{"title":"Globalization and Asian Religions in the Scuola di Meditazione","authors":"Ugo Dessì","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10063","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores the Scuola di Meditazione (School of Meditation) established in Sardinia in 1983, one of the earliest instances in Italy of the use of ‘Eastern’ techniques by Roman Catholic religious professionals to promote the practice of meditation for lay people. Against the backdrop of ongoing religious diversification in the Italian context, this case study provides an insight on religion under globalization as a complex and multilayered phenomenon. In particular, the formation and activities of the Scuola di Meditazione show to be ingrained in the working of the global cultural network, with both direct and indirect cultural imports from Asia through mediatization, missionization, and mobility; to build upon the broader global repositioning of the Roman Catholic Church towards Asian and other ‘world’ religions through the adoption of a soft inclusivist approach; and to provide a meaningful framework for glocal practices resulting in the globally-oriented reshaping of individual religious worlds.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"06 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86304845","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}
{"title":"Ways of Self-Transcendence: On Sacrifice for Nothing and Hyperbolic Ontology","authors":"S. Lehmann","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10047","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article will take Jan Patočka’s concepts of care for the soul and sacrifice for nothing as a starting point to discuss the ontological premises of a renewed epimeleia heautou, or care of the self. I will argue that Patočka understands the ancient Good in terms of Heidegger’s ontological difference. Care for the soul thus ends up with an empty transcendence. In contrast, I will advocate a hyperbolic concept of Being. All that exists is characterized by being beyond beingness, an inner transcendence of itself. This provides new ontocosmological as well as political perspectives.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88247376","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}
{"title":"Profiting from Crisis? Catholic Traditionalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Thomas Schmidinger","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000During the COVID-19 pandemic, traditionalist Catholic communities have been able to draw worshippers from mainstream parishes that restricted services, thereby profiting from the crisis. In addition, they have used pandemic conditions to advance an ultra-conservative strain of Christian theology that foregrounds the role of believers in the Ecclesia militans or “militant Church” by rejecting (in part) state-imposed measures against the pandemic and propagating a critique of vaccination in line with decades of mobilization against abortion and secularism.\u0000The paper focuses on the largest of these communities, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Focusing mainly on Austria, it details how these communities have sought to leverage the crisis to court worshipers from mainstream parishes and advance their long-term strategic ambitions to destabilize the post-Second Vatican Council status quo within the Roman Catholic Church.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83434395","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}
{"title":"Other Abrahams: Sacrificing Faith","authors":"Annie Sjöberg","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10049","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article analyses the complex intermingling of positivity and negativity in the circular definition of faith, as well as the different sacrifices deemed necessary to keep the “circle” intact. The analysis departs from the first paragraph of Saint Augustine’s The Confessions, Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and two short excerpts by Franz Kafka: a reflection on “other Abrahams” in a letter to Robert Klopstock in 1921, and a fragment named “Die Prüfung”. Kafka being one of the most original interpreters of modernity’s drastic implications for religion, the aim of the article is to display and reflect upon both a continuity and discontinuity from Augustine and Kierkegaard. In Kafka, the structurally dynamic tension inherent in humanity’s relation to the divine has been stretched all the way to its breaking point, leaving us with a religious structure but without access to a living core, a faith without a possible life form.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82135619","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}
{"title":"Kierkegaard’s Existential Sacrifice","authors":"Petr Vaškovic","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10053","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper aims to analyze the notions of sacrifice and existential entrapment in the early writings of Søren Kierkegaard. I look at two female characters that appear in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or – Marie Beaumarchais and Donna Elvira – and I argue that an encounter with a deceptive individual (a seducer) forced these two women to sacrifice their capacity for existential-spiritual growth. Donna Elvira and Marie Beaumarchais remain trapped – as Kierkegaard frames it – within the aesthetic existential sphere. The goal of my paper is twofold: first, I describe in detail the nature of their sacrifice and the reasons for their existential entrapment, and, secondly, I determine whether Kierkegaard believes this to be an existential affliction that affects exclusively women, i.e., whether it is gendered or not.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87501676","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}
{"title":"The Exposure of Violence: A Performative Reading of Sacrifice in Genesis 22 with Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben","authors":"C. Breu","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The sacrificial story in Genesis 22:1–19, the Aqeda or “Binding of Isaac,” has generated a large body of research literature. This is due to its irresolvable ambiguity: God commands the sacrifice of Isaac and stops it. The reader is not informed about reasons or intentions of the characters involved. After analyzing some possible approaches to the text’s ambiguity, I offer a new performative reading of the passage with Giorgio Agamben’s and Judith Butler’s theories of gesture. I argue that this approach effectively deals with ambiguity, because it neither erases violence nor justifies it. It rather exposes violence by interrupting and redirecting it. Abraham’s raised hand with the knife thus becomes an interrupted gesture. It makes the text a monument to violence that teaches to see the same situation in a different light and to interrupt the continuous repetition of violent behaviour.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82646677","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}
{"title":"“All the Rest Is Commentary …”: Being for the Other as the Way to Break the Sacrificial Logic","authors":"Kateřina Kočí","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Feminist criticism recognises two rival sacrifices in the Western philosophical- theological tradition: the motherly sacrifice of childbirth and the near-sacrifice of Isaac (the so-called Akedah; Gen 22). In this paper, I investigate both sacrifices as a self-emptying and transformative process that aims to offer oneself in the place of the other. The argument proceeds in three steps: first, I present the self-sacrifice of childbirth as the moment of identity split and the “being for the other”; second, I interpret Gen 22 as a self-sacrifice (“Here I am”; Gen 22:1c) which calls to responsibility as a possible route to non-sacrificial relations; finally, I question the essentialism that accompanies the Akedah and childbirth in order to liberate both from gender stereotypes and to present them as two different forms of self-sacrifice which seek to break the sacrificial logic of our Western society.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86295634","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}
{"title":"Inductive-theological Notes on Religious Pluralism in a Passage of the Abu Dhabi Declaration","authors":"F. Mandreoli","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The theological question of the recognition of the legitimacy of ‘other’ religious traditions is today a relevant issue not only for the religious sciences, but also for politics and those dealing with social issues. This contribution deals with this issue starting from some considerations of the Abu Dhabi Declaration, signed by Pope Francis and Imam Ahmad al-Tayeb, in which there is a bold statement on the theological goodness of religious pluralism. This statement is re-read in a sapiential key and with an inductive and experiential theological perspective.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74630782","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}
{"title":"Introduction: Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice: A Religious Concept under Transformation","authors":"Kateřina Kočí","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10062","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Sacrifice, originally a religious-cultic concept, has become highly secularized and used in various instances for different social phenomena. The current issue puts forward a selection of papers that offer insights into sacrifice and self-sacrifice and focus on the process of transformation of the sacrificial individual. Three main axes put the concrete papers into a dialogue with one another: first, there is the philosophical-theological and gender reflection of the experience of the paradigmatic sacrificial story of the western tradition, i.e., the Akedah (Gen 22); second, the existential-phenomenological interpretation of self-sacrifice in the secular world which nevertheless aims to reveal a higher good – Freedom, Love, or the Good; third, the gender and feminist reflection of the motherly sacrifice of childbirth both in the religious-cultic context and in the secular context which presents childbirth both as a moment of autonomy loss and submission and a moment of women self-emancipation.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81705097","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}
{"title":"Sacrifice and Obedience. Simone Weil on the Binding of Isaac","authors":"Esther Heinrich-Ramharter, Richard Heinrich","doi":"10.30965/23642807-bja10059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/23642807-bja10059","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Sacrifice and obedience are two concepts that are central to the thinking of the French philosopher Simone Weil. She does not always relate these concepts, and even in her references to the Akedah – the “binding of Isaac”, the story in Genesis 22 – where one would expect both concepts to occur, she only makes the connection between them in a split way: She focuses on the sacrificial aspect in one entry in her Cahiers, and on obedience in another.\u0000In Gen. 22 God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Weil refers to this narrative only very rarely; those two of these mentions that will be addressed in this paper seem very different at first glance – not least because one is about sacrifice, the other about obedience – but it will eventually become apparent that, from Simone Weil’s point of view, they belong together in a systematic way.","PeriodicalId":53191,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90244302","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}