Religions, Volume 12, Issue 11

Several large-scale Bible epics have been produced in the decade after the revival of epic cinema at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while many biblical films of this period were primarily aimed at religious audiences, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah...

Cultural beliefs and practices find expression through rituals. Rites of initiation or passage are some of the most common rituals among the indigenous African societies. Pregnancy and Childbirth are not only biological events, but also socially and...

The purgatory doctrine, which has played a vital role in Christian culture, states that most believers must experience afterlife punishment in order to be cleansed of their sins before entering Heaven. Traditional Islamic theology rejects the notion...

The hermeneutical turn in Islamic studies has also affected Islamic scholarship in Turkey, a country where traditional Sunnism historically dominates. Historicism in Islamic studies became an influential intellectual and academic current in Turkey af...

The idea of a univocal property of ‘goodness’ is not clearly found in classical Sanskrit sources; instead, a common ethical strategy was to clarify the ontological nature of the self or world in such a way that ethical implications natura...

Culture has its source and anchoring in religion, but the presence of religious values in social life takes place in terms of culture and through culture. Religiosity plays a key role in defining the boundaries of cultural differences, and this paper...

Historians include the Bāṇas among the important minor dynasties of South India. They are first mentioned as Bṛhadbāṇas in the Tāḷagunda inscription of the fifth century. Rulers with the Bāṇa name exi...

Prayer is a central element of religiosity but research has focused primarily on distinguishing its types and analyzing its functional aspect. A particularly important issue is the subjective evaluation of prayer importance, which so far has not been...

Within southern hip-hop, minimal credit has been given to the Black women who have curated sonic and performance narratives within the southern region. Many southern hip-hop scholars and journalists have centralized the accomplishments and masculinit...

Cyprus acquired special importance, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, on the Eastern Mediterranean’s pilgrimage network. Described by contemporary pilgrims as “Terra christianorum ultima”, the island was considered to be the last Christ...

The Qur’an often compares its own inspiration and revelation with previous scriptures to its audience. However, the Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity had manifold understandings of the inspiration and revelation of scripture. The rabbinic traditi...

This paper considers Marian iconography in which the Virgin is depicted sitting on the ground, known as the Virgin of Humility. The creation of this Marian type coincides with Saint Thomas’s systematization of the virtues, which resulted in a d...

This thought experiment in comparison ponders a Black man’s conviction that his Hebrew identity would make him immune to COVID-19. Surfacing the history of the claims and the scholar’s own suspicions, the paper examines the layered politics of identi...

This paper examines the benefits of ethnographic film for the study of religion. It argues that the exploration of gaps between colloquial descriptions of divinities and their practical manifestation in ritual is instructive of the way religious cate...

A number of years ago, renowned English biographer Andrew Lycett wrote a short piece about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that highlighted the seemingly irreconcilable tension between Doyle the creator of the “super-rational” detective Sherlock Holmes, and D...

Following the completion of work on the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith began his work on expanding the Bible’s scope. Unlike many of his contemporary Bible thinkers who were also working on translations of the Bible, Smith expanded the text in unique w...

In this article, I examine the role of prophetic disappointment in creating ideological change. I discuss the response of two Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924–2010) and Rabbi Shmuel Tal (b. 1962), to the crisis of faith they encountered reg...

Bauls, the wandering minstrels of rural Bengal (of both Bangladesh and India), are a socio-religiously marginalized cultural group. While the ritualistic practices and spiritual discourses of the Bauls have received scholarly attention, scholarship o...

Comenius is considered by many scholars to be the father of modern education, a title that he has thoroughly earned. His ideas about universal education for all children foreshadowed modern pedagogical developments, and he dedicated more than forty y...

Recent scholarship focuses on the plasticity of the concept of “scripture” as it is defined by different religious traditions. Based on its contents, the Quran is most commonly compared to the Bible, yet such an approach misses the distin...

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the term intercultural theology has been gaining more and more traction. At the same time, the terms world Christianity and anthropology of Christianity have also become established. This article inquires into...

This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish–Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–1484)—whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century—as a case study, taking up questions of the reception of cults...

Existing scholarship has largely focused on the violence of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) when analyzing their response to the Oslo Agreement and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) in the 1990s. The Islamist oppo...

How to be authentically modern? This was the pervasive question behind the ideological elaborations of numerous religious and nationalist movements toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of them attempted to find the answer in an imaginary pa...

The decolonial discourse around Christianity must not avoid dealing with Whiteness if there is going to be any fruitful decolonization. Colonialism and the Western missionary enterprise were not necessarily two distinct and unrelated entries to preco...

Listening to sabad kīrtan (sung scriptural verse) is a core, everyday, widespread, and loved worship practice of Sikhs around the globe. Thus, it would be fair to state that sounding is central to Sikh worship. Indeed, the Sikh scripture conside...

Zosimus of Panopolis was a Graeco-Egyptian alchemist of the 3rd century whose alchemy was imbued with both technical and Gnostic elements. In this way, the notion of conversion is met in the corpus of Zosimus in both its material and spiritual aspect...

There are a great many studies on the figure of Mary Magdalene in different areas of knowledge. Nevertheless, there is a gap as regards the image of this character in Catalonia, and specifically regarding the visual representation of her soul at the...

In this article, we respond to the Special Issue theme by addressing the complexities of religious identities in archipelagic communities where the dual role of the sea as conduit and barrier has impacted the parish system, farming estates and commun...

A beatitude is a blessing. It is a form of appreciation that can be directed toward others or oneself. Theologically speaking, some frame the original beatitudes from The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew as pertaining to “spiritual happin...

This paper explores the notion of insularity and religious life in the sacred landscape of Ikaros/Failaka with a particular focus on the Hellenistic period. The little island of Ikaros/Failaka in the Persian Gulf had a long pre-Hellenistic religious...

This article examines the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in counter-radicalization in Nigeria, with emphasis on the Boko Haram terrorist group operating in northeast Nigeria and the greater Lake Chad region. A qualitative methodological app...

Many young Christian men faced a moral dilemma when selective military conscription was introduced in Australia during the Vietnam War from 1964–72. The legislation was the National Service Act in 1964 (NSA). Some believed that their Christian consci...

In this study stone pagodas from ancient Japan (7th to 9th centuries) were analyzed. The findings show that there are some apparently influenced by the Korean Peninsula and two other types. While there are examples of the former type that are large a...

This paper aims to explore the roots of the nativist discourse among Iranian intellectuals in the 20th century prior to the Islamic Revolution, a discourse based on Eastern authenticity and the felt need for a return to Islamic, Persian, or Asian tra...

Kathryn Tanner maintains that political theologies based on the Trinity are not only unsound, but potentially dangerous. Her primary concern is that the Trinity, by definition, cannot serve as a “model” for human socio-political organization. Mirosla...

The main aim of the article is to analyze the Prosperity Gospel as an important element of the contemporary pentecostalization of Christianity. The essence of this global process is the emergence of thousands of new Pentecostal denominations and the...

By the time of his death in 1280 Albert the Great was respected not only as a theologian and philosopher, but also as one of the greatest authorities on astrology in the West. Such expertise rarely gains plaudits today, but in late medieval Europe kn...

The authors’ objective was to find out how and why the approach of the Russian Orthodox Church to sociocultural adaptation of predominantly Muslim international labor migrants has evolved from its initial stage to now. Research methodology is based o...

This essay analyses Leonardo da Vinci’s innovative iconography in the making of the panel known as the Virgin of the Rocks (Paris, Louvre) in relation to his considerations on the important Renaissance debate of Paragone, or comparison among the arts...

The largest part of the existing literature with regard to Islamophobia in Greece focuses primarily on the policies, activities and discourse of politicians and political groups of the extreme right, Orthodox Church figures, state authorities, the me...

To theorize Jain sovereignty, this essay takes up Ernst Kantorowicz’s underlying query of what happens when a king dies. In turning to medieval Jain authors such as Jinasena, we see how sovereignty and renunciation were mutually constituted such that...

Is suicide the unforgivable sin? Most Western arguments against suicide stem from Christian arguments. Christianity has a long-standing position that suicide is morally wrong. However, on the issue of suicide and salvation, Christianity is divided. D...

Nuclear rivalry, as well as terrorism and the war against terror, exemplify the dangerous escalation of violence that is threatening our world. Gandhi’s militant nonviolence offers a possible alternative that avoids a complacent indifference toward i...

This article focusses on the relationship of the church with productive landscapes and coastal topographies within numerous Cypriot contexts of the 4th–8th centuries. Through synthesising the archaeological research and architectural remains of these...

This article aims to provide an a posteriori argument from love for the Trinity. A reformulation of the argument from love is made by proposing a novel version of the argument that is situated within an objective, empirical, natural theological frame...

By the twelfth century, a broad consensus had developed among Tibetan Buddhists: The Middle Way School (Madhyamaka) of Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century), as interpreted by Candrakīrti (c. 600–650), would be normative in Tibet. However, Tibetans had inherite...

In spite of the increasing presence of religion in international relations with various publications observing this presence and numerous authorities calling for the inclusion of religion into mainstream research, there is no universal consent to rec...

Catholic schools. has articulated There are concerns that the curriculum of Catholic schools has been increasingly dominated by pressures to conform to a programme of education legitimised by an intrusive secular state and designated as a ‘national c...

Buddhist influences on the sacred axis of the capital during Medieval China (220–907) underwent a process of starting with little impact during the era of Eastern Han, Caowei, and Western Jin (220–317) to a more prominent influence from the late Sout...