ISSN 2363-6696
15 papers in the library · 15 citations · publishing 2014-2026
Entangled Religions October 29, 2026 Kristina Schubert
Contemporary Sufi-inspired healing practices in German-speaking contexts draw on concepts and practices whose meanings are reshaped as they enter contemporary healing discourses. Drawing on historical and conceptual scholarship on Sufi traditions and on previously published qualitative findings from a doctoral study of contemplative and healing practices in Germany, the analysis focuses on four...
Entangled Religions July 16, 2026 Carola Erika Lorea, Rohit Singh
Informed by ethnographic fieldwork with humans, nonhumans, and the materiality of living traditions, this collection encourages comparative analysis, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-pollination among scholars of religion and Tantra across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayan region, and Europe. With its premodern origins in South Asia, Tantra has emerged as a repertoire of...
Entangled Religions July 16, 2026 Maciej Karasinski, Fathima Fasleena
The article explores the cultural significance of the sacred groves (kāvus) of Kerala and their relationship to various notions of nature, ecology and indigenous spirituality. We employ a mixed method of research that combines textual sources and oral exegesis as well as anthropological fieldwork to investigate the spaces within the kāvus that are designated for Tantric healing and empowerment....
Entangled Religions July 16, 2026 Carine Plancke
Critical scholarship on neo-Tantra has underscored how it has distorted Tantric practice into a consumerist pursuit of so-called sacred sex that bears little resemblance to the South Asian traditions it originates from. However, some scholars caution against simply dismissing neo-Tantra as misappropriation. Instead, they call for a nuanced investigation into its creative synthesis of Western...
Entangled Religions June 18, 2026 Dylan Esler
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Entangled Religions June 18, 2026 Henrik H. Sørensen
This article aims at approaching the topic of non-doing (Chin. wuwei 無為), and the related idea of effortlessness (Chin. wu gongyong 無功用), from the perspective of the Chan Buddhist tradition (禪宗) in late medieval China. This highly practice-oriented form of Chinese Buddhism developed well-defined soteriological strategies for their practitioners to attain the absolute, variously defined as the...
Entangled Religions December 2, 2025 Louis Komjathy
The present article explores Daoist effortless meditation with particular attention to its association with the inner cultivation lineages of classical Daoism (ca. 350–ca. 90 BCE). In addition to discussing the technical specifics of the practice, including its intimate connection to wúwéi 無為 (lit., ‘without acting/doing’; non-action/effortlessness), consideration is given to related...
Entangled Religions June 26, 2025 David Germano
The Seminal Heart (snying thig) is a form of the Tibetan Buddhist Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) tradition, which itself has been marked by a complex array of contemplative practices that have changed dramatically since its inception in the eighth century right up to present times. A highly innovative central principle in these meditations is the shifting roles of volitional effort and loci of...
Entangled Religions July 3, 2023 Gavin Flood 4 citations
Contemplative traditions focused on Śiva and the Goddess developed during the medieval or post-Gupta period in Kashmir, although not limited to that region. In this paper I present textual accounts of a kind of meditation and its accompanying doctrine geared towards liberation conceptualized as an expanded awareness described in Śākta-Śaiva scriptures. This Śākta-Śaiva tradition has scriptural...
Entangled Religions July 3, 2023 Patrick Benjamin Koch 2 citations
This study investigates the way in which different concepts of contemplation and seclusion are negotiated in Jewish spiritual literature. Focusing on (early) modern examples, it particularly addresses the functions and goals of physical and mental exercises designed to achieve detachment from worldly concerns. It shows how practices denoted by the terms perishut (lit. “separation”) and...
Entangled Religions July 3, 2023 Louise Nelstrop 1 citation
This essay explores the dynamic of contemplative action, which I will refer to as ‘social mysticism’, or what from the perspective of comparative mysticism we might also want to term a form of ‘non-doing’. It focuses primarily on the medieval English mystical tradition, illustrating that two forms of action are discussion—ordinary actions and those which flow out of contemplation. It is noted...
Entangled Religions April 14, 2023 D. Johannsen
Among modern practitioners of magic, the “psychologization of magic” has become a common strategy to adapt practices such as rituals of invocation to naturalistic thought. In this article, I discuss what was probably the most elaborate attempt to bridge the gap between the magic of the past and magic suited for the present that took place within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn...
Entangled Religions December 17, 2019 Ines Weinrich
The Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) is one of the most often cited authors when it comes to "music and Islam." His “Book on the Etiquette of Listening and Ecstasy” (*Kitāb Ādāb as-samāʿ wa-l-wajd*), translated into English more than a hundred years ago, is widely circulated among Muslims in the East and West, in Arabic and English, in print and on the internet. This paper...
Entangled Religions November 12, 2019 James W. Watts
Rituals obviously utilize the human senses. Theological and mystical interpretations frequently comment on sensation as a source of metaphors for religious experience. However, the discourse used in religious rituals themselves usually avoids using the normal vocabulary appropriate to particular sensations, while focusing on ritual performance instead. This raises the question of whether it is...
Entangled Religions October 31, 2014 Stuart Ray Sarbacker 8 citations
In viewing physical practice as instrumental, traditions of modern postural yoga contain an implicit spirituality that echoes its historical precursors in the medieval traditions of haṭhayoga. The physicality of modern postural yoga tradition links the practices of premodern haṭhayoga traditions with disciplines of body that are characteristic of modern cosmopolitanism, such as gymnastics and...