religious experience—Herbert’s sonnets become rooms, or perhaps, poetic chapels, where readers have the chance to experience the spiritual ultimacy of “something understood”. Full article

This article reconsiders literature’s capacity to express and evoke spiritual experiences by turning to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially his discussion of mysticism and his suggestion that poetry can bring about such states. James’s ideas are especially promising given recent developments in postsecular and postcritical scholarship that problematize a religious/secular divide and call into question a hermeneutics of suspicion. Bringing James into conversation with Paul Ricoeur, I aim to show how receptivity to spiritual experiences in literature might generate expansive models of both poetics and hermeneutics. To pursue these possibilities, my study analyzes three examples of Victorian lyric poems that probe the edges of wonder: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Nondum” and Dollie Radford’s “A Dream of ‘Dreams’”. These case studies strategically select work by writers of various belief or unbelief positions, highlighting the dynamism of the late nineteenth-century moment from which James’s writings emerged. I argue that this poetry facilitates a re-imagination of hope, beyond a faith/doubt dichotomy, as well as a re-framing of revelation, from proclamation to invitation. Building on insights from both James and Ricoeur, my discussion concludes by making the case for cultivating an interpretive disposition that does not guard against but opens toward poetry’s latent potential to take readers by surprise. Full article