446 papers in the library · 806 citations · publishing 2011-2026
Religions March 30, 2019 C. Chapple
Yoga practice provides access to religious experience, which has been defined by William James as “immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness.” In this paper the processes of Yoga will be summarized as found in the Bhagavad Gῑtā and the Yoga Sūtra. This article concludes with instructions on how to perform a practice that integrates Yoga breathing and movement...
Religions March 28, 2019 C. Miller 3 citations
This article proposes an introductory course to Jainism vis-à-vis the categories of yoga and ecology. Following a short introduction, the main section of this paper introduces the contents of the syllabus for this upper division undergraduate theological studies course. Students will learn not only the history and philosophy of Jainism, but will also undertake basic Jain contemplative...
Religions March 28, 2019 Veena R. Howard
This paper focuses on the branch of Santmat (thus far, unstudied by scholars of Indian religions), prevalent in the rural areas of Bihar, India. Santmat—literally meaning “the Path of Sants„ or “Point of View of the Sants„—of Bihar represents a unique synthesis of the elements of the Vedic traditions, rural Hindu practices, and esoteric experiences, as recorded in the poetry of the medieval...
Religions March 19, 2019 Jeffery D. Long
The pluralistic turn in modern Hindu thought corresponds with the rise of an emphasis on direct experience of divine realities in this tradition. Both pluralism and a focus on experience have precedents in premodern Hindu traditions, but have become especially prominent in modern Hinduism. The paradigmatic example in the modern period of a religious subject embarking upon a pluralistic quest...
Religions February 28, 2019 Perundevi Srinivasan
In south India, when a person is afflicted with poxes of any variety, it is believed that the goddess Mariyamman has “arrived„ in the person. The Tamil term “ammai„ means pustules or “pearls„ of poxes as well as mother/goddess. Indigenous discourses, gleaned from resources, such as songs and narratives, facilitate our interrogation of the Hindu “religious experience„ that underscores the...
Religions February 22, 2019 Travis Dumsday
There is a substantial literature on the question of whether methodological naturalism (MN) is and/or should be among the principles operative in the natural and social sciences; moreover the status of MN has been one of the battle grounds in prominent debates regarding the demarcation lines between science and theology (e.g., the debate over whether intelligent design hypotheses can ever count...
Religions February 7, 2019 Yaakov Ariel 1 citation
The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s cultural and spiritual journeys, and traces the poet’s paths as foreshadowing those of many American Jews of the last generation. Ginsberg was a unique individual, whose choices were very different other men of his era. However, it was larger developments in American society that allowed him to take steps that were virtually unthinkable during his parents’...
Religions January 29, 2019 Guy L. Beck
While music plays a significant role in many of the world’s religions, it is in the Hindu religion that one finds one of the closest bonds between music and religious experience extending for millennia. The recitation of the syllable OM and the chanting of Sanskrit Mantras and hymns from the Vedas formed the core of ancient fire sacrifices. The Upanishads articulated OM as Śabda-Brahman, the...
Religions January 29, 2019 Edwin Ng, Zack Walsh
This paper proposes “making refuge„ as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, a guiding ethos and praxis, for the engaged Buddhist aspiration of responding to the social, political, economic, and planetary crises facing the world. Making refuge is conceived as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of...
Religions January 15, 2019 S. Sarbadhikary
This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and...
Religions December 4, 2018 Haiyan Xing, Gerald Murray 8 citations
This paper presents information on the shamanic religious system practiced among the Tu ethnic group of Qinghai Province in Northwest China. After presenting ethnographic information on the spirit beliefs, rituals, and shamanic specialists of the Tu, the paper will use a systemic definition of religion to (1) identify changes that have occurred in the focus of Tu shamanism and the role of the...
Religions November 26, 2018 Tatyana Lifintseva, Dmitry S. Tourko 1 citation
In this article, the authors investigate ontological strategies in Meister Eckhart’s metaphysics, which remounts Neoplatonism and the Corpus Areopagiticum, and in two schools of Indian philosophical tradition, the Advaita Vedanta and Early Buddhism. Along with differences in the anthropology, epistemology, and soteriology of these traditions, we can find similar strategies of ontological...
Religions November 15, 2018 Manuel Lopez
In this article, I would like to reframe our understanding of the role played by doxographies or classification of views (Skt. siddhānta, Ch. panjiao 判教, Tib. grub mtha’) in the Buddhist tradition as it pertained to Tibetan attempts at defining and organizing the diversity of Buddhist contemplative practices that made their way into Tibet since the introduction of Buddhism to the Tibetan...
Religions August 27, 2018 Kenneth S. Sacks
In his 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” Emerson demanded that, above all, […]
Religions August 16, 2018 Terje Sparby 5 citations
Anthroposophic meditation is unique in that it arises within a European context and emphasizes cognition, self-development, and sociocultural renewal. This article presents the perceived effects of two of the most common Anthroposophic meditation practices within the current sample (N = 30). The first, Anthroposophic mantra practice, seeks to connect the practitioner to a spiritual reality. The...
Religions July 23, 2018 Trude Fonneland
To choose a terminology for an investigation of shamanism in contemporary Norway is not entirely without problems. Many shamans are adamant in rejecting the term religion in connection with their practices and choose broader rubrics when describing what they believe in. When shamanism was approved as an official religion by the Norwegian government in 2012, the tensions ran high, and many...
Religions June 26, 2018 Teng-Kuan Ng 5 citations
This paper studies the ways that Walker, a short film by the Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, visualizes the relationship between Buddhism and modernity. Via detailed film analysis as well as attention to sources in premodern Buddhist traditions, this paper argues that its filmic performance of Zen walking meditation serves two functions: To present slowness and simplicity as...
Religions June 12, 2018 Andreas Gonçalves Lind 1 citation
The recent debate on the notorious Anselmian proof of God’s existence, usually called the “ontological argument”, is placed within an analytic approach, since Alvin Plantinga revisited this argument beginning in the sixties and especially during the seventies. At the same time, Michel Henry contested this proof, situating the debate in a completely different area of philosophy. Henry’s critique...
Religions May 3, 2018 Roy Tamashiro 12 citations
This article describes insights and consciousness transformations reported in several contemporary peace pilgrimage oral histories and autoethnographies, including my own. Autoethnography is a form of autobiographical writing that stresses the interpretation of experiences in their psychosocial, cultural, and historical contexts. Peace pilgrimages are typically self-defined journeys and...
Religions April 18, 2018 Pavel Nosachev
The main research issue of this article is to determine the extent to which Western esotericism influences the formation of computer game plots. The methodological framework is the occultural bricolage theory (C. Partridge). This article looks at how the paranormal is represented in the game “Gray Matter”, created by J. Jensen. Jensen has always used occult bricolage as the main method for...
Religions March 22, 2018 Brooke Schedneck
Female non-Buddhists have been writing detailed descriptions of their personal experiences in vipassanā meditation retreats since the 1960s. These memoirists relate to the English-speaking world their experience of the retreat process and self-transformations. Early memoirists traveled Asia in order to learn and practice vipassanā meditation. These memoirs are as much about the meditation...
Religions March 15, 2018 Alison T. Smith
The Camino de Santiago has witnessed an unprecedented number of walkers in recent years. Traditionalists feel that the Camino is suffering from excess—too many visitors and too much strain on the infrastructure, accompanied by an ignorance of what it means to be an “authentic” pilgrim. Contemporary pilgrims often use ancillary services to transport their bags, approaching the Camino as an...
Religions March 14, 2018 Kerry Skora
This essay addresses the question of the relationship between Aesthetics and Tantra, in the world-view and life-world of Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (ca. 975–1025 C.E.) and his tradition. I respond to a classic work on Abhinavagupta’s understanding of aesthetic experience and religious experience by shifting the focus from ultimate experience to the life of a liberated being. I argue...
Religions 2018 Chia Longman 58 citations
This paper draws on the results of ethnographic research on ‘women’s circles’; women-only spaces that celebrate sisterhood and the ‘feminine’, including the increasingly globally popular ‘Red Tent’. Women’s circles are non-institutionalized, often monthly gatherings, for women to come together and relax, meditate, share stories, partake in rituals, heal, nourish, and empower themselves. Based...
Religions November 30, 2017 Noel Keating 3 citations
Using an interdisciplinary approach and a phenomenological, hermeneutic, mystagogical methodology, this paper explores how children describe the deep fruits of meditation in their lives. Seventy children, aged 7 to 11, from four Irish primary schools were interviewed; all had engaged in meditation as a whole-school practice for at least two-years beforehand. The study sought to elicit from...