ReligionsJanuary 23, 2021Eunil David Cho5 citations
This article focuses on exploring the concept of narrative identity, which has emerged as an integrative concept in various academic fields. Particularly in philosophy and psychology, scholars have claimed that humans are storytellers by nature and tell their stories that develop in them a sense of identity. However, this concept has been criticized by those who have argued that while some...
Drawing a clear line between phenomenology and theology remains a challenging endeavor. This article has two parts: The first one argues that, from a methodological point of view, there is a need for a theo-phenomenology, a phenomenology which acknowledges religious faith as a given. The second part of the article tries to present the essence of religious call in Eastern Orthodox spirituality....
The main research issues of the article are the determination of the genesis of theology created in Supernatural and the understanding of ways in which this show transforms a traditional Christian theological narrative. The methodological framework of the article, on the one hand, is the theory of the occulture (C. Partridge), and on the other, the narrative theory proposed in U. Eco’s semiotic...
On the island of Bali in Indonesia, the traditional Hindu religious leaders are the pedandas, or brahmin high priests. Their religious status is largely based on their mystical states, during which they create the highest and most valuable form of holy water, which is needed for all religious rituals on the island. It is one of the rare examples in world religions where mysticism is not only...
Gender dysphoria is considered a pronounced experience of distress in the bodies and minds of some transgender people. Examining the text Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryū Suzuki, I analyze some of the difficulties that may arise for transgender practitioners experiencing acutely strong gender dysphoria within the Sōtō Zen meditation experience. I seek to understand how physical and...
The burgeoning application of contemplative pedagogy (CP) in Buddhist studies courses has been widely discussed; yet, how educators incorporate it with other teaching strategies has not attracted much scholarly attention. Drawing from the author’s teaching experience at a Jesuit University, this article demonstrates that integrating CP’s first-person, second-person, and third-person approaches...
There has been a long-standing academic debate on the religious orientation of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa (1836–1886), one of the leading religious figures of modern India. In the light of his teachings, it is possible to accept that Rāmakṛṣṇa’s ideas were Vedāntic, albeit not in a sectarian or exclusive way. This article explores the question of where exactly to place him in the chequered...
The main aim of the present study is to investigate when “loss of self” results in scaredness or anxiety during or after an out-of body-experience (OBE). An OBE is an intense form of (bodily) self loss in which people have the impression that their self is located outside their body. In a sample of respondents reporting to have had an OBE (n = 171), anxiety and different conceptualizations of...
The following article is an exploration of supernal dreaming, a type of dream that engages the dreamer as a profound, participatory, and often revelatory event. Dream types are not well developed in dream research; this article contributes to the development of a more typological approach to dream analysis. Four dream types are presented and contextualized with reference to their metaphysical...
Mystical literature and spirituality from 16th-century Spain engage religious images from the three most prominent religions of al-Andalus—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: among others, the dark night, the seven concentric castles, the gazelle, the bird, the sefirot‘s encircled iggulim or towering yosher, the sacred fountain, ruins, and gardens. Until the 20th-century, however, scholarship...
ReligionsJuly 21, 2020Carlos Miguel Gómez Rincón3 citations
This article offers an intercultural interpretation of the sense of the sacred in the practice of yage shamanism in Colombia. This practice is based on the ritual use of a plant medicine which for centuries has been the basis of the medical, spiritual and cultural systems of indigenous peoples of the Amazon piedmont in Colombia, Ecuador and Perú. Since the 1990s, this practice has expanded to...
The aim of this article is to philosophically explore the tension between “the God of the philosophers” and “the God of religious experience.” This exploration will focus on the mystical theology of the 16th c. Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. It will be argued that a satisfactory resolution of the aforementioned tension cannot occur on the basis of the monopolar theism that has dominated...
This article, based on an open-question survey completed in 2018, engages with McAdams and Manczak’s approaches to life stories (2015) and Mayer’s ten elements of the shaman myth (2008) to explore the way contemporary people based in the UK, who define themselves as shamans, talk about their becoming a shaman. Individual narratives point out the intricate meeting points between different...
This article presents the results of a qualitative study of Anthroposophic meditation, which arose in the German-speaking world in the early 20th Century focusing on cognition, self-development, and pro-social action. The objective was to explore this previously unstudied form of meditation. The current sample (N = 30) consists of long-term practitioners of Anthroposophic meditation....
The aim of the current investigation was to identify universal profiles of lived spirituality. A study on a large sample of participants (N = 5512) across three countries, India, China, and the United States, suggested there are at least five cross-cultural phenotypic dimensions of personal spiritual capacity—spiritual reflection and commitment; contemplative practice; perception of...
This study investigates the lived-experience of spiritual life in contemporary USA, India, and China. A qualitative coding frame was constructed based on participant responses to open-ended questions regarding spirituality. Qualitative analysis was facilitated by the use of Dedoose, a mixed methods software. The exploratory approach of this study takes on a cross-culturally comparative lens,...
Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra is an Indian Buddhist sutra dating to the first half of the first millennium. Chapter 7 of the sutra consists of a very long meditation on the body, unusual in Buddhist literature for its anatomical, especially osteological, detail. The meditation also includes extensive descriptions of many internal worms as well as the internal winds that destroy the worms at the...
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is applied in various fields such as medicine, cognitive science, business, and education. The mindfulness of Buddhism is at the center of MBSR, and this means that Buddhist meditation has a great effect on modern society. For Buddhist meditations on death, the Aṅguttara Nikāya suggests mindfulness of death (maraṇasati), referring to ten methods of...
This essay explores theatrical drama alongside aspects of religious dimensionality David Tracy analyzes in terms of limit experience, limit language, and limit questions. The claim is that metatheatrical forms can correlate with limit dimensions, a correlation which may prove as pertinent as ritual for linking drama with religious experience, thought, and practice. Here, metatheatre and limit...
Since the late 1990s, the expression “Jewish Mindfulness” has become ubiquitous in Jewish community centers (JCCs) and synagogues in America, in Israel, and in the Western diaspora. “Mindfulness”, a secular meditation technique originating from Buddhism which has been popularized in Western culture through its recontextualization within the Western therapeutic culture, has been increasingly...
This essay attempts to determine whether Daisaku Ikeda can be seen as a Jamesian psychologist of religion. Concerning the development of this essay, it first focuses on a common concern that exists if we look at the work of William James and the Psychology of Religion in terms of how it exists as a distinct movement and how it is related to Ikeda’s perception of religion within a secular world....
Drawing from long-term ethnographic research with a global network of contemplative Christians, this paper discusses an emerging teaching role for North American monasteries as the numbers of avowed religious decline. Since the Trappist community of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, first developed the Christian meditation technique called Centering Prayer in the 1970s, monks and...
In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of...
The “inner organ” (antaḥkaraṇa) in the Indian philosophical school called Sāṃkhya is applied in two different experiential contexts: in the act of transcendence according to the path of yoga explored in the Yogasūtras of Patañjali (ca. 350 CE) and in the process of identity shift that occurs in possession by a deity in a broader range of Indian cultural practices. The act of transcendence will...
This special issue of Religions brings together a talented group of international scholars who have studied and written on the Hindu tradition. The topic of religious experience is much debated in the field of Religious Studies, and here we present studies of Hindu religious experience explored from a variety of regions and perspectives. They are intended to show that religious experience has...