Religions
August 27, 2025
Jinjing Zhu
The paper analyzes two allegories in the Zhuangzi—the Huzi and Lady Yu stories—to outline a four-stage mystical process. It begins with a lifeless stage achieved through purgation of self and world, followed by a revitalization where Oneness is experienced both introvertively and as extrovertive truth. Next comes an emptiness that transfigures reality by reconciling things and halting time and motion, culminating in the deconstruction of the transcendental Dao and alignment with the spontaneity of things. Oneness is not the final stage but a step toward reconciling Oneness and multiplicity, eventually leading to its deconstruction and a return to multiplicity. This paradox is central to Zhuangzi's mysticism.
Religions
August 26, 2025
Richard Viladesau
Feeling and thought operate largely through learned and transcultural associations. In Western art, certain arrangements of sounds, shapes, and colors are assumed to evoke particular emotions and ideas. Rudolph Otto applies this idea to the experience of the "Holy" as a unique, irreducible "mysterium tremendum et fascinans," yet a "law of associations" allows aesthetic and moral experiences to evoke the numinous by analogy. The analysis questions whether religious consciousness is a sui generis experience or an interpretation. Post-Kantian transcendental theology proposes that "depth" or "limit" experiences are implicit in consciousness, providing a basis for associations with ultimate mystery.
Religions
June 23, 2025
Aloisia Moser
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Religions
June 5, 2025
Shan Gao
Emerson and Zhuangzi each reconstructed virtue to address meaning crises during eras of social transformation, but their metaphysical foundations lead to different aesthetic appreciations: Emerson promotes appreciation of nature as life's best meaning, while Zhuangzi emphasizes harmony between humanity and the Dao, not wilderness. Through intercultural dialogue, the author aims to integrate Emerson's virtue into Zhuangzi's framework, producing an integrated environmental virtue that yields an ecological aesthetic self—a self integrated with nature's value. This new self and value may shape practices in the AI-driven era of transformation.
Religions
May 27, 2025
Peter D. Hershock
Reductive physicalism has succeeded in producing technological advances and material control, but it has failed to solve the hard problem of consciousness, exposing humanity to existential and ethical risks as the attention economy and artificial intelligence restructure human presence. Using Buddhist concepts of causality and agency, this paper proposes a nondualist, nonreductionist theory of consciousness and evolutionary dynamics. It aims to open an ethically productive middle path for critically rethinking the Fourth Industrial Revolution and positively reconfiguring human–technology–world relations.
Religions
May 12, 2025
Aloisia Moser
Consciousness is less central than traditionally assumed, and retreating to the subconscious is an inadequate response. Drawing on Nietzsche's perspectivism and Wittgenstein's concept of "form of life," the paper argues that human will arises from interdependent life forces and that meaning emerges from shared practices. A moth infestation metaphor illustrates the interconnectedness of sentient and non-sentient beings. Theology must rethink its focus on human consciousness after the "anthropological turn," avoiding dualistic body–soul separations. Embracing a holistic view of interconnectedness can enrich understanding of human existence and foster compassionate engagement with diverse life forms.
Religions
March 27, 2025
Amber Bird
By analyzing George Herbert's seventeenth-century devotional poems, particularly his shape poem 'The Altar' and his sonnets, this essay argues that deliberately choosing formal constraint can foster a spiritual experience. Herbert's sonnets, such as 'Prayer,' 'Love,' and 'Redemption,' pair key religious concepts with the attentive demands of poetic form, challenging passive notions of Christian experience. The poems demand careful attention and neurological intensification, a quality of religious experience, transforming readers' conceptual understanding of Christianity. Herbert's sonnets become poetic chapels where readers may encounter 'something understood,' reframing religious experience through the constraints of poetic form.
Religions
March 26, 2025
Liz MacWhirter
Creative–critical research, which merges creative practice with theoretical inquiry, is especially suited to studying mysticism. A case study using the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich's writings shows how her poetics intersect with trauma-informed theology, forming a framework for processing loss and grief through mystical union with God. This framework was applied to contemporary ecological grief in a performative long poem, Blue: a lament for the sea. The theopoetic process, working with Julian's images of Christ's wounds and one-ing, developed new language for liminal and spiritual experience. Insights from such research can be shared in performance and publication, bringing the whole self to scholarship and revealing new dimensions.
Religions
March 26, 2025
Linh Thi Thuy Nguyen
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs) can both be inhibited and catalyzed by religion. Analyzing the author's first-person STEs in Buddhist and Christian contexts, along with testimonies from diverse religious backgrounds, suggests that religion may sometimes prevent adherents from having STEs, yet it can also trigger such experiences in nonreligious individuals. STEs appear universal across cultural and religious boundaries, offering potential for interfaith dialogue and a framework for religious harmony. Data on STEs may also bridge science with other forms of knowledge, enabling shared discourse. A proposed mechanism highlights STEs' role in achieving lifelong peace by balancing physical and mental needs, helping individuals maximize potential and lead fulfilling lives.
Religions
March 26, 2025
Federico Divino
Vedic hymns in the R̥gveda contain metaphors—fire, chariot, yoke, light, ocean—that prefigure ideas later developed in Buddhist meditative practice and theory of knowledge. The Vedic seer serves as a forerunner of the Buddhist practitioner, with both traditions sharing themes of overcoming ignorance and attaining knowledge. Two major metaphorical fields are identified: one concerning cognition and knowledge, the other contemplative practice and liberation. Vedic contemplative exercises, often understood as prayer, show similarities to Buddhist meditation. While Vedic religiosity focuses on divine association, Buddhism reinterprets these ideas within a human-centered framework, indicating an intricate dialogue rather than a simple rejection of Vedic traditions.
Religions
February 25, 2025
Tara B. M. Smith
Miniature painting in Warhammer 40,000 induces a flow state that is meditative, meaningful, and positive for mental health. Based on interviews and journal entries from a 6-month participant study of 14 painters, the authors indicate that painters achieve deep concentration and a temporary loss of self, consistent with Csikszentmihalyi's definition of flow. The activity fosters mindfulness and a heightened awareness of the body, connecting to situated cognition. The paper argues that this flow state, while often studied in videogames, has received less attention in hands-on creative activities like miniature painting.
Religions
February 25, 2025
Ivana Gagić Kičinbači
An artist's struggle for inner freedom in practice-led artistic research is examined through drawing, framed within a Catholic perspective. The quest for inner freedom is vital for artistic work that communicates the ineffable. The artist strives to reach deeper levels of spiritual experience and work from that state of consciousness, acting as a mediator connecting invisible, intuitive dimensions and making them visible through art. Research involved close observation of the artmaking process and conditions, using visual arts methodologies and qualitative narrative research. Contemplative practices are highlighted as tools for achieving inner freedom and unlocking creative potential.
Religions
February 6, 2025
Timothy Stanley
The essay evaluates the concept of the trace within extended mind (EM) theory, starting by distinguishing Andy Clark's complementarity model from competing views. It shows how an undeveloped notion of the trace emerges in Clark's debate with internalist critics, then introduces Paul Ricoeur's metaphor of the imprint from Memory, History, Forgetting. The recent debate about the plastic trace is applied to this context, rehabilitating Jacques Derrida's legacy. The essay concludes that EM offers renewed promise for modeling deliberations between religiously diverse people.
Religions
December 27, 2024
Na Liu
Inner peace cultivated through Zhuangzi's mystical philosophy can serve as a foundation for nonviolent resistance and peaceful social change. Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese thinker, taught achieving harmony with Dao, the natural order, through concepts like the perfect natural state (Pu), free and easy wandering (Xiao Yao You), equalizing things (Qi Wu Lun), fasting of the mind (Xin Zhai), and sitting and forgetting (Zuo Wang). These teachings promote inner peace and tranquility, which can help individuals transcend anger, resentment, and violence, fostering compassion and understanding toward opponents. This inner peace can then fuel the courage and determination needed for peaceful protests and civil disobedience, offering an alternative approach to creating a more just world.
Religions
October 25, 2024
Gregory S. Sparrow, Ryan Hurd
An analysis of 19 dreams from a single subject, using co-creative dream theory, identifies subjective antecedents to experiences of inner light and ecstasy. The study treats dreams as interactive, real-time relational events rather than fixed products of the unconscious. By examining how the dream ego's feelings, choices, and reactions shape metaphoric content, the authors show that the dreamer's responses influence the emergence of light experiences. This process-oriented approach offers a potential avenue for accessing core mystical experiences, which are widely considered universal across cultures.
Religions
October 25, 2024
Brianna K. Morseth
A one-month Chan Buddhist retreat at a monastery in Taiwan increased recycling and reduced food waste among international participants. Salivary oxytocin showed a marginal increase after practicing the huatou "Who recites the Buddha's name?", a contemplative technique that challenges the sense of self. Participants' phenomenological reports described an interrelational, ecological sense of self during this practice. The precise mechanisms linking contemplative practice to environmentally sustainable behavior remain unclear, but the authors propose that existential emotions like doubt and awe may alter the sense of self, fostering a feeling of interconnection with broader ecologies. Further research is needed to test this framework.
Religions
September 27, 2024
Davide Tramarin
A carved wooden Visitation group (1310–1320) from the Dominican convent of St. Katherinental originally included two rock crystal cabochons embedded in the wombs of Mary and Elizabeth. The crystals, symbols of purity and divine illumination, were integral to the artwork's design and function. The sculpture was conceived in connection with Meister Eckhart's mystical doctrine of inner vision and the Eternal Birth of God within the soul. For the Katherinental nuns, the crystals served as tools fostering spiritual connection with the divine. The analysis draws on sensory studies and visual and material culture methods to interpret the iconological essence of the piece.
Religions
July 26, 2024
Sami Pihlström
William James's pragmatist philosophy of religion offers a distinctive account of situated religious cognition that remains relevant to contemporary discussions. This paper identifies central situational themes in James's work, focusing on the relationship between belief and hope as situation-dependent concepts. It also briefly examines the ontological status of the objects of situated religious cognition, showing how James's pragmatism treats religious beliefs as shaped by context and practical consequences rather than as fixed metaphysical claims.
Religions
May 27, 2024
Ünsal Yılmaz Yeşildal, Banu Güzelderen, Fatih Düzgün
Âşıks, Turkish improvisational poets, are seen as inheritors of shamanic functions, with poetic roles shifting from shamans to ozan (bards) and then to âşıks from the 15th–16th centuries. They share parallels with shamans in upbringing, development, and societal status. Âşıks honor deceased masters by reciting their works, a practice called “usta malı söylemek,” aiming to connect with ancestral spirits. This resembles shamans invoking spirits of departed ancestors for celestial and subterranean journeys. Interviews with 34 âşıks across Türkiye, analyzed via document analysis, found all were nurtured in a master–apprentice tradition. They consciously evoked masters’ spirits during performances, and while regional and age variations existed, reciting masters’ poems elevated spirits, and neglecting it was seen as potentially harmful to tradition, themselves, and their surroundings.
Religions
April 26, 2024
Pathompong Bodhiprasiddhinand
Buddhist ethical practices, including chanting, mindfulness, concentration, meditation, and insight (vipassanā), can improve both physical and mental health for practitioners during pandemics such as COVID-19. The paper argues that the core Buddhist ethics of morality, meditation, and wisdom, when perfectly practiced, can eliminate mental defilements believed to be root causes of illness and lead to nibbāna, a state beyond suffering. It highlights a set of practices called the four bhāvanās (types of development) as a means to enhance well-being during any pandemic.
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christine S. Vanpool
Between AD 1200 and 1450, shamans in the Casas Grandes region used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to enter trance states, enabling their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved vertigo and soul flight, common cross-culturally and consistent with nicotine intoxication. Shamans interacted with other-than-human beings, including macaw- and serpent-linked deities, and used animated objects such as Playas Red and Chihuahuan Polychrome pottery effigies of humans, macaws, and snakes. These pots, proposed as animate “pot-people,” featured designs emphasizing spinning and vertigo, central to soul flight. Some pots were literally spun, as evidenced by wear patterns on their bases, reflecting sympathetic and mimetic magic linking them to the spirit world.
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christopher Jensen
Teaching about significant dreams and exemplary figures (saints) in religious communities can be enriched by the comparative hagiology approach, which expands traditional hagiography. The author argues that this perspective reveals correspondences between how religious groups treat dreams and how they treat exemplars. The comparative hagiological classroom offers a productive learning environment that addresses challenges in contemporary post-secondary education for both instructors and students.
Religions
December 22, 2023
Woramat Malasart
The Dhammakāya Gāthā, a Pāli Buddhist prose text circulated in Tai–Khmer Buddhism for over five centuries, has its earliest extant version on a 1549 CE stone inscription from Wat Suea, Thailand. The text identifies the Buddha's knowledge and virtues with his physical attributes, praises his resplendent body as the dhammakāya, and exhorts meditators to recollect the dhammakāya to attain Buddhahood. Though well-known pre-modernly, it is little used today. Analysis of textual and paratextual elements reveals a unique meditation practice called Dhammakāyānussati, or "Recollection of the Dhammakāya," involving reciting the text, constructing the Buddha image, and visualizing the dhammakāya embodied in it, contributing to Buddhānussati in Tai–Khmer Buddhism.
Religions
December 22, 2023
Elizabeth F. Perry
Julian of Norwich presents herself not as an author but as a revelator, mirroring John's acts of unveiling visions and divine dialogue in the Biblical Revelations. Her longer Revelations of Divine Love layers authorizing and devotional steps to frame the work as a gift for her community. Julian's daring yet orthodox visions address spiritual authority and individual faith amid the rise of Lollardy. The article examines how Julian's Revelation of Divine Love functions as contemplative drama, comparing it with The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ and The Cloud of Unknowing. Julian's revelations show interior contemplation transformed into collective acts of devotion, demonstrating the interchange between vernacular mysticism and public devotion through affective piety and performed spiritual dialogue.
Religions
October 27, 2023
Jim Robinson
Rosemary Radford Ruether, known as a prophetic Catholic scholar-activist, also had a formative mystical experience as a young woman that shaped her life's work. This paper presents Ruether as both a prophetic figure and a spiritually attuned seeker. It first offers a democratized and demystified view of mysticism using the work of Bernard McGinn, Dorothee Söelle, and Jess Byron Hollenback. Then it provides a biographical sketch, contextualizing her early mystical encounter with the divine as a feminine presence suffusing creation. That experience is interpreted as a meaningful source of inspiration for her decades-long commitment to an anti-patriarchal, ecofeminist theology.