Religions
June 22, 2026
Evanne Nowak
Ecological degradation is accelerating worldwide, yet the losses of species, ecosystems, and landscapes often remain socially and culturally unmourned. This article explores how contemplative ecology may offer a pathway for engaging with ecological grief. Drawing on the case study of Lab Landschapspijn Veluwe in the Netherlands, it examines how contemplative practices—such as contemplative...
Religions
June 19, 2026
Dongkyu Kim
This article explores the structural paradox of the byeong-gut (Korean shamanic healing ritual): why it adheres to the rigid and canonical format of the jaesu-gut (shamanic blessing ritual) instead of adopting a specialized clinical procedure. Critiquing the instrumental trap of previous scholarship that reduces shamanic healing to psychological comfort or social liberation, this study proposes...
Religions
June 16, 2026
Emmanouil Synadinakis, A. Delis, Anastasia Doska et al.
Religious psychopathology as a field lies at the intersection of psychiatry, theology, and culture. It addresses scientific discoveries and questions relating to the manifestation of mental health disorders that are expressed through religious content, ideation, and/or behavior. Religious psychopathology, being a multifaceted phenomenon, challenges clinicians, researchers, and religious leaders...
Religions
June 12, 2026
Yue Wang
This article argues that lotus and dharma wheel motifs in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves function not merely as decorative symbols but as active visual apparatuses that generate embodied religious experience through a mechanism we term “totemic mediation.” Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reading of totemism, Descola’s ontological framework, Gell’s theory of art as agency, Meyer’s “sensational...
Religions
May 26, 2026
Andrew S. Skinner
A growing body of empirical study recognises a tendency for users to form (para)social bonds with Large Language Models, even when users know explicitly that these systems lack interiority or personhood. This contribution argues that such attachments arise from evolved human capacities to attribute being, moral status and, in some ways, ‘soul’ to nonhuman others—and that this capacity now...
Religions
May 25, 2026
Lin Li
This study examines Chan meditation as a resource for spiritual ecology through two foundational texts, the Platform Sutra (Tanjing 壇經) and the Compendium of Five Lamps (Wudeng Huiyuan 五燈會元). The Platform Sutra reformulates meditation as “the non-abiding of mind” (xin wu suozhu 心無所住), with “no-thought as the essence” (wunian weizong 無念為宗) and “the unity of concentration and wisdom” (dinghui...
Religions
May 19, 2026
Marten Van den Toren-Liefting
Over the course of 2021, I conducted ethnographic research among transnational Pentecostal communities in Madrid. During this research, ethnographic data on manifestations of the Spirit was collected. This data appeared to defy the perspective of a distant and critical observer. In this article I explore how an anthropologist might incorporate Tillich’s theology of the Spirit to make sense of...
Religions
May 18, 2026
Geoffrey Ready, Ron Cole-Turner
Recent studies show that psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD can reliably occasion spiritual or “mystical-like” experiences under supportive conditions, and the spiritual dimension of these experiences may contribute to their reported mental health benefits. Scholars have begun exploring how such experiences might relate to spiritual growth within Christian frameworks, but most theological...
Religions
May 14, 2026
Hollis Phelps
This article provides a critical analysis of the term “entheogen” as a name for certain psychoactive drugs, arguing that it functions more as a theological construct than a neutral designation. The article analyzes how entheogenic discourses present claims about the historicity of their use, their supposed spiritual or religious meaning, and their ultimate significance for individual and social...
Religions
May 11, 2026
Enis Doko
This paper argues that Sufi–Sadrian metaphysics makes strong artificial intelligence metaphysically intelligible while resisting both reductive functionalism and indiscriminate panpsychism. The argument begins from the Qur’anic and Sufi rejection of a purely inert cosmos and develops through Ibn ʿArabī’s account of divine self-disclosure and Mullā Ṣadrā’s ontology of graded existence, knowledge...
Religions
May 3, 2026
Muhammadullah Haji Moh Naseem, Meryem Gürbüz
This study examines the human–nature relationship in the thoughts of Yunus Emre (d. ca. 1320) and addresses the Qur’anic positioning of humanity as laden with responsibility through the idea of amanah (entrustment), while focusing on Yunus Emre’s reflections on this concept as both a mystical stance and a moral state. His poems place humanity not as an absolute claim of ownership over the world...
Religions
May 2, 2026
Matteo Sgorbati
This paper examines the discourse surrounding the relationship between meditation and psychological well-being from a historical perspective. While both Buddhist practitioners and psychotherapists aspire to a state of health, they appear to diverge on what this goal entails and how to achieve it. Influential voices such as Conze and Jung have argued that psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation...
Religions
April 29, 2026
Hengfu Zhu, L H Zhu
This study examines the Vajra Exorcism Dance—commonly known as “Beating the Devils” (tiao buzha)—as performed at Yonghegong Lamasery in Beijing, positioning it as a quintessential example of monastic Nuoxi in which ritual form serves as the active embodiment of doctrinal content. By situating the performance within its historical, religious, and socio-political contexts, this paper argues that...
Religions
April 24, 2026
Youngsun Yang, Eunyoung Lee
This article examines the concept of the brain (mastiṣka) within the Indian intellectual tradition, tracing its development from the magico-religious medicine of the Atharvaveda (c. 1200–900 BCE) through the classical Āyurvedic texts—the Suśrutasaṃhitā, the Caraksaṃhitā, the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā, and the relatively neglected Bhelasaṃhitā—to the subtle-body physiology of Haṭha Yoga literature....
Religions
April 9, 2026
Julie Robertson, Sehrish Haroon, Thomas St. James O’Connor et al.
This article explores Daniel Kahneman’s concept of system thinking from his book Thinking Fast and Slow (2013) in the context of contemporary spiritual and theological reflection. The question studied here is: What does the intentional use of emotions, dreams and intuition described by Daniel Kahneman as System 1 thinking look like in contemporary spiritual and theological reflection? According...
Religions
April 4, 2026
Fehmi Ünsalan, Sema Ülper Oktar
This article posits that Islamic fairy tales function as a mystical bridge of speech, a discursive passage that, within the siyasatnama tradition, summons the subject toward ethico-political responsibility, while in Sufi narrative, it carries the seeker beyond the limits of language toward a transformative silence. Reading Indo-Persian and Ottoman siyasatnama texts alongside the Sufi classics...
Religions
April 2, 2026
Qiongke Geng
This paper systematically investigates psychoactive substances and their ritual consumption practices within the Daoist cultivation tradition. As a category of Daoist ingestive (fushi 服食) culture, these substances, derived either from specific botanicals or through artificial synthesis, are ceremonially administered to induce mystical experiences in practitioners, ultimately facilitating their...
Religions
April 2, 2026
Eduard López Hortelano
This article argues that Angela of Foligno’s Memoriale constructs seeing and hearing as epistemic operations through which theological knowledge becomes possible. Rather than treating vision and audition as devotional motifs, the study reads them as structured modes of knowing that transform affect into cognition. Using selective close readings of key passages in the Latin tradition of the...
Religions
April 1, 2026
Xiaoshuang Liu
Mental illness has become increasingly prominent in the modern individuation process in China. Correspondingly, contemporary shamanic practices in the north of China have gradually focused on mental issues and have constructed an indigenous concept related to them: “virtual illness.” Based on many years of fieldwork conducted in the shamanic regions of the north of China, this study focuses on...
Religions
March 27, 2026
Muhammed Tarik Ablak
This article examines how religious experience is articulated through genre in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī (d. 1674), focusing on the striking contrast between his ghazals and non-ghazal compositions. While Neshāṭī’s qaṣīdas, mathnawīs and other formal genres employ an explicit and direct religious language—addressing God, the Prophet, sacred figures,...
Religions
March 22, 2026
Tibor Görföl
Bede Griffiths is considered one of the pioneers of interfaith theology. He sought to establish a profound connection between different religious traditions at a time when even Christian ecumenism was still in its infancy. His spirituality, nourished by monastic sources, and his mystical teachings devoted an unusually high degree of attention to the problem of nature. According to his own...
Religions
March 20, 2026
Byoungjai Lee
1 citation
Meditation-related difficulties have been systematically documented in contemporary contemplative science, yet the prescriptive resources preserved in the ancient Buddhist commentarial literature remain underutilized in comparative research. This study analyzes the case of five hundred monks in the Paramatthajotikā I’s commentary on the Karaṇīya-metta-sutta. During intensive practice, these...
Religions
March 20, 2026
Youngsun Yang
While Western theology typically locates omniscience in a personal Creator-God, Indian philosophy presents a notable spectrum. This article traces the dialectical arc of omniscience (sarvajñāna) across major Indian philosophical traditions, arguing that what appears as an epistemological question—“who knows everything?”—is ultimately an ontological puzzle about the nature of consciousness...
Religions
March 20, 2026
Torbjørn Eftestøl, Jeremy Qvick
This article explores Rudolf Steiner’s Christology within the framework of cosmic evolution, focusing on the Second Coming of Christ as a pivotal metaphysical event. Identifying a scholarly lacuna regarding Steiner’s developmental cosmology and the work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, the study adopts an immanent–synthetic methodology to demonstrate a sacramental, participatory epistemology. The first...
Religions
March 17, 2026
Jia Liu
This article explores how Buddhist theories of mind-nature can inform ethical design in artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on AI as a supportive condition for human awakening and self-realization. Drawing on the doctrine of no-self, it argues that AI should not be treated as an autonomous moral subject, but as a contingent mirror of human data, design, and intention. Although present AI...