Engaged spiritualities face a central challenge: how to transform moments of transcendence into enduring forms of shared life under modern conditions of pluralism, critique, and expressive individualism. This article asks what enables certain forms o...
Drawing on practices and teachings from Daoism, neo-Confucianism, and tantric Buddhism, Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–1511) created the system of Yuiitsu Shintō, also known eponymously as Yoshida Shintō, all the while making claims for Shintō as the world’s...
Ritual has long served as a central axis of religious life, not only structuring practice but also transmitting meaning across generations. This article offers a new perspective on how Hasidic thought reconfigures the medieval Jewish genre of ta&lsqu...
In the present study, I undertake to show that the public sphere can be constructed within the frames of a discourse loaded with religious symbols, either as part of religious institutions and manifestations, or, in a more interesting case, through t...
The “hand-waving sacrifice” is a large-scale sacrificial ceremony with more than 2000 years of history. It was passed down from ancient times by the Tujia ethnic group living in the Wuling Corridor of China, and it integrates religion, sa...
Confucian rituals have constituted the foundation of religious practice in the traditional societies of East Asia. Paying attention to the Confucian ritual, this article explores the way Confucianism constructs its symbolic system based on people’s n...
One of the traditional religious rituals of the Yao ethnic group is seeking reciprocal favor for the family from the gods (known as “Huan Jia Yuan”). The cultural value system of the Yao community can be seen in this ritual. Based on fieldwork examin...
In ancient China, all moral concepts are based on Li 禮 (ritual). Jing 敬 (reverence and respect) is one of the core categories of Confucian ritual spirituality and has rich ideological connotations. This study dis...
Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Rudolf Clausius, and Léon Brillouin considered certain “values” as key quantities in their descriptions of market competition, natural selection, thermodynamic processes, and information exchange, respectively. None of tho...
The article is a preliminary effort to join neo-positive and historical institutional analysis from comparative politics with insights from discursive and phenomenological analysis. It highlights a message arising from a South Korean film related to...
The 4th and 5th centuries marked a pivotal phase in the development of the Goguryeo regime. Its tomb murals epitomize the visual strategies of state-building, serving to establish a “sacred theater” of power. Taking Tomb No. 4 of the Wuku...
Like most tribal societies, the socio-religious system of the Karbis of Assam also largely conforms to the belief in magic, spirits, and the ancestor cult. The Chomangkan is one of the most important rituals of the Karbis and mirrors their philosophy...
The Eight Banners System is the social organizational structure of the bannerman (qiren, 旗人) from the Qing dynasty and the fundamental system of the country under Qing rule. It is divided into three types: the Manchu Eight Banners, Mongolian Eight Ba...
Sacrifice to mountain and water spirits was already a state ritual in the earliest dynasties of China, which later gradually formed a system of five sacred peaks, five strongholds, four seas, and four waterways, which was mainly constructed by the Co...
This paper explores the question of how religious symbolism functions to provide a more meaningful or enriched experience of life. It examines a common and highly influential view, referred to here as the “source model”, for which this fu...
Myths provide hagiographic and iconographic accounts of the gods, which shape rituals that are performed in cults associated with these gods. In the realization of iconographies and ritualization of narratives in myths, material objects play an activ...
The general theory of information, which includes syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and many other special theories of information, provides theoretical and practical tools for discerning a very large diversity of different kinds, types, and classes of...
This paper examines the philosophy of “Dao follows nature” (道法自然) and investigates how Daoist clothing transforms abstract cosmological concepts into a “wearable interface for spiritual practice&rdqu...
The sacrificial ritual to Mount Yi (Yishan 沂山) or the Eastern Stronghold (Dongzhen 東鎮) was included in the traditional Chinese state ritual system to mountain and water gods, and therefore, originally, it was a Confucian r...
All institutions are the product of human activity. This article will consider how the development of the Sacrament of Orders is embedded in the social construction of the church as an institution, with a leadership structure and a system of symbols...
There is a divergence between religion and its modes of application, or religion and religiosity. This essay provides a critical analysis of Clifford Geertz’s book Islam Observed and tries to attempt the question of whether Islam is better unde...
Water is the source of life and also the lifeline of cities. The reconstruction of secondary water supply systems is a key component of urban renewal reforms, and the collaborative governance of such projects has become a focal topic through academic...
Australian Aboriginal symbols are visual forms of knowledge that express cultural intellect. Being classified by a Western interpretation of “art” devalues thousands of years of generational knowledge systems, where visual information has been respec...
This paper examines the Daoist stelae of the Northern Dynasties through the lens of Eliade’s religious theory, with particular focus on the transformation of profane objects into sacred ones and the transition of local believers from the profan...
Dating the late 1000s to the mid-1200s CE, petroglyphs of sandal images are among others that distinguish ancient Pueblo rock art in the San Juan and Little Colorado River drainages on the Colorado Plateau from Ancestral Pueblo rock art elsewhere acr...
Qurrat al-ʿAyn is the name of the enigmatic Maiden who appeared alongside Ibn ʿArabī when he was inspired to recite the four verses that open The Interpreter of Desires, as he was wandering around the Kaʿba. In this article, through the analysis of t...
Qixiang is a unique sacrificial culture created by the Han army eight banners in northeast China. This culture not only has elements such as shamanism and Han people burning incense, but also has military sacrificial elements. This paper argues that...
This study explores the ethnobotanical significance of plant species used in the Heet Sip Song (Twelve Monthly Merit-Making) ceremonies in Roi Et Province, Northeastern Thailand. A total of 80 plant species across 73 genera and 42 families were docum...
Between 1008 and 1016, for several times Emperor Zhenzong (968–1022, r. 997–1022) distributed Zhicao (Ganoderma Lucidum), acquired during the Fengshan 封禪 rituals. These grand-scale activities from central to local levels wer...
The River God cult held a significant place in state rituals in imperial China. While scholars have primarily focused on the evolution of the River God sacrificial system, with its interplay of the official granting of noble titles and popular belief...
This paper addresses the problem of infrastructural breaks in two systems—the funeral market and maternity care. The authors analytically problematize how dysfunctions in the operation of these infrastructures shape the experiences of funeral a...
In Slavic folk culture, Christianity is a foreign, borrowed cultural model, while the oral tradition is native and familiar. The different areas of folk culture were influenced to varying degrees by the Christian tradition. The most dependent area of...
18 December 2021
Approximately 200 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) worldwide. Migration has spread the practice of FGM around the world, thus making it a global public health issue. The objective of this descriptive qualitative...
This paper focuses on the Jidu 濟瀆 (i.e., the Ji River 濟水), one of the four waterways (sidu 四瀆) in imperial China. Even though it vanished a long time ago, the Jidu had always been a part of the traditional Ch...
Traditional Chinese state sacrificial ritual represented a symbolic system of integrating religious belief, divine authority, and political legitimacy. The Northern Stronghold (Beizhen 北鎮, i.e., Mount Yiwulü 醫巫閭...
As a representative form of popular religion in southern Fujian (Minnan 闽南), the Sanping Patriarch (Sanping Zushi 三平祖師) belief exhibits distinct transregional and cross-cultural characteristics in its dissemi...
As the “Ninth Grotto-Heaven” in Daoist tradition, Linwu Cave has served as a symbolic bridge between the human and immortal realms since the Tang Dynasty. During the Ming Dynasty, painters of the Wu School in Suzhou reimagined Linwu Cave...
This article examines how a Daoist sacred mountain community in east China historically intertwined its religious life with the rhythms of the natural world, thereby challenging the conventional divide between “nature” and “culture....
Limited accessibility, mountainous geography, and seismic conditions have posed challenges to both the preservation and the transmission of knowledge inherited from the Incas. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the ancestral Inca construction s...
This study examines the traditional villages of the Tujia and Miao ethnic groups in Xiangxi Prefecture, western Hunan, and clarifies their spatial distribution and residential cultures through ArcGIS-based spatial analysis combined with extensive fie...
Vine cultivation has a strong territorial character derived from the environmental, social, cultural and economic interactions with the space in which the vines are grown. In Spain, this activity is clearly representative of Mediterranean agrarian la...
The Black Lives Matter movement has become one of the most visible, controversial, and impactful campaigns to address racialized violence and discrimination in the 21st century. Activists within the movement join traditional forms of social protest a...
In Daoist cosmology, the southern celestial star deities are represented by terms such as the Southern Dipper, the Southern Palace, the Southern Chang, and the South Pole, each with specific cosmological significance. These concepts are closely inter...
The centrality of disruption as a graced moment of awakening social imagination to a new dawn where human flourishing becomes a possibility ought to be the focus of the church’s praxes of sacramental rituals. In fact, Christianity is itself a r...