Religions
March 28, 2024
Mark Slatter
3 citations
This article charts some of the conversations around psychedelics, mysticism, Catholicism, and the Catholic mystics. I provide a context for the current “psychedelic renaissance” and bring the focus to psychedelics and Catholicism. The literature’s frequent comparisons of psychedelic mystical trips with Catholic mysticism raises questions about the legitimacy of religious ways of knowing, the...
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christine S. Vanpool
Medio Period (AD 1200 to 1450) Casas Grandes shamans used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to initiate trance states that allowed their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved a sense of vertigo and soul flight that is cross-culturally common and occurs with tobacco-based nicotine intoxication. The Medio Period shamans also relied on and interacted with...
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christopher Jensen
This paper explores the potentially fruitful interplay between a set of practical and theoretical approaches developed to teach post-secondary students about accounts of dreams and of exemplars, in cases where these phenomena have been deemed significant by specific religious discourse communities. Incorporating insights from his participation in the Comparative Hagiology group, the author...
Religions
March 6, 2024
Zhengfu Chen
1 citation
The Miao (Hmong) community in Southwest China, deeply entrenched in a religious belief system acknowledging the omnipresent spiritual essence and venerating ancestor worship, perceives life as a harmonious blend of the “soul” and the “body”, intricately interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Within this cultural milieu, shamanism and healing practices form an inseparable nexus, epitomizing a...
Religions
February 25, 2024
Julian Schott
1 citation
The religious worldview of the mantranaya (esoteric Mahāyāna or Vajrayāna) can arguably be seen as rooted in the perspective that reality (tattva) is to be self-experienced (svasamvedya) through contemplative practices, serving as both their means (upāya) and expression (caryā). The tantric path-model of Padmavajra’s Guhyasiddhi, an exegetical text in the Guhyasamāja tradition, supposedly...
Religions
February 23, 2024
Yin Paradies, Cullan Woods Joyce
5 citations
Colonisation, genocide, ecocide, and climate derangement are ongoing, unfurling, global tragedies. In so-called Australia, spiritual practitioners can respond to these crises by deepening their engagement with Aboriginal perspectives/practices. This paper contends that some Eurocentric habitual categorisations subtly misinterpret Aboriginal experiences of the sacred, such as identifying...
Religions
February 23, 2024
Jianyu Shen
1 citation
This article examines the earthly journey of the saints in early Jewish and Daoist hagiographies. The major texts for comparative reading are Sefer Shivchei Ha-Ar”i and Shenxian Zhuan, namely, the foundation stones of each hagiographical tradition. Emphasis is laid on the most significant phases in the process of making saints while the candidates dwell in the worldly domain as quasi-divine...
Religions
February 23, 2024
Thijs Huijs, Arjan W. Braam, Renske Kruizinga et al.
In general, studies of spirituality show positive associations with measures of well-being, but less is known about the possible role of mental distress in this association. Following the two-continua model of mental health, the current quantitative four-week follow-up study examines how spirituality is associated with well-being and mental distress. Spirituality is measured using the...
Religions
February 16, 2024
K. Taylor, Eli Kramer
In this paper, we will present Rinzai practices from Zen Masters Ikkyū Sōjun (一休宗純, 1394–1481) and Hakuin Ekaku (白隠 慧鶴, 1686–1769) as offering a distinctive kind of spiritual exercise: disruptive reorientation to transcendence (enlightenment) through immanence (a return to the world in all its ugly distractions, beauty, and insight). This paper seeks to explore Hadot’s philosophy as a way of...
Religions
January 30, 2024
Sthaneshwar Timalsina
In the classical philosophical landscape of India, the Advaita of Śaṅkara occupies central stage. Besides the Upaniṣadic literature, the Gauḍapāda-kārikā (GK) of Gauḍapāda is the primary text in this school. Relying primarily on the GK, this essay explores the ways the issue of change can be addressed within the Advaita paradigm. For Advaitins, there exists only the singular reality of Brahman,...
Religions
January 17, 2024
Przemysław Zgórecki
Contemporary thinking on religion is confronted with the challenge of shifting from a ‘philosophy of religion’ to a ‘philosophy of religious experience’. This challenge, on which the common future of philosophy and theology depends, is not to draw a line between the two, but rather to cross that very line. Crossing the boundary between philosophy and theology, which is what is being discussed...
Religions
January 2, 2024
Yohan Yoo
In the Jeju shamanic religion, chickens have been sacrificed for aekmagi, a ritual to prevent aek, a looming misfortune that may cause death. Whereas ordinary participants are thought to be at risk of harm when possessing or eating chickens or other offerings made to prevent aek, the simbang, Jeju shamans, are thought to be immune to it. Simbang are believed to be permanently on the threshold...
Religions
December 27, 2023
Libera Pisano
This paper examines Gustav Landauer’s mystical anarchism, focusing on the concept of overcoming death as a core element of his thought. It explores Landauer’s rejection of death as both a linguistic superstition and a limited worldview, emphasizing the collective whole over individualism. The essay suggests that Landauer’s representation of revolution moving from space to time includes his...
Religions
December 26, 2023
Yixuan Liu
1 citation
In medieval India, the desire for “the unity of Brahman and Self” was present in the Vedānta tradition of Hinduism. Adi Śaṅkara, the master of Vedānta philosophy, proposed the six-fold sādhana: mind control, sense control, mental tranquility, endurance, potential faith, and concentration. These six-fold practices can help Vedānta followers realize unity with Brahman. In medieval Christianity,...
Religions
December 22, 2023
Woramat Malasart
The Dhammakāya Gāthā is a Pāli Buddhist prose text that has been circulated within the cross-cultural/translocal sphere of Tai–Khmer Buddhism for over five centuries. Its earliest extant version appears on the “Braḥ Dhammakāya inscription”, an engraved stone slab from the Stūpa of Wat Suea, Phitsanulok, Thailand, dated to 1549 CE. The Dhammakāya text consists of three parts. The first part...
Religions
December 22, 2023
Elizabeth F. Perry
Julian of Norwich’s performance within her longer Revelations of Divine Love involves layers of authorizing and devotional steps that frame it as a gift for her community. She presents herself not as an author, but as a revelator, in step with John’s acts of unveiling his visions and dialogue with the divine in the Biblical Revelations. Examining Julian’s act of presenting her visions in...
Religions
November 3, 2023
Victoria Dos Santos
6 citations
The aim of this paper is to examine and illustrate how the animistic ontology present in neopaganism allows embodied and sensuous interactions with virtual worlds. By considering animism as a strategy with which to rethink human cohabitation with the techno-digital otherness, I will show how neopagans who use computer technology for spiritual purposes experience the online context as an...
Religions
November 1, 2023
Haddy Bello
The school of phenomenology went with Edith Stein all her life and became one of the guiding strings of her thought, which deepens more and more on the experience of the crucified. The Steinian idea of freedom starts from philosophy. However, it is intimately crossed by the theological (and mystical) question, since, for the author, the historical realization of the human life is possible when...
Religions
October 27, 2023
Abraham Vélez de Cea
Panikkar’s philosophy of mysticism is best understood as an attempt to overcome monistic and dualistic ways of thinking about the divine, human beings and the universe. Mysticism, for Panikkar, is irreducible to either monistic experiences of oneness without a second or to dualistic experiences where the divine is seen as wholly other. Rather, mysticism relates to holistic experiences of...
Religions
October 27, 2023
Jim Robinson
While Rosemary Radford Ruether is widely, and rightly, acknowledged as a prophetic Catholic scholar–activist, her interest in and experience of mysticism is rarely emphasized. However, Ruether had an impactful mystical experience as a young woman, and the themes of this experience echo throughout her body of work. This paper paints a portrait of Ruether as both a profoundly prophetic...
Religions
October 27, 2023
Svein Aage Christoffersen
In K.E. Løgstrup’s (1905–1981) theology, the point of intersection between phenomenology and systematic theology is our life experiences. In this article, Løgstrup’s way of combining phenomenology and theology is explored from the 1930s to the 1970s. The idea that life is not an amorphous abyss, but God’s creation runs like a connecting thread throughout Løgstrup’s oeuvre. This idea negating a...
Religions
October 25, 2023
Grzegorz L. Polak
1 citation
The Nibbānasukha-sutta contains Sāriputta’s statement that the pleasure (sukha) of nibbāna lies in the fact that nothing is experienced (vedayita). This statement may be seen as complementary to the proclamation in the Kaḷāra-sutta that all that is experienced is unpleasant (dukkha). In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct the ideas serving as a philosophical backdrop to these radical and...
Religions
October 19, 2023
Brian Claude Macallan
3 citations
This paper explores Christian responses to religious and spiritual experiences (RSEs) associated with psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT). It addresses the challenges of defining and understanding spiritual and religious experiences and examines the theological implications of PAT-induced RSEs. It highlights the growing acceptance of PAT as a therapeutic approach and its potential benefits for...
Religions
September 27, 2023
Blanche Lagrange
The monastic reforms of the 10th century greatly increased the role of the psalter, a biblical book that became the main tool of a monk in personal and collective prayer. The Odbert Psalter, produced in Saint-Bertin around 999, opens with a scene of Pentecost in which we see Christ represented as a king who is static and in a space distinct from the apostles, exhibiting an attitude of...
Religions
September 27, 2023
Magdalene Thomassen
The article first exposes a section in Edith Stein’s masterwork, Finite and Eternal Being, where she explicitly reflects upon the relation between philosophy and theology, and on the possibility of a Christian philosophy. Here, Stein enlarges the scope of rationality when propagating faith as a source of knowledge in its own right. The phenomenological first-person perspective and notions of...