Search Results (12)

In the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis necessitates a radical repositioning of the human-nature relationship. This paper examines the sijo poetry in Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s For Nirvana through an interdisciplinary framework bridging Zen philosophy with material ecocriticism. The study elucidates how Musan deconstructs anthropocentric exceptionalism by restoring agency to the non-human world. Textual analysis reveals three arguments. First, elemental forces like wind and waves are subjectified as primordial teachers through mujō-seppō (non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma), dismantling sovereign human scriptural authority. Second, visceral encounters with animals and insects critique logocentric domination, proposing “epistemological silence” and “radical humility” as alternative eco-politics. Finally, bodily decay and trans-corporeal porosity are reframed as generative pathways toward a radical “ecological Nirvana”—a physical matrix of cyclical renewal. By synthesizing Jane Bennett’s vital materialism with Dōgen’s Zen vision of “walking mountains”, this study deploys a Zen materialism lens that enriches Western theory with the Buddhist soteriology of compassion (karuna). Ultimately, Musan reconfigures Nirvana not as an escapist transcendence, but as a profound somatic descent into the material mesh, where ultimate spiritual realization lies in the ego’s total dissolution into the “walking, talking minerals” of a sacred, suffering ecosystem. Full article

Across modern Asia and many other regions, artificial intelligence is transforming religious life in diverse and profound ways. Robot priests chant sutras at Japanese Buddhist temples, AI-powered apps offer personalised coaching in Quranic recitation to millions of Muslims, and bereaved families consult algorithm-generated avatars of the deceased in China. They are neither merely tools for instrumental use nor channels for transmitting pre-existing religious authority. Instead, they create new forms of religious content, new types of spiritual encounters for religious users, and new structures of authority. This paper argues that understanding these phenomena requires theoretical innovation beyond simply applying existing concepts to new domains. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, algorithmic culture studies, and scholarship on Asian religious traditions, the paper proposes the theoretical framework of generative charisma, theorising how AI systems gain religious authority through three interconnected mechanisms: captivation by generation, intimacy trust through personalisation, and oscillating enchantment. It also highlights accountability as a structural issue that needs critical discussion regarding governance. The paper demonstrates the framework’s usefulness by examining AI recitation coaching in Islamic practice and AI grief avatars in Chinese Buddhist mourning, showing its relevance across different religious traditions and technological forms. Full article

In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, copying and printing sacred texts is considered a form of merit-making, or virtuous activity. One reason for the printing and circulation of books in the Buddhist tradition is the belief that one can gain merits. From the introduction of Buddhism into China, devotees copied, printed and disseminated sūtras to generate merit, a kind of spiritual goodness, which accumulates with each positive act. The author has gathered a large amount of data from libraries, museums and temples around the world that demonstrates how the imperial family members, concubines, court ladies, eunuchs, Buddhist monks and lay devotees supported the construction of the Buddhist canon. They believed that the printing of the Buddhist scriptures would grant them all kinds of merit, such as those who seek happiness in life now and happiness in the next life, or those who encounter disasters and difficulties in the present world. As this paper deeply delves into the sources of the editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon, we may further analyze the practice of merit-making hierarchically and horizontally. Full article

Digitalization has transformed how young believers in East Asia encounter, interpret, and negotiate Christian teachings. Drawing on four years of ethnographic and digital fieldwork at a large Pentecostal megachurch in Singapore (2019–2022), this article develops the concept of theological tinkering to describe how youth engage diverse Christian ideas through algorithmic exposure, relational discernment, and institutional boundary-work. In an environment where spiritual content circulates through smartphones, social media, livestreams, and peer networks, theological meaning is increasingly assembled through movement rather than inherited through stable structures. The article situates the Singaporean case within broader scholarship on mediatization, hybridity, digital authority, and liquid modernity, showing how theological reasoning is shaped by digital infrastructures, affective-spiritual evaluation, and communal negotiation. Rather than signalling doctrinal instability, theological tinkering reflects a resilient mode of liquid faith: a capacity to remain rooted while navigating plurality. The findings invite a rethinking of theological formation, pastoral leadership, and digital discipleship in East Asia’s rapidly evolving religious landscape. Full article

This article employs the theoretical framework of religious mediatization and a philosophical–anthropological lens to examine how various religious traditions utilize audiovisual media in the digital age to disseminate their faith and transform the religious experience. By comparing representative film and television cases from Christianity, Islam, and Eastern religions, the study analyzes how digital media reconstruct religious narratives, ritual practices, and identity, and facilitate cross-cultural faith exchange in online spaces. The findings indicate that audiovisual media have become a key arena for contemporary religious practice: they reinforce believers’ identity within their tradition while enabling different faith communities to encounter each other’s narratives, generating new understanding and spiritual experiences. Meanwhile, digital media have fostered virtual religious communities and a fan culture reminiscent of “implicit religion” (secular activities imbued with religious-like devotion), challenging traditional religious authority. Finally, from an interdisciplinary perspective, this article reflects on the opportunities and challenges of religious mediatization in the digital era, highlighting how media shape humanity’s quest for meaning and transcendence in a “liquid modernity” context. It also calls for deeper research into interreligious digital communication. Full article

Evangelical immigrants from the Global South have a high degree of confidence in their own ability to start a business in the UK, and they report a significant amount of entrepreneurial engagement within their communities. This article explores how these Christians developed their skills and dispositions, how they are launching businesses in the UK, and—most importantly—how the action of God can be perceived through their experiences. The author constructs a metanarrative which begins in the Global South. Through their encounter with evangelical faith, women and men are developing the ‘spiritual capital’ that has historically been proven to foster entrepreneurship. In many instances, however, this potential for success lies latent in a societal context that hampers and threatens entrepreneurial enterprise. The story then shifts to the UK. When these evangelicals immigrate, many find success in business as they choose to put their spiritual capital to work. It is here argued that the actions of God can be discerned within this story. In the same way that God acted in Biblical times to raise the helpless and to bless exiles in a foreign land, so he seen by his people to be working today. Full article

Although the Bahāʾī Faith was born in a Shīʿī Islamic cultural milieu it has clearly gone beyond the “gravitational pull” of Islām and assumed a distinctive social, scriptural, and religious identity. Bahāʾīs revere Islām as “the source and background of their Faith” and consider the Qurʾān the only authentic, uncorrupted scripture apart from their own. However, Bahāʾī teachings insist that this new religious movement is more than a sectarian development. It represents a distinctive—if you will “autonomous”—religious dispensation along the lines of the development of Christianity out of its original Jewish setting. This assertion and trajectory is clear in the very earliest scriptures of the new religion revealed by the Bāb and runs through subsequent Bahāʾī writings. A key term, badīʿ, used dozens of times by the Bāb in his annunciatory composition, the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ, denotes this sense of the “wondrously new”, something that is simultaneously ancient and unprecedented. It is suggested here that this term is a central and pivotal idea in the Bāb’s vision and that it had a major role in generating the imaginative and kerygmatic cultural energy that would eventually result in the above-mentioned escape from an Islamic orbit. The word badīʿ eventually acquires a life of its own in Bahāʾī thought and practice. It is the word used to designate the new calendar whose current year is 180 B.E., “Bahāʾī Era” or “Badīʿ Era”. It is used in the title of one of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s major books, the Kitāb-i Badīʿ. It is given as a name for one of the young heroes of the Bahāʾī Faith who was tortured and killed because he dared to attempt to communicate directly with the Shah of Iran to testify to the truth of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s mission. It is a word encountered frequently throughout the Bahāʾī writings and translated various ways. It functions as an emblem and symbol of the Bahāʾī ethos and message. The main focus here is the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ, the Bāb’s proclamatory summons, disguised as a Qurʾān commentary, in which he claimed to be in immediate and intimate contact with the hidden Imām and, therefore, the centre of all authority (walāya) whether political or spiritual. The clarion message of the Qayyūm al-Asmāʾ, in which the much repeated Arabic word badīʿ is a powerful and vibrant symbol of “the new”, is that a profound and radical covenantal renewal—as distinct from “revivification/tajdīd”—is at hand, a renewal that would evolve into a distinctive Bahāʾī communal identity that is simultaneously–and therefore wondrously–new and primordial. Full article

Across the globe, comprehensive COVID-19 vaccination programs have been rolled out. Naturally, it remains paramount for efficiency to ensure uptake. Hypothetical vaccine acceptability in South Africa was high prior to the availability of inoculation in August 2020—three-quarters stated intent to immunize nationally. However, 24 months on, less than one-third have finished their vaccination on a national average, and in the sprawling South Western Townships (Soweto), this figure remains troublingly low with as many as four in every five still hesitant. Medical anthropologists have recently portrayed how COVID-19’s jumbled mediatization produces a ‘field of suspicion’ casting serious doubt on authorities and vaccines through misinformation and counterfactual claims, which fuels ‘othering’ and fosters hesitancy. It follows that intent to immunize cannot be used to predict uptake. Here, we take this conceptual framework one step further and illustrate how South African context-specific factors imbricate to amplify uncertainty and fear due the productive nature of communicability, which transforms othering into racialization and exacerbates existing societal polarizations. We also encounter Africanized forms of conspiracy theories and find their narrational roots in colonization and racism. Finally, we discuss semblances with HIV and how the COVID-19 pandemic’s biomedicalization may inadvertently have led to vaccine resistance due to medical pluralism and cultural/spiritual practices endemic to the townships. Full article

This paper explores the barriers to supporting South Asian (Pakistani, Nepalese and Indian) migrant children with special needs and their families encountered navigating Hong Kong’s special needs system and accessing education and healthcare services. It adopts concepts of stigma and disability rights. It draws on semi-structured interviews with fifteen South Asian children and young people with special needs (age 5–21; M = 10; F = 5) and their families, and seven professional practitioners based on the qualitative descriptive method. Informants experienced intersecting stigmatization that included (1) institutional exclusion, (2) daily life microaggressions, and (3) misunderstandings and a lack of awareness education. Simultaneously, some were empowered through (4) support and accommodation, and (5) spiritual support from religion. This paper reveals a paradox embodied by Hong Kong; it is an Asian multicultural city committed to embracing the vision of disability inclusion while failing to ensure necessary support to reduce the stigma experienced by culturally diverse children with a disability. It makes recommendations based on a socioecological framework and concludes that concerted efforts by relevant authorities and organizations should be made to reduce stigma by taking into consideration the intersecting stigmas, specific resources unique to migrant communities, disability rights and cultural sensitivity. Full article

This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of “fabulation”, an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually “authorizing”. By “fabulation”, we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within another object—in other words, an interior agential image, or “soul”; and by “authorizing”, we mean “deemed as having some claim to arbitration, persuasion, and legitimacy” such that the user might make choices that affect their life or others in accordance with the AI or might have their spiritual needs met. We considered two case studies where this agency took on a spiritual or religious valence when contextualized as such for the user: a robotic Buddhist priest known as Mindar, and a chatbot called The Spirituality Chatbot. We show how understanding perceptions of AI or robots as being spiritual or religious in a way that authorizes behavioral changes requires understanding tendencies of the human body more so than it does any metaphysical nature of the technology itself. Full article

This essay offers an example of a guiding thread in my own research on and teaching of Dante’s Commedia. Specifically, I will follow a strand that leads us from Dante’s encounter with the “bella scola” of classical poets in Inferno Canto 4, through a key scene in the Purgatorio where Dante and his guide Virgil meet the late classical poet Statius, to the remarkable six-canto suite in the Heaven of the Stars, sign of Gemini, in which Dante-poet has Dante-character undergo a series doctrinal tests on the theological virtues. His successful response to the challenges posed by the apostles Peter, James, and Paul doubly authorizes him as poet and as Christian teacher of the highest order. These unique experiences as Dante is successively introduced to and made part of a rising series of elite groups, highlights his double role as humble student and prospective teacher of others. Among the various aims of this essay is to give a sample of a way in which teachers of the Commedia may address the perennial pedagogical problem of how to account for the extraordinary spectacle of a first-person epic that at once expresses deep piety with profound “charitas” (spiritual love) and appears as the absolute height of a self-aggrandizement seemingly inconsistent with Christian humility. Another is to suggest one possible strategy for teaching the Comedy as a whole, and especially the final canticle, the Paradiso, which even Dante himself notoriously thinks is “not for everyone”. Full article

By situating herself in the historical dialogue about Christianity, women, and sexuality, the author examines what many may consider an oxymoron—spiritual eroticism. The essay provides a definition of spiritual eroticism, one which takes it beyond intense sexual encounters but instead grounds the idea in the story of Oshun, the African deity of beauty, sensuality, and fertility. Spiritual eroticism is explored in Tina McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With. Full article