Band 6, Heft 1

In the Hebrew Bible, Jephthah’s daughter has neither name nor heir. The biblical account (Judg. 11:30–40) is somber—a daughter due to be sacrificed because of her father’s rash vow. The theme has inspired numerous midrashim and over five hundred artistic works since the Renaissance. Traditionally barred from studying the Jewish canon as women, many Jewish feminists are now adopting the midrashicpoetry tradition as a way of vivifying the female characters in the Hebrew Bible. The five on which this article centers focus on Jephthah’s daughter, letting her tell her (side of the) story and imputing feelings and emotions to her. Although not giving her a name, they hereby commemorate her existence—and stake a claim for their own presence, autonomy, and active participation in tradition and society as Jewish women.

This article examines the impact of the widespread pattern of unequal age at marriage which led men to conclude that not only were their wives less experienced and mature, they were also inferior by nature. It examines the ideological underpinning for the view of women’s inferiority in Plato and the Genesis creation stories, especially in their Greek translation. It then traces the way this value system found expression in the traditional allocation of gender roles, women taking responsibility for the internal affairs of the household and men for the external affairs, including public discourse. There were exceptions both within Judaism and within the early Christian movement. These and the egalitarian thoughts in Christian beginnings had the potential to subvert these norms, over time, but a long time.

Recent research demonstrates that maternal grief functions paradigmatically to epitomize despair and sorrow in the Hebrew Bible. These literary uses of maternal grief reinforce the stereotype of womanhood, defined by devotion to children and anguish at their loss. In 1–2 Kings, narratives about unnamed bereaved mothers are used politically to create a contrast with named biblical queens who lose their sons but never grieve for them. Although 1–2 Kings names the queen mothers alongside the male rulers, these mothers have no agency or when they do, they act more like men than women. Neo-Assyrian inscriptions attest the masculinity of royal female power, and this article argues that conceptions of royal female power in Judah were similar. By contrasting the masculine queens with stereotyped “real men” and “real women,” traditional gender performances literarily overcome the institution of queenship. While the queens are polemicized, unnamed mothers emerge as the female heroes of Kings. Royal female power is demoted beneath reproductive ability and emotional responses to children, while the gender fluidity of royal power is circumscribed.

This article explores the way assumptions about gender prevalent in twenty-first century readers impact our understanding of Sarai. It interrogates the way a mere glimpse allows us to instantaneously assign a person gender, something trans theorist Julia Serano calls gendering. Through this article, we see how the third-party accounts of Sarai in Genesis 11:19–12:20 parallel the experience of that introductory glance today. By undertaking a close reading, different themes emerge that work to both confirm and challenge her fit within dominant gender norms. Indeed, Sarai cannot easily be subsumed into cisnormative gender expectations that privilege consistent coherence between the sex assigned at birth and gender identity and expression. Genesis 20:1–20 is then placed in discussion with the earlier portion of Sarai’s story. It provides the opportunity to revisit how observers within the text see and understand her. In turn new details emerge that seek to confirm Sarai’s fit within cisnormativity; but in doing so, they end up disrupting our perception that Sarai is a cisnormative woman. Ultimately, this reading establishes that Sarai does not neatly fit our preconceptions, which opens up the potential to consider her a transgender or a gender-diverse figure.

The rise in popularity of comic book Bibles has brought with it the opportunity to interrogate, challenge, reframe and reimagine difficult aspects of sacred scripture through text–image retellings. By their nature and format, comic books are uncontrollable vehicles of cultural expression, and in the case of biblical comic books, religious expression. As such, they can offer retellings of biblical narratives which challenge established practices of biblical interpretation normally rooted in patriarchal and conservative ideologies and may open the text up to more creative interpretations which are not restrained by those traditional approaches of reading the Bible. This article considers R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb (2009) as a case study which focuses on the character of Rebekah (Gen. 24:15–67 and 25:19–28), demonstrating how the combination of text and image acts as a commentary to the biblical narrative as well as reframing Rebekah as a matriarchal leader, a move which is not reflected in the words but is depicted through accompanying images. The case study demonstrates how biblical comic books can move beyond the constraints of traditional biblical scholarship to reinterpret characters and stories from perspectives previously unvisited.

As many native women in conquest accounts (historical and fictional), Rahab in Joshua 2 is often “hypersexualised” in biblical scholarship. One narrative detail gratuitously read in sexual terms is her name, Rahab, which is linked to the idea of “broadness.” Traditionally, “Rahab” is read as a harsh nickname highlighting the woman’s occupation, prostitution, or as a reference to her genitals. Against these readings, this discussion considers the language of “broadness” in biblical profiles of the Promised Land and the Torah, key motifs from Joshua 1–2, and demonstrates that the trope of “broadness/spaciousness” constitutes the rhetoric of liberation in the Hebrew Bible. That is, God is often cast as someone who brings afflicted/landless people to a broad locale or “broadens/enlarges” their hearts through his Torah. Since Rahab is linguistically and thematically linked to these acts, it is argued that through her Joshua 2 offers a midrash on Joshua 1. That is, from within Canaan, her name reverberates God’s earlier promises to Israel (“he [God] has created a wide expanse”) and she, herself, models a life informed by the Torah (vv. 9–12). Arguably, through her, Joshua 2 also offers a microcosm of YHWH’s own nature and modus operandi in the world.

The name of the second person greeted in Romans 16:7 is given as IOYNIAN, a form whose grammatical gender could be either feminine or masculine which leads to the question: Is it Junia or Junias – a woman or a man – who is greeted alongside Andronicus as “outstanding among the apostles?” This article highlights early influential answers to this question in the history of interpretation (John Chrysostom’s commentary, the discipleship list of Pseudo-Epiphanius, Luther’s translation, and Calvin’s interpretation) showing that societal perceptions of women’s roles were a factor in how they interpreted IOYNIAN. The article then summarises the last 150 years of interpretation history which saw (a) the disappearance of Junia from the text and from scholarly discussion due to the impact of the short-from hypothesis in the nineteenth century, (b) the challenge to this male interpretation in connection with second wave feminism, and (c) the restoration of the female reading in the ensuing debate. Bringing together the main lines of the argument, it will be shown that there is only one reading supported by the evidence, the female reading which throughout the centuries was the more difficult reading in light of the church’s and society’s perception of women’s participation.

The article maintains that the theological perspectives of RastafarI continue to be under-researched in the Caribbean context with perhaps more attention being paid to their contributions to the racial, musical and linguistic traditions of the region. In particular, Rasta theodicies are not as clearly articulated as other elements of its belief system even as it is recognised that RastafarI mansions and individual members do not hold homogenous beliefs about many things. The discussion takes as its starting point two prior reflections, “Just Desert or Just Deserts?: God and Suffering in these Perilous Days” (Perkins 2016) and “The Wages of (Sin) is Babylon: Rasta Versus Christian Religious Perspectives of Sin” (Perkins 2012); the former reflection highlights the insufficiency of traditional theodicy to answer the question: “if God is good, why does evil exist?” No one answer can sufficiently do justice to the many dimensions of the question. In that regard, Perkins (2016) argues for attention to the important “answer” that the radical suffering perspective offers to the discussion (Sarah Anderson Rajarigam (2004) too emphasises divine suffering or theopathos, as the response to radical suffering. She frames theopathos not just as an option within theodicy but as an alternative to theodicy, which she derides as “the spoilt child of enlightenment that self-destructively craves for theoretical and philosophical remedies for radical human suffering” (27).). Perkins (2012) explicates a particular Rasta understanding of sin and evil, which are important elements of any theodicy. For Rasta, sin is tri-dimensional – personal, inherited and corporate. Sin in its corporate or social dimension is the most salient as it is moral evil – a rejection of Jah’s will – which leads to the oppression of Jah’s people.

Viewing hardship through the Western tradition of theodicy, Western theologians and philosophers sometimes approach their Muslim neighbors with questions about the Islamic perspective on suffering. But merely by asking about “suffering,” these Western friends already project a theological category foreign to most Muslims, particularly those from a non-Western background. In order for Christian and post-Christian Westerners to understand the Islamic approach to hardship, they must first learn to distinguish between affliction and suffering. This requires a careful look at the creation narratives each tradition tells: for example, does God initiate human affliction? And what does the answer to this question say about the nature of affliction, if God is also good? Answering these queries helps one to distinguish Christian and Islamic responses to catastrophe, pain, and even violence. Furthermore, examining the koranic reply may redirect Western persons to teachings within the biblical tradition, which Christians often overlook or avoid. The instrumental role of affliction is relatively unpopular in the West, but dialogue with Islam uncovers the fact that it is a concept neither alien nor unimportant to biblical teaching. In fact, God’s repurposing of affliction is vital to Christian doctrine. Dialogue with Islam may help to recover this Christian lesson.

Samuel Lebens and Tyron Goldschmidt provided original theodicies, which suggest that at one time God will change the past, either by erasing/substituting the sins of humans or erasing the whole entirety of evils. Both theodicies imply the idea that God can completely change the past without leaving any traces. In this paper, I argue that Lebens’ and Goldschmidt’s preferred model, which they call the scene-changing theory, is problematic. First, its complex metaphysical foundation could be replaced with presentism (roughly, the view in the ontology of time that only present things exist) without losing any substantial heuristics. Second, their theory either implies a controversial theory of truthmaking under presentistic and hyper-presentistic ontology or implies controversial views on the counting of events under presentistic and hyper-presentistic ontology. Thirdly, I will argue that any theory of elimination/substitution of evils of the past implies that there are unnecessary evils, which is inconsistent with God’s goodness.

A reply to Bogdan V. Faul’s “Can God Promise Us a New Past? A Response to Lebens and Goldschmidt.” In this reply we clarify why it is that we regard a scene-changing theory of time to be an improvement over presentism from a theological point of view. We present two benefits: a scene changing theory allows God (1) to improve the past and it allows him (2) to give free will to human beings whilst ensuring that they hyper-will never have misused it. More generally, the scene-changing theory when compared to presentism has the more compelling account of the badness of past evils.

When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD’s host, his stance appears much like the theodicist, who, facing the awful prospects of suffering, evil, or death, seeks assurance from God, asking, “are you for us or our adversaries?” (Jos 5:13). Yet the angel’s reply is not “yes,” as typical theodicies seek to answer on God’s behalf, but “No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD.” (Jos 5:14) The implication is political: the angel seeks to alter Joshua’s stance from one ordered to his own purposes to one ordered to the LORD’s. Like traditional theodicies, Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness (2010) does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love God, suffering is caused or permitted. I avoid this problem by finding a “kenotic” aspect in the action of signs in which the perennial problems of suffering and evil do not arise, and which is available to direct experience, making it empirically falsifiable in principle. Like the angel’s reply to Joshua, this invites a change from a speculatively grounded stance representing the hopes of a theodicist, to one formed from real interactions that transcend discourse.

The nature of suffering and the problem of evil have been perennial issues for many of the world’s religious traditions. Each in their own way has sought to address this problem, whether driven by the all too present reality of suffering or from philosophical and religious curiosities. The Christian tradition has offered numerous and diverse responses to the problem of evil. The free-will response to the problem of evil, with its roots in Augustine, has dominated the landscape in its attempt to justify evil and suffering as a result of the greater good of having free will. John Hick offers a ‘soul-making’ response to the problem of evil as an alternative to the free will response. Neither is effective in dealing with two key issues that underpin both responses – omnipotence and omniscience. In what follows I will contrast a process theological response to the problem of evil and suffering, and how it is better placed in dealing with both omnipotence and omniscience. By refashioning God as neither all-knowing nor all-powerful, process theodicy moves beyond the dead ends of both the free will and soul-making theodicy. Indeed, a process theodicy enables us to dismount the omnibus in search of a more holistic, and realistic, alternative to dealing with the problem of evil and suffering.

The problem of evil and the injustice it brings out has a long history in western philosophy and it has been one of the core arguments against the existence of God as an all-powerful and all-good Being. In a number of texts Meillassoux agrees with this line of argument, but he also argues that atheism fails to take into account the injustice of evil. His central thesis is that while the existence of evil discounts the existence of the ‘revealed’ God, he proposes a messianic vision where we can hope for the arrival of a God who will have the power to rectify the injustices that have been committed. To justify the possible arrival of such a being Meillassoux describes the world as a contingent place such that things happen without a necessary reason. This explains why, in the past, novel and inexplicable situations (‘advents’) have arisen and, possibly, others might arise. One such possibility is the arrival of a God who will redeem all the injustices suffered within the world.

What role should theodicy play in the face of loss and acute suffering? Should it keep its distance and remain respectfully silent or should it step forward to illuminate the opaque reality of evil, especially untimely death? In my article, I explore the fraught relationship between the personal experience of loss and its theological interpretation through an analysis of three related bereavement autobiographies: C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed , Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son , and William Abraham’s Among the Ashes . Invoking Job’s “friends” as a theoretical framework, I analyze each author’s attempt to reconcile the lived experience of suffering with the theoretical task of theodicy: to explain suffering. I conclude with my own constructive proposal on the place of theodicy in the realm of human anguish.

Analytic theodicy commonly suggests an overarching reason why a benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent deity permits the quantity and intensity of suffering in our world. This is often couched in terms of freedom of belief or action, or some other variation of the claim that suffering is “worth the price.” I argue that not even the hope of post-mortem consolation could adequately compensate any individual for the inevitable loss of everything which makes, or might have made, life in this world worth living. By contrast, transformational theodicy argues that suffering is an unfortunate by-product of our evolving world. All living things are connected to other living things by means of networks, symbolised for John Hick by Indra’s Net. Divinity is both the force which brought about the beginning of the universe and sustains its continued existence and an objectively existing standard of goodness which is manifested in varying degrees throughout our world, metaphorically conceived in terms of non-binary personhood. It casts light on human endeavours and provides a source of power on which humankind may draw by means of prayer or meditation to influence the networks of living things in order to prevent or alleviate suffering and promote the flourishing of living beings.

The interpretation of disaster through a religious lens has produced diverse theological perspectives regarding disaster. This article seeks to analyze the theology of disaster from a Protestant perspective, which may be combined with local knowledge and modern science to create disaster response strategies. This study is based on field studies and related literature analysis with qualitative method using an ethno science approach to see disaster phenomena in the context of Indonesian society, using primary data and secondary data. This study finds out that within Christian theology and among its followers disasters can be seen as the means through which God glorifies His creation while punishing those who have sinned and abandoned His teachings. It concludes, first , that God – the Creator – shows His love and mercy even through disaster. In the Protestant perspective, God seeks to honor His creation by mercifully creating balance. Second , disaster, as part of a natural cycle, should also be understood through local knowledge and modern science; as such, a holistic approach is necessary to understand and respond to disaster.

The paper deals with significantly different sources and historical periods: the parts dedicated to breastfeeding are based on votive statuettes of adults with infant/s from ancient Latium and Southern Etruria; the ones on pregnancy and childbirth are based on two archeological sources – one from Southern Etruria and one from Imperial Rome – which show the male (divine) appropriation of exclusively female biological functions; The parts on mothering are based on the concept of “mothering figures” (male mothering, animal mothering…) through mythological examples from Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art and narratives. Despite the heterogeneous documentation, we may conclude that the mother was not the only active character in the process of conceiving, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising an infant in the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman societies. Many other figures close to the mother – male and female – were engaged in obtaining divine protection for her and her child; in helping, supporting, and even substituting her when necessary (and, of course, when possible). The research has been conducted mainly by using the concept of kourotrophia and mothering figures as analytical tools.

This article looks at the regulations of pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding in Ayurvedic treatises, and at representations of mothering in Vedic and Puranic texts related to childrearing. Ayurvedic garbha sanskar (educating the mind of the foetus) regulates the pregnancy of women to ensure the safe birthing of superior babies. Breastfeeding is both glorified and strictly regulated in Ayurvedic texts. Several Vedic texts describe a range of rituals to benefit a caste Hindu child’s life from before birth to the beginning of manhood. These rituals are formally conducted by the father, whereas the mother’s role is marginalized. Although these texts scrutinize and discipline maternal bodies, yet there are several interstices where female and/or maternal agency can be performed. Ayurvedic obstetric practices often incorporate the indigenous knowledges of midwives ( dais ). The scripturally-mandated practice of wet-nursing shifts and complicates biological motherhood roles. The domestic tradition of performing vratas to secure the offspring’s longevity allows mothers to have a more central role in childrearing rituals. I will compare the regulatory texts and the potentially resistant practices from a maternal feminist perspective in order to interrogate the multiple ways in which the Hindu childbearing and childrearing framework is a site of surveillance as well as assertion for mothers.

This paper examines mothers and mothering in the Pāli canon and commentaries and contends that a mothering path emerges when the deeply patriarchal traditional hierarchy of values is challenged and, following Karen Derris, the unthoughts related to mothers and mothering, which this hierarchy of values generates, are also challenged. The article focuses on three main female characters, Māyā, Mahāpajāpatī, and Visākhā, whose paths as mothers or as lay followers of the Buddha who “stand in the position of a mother” constitute a deliberate soteriological path in the Pali Buddhist texts. It draws on contemporary Buddhist Studies feminist scholarship (in particular, the work of Karen Derris (2014) and Liz Wilson (2013)) as well as motherhood studies (in particular, Sara Ruddick’s (1989) work based on Adrienne Rich’s (1976) foundational distinction between motherhood as a patriarchal institution that oppresses women and mothering as women’s lived experience to outline how mothering activities in the Pāli canon can be discerned as a soteriological path that follows the same trajectory as the Buddha’s Bodhisatta path that begins with making a solemn vow ( patthanā ) and ends with awakening ( nibbāna ). I conclude that adopting this approach allows us to reenvisage activities and relationships usually understood as “this-worldly” in the canonical and commentarial Pāli texts, and in contemporary feminist scholarship, as the embodiment of a soteriology based on interdependence and compassionate care for others.

Conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the rearing of children are truly human experiences. But in religions and in their authoritative texts, these experiences are regularly utilized in metaphorical or symbolic language, or in narratives that tell of the origins of families or even peoples, of the relationship between individuals and groups or the relationship between humanity and the gods. Taking a closer look at the events surrounding childbirth and the time period of breastfeeding, it will be shown how literary texts from the Hebrew Bible go about intermingling motherhood and religion for the purpose of describing the origins of a nation.

In Islamic law, kinship is defined by consanguineal and affinal relationships. Birth and Islamic marriage are important events that define religious responsibilities of family members towards each other. Some responsibilities are connected to Mahramiyat, a framework of interpersonal relations that regulates marriages and interactions with the opposite sex. Besides consanguineal and affinal bonds, mahramiyat and kinship can also be established through breastfeeding. The relationship formed through breastfeeding is called milk mahramiyat/kinship. It is spoken of in the Quran and hadith and has been extensively discussed in Islamic Feqh. This study investigates Shi’i guidelines on milk kinship. My interest is in the exploration of existing gendered rulings on the conditions of milk mahramiyat/kinship in Shi’i jurisprudence. The analysis aims to bring forth discussions on the significance of breast milk and the maternal body, and to investigate how milk kinship is framed within the patrilineal system of kinship in Shi’a Islam. The findings discuss rulings on the role of milk-mother and -father in the way kinship takes effect. While patrilineal kinship is often defined based on a paternal ‘milk line’, the study suggests that alternative readings and interpretations of the Quran and hadith are available that centralize the mother and the maternal body.

New entanglements between parenting (in theory and practice), environmentalism, religion, spirituality, and secularism are at the core of the analysis presented in this article. In francophone contexts, discourses by practitioners, advocates and detractors of natural parenting contribute to associating this specific style of parenting and several of its key practices with religion and spirituality. After documenting and defining natural parenting by listing its characteristic practices and underlining its values as well as its important overlap with attachment parenting, this article examines the historically religious roots of movements linked to several practices still regarded as typical of natural parenting (natural childbirth movements, natural family planning or fertility awareness, and breastfeeding advocacy). Along with feminist and medical strands of criticism, within these highly secular contexts, the association with religion and spirituality participates in the criticism of this style of parenting which combines the key tenets of attachment parenting with a strong environmentalist agenda implemented for the most part in the domestic sphere and around women’s bodies.

In Heidegger, fear reveals the thing to be feared in a fuller way than theory can. However, anxiety is distinct from fear, for while fear is directed towards a specific thing within the world, anxiety is anxious about existence itself, disclosing the totality of Being. A similar method could be applied to faith. Arguably, faith is a mood; a feeling of trust in the divine that can be phenomenologically consistent and overwhelming. However, faith is not necessarily directed towards a specific object within the world. One cannot point and say: “God is right there!” Indeed, attempts to do so through miracles, teleology or dialectics have been roundly critiqued by the Western tradition. But then what is this mood of faith disclosing if not something within the world? Perhaps, like anxiety, faith is not revealing an object within the world, but the world as a totality. Since God—at least the God central to much of the Judeo-Christian tradition—is not a being but Being itself (or in some formulations is actually ‘beyond being’), God therefore cannot be disclosed in the world as an object but has to be disclosed as that which is transcendently beyond it. Such a conclusion does not simply flee the realm of the everyday, but derives from, and legitimates, basic descriptions of religious experience. Specifically, Judeo-Christian descriptions of (1) divine providence, (2) happiness/ joy, (3) the eschatological ‘not yet’, and (4) Divine Hiddenness. This paper will argue that appropriating Heidegger’s phenomenological method in his discussions of fear/anxiety and applying them to Judeo-Christian descriptions of faith thus leads to a radically different ontology from that of Heidegger himself, offering a renewed basis for religion that contrasts the nothingness revealed by anxiety with the divinity revealed by faith, challenging us to weigh for ourselves which mood is more swaying.

There is a distinctive wonder bordering on and awakening to the philosophy of religion within Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is not primarily a wonder directed to how things are or that they are, but rather the wonder connected to the most fundamental principle of transcendental phenomenology. That principle is the ancient principle of the convertibility of being with what is true or the inseparability of being and manifestation. Phenomenological wonder is primarily at the correlation of being as what is true or made manifest with consciousness. And yet there is an even more basic phenomenological wonder which founds this correlation, and that is the manifestness of first-person experience within which all other wonder emerges.

In Religious Experience , Wayne Proudfoot argued that a tout court rejection of reductionism in accounts of religious experience was not viable. According to Proudfoot, it’s possible to distinguish between an illegitimate practice of descriptive reductionism and the legitimate practice of explanatory reductionism. The failure to distinguish between these two forms of reductionism resulted in a protective strategy, or an attempt to protect religious experience from the reach of scientific explanation. Among the theorists whom he accused of deploying this illegitimate strategy Proudfoot included William James and his work in The Varieties of Religious Experience . In this article, I argue that while James does occasionally deploy a protective strategy in Varieties , this is not the only nor most important method of treating religious experience James developed. Implicit in his rejection of medical materialism, James not only deploys the protective strategy Proudfoot criticizes, but the pragmatic method with which he treats all claims. I argue that James’s pragmatic method leads to what James called noetic pluralism, or the view that there is no privileged knowledge practice, but a plurality of knowledge practices, and that this method puts pressure on the explanatory reductionist, who is implicitly committed to noetic monism.

The importance of religious figures in Heidegger’s early development has long been understood. Beginning especially in the WS-1920 , with the Phenomenology of Religious Life lectures, figures such as Paul and Augustine played essential roles in his early attempt to move beyond the legacy of Cartesian thought. Despite appearing to secularize these accounts, Heidegger nonetheless implies that it is because of their religiosity, and not in spite of it, that they are of phenomenological interest. For this reason, the exact status of religious descriptions in his phenomenology has been a source of contention. My argument in this paper, is that this status is best understood by turning to Heidegger’s early approach to phenomenological reading. This approach, I argue, is grounded in a performative model of language, exemplified in Destruction [ Destruktion ], and defines the limits within which he can engage with the religious character of historical texts.

Phenomenologies of religious experience have been developed by Max Scheler and via Alfred Schutz’s frameworks of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning.” For both, religious experience resists the pragmatic imperatives of the mechanistic worldview or world of working. Schutz’s paradigm begins with a distinctive noetic religious epoché opening the religious province, in contrast with Scheler’s start with spheres of being (especially the absolute sphere) furnishing the noematic context for religious acts. Scheler’s religious act resembles the religious epoché , but his eidetic analysis highlights the act’s distinctiveness, irreducibility to non-religious acts, and immunity to psychological reductionism. Correlating the religious act with his value theory (the absolute sphere), Scheler better withstands the subordination of religion to the pragmatic imperatives and the absolute to lesser values than does a Schutzian ranking of purposes in the province’s form of spontaneity. Scheler’s absolute personal being, whose revelation one must respectfully wait, supports the Schutzian relaxed tension of consciousness. Respectfulness of persons, the social/communal/critical dimensions of religious experience, religion’s need for critique from theoretical provinces of meaning, and the wariness of idolatrously substituting one’s own finite goods for the absolute can all mitigate the religious imperialism and violence to which absolute commitments can lead.

The secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold problem for evidentialism and explain pragmatic encroachment (PE) as a solution to it. Second, I argue that religious experience can justify belief in God if one adopts PE, but this poses a dilemma for the defender of the veridicality of religious experience. If PE is true, then whether S has a justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience depends on how high the stakes are for having an experience with God. This requires one to determine whether the stakes are high or low for experiencing God, which puts the experient of God in an awkward position. If the stakes are not high, then justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience will be easier to come by, but this requires conceding that experiencing God is not that important. If the stakes are high, then the experient can maintain the importance of experience with God but must concede that justified belief in God on the basis of experience with God is less likely to happen, perhaps impossible.

Augustine’s account in the Confessions Book IX of his ecstasy at Ostia remains unsurpassed in its poetic force, yet unusual, as a description of religious experience, in two particular respects. First of all, what he describes is not a “vision” of God, but an experience of listening . Second, it is not a solitary but a shared experience (e.g., with his mother, Monica). This essay considers the significance of these two elements by analyzing the relation between his description in Book IX and the understanding of rhythm that he develops in De musica . Drawing also on Book X (on memory) and Book XI (on time-consciousness) in the Confessions , I investigate a particular type of flowing memory – what I call, “perfect” memory – that characterizes the temporally ordered movements of musical rhythm, showing that it is in this type of memory that Augustine finds God.

The aim of the present study is to clarify the lay experience of grace through person-level narratives. This empirical qualitative study follows a bottom-up approach, not restricted by specific theoretical assumptions, and includes a large and heterogeneous group of Belgian participants. The sample (recruited online) was composed of 456 participants (64% women, mean age = 50.04, age range from 18 to 93 years). Data consisted of 456 written narratives describing the experience of grace. They were analysed using a thematic analysis and thematic network approach with the help of a qualitative data management package Nvivo 12 pro. The resulting thematic network visualizes the experience of grace in the flow of time with (a) antecedents, grace can happen anywhere and anytime, but difficulties often precede grace; (b) the core experience is one of receiving an unmerited free gift in response to failure or brokenness or as an encounter with goodness and beauty, and this can be given by the divine or by other people and lastly (c) consequences entails a transformation at the intrapersonal, interpersonal and/or situational level. Our approach allows for an ecological and bottom-up understanding of grace as experienced nowadays in a secularized country and can empirically inform future studies about the connection between grace and psychological flourishing.

There are three models of pain in the phenomenology of religious experience. The first model suggests that pain is instrumental to attaining the desired religious experience. The second model proposes that pain is constitutive of the desired religious experience. The third model, which is a model of senseless pain in religious experience, is underdeveloped. I provide an exposition of this model in this article. I also give four arguments for the necessity of affirming senseless pain in the phenomenology of religious experience. First, affirming senseless pain in religious experience provides a way to describe the process of purpose attribution to pain qua a sensation or a feeling. Second, such an affirmation also provides a way for describing the meaning formation in religious experience through interpreting pain qua symbol. Third, the affirmation is also necessary to maintain continuity between mundane and religious experiences. There are instances of senseless pain in the literature on tragedy, chronic pain, and torture. Maintaining continuity between ordinary and religious experiences via the notion of senseless pain opens the possibility of developing mysticism in everyday life. Lastly, the presence of the unknown in senseless pain makes room for mystery in religious experience.

This study focuses on various phenomenological conceptions of the invisible in order to consider to what extent and in what way they involve moments of hiddenness. The relationship among phenomenality, invisibility, and hiddenness is examined in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Henry, and Merleau-Ponty. The study explains why phenomenologists prefer speaking about the invisible over a discourse of the hidden. It shows that the phenomenological method does not display the invisibility as a limit of experience but rather as a dynamic component of relational nature of any experience, including the religious one. Special attention is paid to topological moments of the relationship between the visible and the invisible.

The aim of the text is to characterise some phenomenal aspects of irony (particularly, of the ironic speech acts), which may be found in the Kierkegaardian reflection concerning diverse ironic attitudes of individuals, mainly of Christians. The constant assumptions in Søren Kierkegaard’s various output – in pseudonymous works, those signed with his own name, in “edifying discourses” and other religious texts –include the teleological conception of the sense of human being and existence. According to the philosopher, this sense is determined by the individually chosen and subjectively accepted goal of existence, related to the indicated three stages of life. This is the goal of a person who lives their mortal existence between joke and despair, at an ironic and sceptical distance from rash judgements and generalisations, and at the same time in fear of mundane threats and in fear of God. With the ambiguity of the category of existence, researchers combine an ironic attitude which, according to Kierkegaard, would characterise our way of existence together with its cognition and which would be connected with the conception of subjective truth as based on paradox. Kierkegaard wrote about ironic engagement and at the same time distance, about a positive ironic attitude towards the world of the here and now – a mundane immanent reality. According to Kierkegaard, the ironic attitude is closely related to dialectics, which he understood in a specific way – the structures of repetition and doubling are dialectic, and this dialectics may be found, among other things, in communication and in irony as a specific relation between thought and language. One must highlight that Kierkegaard considered two general types of irony: verbal (logical, rhetorical and poetic) and situational (existential), ultimately pointing out their religious aspects. The final part of the article describes different interconnections between the logical plus rhetorical aspects of irony and the issue of religious engagement of individuals (Christians) – their ironic entanglement in the relations between faith and knowledge, faith and doubt, mundane immanent world and transcendent universe.

The article consists of two parts. The first part outlines two conceptions of religious experience that can be found in the last three philosophical books of Michel Henry: the first, broad conception of religious experience is connected with the transcendental relation of human self to God as proposed by Henry; the second, narrower conception concerns the story of salvation as told in Henry’s Christian trilogy, and acquires the form of the “second birth.” Yet the transcendental disposition of Henry’s phenomenology prevents it from developing hermeneutical tools that would guide the understanding of religious experience. The second part of the article deals with the critique of Dominique Janicaud, who questioned the phenomenological methodology of Michel Henry precisely because of its religious overtone, and with the subsequent discussion incited by Janicaud’s criticism. The article defends the phenomenological status of Henry’s work by arguing that Henry’s thinking could not be rightly accused from being theological or metaphysical at the time of the publication of Janicaud’s first critique. Yet it is true that the later Christian trilogy identified the general structures of appearing with the inner life of the God of the Christian Bible, and the experience of Christian faith thus became the presupposition of Henry’s phenomenology. The article also argues that religious experience belongs to the field of phenomenological research.

That there exists something like religion seems self-evident. Anthropologists, we are told, have discovered that all cultures have a religion of some kind. But what is “religion”? If we trace the concept to its origins in religio , we see that our current definition of the term is considerably different. The Latin term religio has to do with virtue or fulfilling one’s obligations to one’s family and community. It has nothing immediately to do with gods, the supernatural, and the afterlife. In contrast, “religion” – something to do with a kind of belief or faith – took about a millennium to take shape. At stake here is a distinction that continues to grow in importance with the increasing number of “nones,” people who consider themselves “non-religious” but are sometimes willing to label themselves “spiritual.” Such a distinction is only meaningful to the extent there is a difference. My paper begins by establishing the nature and the scope of the question. Then I consider Husserl’s idea of returning to the origin – the Ursprung . In effect, Husserl’s quest can be considered an archaeology. Yet an archaeology of religion or even “spirituality” turns out to be impossible. In light of that, I ask: Is there something like primordial religion – something that we could likewise experience today? I suggest that we can find it in Plato, Aristotle, and Kant – an awe or wonder in face of the complexity of the universe. William Cantwell Smith speaks of “the archaic meaning of religio as that awe that men felt in the presence of an uncanny and dreadful power of the unknown.” That awe in religio and philosophy seem to be fundamentally the same. But, if that is the case, then the distinction between “religious” and “spiritual” may not have any real basis.

On a phenomenal level, no differences between the mystical and the initial sequence of psychotic experience are to be found. Both are characterized by transliminality (i.e., an experience of consciousness transcending both the psychophysical and the rational realms). However, the situation is different if we integrate psychodynamic implications before and after those experiences into the comparison. One difference on this level is that the mystical experience (if it meets sufficient ego stability) primarily offers personality-strengthening potential. In contrast, transliminality, which occurs in the course of psychotic experience (if it encounters insufficient ego-stability or a pronounced vulnerability), primarily offers personality-weakening potential. However, if the therapeutic process succeeds in setting ego-stabilizing impulses (or eliminating thought and affect disorders which are typical for psychoses of the schizophrenic spectrum), a conscious incorporation of the transliminal experience into the further therapeutic process proves to be helpful, too. The essential philosophical and therapeutic significance of the connections analyzed here are reflected on with the help of philosophical and psycho(patho)logical phenomenology, in particular with the writings of Husserl’s and Pfänder’s pupil Gerda Walther, combined with current theorems of responsive phenomenology. Walther’s insights into the (dys-)functionalities of ego-center (“Ichzentrum”), self (“Einbettung des Ichzentrums”), and basic essence (“Grundwesen”) in mystical and psychotic experience, with respect to their (meta-)transcendental relationship with divine essence (“göttlicher Wesensgrund”) provoke further research questions on the constitutive and therapeutic implications of transliminality in the context of mystical and psychotic experience.

This paper brings together ethnography as practice research, and theology as experiential theory, towards an ontological interdisciplinary understanding of relational personhood on Mount Athos. The first part of the paper consists of ethnographic data gathered from the field, approaching monastic life as a rite of passage to heaven, and using the anthropological discourse of the “sacred” to represent and interpret this passage in sociological and moral terms. The second part of the essay expands on this empirical material by following the two “fundamental” elements of personhood, Freedom and Otherness, in the respective Christological discourses of Zizioulas and Yannaras. The aim of the second part is to ontologically expand on the experience of relational personhood by approaching theology as a kind of practice [“theoro” as “I-see-God” via practices of faith] that takes us to deeper levels of understanding of being and becoming, in relation both to the invisible God and the visible, material World. In this context, the focus of the paper gradually moves from the Athonian landscape. informed by the energies of God that run through it, to Athonian personhood as defined by the personal and ontological relation of each monk to the landscape, which includes themselves, in an ontologically relational manner. As I argue, this relational ontology extends from the grace received in everyday practices by all the monks to the charismatic personalities, whose individual agency and freedom from nature enabled them to change Athonian history and become emblems of the contemporary ideals of monastic life as a dialectical symbiosis within God and nature.

The assimilation of phenomenology by theology (namely of Heidegger by Karl Rahner) exemplifies how a pre-existing philosophical framework can be imported into a theological system by being suffused with belief. Although one would imagine that the incommensurability between philosophy and religion would thus be overcome, the two disciplines risk to remain, given the sequels of the ‘French debate’, worlds apart, separated by a leap of faith. In this paper I attempt to uncover what grammatical similitudes afforded Rahner formal transference in the first place. Uncovering analogous uses of contemplative attention, namely between Heidegger and Simone Weil, I hope to demonstrate the filial relationship between existential phenomenology and Christian mysticism. I propose that attention is a key factor in both systems of thought. Furthermore, I propose that: 1) attention, the existential hub between subject and phenomena, provides a base for investigating methodologies , as opposed to causal relations, in philosophy and religion; 2) that the two attentional disciplines of meditation and contemplation, spiritual practices designed to shape the self, also constitute styles of thinking; and 3) the ‘turn’ in the later Heidegger’s philosophy is a strategic point to inquire into this confluence of styles of thinking, evincing the constantly dynamic and intrinsically tight relation between philosophy and theology.

Martin Luther suggested that God disperses the salvation gained by the sacrifice of Christ both before and after the crucifixion itself. This essay describes how quantum time entanglements can facilitate a timeless dispersal of salvific grace and hypothesizes that it is God who creates, maintains and manipulates space-time using such entanglements, in a way analogous to a spider controlling its web.

This article seeks to distill key moments in the early work of the philosopher John D. Caputo. In considering his early investigations of Martin Heidegger, it argues that an adequate account of the trajectory of his later theological project requires a refraction through a crucial double gesture in these earlier writings. To this end, the article follows Caputo’s relationship with Heidegger where the optics of ‘overcoming metaphysics’ are laid bare (the first gesture). In these deliberations, alongside Neo-Scholastic Thomism, it is clear that what constitutes (theological) metaphysics for Caputo is any thinking which fails to think that which ‘gives’ the distinction between Being and beings. The second gesture, then, reveals ‘a certain way’ ( d’une certaine maniére ) of reading that allows him not only the unique possibility to re-read Scholastic Thomism by way of Meister Eckhart, but also the delimitation of the mythological construal of Being in the later Heidegger himself. The article’s methodological argument is that this transgressionary impulse gleaned from Heidegger, constitutes the ‘origins’ of Caputo’s move into the ethical-religious paradigm of deconstruction and, therefore, is also axiomatic for his later radical theology of ‘religion without religion.’

The appearance of Ἰουδαίαν in the table of nations (Acts 2:9–11) has troubled interpreters for centuries. Several scholars have proposed to emendate the text. The argumentations for such conjectures vary in elaboration and support. This article gives a diachronic overview of the conjectured emendations. It concludes with an evaluation of the discussion from a phenomenological perspective and a summary of the used argumentation, thereby providing input for a reversed engineering approach to the issue.

Building on a plethora of conjectured emendations for IOϒΔAIAN, this article approaches the issue once again to test the viability of a quantitative tool and to establish the possibility of palaeographical confusion of IOϒΔAIAN with an alternative topo- or demonym. The article starts with an experiment using Greek topo- and demonyms derived from contemporary Christian, Jewish, and Classical sources to establish a palaeographical confusion score. Next the likeliness of the “closest” alternatives in the geographical arrangement of Acts 2:9–11 is explored. The article ends with an evaluation of the possible implications for the text in Acts 2:9 as well as a critical appraisal of the method for conjectural criticism.

Some verses of the holy Qur’an speak of a preference of man over woman such as 2:228, 4:34 and 43:18. One can ask whether man and woman have the same essence or whether man has certain characteristics that make him own a different and superior essence. How have exegetes understood these verses through history? Research on more than 100 classical and contemporary Shia and Sunni exegeses demonstrates that understanding of these verses was constant for centuries but was subject to evolution in the twentieth century. In this evolution, the inferiority of women in earlier exegeses was largely replaced by exegeses that provide respect and reverence for women. This change in understanding of the verses has been undoubtedly influenced by improvement in the cultural, social and economic situation of women in the twentieth century. A finding of this research is that some Qur’anic verses have the potentiality for different, and sometimes contradictory, understandings. On the other hand, the cultural and historical frameworks of the exegetes have played a crucial role in their understanding of the Qur’an. Therefore, understanding and interpreting the Qur’an is a dynamic process that should be reviewed according to the needs of the time.

There is a particular question that has plagued classical Christian theism over the centuries. What reason could God have for creating a universe? In this article, I shall articulate the unique claims of classical theism that other rival models of God lack. I shall argue that classical theism’s unique commitments entail that God cannot create the universe for a reason. Thus, any nonclassical model of God can claim to have the advantage over classical theism because they can affirm that God creates the universe for a reason. In Section 1, I shall articulate classical theism. In Section 2, I shall lay the groundwork for the debate by explaining what a reason is and what a creation is. In Section 3, I shall argue that a classical theist cannot affirm that God creates the universe for a reason, thus conflicting with God’s perfect rationality.

This article traces the trajectory of the Catholic Church’s discourses on drug use in the Philippines since the first time a statement was made in the 1970s. By drawing on official statements by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), it argues that shifts in emphasis have taken place through the years: the destruction of the youth , attack on human dignity , and then social moral decay . Collectively, they emanate from an institutional concern for peace and order. But they also reflect the moral panic around drug use that has been around for decades, which, on several occasions, Filipino politicians, including President Duterte, have mobilized as a populist trope. In this way, the article historicizes the Catholic Church’s official statements and frames them in terms of morality politics through which values and corresponding behavior are defined by an influential institution on behalf of society whose morality it deems is in decline. The article ends by reflecting on the recent statements by the CBCP that invoke compassion and redemption.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the applicability of selected methods of the so-called distant reading from the area of digital humanities for the interpretation of early Christian texts, specifically for approaching similarities and differences between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. We use the term “distant reading” for the methods that allow us to explore, analyze, and visualize digitized textual data while using the tools from the area of data mining, natural language processing, or corpus linguistics. We want to explore whether methods from the field of digital humanities can allow for a sophisticated, quantifiable, and replicable comparison of the corpora of early Christian movements and thereby help to uncover the basic features of their theology and thus be a suitable complement to traditional exegesis and interpretation achieved by close reading.

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls expanded the scope of authoritative and parascriptural traditions that reimagine the lives and times of ancestral figures. In several cases, these Aramaic writings include birth notices or narratives. The Genesis Apocryphon and Aramaic Levi Document portray the patriarchs receiving divine revelations regarding the genealogy and destiny of their progeny. Parents in both texts respond with awe yet keep the knowledge to themselves, reflecting on it in their “heart.” This article brings the revelatory tradition and terminology of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to bear on Mary’s responses to claims of Jesus’ messianic potential (Luke 2:19) and otherworldly paternity (Luke 2:51). The study underscores the importance of the Qumran Aramaic texts for evaluating Lukan special material and points to the relevance of these writings for recovering the Second Temple contexts of the thought, practice, and literature of the early Jesus movement. The focused case study concludes with methodological recommendations for renewed joint research on Qumran and emerging Christianity. The prescribed approach strives to avoid both “parallel-o-mania” and “parallel-o-phobia” by accounting for the complex compositional, conceptual, and cultural dynamics of both collections.

The feminist theological and historical work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has been met with diverging responses. For feminist biblical scholars, Schüssler Fiorenza is essential reading, with even her works from the 1970s and 1980s still standing as key reference points. For mainstream (“malestream”) biblical scholarship, however, her entire body of writing is typically ignored, including within historical Jesus research (HJR), despite its value in both problematising and advancing the so-called Quests for the Historical Jesus. By evaluating and synthesising Schüssler Fiorenza’s HJR work on fundamentalism, feminism, and anti-Semitism, this article situates the effects of Schüssler Fiorenza’s work and the credibility of her critics within the Quests. While the themes Schüssler Fiorenza addresses, such as feminism and Judaism, are key features of the Third Quest, Schüssler Fiorenza’s proposals with regard to HJR, including the politics of interpretation, the shift to memory and orality studies, and the evaluation of meaning-making itself, are theoretically critical and self-reflexive in a way which the Third Quest has rarely been. Given the emphasis Schüssler Fiorenza places on self-evaluation, and her critical examination of the work of her peers in HJR, one is led to consider the possibility that her work may represent a Third Quest Critical-Stream, or even a Fourth Quest.

This paper gives a systematic account of Dialectical Theology (DT) and its surprisingly ramified usage of the concept of religion on the backdrop of recent debates about the “return of religion.” First, the positional context between Schleiermacher and Barth is sketched. Second, the highly divergent positions of Bultmann, Barth, Brunner as well as Gogarten and Tillich are presented – always in regard to their sometimes programmatic, sometimes rather hidden references to “religion” between its facticity and normativity. Third and by way of conclusion, it is suggested to restrict “religion” as a concept to non-theological disciplines, i.e., to treat “religion” as a strictly empirical and sociological term, whereas theology is concerned with faith that belongs to a very different game than religion, as DT helps to clarify.

Applying sociological imagination and theological perspectives and using some secondary literature that focus on the American pastoral experience, this article explains why sociology and the social sciences are underutilized in the pastoral ministry of Catholic priests despite the Catholic Church’s openness to human sciences’ contributions to evangelization after the Second Vatican Council. In particular, it examines how the (i) uneasy alliance between Catholic theology and sociology, (ii) overemphasis on the invisible and theological dimension of the Church in current ecclesiologies, (iii) highly philosophical and theological clerical education which sidelines the empirical sciences in clerical pastoral work, and (iv) dominance of the individualist approaches of clinical psychology in pastoral theology have greatly contributed to the neglect of sociological inquiries and perspectives in clerical formation and pastoral ministry. It also argues that a genuine pastoral care must be based on a holistic and empirical assessment of the pastoral needs of parishioners by priests using sociology and the social sciences before it prescribes a plan of action for pastoral care to accurately inculturate the Christian message in today’s technological culture.