Search Results (9)

This study examines how South Korea’s 1970s Protestant democratization movement embodied Hans Joas’s concept of the “sacralization of the person” during the authoritarian Yushin regime. Challenging binary narratives of human rights origins as exclusively secular or religious, the research analyzes how Korean Protestant activists created institutions, rituals, and theological frameworks that infused human dignity with sacred character. The study demonstrates how religious actors effectively bridged religious and secular boundaries in human rights advocacy through historical analysis of the National Council of Churches in Korea’s Human Rights Committee, Thursday Prayer Meetings, and the development of Minjung theology. The findings reveal a distinctive process of sacralization that evolved from individual to collective understandings of human dignity, culminating in the radical Minjung Messiah theory. This case study illustrates how Joas’s affirmative genealogy operates in non-Western contexts, showing that sacralization emerges through dynamic interactions between religious conviction, historical events, and cultural transformation rather than through abstract reasoning alone. The Korean experience demonstrates that universal human rights gain moral force when diverse traditions collaborate to uphold human dignity across ideological divides. Full article

Pastoral supervision and spiritual direction are inherently personal in nature. They reveal a transformative life of spiritual and soul care demanding the formation of theological reflection, healing, guidance, and discernment. Whilst pastoral supervision serves to guide theological reflection on service and mission, spiritual direction facilitates the moments of awakening to the presence and narrative of God’s grace and work in the depths of the soul. Under the light of Catholic Social Teaching, the notions of solidarity and subsidiarity will be pressed into service to unveil a common spiritual–theological foundation animating the roots of both these ministries. To understand the common dynamics of pastoral supervision and spiritual direction, the article develops a spiritual theology to reveal that both ministries, however distinct in practice, share the same incarnational (creative) and redemptive (re-creative) qualities. In other words, they both share the same source, root, origin, or existence in God’s word and grace. This comes to light by learning to pronounce love in truth, a prophetical work of solidarity and subsidiarity, of friendship and sharing orienting integral human development to listen and respond to God’s movement. The actions of solidarity and subsidiarity are rooted in the beatitude of righteousness revealing the little goodness, a work of possibility and responsibility. Such actions serve to transform the time of ministry into spaces of blessing and mystery, of appreciating the sacredness and unknowability of the other with boldness, curiosity and gentleness. The article concludes by showing how both ministries of pastoral supervision and spiritual direction share the spiritual-pastoral appeal to form communities witnessing the little goodness of love in truth. 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

This article explores the notion of the “magic of a place” and the way a space attracts groups and individuals who follow various forms of vernacular or lived religion and spirituality. The space is Sintra, an “enchanted” mountain facing the westernmost point of Europe, the Roca Cape. Classified by UNESCO as Cultural Landscape, Sintra is a unique place, a “sensuous sacred geography”; its sacredness comes from its natural setting, combined with historical layers of religious use and the way these are nowadays interpreted by individuals who live spirituality as “sensational forms” (configurations of imaginations and sensations in a context of religious and spiritual traditions). Thought of as an encapsulated magical place where innumerous groups perform their ceremonies, meditations, and spiritual retreats, Sintra is a scenario where Tweed’s discussion on the sacredness of a place is highly suitable and transreligiosity and spiritual elasticity are the norm. Furthermore, through the ethnographic data presented, we will see how, within this “spiritual elasticity” directly relating to the astonishing nature of the Sintra mountain, individuals find relief for their personal crises or their collective eco-anxiety. Full article

The paper takes its departure point from a seemingly innocuous idiom that common English parlance uses to describe a person who has lost possession of their rational mind: “not all there.” Interrogating the locality that this deictic “there” implies, the argument juxtaposes it with recent religious scholarship on the Afterlife, which posits that, by extension, from the absence of the risen Christ from the tomb, the Christian subject is essentially similarly ‘not there’. Thus, the paper treads a thin line between sacredness and profanity in attempting to map out the spatial coordinates and configuration of the imaginary realms of the life-less and mind-less, that is, the Afterlife and madness, respectively. This examination is conducted through late 20th-century literary representations of, on the one hand, the Afterlife as an urban netherworld, experienced as infernal and life-negating, and of the city perceived through a schizophrenic mind, which displays an uncanny similarity to Hell: disorienting, dissipating, and ghostly. In this manner, following recent scholarship of embodied cognition, the paper demonstrates an unexpected and hitherto unexplored affinity between the Afterlife as a key concept of conventional religious thought and madness and the mad subject as an oft-reviled cultural, social, and literary figure. Full article

As a famous “miraculous monk” dating from the Tang Dynasty, Wanhui (632–712) was favored by four emperors, Gaozong (r. 649–683), Empress Wu (regency: 684–690; reign: 690–705), Zhongzong (r. 683–684, r. 705–710) and Ruizong (r. 684–690, r. 710–712). Relying on his special religious status as a Buddhist palace chaplain, he was alleged to have created religious momentum and to have advocated political opinions to maintain the “legitimacy” of the Li-Tang imperial family, but he was unfailingly able to avoid political persecution. Although there have been some academic publications on Wanhui and the group of “miraculous monks” and “mad monks” in the Tang Dynasty, there are still ambiguities in the understanding of Wanhui’s political and religious image. This article firstly conducts textual research on the interdependence and interaction between the sacred space of the Tang Buddhist palace chapel on the one hand and religious personality as represented by Wanhui on the other. The former gave the latter a rich religious sacredness, mystical charm and strong political support; while the latter, in turn, strengthened the religious and political functions of the unique Buddhist institution in the service of imperial power, manifesting itself in the consolidation and elevation of the former. Secondly, by investigating the reasons for shaping the political and religious images of Wanhui in monastic biography and Buddhist hagiography, this article argues that this was a conscious arrangement due to the political purposes or religious intentions of the compilers. Finally, by exploring how Wanhui exerted various subtle political and religious impacts on the Tang emperors by virtue of his status as a miraculous Buddhist palace chaplain—partly imparted by sacredness of the Buddhist palace chapel—this article attempts to shed new light on several key aspects of the complicated state–saṃgha relationship during this special period of the Tang Dynasty. Full article

The demand for medical assistance in dying remains high and controversial with a large knowledge gap to support optimal patient care. The study aimed to explore physicians’ attitudes regarding euthanasia and examine the factors that related to these attitudes. We surveyed 135 physicians working at a tertiary-care hospital in Israel. The questionnaire was comprised of demographic and background information, DNR procedure information, encounters with terminally ill patients, familiarity with the law regarding end-of-life questions, and Attitudes toward Euthanasia. About 61% agreed that a person has the right to decide whether to expedite their own death, 54% agreed that euthanasia should be allowed, while 29% thought that physicians should preserve a patients’ life even when they expressed the wish to die. A negative statistically significant relationship was found between the level of religiosity and attitudes toward euthanasia. The physicians’ attitudes towards euthanasia are quite positive when compared to other countries. The data shows a conflict of values: the sacredness of human life versus the desire to alleviate patients’ suffering. The Coronavirus-19 outbreak reinforces the importance of supporting physicians’ efforts to provide ethical and empathic communication for terminally ill patients. Future studies should aim to improve our understanding and treatment of the specific types of suffering that lead to end-of-life requests. Full article

The aim of this paper is to analyze the persistence of sacrifice as self-sacrifice in contemporary societies. In order to reach this goal, firstly, we discuss how in the Axial Age (800–200 B.C.E.) an understanding of sacrifice as ritual worship or a ritual practice that involves the immolation of a victim became less prevalent and a new understanding of sacrifice emerges. This new notion of sacrifice focuses on individual relinquishment and gift exchange, that is, on a person sacrificing or relinquishing him/herself as a gift that is given in an exchange relationship for protecting a greater good (a god, a community, a person, a nation, and so on). Secondly, we analyze how this new sacrifice formula had an important impact on the understanding of sacrifice. Most notably, it led people to conceptualize sacrifice as a project or as something that persons could intentionally embrace. Thirdly, and as a result of the previous processes, we attend to the secularization of sacrifice, not in the sense of a de-sacralization of this phenomenon but in the way of sacralization of the mundane realm and mundane things, such as intentional self-sacrificial acts, in social contexts where there is religious pluralism. Insight into how the notion of sacrifice is secularized is found throughout the classic works of Marcel Mauss and Georg Simmel, and these works are discussed in section three. Fourthly, we study the sacredness of the person as a clear type of secular religiosity that develops self-sacrificial forms. Two of these self-sacrificial forms are the actions of 9/11 rescuers and COVID-19 healthcare professionals. A short analysis of both will serve us to illustrate how self-sacrifice is embodied in contemporary societies. Full article

While some human rights theorists suggest that the universalistic project of human rights can be consistent only with an individualistic conception of dignity aligned with liberal regimes, there have also been some voices of discontent raised from Christian and Confucian thinkers in favor of incompatibility. I refer to the universalistic position of approaching cross-cultural human rights by focusing on Pogge’s contextualistic universalism and Joas’ universalistic emphasis on the sacredness of person. I show how it is possible to ground the religious foundation of human dignity on self-transcendence (Joas) and the institutional foundation on the capacity for the pursuit of a worthwhile life as flourishing (Pogge). This idea of dignity grounds human rights as the entitlement to institutional measures for securing the access to basic goods for human flourishing (Pogge). When reinterpreting Augustine and Xunzi in light of human dignity and human rights, I tackle two questions, following Pogge and Joas. First, I reinterpret Augustine and Xunzi by showing how human dignity rests on the relative worth of pursuing one’s flourishing distinct from animals and the absolute worth of pursuing flourishing open for self-transcendence, which also entails different ranges of social conceptions of flourishing. I also tackle how this sense of dignity leads to the entitlement to institutional measures for protecting the access to basic goods for human flourishing as the issue of human rights. Full article