Religions, Volume 13, Issue 11

The True Form Charts of the Man-Bird Mountain (人鳥山真形圖, or TFCMBM) are important ritual images created by ancient Taoists. Scholars envisage them as the “fairy mountain map” (仙山ࢵ...

In this paper I examine the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics by reassessing the relationship between phenomenological and metaphysical transcendence. More specifically, I examine the notion of phenomenological transcendence in Husse...

James Sterba has recently argued that the free will defense fails to explain the compossibility of a perfect God and the amount and degree of moral evil that we see. I think he is mistaken about this. I thus find myself in the awkward and unexpected...

Relationship-oriented questions have always been at the crossroads of ethnoreligious identity, religious freedom, religious conversion, religious prejudice, and religious pluralism throughout Muslim-Buddhist co-existence in the sixth century within t...

Following the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the Korean government announced restrictions on religious activities such as worship services and small group gatherings. Unlike their Buddhist and Catholic counterparts, who responded relatively pliably to th...

It is well-documented that patients’ religious characteristics may affect their health and health care experiences, correlating with better health and psychological well-being. Likewise, health care providers are impacted by religious character...

This article calls for an examination of the spirituality of Jesus in light of the unique historical and theological distinctives of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. Although the topic of spirituality is wide and deep, this study will approach i...

Pacifism is a complex and significant moral, political, religious, and philosophical idea. There is an evolving conversation about peace and nonviolence that occurs among secular scholars, religious figures, and activists. This paper explores this co...

For at least a century the Bible played a significant, positive role in Native American letters starting with the eighteenth-century writings of Samson Occom. A product of the Great Awakening, Occom’s engagements with the Bible resembled those...

This article reflects upon how LGBTQIA+ Christians and their allies within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its predecessor denominations ‘called the question’ on their right to and responsibility for membership, ordination, and marri...

The four principles of Western medical bioethics, i.e., autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice, published by Beauchamps and Childress in their seminal ‘Principles of Biomedical Ethics’, are understood as universal. However, Non...

This paper examines the epistemic value of non-religious mystical experiences. By taking a non-religious angle, it adds a complementary perspective to the context in which mystical experiences are generally discussed, i.e., the context of theological...

The relationship between History and the Islamic revelation has been debated in Academia over the last few decades; its complex framework has usually been investigated in aspects such as the form, the language and the facets of structure that have no...

The scale of the representation of the Islamic head covering has increased exponentially over the last decade because of a range of factors, including growth in the modest fashion business sector and increased visibility of Muslim women in hijab in t...

The major aim of the religious person is to obey God’s injunctions and follow His ways. If he or she shall do so, he or she will attain success in this world or in the world-to-come. Thus, the Abrahamic religions have come to center on precepts...

Contrary to the majority of contemporary analytic philosophers of religion, James Sterba argues in his book Is a Good God Logically Possible? (2019) that Alvin Plantinga with his famous free will defense has not succeeded in solving the logical probl...

After many years of neglecting the religious dimension within intercultural education, today there is a broad consensus in Europe that religious education represents an important dimension in the intercultural education of young people. Awareness of...

The offence and violence surrounding episodes like the Salman Rushdie Affair and the Danish cartoon controversies have furnished Western critique of Islam. While important work has challenged this criticism of Islam by interrogating the secular found...

“Liberationism”, a term derived from Liberation theology (LT), is an analytical concept used by religious historians and sociologists as a generic designation for Latin American post-conciliar Catholicism. “Theology of the People&rd...

This paper examines how megachurch congregations in South Korea responded to governmental measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of religious governance. This empirical study of Saeronam Church (SC) in Daejeon shows that the unexpected cr...

This essay investigates the role of uncertainty in post-Reformation Catholicism. It argues that one of the reasons why uncertainty was so central to early modern Catholic discourse lies in the complex and multifaced relationship between believing&mda...

Chinese spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism all emphasize the cultivation of idealistic mentalities (IMs) which are (1) not yet achieved, (2) clear in value judgment, (3) systematic and stable, and (4) cultivated with syst...

Negativity is an important dimension in both Adorno’s inverse theology and the theological thought of pre-Qin Daoism. Firstly, both have a negative thinking and approach. Adorno inherited the Jewish idea of “forbidden images” and ne...

This article brings Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) Korea into the discussion about the various roles of Daoism in East Asian cultures in which it has, unfortunately, all too often been absent. Based primarily on art-historical methodology and...

This research contributes to the scarce literature that exists on the perception that Catholics have about the Eucharist online, which was continued through various digital platforms, but once the emergence of the COVID-19. In this way, the perceptio...

The poets in question belong to different generations, as well as different cultural, ethnic, and even religious backgrounds. Ethnically Mordvinian Zavyalov (b. 1957), who is also a noted scholar and translator from Ancient Greek and Latin, and ethni...

The body and blood of Christ are essential to Christian liturgy and passion devotion. In medieval devotional books, this came to the fore in an overtly material way. The skin of the pages, the red ink, the words, and the images constituted more than...

Prof. Stephen Strehle’s recent study suggests that modern politics is informed by secularism, which tends to promote hostility toward religion and the desire to purge religion from the public sphere. This essay considers one of the founding doc...

The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, also known as Yuanjuejing 圓覺經 or, in full, Dafang guangyuanjue xiuduoluo liaoyijing 大方廣圓覺修多羅了義經, is a mindfulness me...

This article seeks to demonstrate how the Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (d. 2010) challenges the concept of divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyya), or the rule of God, developed during the twentieth century, primarily by Sayyid Qutb and Abu...

The Door of the Apostles at the Cathedral of Valencia stands as a treasure of sacred Gothic architecture and sculpture. A modification to its original structure in 1599 removed the mullion and the stone image of the Virgin that is to be found today i...

The pandemic enhanced disgust for the socially disadvantaged. In South Korea, hatred of the Chinese, the Shincheonji Church, sexual minorities, and migrant workers intensified during the pandemic. In this social atmosphere of fear and anxiety, Korean...

The debate on the existence of religion in Africa is far from over; it reverberates in new dimensions but asking the same old questions in newer ways. The same argument is being extended to secularism. This article takes a critical look at the concep...

This essay argues that contemporary conceptions of “calling” do not properly reckon with the concept’s biblical and historical foundations. In popular culture, where celebrities and social media influencers wield power, religious la...

This article introduces how, even if in a context refractory to the Gospel, the evangelization of the Dominicans started a kind of dialogue between the symbols embodied in the Catholic cosmology and the ones belonging to the traditional Taiwanese cul...

Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of a diversity of contemporary philosophies moving ‘concentrically’ toward a ‘dramatic theology’. This article affirms the coherence of this claim, by establishing some of these convergences, begi...

Atheists feel there is no reason for religious beliefs and that they should only believe things that can be proven logically or by experiments, while theists believe they have enough reason to believe. At some point, the arguments and counterargument...

The study of gratitude has expanded beyond interpersonal gratitude and considers how people respond to gifts that are not caused by human agency. Given the discord between the prominent understanding of gratitude requiring the appropriate recognition...

This article explores the personal encounters between the Swiss–German missionaries and their Japanese students through their school projects in the late nineteenth century, as a fresh approach to disclose an entirely new analytical angle to mi...

There are accounts of increasing anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues among students and staff at many universities, including the University of Ottawa—accounts borne out by official numbers of referrals to mental health practiti...

This article deals with the different religious counterpoints or beliefs that traditions of philosophy and thought have fundamentally defined around five positions or options: atheist, agnosticism, deism, skepticism, and belief. The aim is to explore...

When examining the history of religions and dominant religious narratives, institutions, cultures, ideologies, and practices in the contemporary world, one is tempted to conclude that religion is more of the problem in relating to diverse issues of w...

Danish elementary school Religious Education (RE) dates back to the beginning of the Danish public schools in 1814 and remained confessional until 1975. In 1937, an option for exemption for teachers and pupils was introduced. However, the non-confess...

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s long-standing group life, and “less gathering” has become a popular slogan during this period. People will probably feel lonely when they are physically, socially, or...

Robert Nola has recently defended an argument against the existence of God on the basis of naturalistic explanations of religious belief. I will critically evaluate his argument in this paper. Nola’s argument takes the form of an inference to t...

In this paper, I reformulate Sterba’s argument from evil and consider the various ways theists might respond to it. There are two basic families of responses. On the one hand, theists can deny that God, as a perfect being, needs to act in accor...

Through his phenomenological interpretation of Paul’s letters, Martin Heidegger developed the Lutheran idea about Christian life experience as an experience of conversion, and argues that the Christian religiosity is rooted in the temporality o...

The “similarity” (gongtong 共通) and “dissimilarity” (chayi 差異) between the Buddhist precepts and Confucian rites in the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties reflected a “dialogue of ci...

Attempts to resolve the problem of evil often appeal to a greater good, according to which God’s permission of moral and natural evil is justified because (and just in case) the evil that is permitted is necessary for the realization of some gr...

This article deals with the description of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the Byzantine liturgical book known as the Typikon of Mâr Saba. This description is well preserved from its oldest known Greek testimonies until at least the 1...