ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.3390/rel15080892
Chase Padusniak
{"title":"Aristotle Meets Augustine in Fourteenth-Century Liège: Religious Violence in the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem","authors":"Chase Padusniak","doi":"10.3390/rel15080892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080892","url":null,"abstract":"As William Cavanaugh has remarked, the scholarly notion of religion “should often be surrounded by scare quotes. Its flexibility and occasional nebulousness make evaluating its role in conceiving of, effecting, and justifying violence even more difficult. At the same time, it sticks around and remains a vital category of contemporary analysis. What if getting behind the Wars of Religion—the period to which Cavanaugh traces the emergence of his “myth of religious violence”—could plant the seeds for a new paradigm in understanding the relationship between religion and violence? In this article, I analyze the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem, a fourteenth-century canon from Liège. Untranslated into English and rarely written about, Hocsem’s text offers an unexpectedly political perspective on this question. Combining insights from Augustine’s City of God as well as Aristotle’s Politics and basing his ideas on his own experience of nearly constant conflict, Hocsem develops the idea that class antagonisms and human frailty make violence—especially political violence—inevitable. He takes this approach within a polity ruled by a prince-bishop, though one he would not have thought of as “religious”. Hocsem’s solutions are thus avowedly political. His pessimism about such questions leads to an emphasis on mitigating violence through the institution of proper socio-political structures. This reading of Hocsem and his politicizing of the question of violence opens new possibilities for scholars, further calling into question any easy relationship between the modern categories of “religion” and violence.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"55 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141808847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.3390/rel15080887
Glenn Joshua Morrison
{"title":"“Continental Philosophy and Christian Beliefs”: Truth in Being","authors":"Glenn Joshua Morrison","doi":"10.3390/rel15080887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080887","url":null,"abstract":"The mystery of being touches upon the depths of God’s truth articulated as love [...]","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"67 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141806813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080883
Judith Stack
{"title":"A Character of Righteous Integrity in Light of God’s Reign: The Spirituality of Jesus According to Matthew","authors":"Judith Stack","doi":"10.3390/rel15080883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080883","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines Matthew’s depiction of both the spirituality demonstrated by Jesus’ actions and words (his own spirituality) and the spirituality he preaches (prescribes/expects of others). Key Matthean themes interweave in this topic. Jesus’ own spirituality and that which he expects of his followers are shaped most profoundly by the apocalyptic expectation of the imminent Reign of God. All practices and attitudes must be aligned with this coming reality. Because of this, the key mark of a true disciple or righteous person is integrity—the congruence of one’s inner character and outer actions, of one’s professed commitments and one’s behaviors. In this, Jesus is the paragon of integrity: everything he does is in alignment with the character of the coming Reign and God’s will. His actions are always a manifestation of his inner character as God’s son and messianic agent within God’s emerging Reign. Those who, like Jesus, manifest a character that is aligned with the realities of the coming age are called righteous and, at the judgment, are allowed to experience God’s Reign. Their attitudes and behaviors have shown that their inner character is in alignment with the character of the Reign of God. By contrast, the scribes and Pharisees are continually upbraided for their hypocrisy and warned that this will cause them to be barred from the Reign. Thus, the spirituality of Jesus in Matthew can be summed up as “spiritual integrity” (which is “righteousness”) shaped by the character of the imminent Reign of God. Jesus exemplifies this and calls his followers to demonstrate their character with integrity as well.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"24 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141813436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080884
Charles Joshua Horn
{"title":"Divine Obligations as Theodicy in Leibniz’s Jurisprudence and Metaphysical Theology","authors":"Charles Joshua Horn","doi":"10.3390/rel15080884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080884","url":null,"abstract":"Leibniz’s jurisprudence and theory of natural law, which began development as early as the 1660s, has implications for his mature theodicy. In this essay, it is shown that based on an analysis of a few key jurisprudential texts, the Nova Methodus (1666), the Elementa Juris Naturalis (1670–1671), and the Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus (1693), Leibniz developed the legal term ‘obligatio’ from Roman Law and the Spanish Jesuit traditions, but that his usage shifted at different stages of his life. Nevertheless, these views are compatible and provide a grounding for his philosophical optimism. It is further shown that Leibniz took the concept of obligatio to provide something like legal standing (locus standi or klagebefugnis) so that rational minds can undergo the theodicean project, that is, because God has obligations to substances, they can seek an explanation for their suffering from God. And because human reason is analogous to divine reason, according to Leibniz, God provides the explanation that the actual world is the best possible world. The goal, then, is to prove that we should take Leibniz’s insights into jurisprudence more seriously, at least in part, because they help to explain his philosophical optimism.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"128 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141811577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080882
Dov Schwartz
{"title":"R. Shmuel Mohiliver and R. Yitzhak Yaakov Reines: Two Types of Religious Zionism","authors":"Dov Schwartz","doi":"10.3390/rel15080882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080882","url":null,"abstract":"A typology presents ideal concrete types, and probing their personality and character enables the creation of general patterns. The study of the personality thus grants access to the depth of an idea not only in abstract terms but also in its function as a guide to, and a source of, an ethos. Furthermore, the personality construct plays a significant role in the understanding of historical processes because many events are ascribed or tied to the centrality of a specific individual. The study of typology is especially linked to Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), who claimed that ideal types convey conscious structures. In his view, we can impart significance to actions and behaviors only in relation to the agent’s set of values. In his writings, Spranger presented six ideal types. What is the meaning of a typology when discussing a movement such as religious Zionism? In this article, I attempt to trace an ideological portrait of two types that, in my estimate, created through their personality and their endeavor the ideological pattern that has accompanied religious Zionism and the religious-Zionist idea throughout this movement’s existence. I set up these two thinkers and entrepreneurs as pure types, even though no such types exist in reality. I present the pure types as founded on dominant features although, again, well aware that there are no pure features in the concrete world. Besides describing the characteristic features of the two types, I will argue that the interaction between the patterns they established facilitates understanding of several historical events. These patterns at times continue one another but, mainly, they confront one another. To illustrate their course, I will relate to two historical episodes where these personality patterns come forth, one that took place a few years after R. Reines’ death and the other about fifty years later or more, whose implications are felt up to this day.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"61 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141813198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080885
Ryan Lemasters
{"title":"Religious Transhumanism as a New Religious Movement: Sketching a Model of the Development of Religious Transhumanism","authors":"Ryan Lemasters","doi":"10.3390/rel15080885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080885","url":null,"abstract":"This essay proposes a new model for understanding religious transhumanism by extending existing frameworks that have been useful for predicting the success of new religious movements (NRMs). This paper focuses on the Mormon Transhumanist Association as a case of religious transhumanism that is incongruent with existing models of NRMs, thereby highlighting the limitations of these models. First, I demonstrate how the Morman Transhumanist Association challenges religious scholars’ conventional concepts for understanding NRMs, particularly within anthropology, cosmology, and eschatology. Then, I present a model that effectively accounts for the unique characteristics of religious transhumanist groups, thereby demonstrating and addressing the field’s current lack of an explanatory framework.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"32 15","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141814007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080886
Kaiyue Zhang
{"title":"The Travelogues of Buddhist Monks and the Knowledge of the Western Regions during the Fourth to the Sixth Centuries","authors":"Kaiyue Zhang","doi":"10.3390/rel15080886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080886","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of monks traveling westward in search of Buddhist scriptures, their travelogues emerged during the fourth to the sixth centuries as a new channel for producing knowledge about the Western Regions, distinct from official sources. The fundamental reason monks wrote these travelogues was to enhance the sanctity of their journeys and the scriptures. Additionally, they fulfilled the demands among Buddhists for information about Buddhism in Central Asia and India. The knowledge about the Western Regions in these travelogues was referenced in works by Chinese scholars, such as the Weishu, Beishi, Shuijing zhu, and Luoyang qielan ji, thereby expanding the audience for such knowledge. Even after the original texts were lost, their content continued to be transmitted through these citations. However, while Chinese scholars often criticized these travelogues for some absurd accounts and made adaptations or deletions, they were nonetheless compelled to utilize the unique knowledge these travelogues offered about the Western Regions.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"74 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141810534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.3390/rel15080881
David W. Kim
{"title":"The First Apocalypse of James in a Socio-Linguistic Perspective: Three Greek and Coptic Versions from Ancient Monastic Egypt","authors":"David W. Kim","doi":"10.3390/rel15080881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080881","url":null,"abstract":"The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) in 1945 rates as one of the two most profound occurrences for Biblical archaeology and interpretation during the last hundred years, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls (1946–1956). The codices allow us to document Christian monastic culture, gnostic Christianity and gnostic offshoots in the desert climate of Late Ancient Egypt. The recovery of the related Codex Tchacos (CT) brought further excitement for contemporary readers by 2006, it being sensational that narratives of “Judas the betrayer” and “doubting Thomas” were found in the whole collection of writings. The text named the [First] Apocalypse of James, significantly, was found to be in both NHC and CT in different Coptic versions (from near the sacred sites of Chenoboskion and El Minya), but yet another more fragmentary version in Greek had turned up much earlier among the huge cache of papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (also, like the other places, on the banks of the Nile). Given the opportunity for comparison, what distinguishes the three versions? Does comparative analysis better tell us what this ancient text is about? Does the strong presence of Gnostic Christian insights in the Coptic texts still imply a historical Jamesian community is being honoured? This paper concentrates on three comparable passages in the three versions that apparently contain historical memories of James and his followers. It works on the reasonable hypothesis that the Greek version of Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 5533) (hereafter = PO) is prior and read with different purposes than the two Coptic translated versions of CT (CT 2.10–30) and NHC (NHC V,3. 24–44). When a critical approach, involving a socio-linguistic comparison, is applied, we will see that the three versions of the text were not directly related to each other, but that narratives about James the Just were available to desert monastics from the second century CE. The paper argues for a literal transmission of traditions from a Jewish Christian community around James into Egypt, that the textual figure of James in the Oxyrhynchus fragments points to a ‘mutual familiarity’ between PO and CT, while the NHC tradition of James has been further elaborated by processes of compilation and addition.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"5 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141810634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-22DOI: 10.3390/rel15070875
Mirosław Brzeziński
{"title":"Old Age in the Perspective of Faith: Elderly People in the Life of the Church","authors":"Mirosław Brzeziński","doi":"10.3390/rel15070875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15070875","url":null,"abstract":"Elderly people make up an increasingly large part of society and the Church. The theme of old age is also increasingly present in papal teaching. This is evidenced, for example, by the series of Wednesday Catecheses on old age delivered by Pope Francis in 2022, or by the establishment of the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly. Given the importance of the presence of the elderly, this article aims to present old age in the perspective of faith, and the importance of the presence of the elderly in the life of the Church. The author will therefore focus, first and foremost, on the view of old age as a time of thanksgiving and gratitude to God for the gift of life, for the goods received, the experiences lived, and the people encountered. Viewed from the perspective of faith, old age is also a time of preparation for death and for meeting the Risen Christ. It is therefore a time to adopt a new outlook on faith and the call to holiness. Old age is, at the same time, a period of life in which individuals can still contribute a lot to the life of the family, society, and the Church through their commitment, service, bearing witness to the faith, bearing witness to the Gospel and the values that flow from living the Gospel, through works of charity and, above all, through sharing the awareness that life is a beautiful gift from God that is worth using well and wisely. And, through the wisdom gained over the many years of their lives, elderly people become authentic witnesses of God’s love. The experience of long life and gratitude for this gift is not only relevant to Catholics and Christians, but has a universal appeal, since in any society, regardless of faith, human life should also be valued in old age.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"83 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141817205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ReligionsPub Date : 2024-07-22DOI: 10.3390/rel15070880
Andy Goodliff
{"title":"Lois Chapple (1897–1989): A Life in Service of Christ","authors":"Andy Goodliff","doi":"10.3390/rel15070880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15070880","url":null,"abstract":"This article gives a narrative account of the life of Lois Chapple, a Baptist woman, who served as a deaconess, a missionary in China, and as an evangelist and a secretary for the Baptist Women’s League and the Baptist World Alliance. This article offers Chapple as an excellent example of how women within Baptist life found opportunities to serve in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":505829,"journal":{"name":"Religions","volume":"14 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141815666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}