Religions, Volume 7, Issue 7 (July 2016) – 15 articles

Mothers and Spirits examines the intersection of women, alcohol, and death through a comparative analysis. Offering a brief history of the study of drinking, followed by a short analysis of drinking in European and Chinese cultures, Cann examines two religious texts central to the roles of women and alcohol in Chinese religious thought and Christianity. Finally, Cann utilizes the historical and textual background to contextualize her ethnographic study of women, alcohol, and death in Mexican Catholicism, Chinese religions, and American Southern Baptist Christianity. Cann argues that both alcohol and temperance are used as a way to forge, cement, and create gender identity, constructing alternate discourses of power and inclusivity. Full article

This paper investigates the research question: How do religious youth learn to give? While it is likely that youth learn religious financial giving from a variety of different sources, this investigation focuses primarily on how parents teach giving to their children. Supplementary data are also analyzed on the frequency in which youth hear extra-familial calls to give within their religious congregations. In focusing on parental transmission, the analysis identifies a number of approaches that parents report using to teach their children religious financial giving. It also investigates thoughts and feelings about religious financial giving by the children of these parents as a means of assessing the potential impacts of parental methods. Additionally, congregation member reflections on how they learned to give provide insights on giving as a process that develops across the life course, often instilled in childhood, but not appearing behaviorally until adulthood. As such, this paper contributes to a life course understanding of religious giving and has implications for giving across generations. Full article

Existing research on religious identity, especially from a narrative perspective, has tended to focus either on accounts of the past (especially occasions of religious change) or on conceptions of religious identity in the present. Religious communities, however, not only provide a sense of identity and belonging in the present—as a “Catholic” or “Buddhist,” for example—they also promote a particular vision of the religious ideal: The way of being-in-the-world that all adherents are (or ought to be) striving to achieve. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this paper describes and analyzes the identity and lifestyle goals of participants in two communities of practice: An Integral Yoga studio and a Catholic prayer house. I find that the ideal spiritual self in both communities is defined by three key characteristics: A sacred gaze, a simultaneous sense of presence and detachment, and a holistic style of identity management. I suggest that in constructing and transmitting a shared vision of the “enlightened self,” these organizations offer practitioners a highly desirable but ever-elusive aspirational identity. This study calls attention to religious organizations as important suppliers of possible identities—the identities, either desired and feared, we think we could or might become in the future—and reveals the situated and contextual nature of adherents’ religious aspirations. Full article

Adolescents, when faced with cancer and hospitalization, experience different needs that can have a profound impact on the adolescent and their family. Spirituality and religion are helpful in order to find meaning in the experience of cancer. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the spiritual/religious needs of adolescents with cancer in Iran. This study was an exploratory qualitative research. Adolescents with cancer, their families and nurses working in cancer unit formed the participants. The study environment was the cancer unit and the study population was adolescents with cancer in Kerman, Iran. Purposeful sampling and, semi-structured interviews with 14 adolescents with cancer and their families and six nurses were performed individually. To analyze the data, qualitative content analysis was used. From the data analysis four main themes emerged: the need for a relationship with God; the need for a relationship with the self; the need for a relationship with others; and the need for a relationship with the environment and nature. The results of this study provided a new vision in meeting the spiritual/religious needs of adolescents with cancer. According our result, adolescents with cancer, in addition to their developmental stage, need to face the other needs that can come along with the needs of this age period. Regarding these needs, it is helpful to find purpose and meaning in the experience of suffering and pain, and it can prevent spiritual distress. Full article

The religious lives of young adults have generally been investigated by examining what young people believe and their self-reported religious practices. Far less is known about young adults’ organizational involvement and its impact on religious identities and ideas about religious commitment. Using data from site visit observations of religious congregations and organizations, and individual and focus group interviews with college-age black and white Christians, we find differences in how black and white students talk about their religious involvement; and with how they are incorporated into the lives of their congregations. White students tended to offer “organizational biographies” chronicling the contours of belonging as well as disengagement, and emphasizing the importance of fulfilling personal needs as a criterion for maintaining involvement. On the other hand, black students used “family” and “home” language and metaphors to describe how their religious involvement, a voluntary choice, was tied to a sense of “calling” and community. We show that this variation is aligned with organizational differences in black and white congregations that situate white youth as separate and black youth as integrated into the larger church community. Full article

This article proposes a re-examination of the institution of marriage in light of the eschatology of the Eastern Church and the theological discourse on the topic developed by three thinkers of the Reformed tradition, namely Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer. In doing so, I take into consideration the relationship of marriage with: (1) sacramental theology; (2) philosophical anthropology; (3) politics; and (4) the question of human sexuality. Such a re-examination of marriage has been made highly urgent and relevant today in the wake of the recent debate on same-sex marriage. This fourfold examination illustrates marriage’s ambivalent position within the Christian tradition insofar as, if taken as normative, marriage diminishes the subversive claim of Christian eschatology. Furthermore, Christian theology refuses marriage an absolute merit, by demanding that it is always qualified in relation to the Church’s eschatological vision. Full article

The issue of freedom of religion has always been situated at the intersection between human rights, personal freedom of choice, religious belief and apostasy. While freedom supporters argue that one is free to choose his or her religion, including changing religion, the Qur’an has made it clear that Islam allows changing of religion so long as it is from any religion to Islam and not from Islam to another religion. Apostatizing from Islam is one of the gravest enormities cautioned with eternal punishment. In interpreting the meaning of freedom of religion and restricting it from the “freedom” to change religion, Muslim scholars have been careful to draw a line distinguishing between the two. This article examines the different interpretations given by scholars on the issue of freedom of religion according to the Qur’an. By using historical and thematic analysis, the writers evaluate the mufassirins’ (scholars of exegesis) views on the related Qur’anic verses. Interpretations of the classical Islamic legal sources are also examined to identify their opinions on the consequences of leaving Islam, followed by contemporary opinions. The objective is to show the development and changes, if any, in the approaches taken regarding the limitations of freedom of religion. This will enlighten the ways to handle the issue of apostasy, as it is seen as a highly divisive and controversial issue, and to highlight an ideal approach for Malaysia. Full article

This article demonstrates remarkably similar methods for linking mind and body to address the “hard problem” in the work of 11th-century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta with a currently prominent neuroscienctific theory, Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory 3.0. Both Abhinavagupta and Tononi and Christof Koch hinge their theories on the identity of phenomenal subjective experience with causality. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory is remarkable precisely in its method for dealing with the mind-body problem; namely, Tononi’s mathematically oriented systems neurology proposes something we typically do not find in neuroscientific literature—that we start from a phenomenology of experience. Abhinavagupta’s sophisticated and, for his milieu, novel way of linking subjectivity and objectivity in the concepts of knowledge (jñāna) and action (kriyā) also offers a way of understanding how subjectivity can be linked to causality. This particular configuration is mostly absent in Western Cartesian models for understanding consciousness and in Indian philosophical speculations on consciousness. However, this, in any case, is precisely the move that Tononi makes when he proposes that information is both “causal and intrinsic.” Abhinavagupta’s similar linkage of subjectivity with causality can help us to think about Tononi’s neuroscientific mathematical model. Full article

Throughout his career, Michel Foucault sustained a trenchant critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he accused of arguing that the subject “dispenses (all) significations”. In contrast to existentialism’s interests in subjective consciousness, Foucault pursues an archaeological method which he later develops into a genealogical approach to discourse that emphasizes the institutional practices and forms of knowledge/power that undergird historical epistemes. Taking contemporary networked Capitalism, the discourse of “workplace spirituality”, and the life history of one management reformer as its case studies, this paper turns to the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in an effort to historicize experiences of neoliberal “spirituality”, as an archaeology of knowledge might, while also attempting to account for intentionality and biography, as existential approaches would. Turning to work in contemporary critical theory, which associates strident anti-humanism in social theory with the rise of neoliberal discourse, I argue that sustained attention to the ways in which personal and social history always entail one another and are mutually arising makes not only for better phenomenology but makes for better critical scholarship as well. Full article

“Belief” as an analytical tool and critical category of investigation for the study of religion has been a resurging topic of interest. This article discusses the problems of language and practice in the discussion of “belief” and proceeds to map a few of the emergent frameworks, proposed within the past decade, for investigating “belief”. The issue of inconsistency, however, continues to remain a perennial issue that has not been adequately explained. This article argues for the utility and value of the “believing selves” framework, in conjunction with revisionist theories of cognitive dissonance, to advance the claim that beliefs are representations, as well as functions, of cultural history which bind individual and society. Full article

The aim of this study was to translate and test the psychometric properties of a Farsi and an English version of the spiritual needs questionnaire (SpNQ) a measure originally developed in German. The World Health Organization guideline for translating and validating questionnaires was used. Participants were recruited from hospitals in Iran and New Zealand during an outpatient follow-up appointment after cancer treatment. People diagnosed with cancer in Iran (68) and New Zealand (54) completed and returned the SpNQ (at time 1) and within the two week time period (time 2). Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.79 to 0.92, except for the existentialistic domain of the SpNQ (0.53–0.54). The coefficient of variation (CV) indicated minimal random variation between the assessments; the measures were generally stable, except for the item “existentialistic”. The translated versions of the SpNQ have the potential to support a comprehensive assessment of cancer patients’ spiritual needs. Full article

Continental philosophers of religion and the theologians who engage with them have recently began to blur the lines between the disciplines of philosophy and theology. This is particularly true after the so-called “theological turn” in phenomenology. I argue for an appreciation of their approaches but will also express that these explorations must remain interdisciplinary. Far too often philosophers and theologians alike appropriate freely within their interdisciplinary research with little regard for the presuppositions and methodologies latent within their appropriations. This article will demonstrate these appropriations through an exploration of Merold Westphal and Richard Kearney’s use of hermeneutical phenomenology, and will claim that their use of this methodology falls upon two distinct discourses, a theological one for Westphal and a philosophical one for Kearney. The upshot of this exploration is an argument for a renewal of methodological restraint when appropriating from other disciplines and a respect for the difference between academic disciplines. Full article

This article explores apophatic ways of presenting God (the Other) in two films of Andrey Zvyagintsev. The lens for this analysis is the phenomenological theology of John Panteleimon Manoussakis, using the following concepts: (1) God as personal Other; (2) the relational nature of God’s self-disclosure through prosopon; (3) God as revealed in space/sight; (4) God as revealed in hearing/time; and (5) God as revealed in touch/self-understanding. This analysis, pursued through close examination of Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003) and Leviathan (2014), demonstrates the relevance of Manoussakis’s theology to the study of religion and film, particularly in its sensual and experiential themes and emphases. Full article

This essay examines the unusual evangelical work of Marilla Baker Ingalls, an American Baptist missionary to Burma from 1851–1902. By the time of her death in Burma at the age of 75, Ingalls was known as one of the most successful Baptist evangelists among Burmese Buddhists. To understand the extraordinary dynamic of Ingalls’ expanding Christian community, this essay focuses on two prominent objects at the Baptist mission: A life-sized dog statue that Ingalls kept chained at the edge of her property and a massive banyan tree covered with biblical illustrations and revered by locals as an abode of divine beings. This essay argues that these objects transformed Ingalls’ American Baptist Christianity into a kind of Burmese religion that revolved around revered objects. Through an examination of the particular shrine practices that pulled people into the Baptist mission, this essay reflects on the larger context of religious encounter, conflict, and representation in modernizing Burma. Full article

This article initiates an inquiry into the sources and frameworks of value used to denote human subjects in modernity. In particular, I consider the conflation of monetary, legal, and theological registers employed to demarcate human worth. Drawing on Simmel’s speculative genealogy of the money equivalent of human values, I consider the spectrum of ascriptions from specifically quantified to infinite human value. I suggest that predications of infinite human value require and imply quantified—and specifically monetary-economic—human value. Cost and worth, economically and legally defined, provide a foundation for subsequent eternal projections in a theological imaginary. This calls into question the interventionist potential of claims to infinite or unquantifiable human value as resistance to the contemporary financialization of human life and society. Full article