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The article acknowledges the limits of the categories of similarity and difference in undergraduate comparative religion courses. To challenge these limitations, including the potential for dualistic or "us/them" thinking, several pedagogical attempts to increase relationality in Christian–Muslim courses are explored. Relational methods include emphasizing living and public interreligious conversations during class segments on scriptural figures as well as humanizing perpetrators of religiously motivated violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baha'i faith is a relatively new religion that has quickly gained popularity over the past century. Its main theological concepts include progressive revelation and religious unity, and perhaps its most important goal is unity among all humans, which takes the form of a single religion and eventually leads to a single peaceful society. Such a destination would first require interreligious dialogue and the acceptance of truth in many world religions at present, according to Baha'i teachings. Ideas of religious diversity have already spread among some Theocentric theologians, which leads us to question if such views are compatible with Baha'i doctrine on religious unity. This study investigates how the Baha'i faith promotes concepts of religious diversity in order to achieve its eventual goal of religious and societal unity, and whether Baha'i teachings are truly compatible with pluralism. The conclusions of this study reveal that while Baha'is promote the concept of religious diversity today, their eventual goal is not compatible with pluralism. Because pluralism implies the existence of multiple religions that share truth, its outcome is different from a single, worldwide religion. Theocentric ideas encourage diversity, but do not specify a formal outcome, which means that interreligious dialogue and acceptance of truth in many faiths could lead to pluralism or unity. Therefore, Theocentric theology does not necessarily disagree with Baha'i goals or the concept of pluralism due to a lack of specificity. This study is significant as our societies become more globalized, such that the coexistence of religions is becoming more critical. The Baha'i faith's strong focus on religious unity sets it apart from religions that are traditionally exclusive. An analysis of such a religion that emphasizes interreligious dialogue and encourages cultural fusion is therefore essential for our understanding of interactions between religions in a multicultural society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Renaissance and Reformation eras, the discipline of religious studies saw a notable paradigm change. This movement entailed a departure from the previous emphasis on Christian apologetics and polemics towards a more rigorous and analytical evaluation of established religious ideas. Friedrich Max Müller and Cornelis Petrus Tiele were instrumental in facilitating this paradigm shift by their rigorous scientific investigations into the field of religion. This article provides an overview of the scholarly contributions made by the authors in the field of religious studies. It explores their viewpoints on key concepts such as neutrality, objectivity, error study, and comparative religion. Notwithstanding the presence of detractors, their scholarly endeavors established the foundational framework for conducting a thorough examination of religious phenomena on an international level, hence facilitating the development of comparative religious studies. In the present day, the academic investigation of religion persists as a means for researchers to engage in a systematic and analytical examination, hence there is need to incorporate environmental and ecological aspects and poststructuralist deconstruction, thereby enhancing comprehension of the societal significance of religion. The founding studies of Müller and Tiele continue to hold significance and are indispensable in present-day study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With regard to the assertion of the nature of the world, primitive Buddhism advocates "all phenomena that arise from causes" and opposes the existence of "God" or "Creator", who created everything in the universe, which is significantly different from monotheistic beliefs such as Brahmanism, Christianity, and Islam and is therefore often called "atheism". This paper introduces the Buddhist cosmology of Mount Sumeru and the tri-sahasra mahā-sahasra lokadhātu under the perspective of comparative religions and the first human beings who came to this world from the ābhāsvara-deva as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures and explores the question of whether Buddhism is atheistic. It is believed that the key to the debate between Chinese and Western scholars on whether Buddhism is atheistic is the difference in understanding the concept of "God". Buddhism does not deny the supernatural power of "ghosts and gods", so its essence is still theism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Qur'an never explicitly mentions the name yhwh, this study demonstrates that it reveals cognizance not only of the divine name but also of the elaboration of its meaning by paralleling interpretations found in some of the earliest rabbinic traditions, evidently building on traditions that were circulating amongst Jewish communities of Late Antiquity. I propose that the absence of an explicit mention of yhwh in the Qur'an points to the Qur'an's oral rather than literary genesis. This study analyses Pharaoh's inquiries about who and what the Lord is (in Q 20.49–55; 26.23–28). The Qur'an responds to these questions, whereas in the Exodus account, Pharaoh's questioning about yhwh remains unanswered. The Qur'an appears to interpret the meaning of yhwh as God's continuous generative action, the originating cause of every thing, and God's existence, transcendence and omnipresence, echoing some explanations of the divine name in the earliest rabbinic traditions. Thus, the Qur'an engages with some of its audience by referencing Jewish understandings of the divine name. By reframing and reinterpreting some biblical stories, the Qur'an provides exegetical contributions to these narratives, highlighting its unique and critical role in the broader religious discourse during Late Antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arvind Sharma has made immensely significant contributions in the fields of both comparative religion and the study of Hinduism through his methodology of "reciprocal illumination" and his prominent role in international conversations on women and religion, religion and human rights, freedom of religion, and religious tolerance and conflict. Aware of the power of religion and its negative valuation, especially post-September 11, he displays a deep commitment to fostering interreligious understanding, arguing for religion as an essential and positive partner in envisioning and actualizing human flourishing, upholding human dignity, and engaging in global ethical cooperation, and equally he demonstrates Hinduism's potential contribution both to these endeavors and to moving the field of comparative studies beyond its Western, Christian, and colonialist origins and assumptions. This essay details these contributions and Sharma's place as an interpreter of Hinduism for those inside and outside the tradition in our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special section Comparative X: Religious and Gendered Transitions, linking the experiences of religious exes and transgender people through their mutual and different uses of "X" to mark liminal identity and status. Reframing religious disaffiliation through the lens of transition, the article presses on the overlap and intersection of religious and gendered movements to connect these different but related crossings as Xes. Through this crossed and comparative framework, it offers a way of looking at the norming systems of religion and gender together through the movements of those who cross them. Expanding comparative studies in religion through the interfaithless, it introduces comparative ex-religious studies as a new subfield. Drawing on the literature of religious disaffiliation and queer and transgender studies in religion, the article considers how changing the orientation through which we approach religion from its Xes might lead to a better understanding of how the normative structures of "religion" and "gender" shape one another transitively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1928, Karl Ludvig Reichelt (1877-1952) went to Taiwan to pay a special visit to the Venerable Luo Miaochi (1904-1930), the then Vice-abbot of Bangka Lungshan Temple, in Taipei. The two then established a memorable friendship and initiated a meaningful discussion on the possibility of a “New Religion.” The 2nd volume of Reichelt’s seminal writings, Fromhetstyper og Helligdommer i Øst-Asia I-III, is an invaluable account of their interactions and discussions on religious topics. Although Luo Miaochi stands as an indispensable figure in the history of Buddhism in Taiwan, research on him remains scarce and limited. This study aims to fill in this gap through a detailed descriptive analysis of the relationship and the communication between Reichelt and Luo, contributing to a better understanding of Miaochi, and of this significant inter-religious dialogue in the historical junction of world religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the trajectory of the sociology of religion from the post-war period to the present, focusing particularly on the evolution of the secularization thesis. It highlights key figures and their contributions, such as Bryan Wilson and David Martin, and explores their perspectives on secular society and religious vitality. It delves into the impact of political revolutions, such as the American and French Revolutions, on religious institutions and societal structures.

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines," this essay explores the side of Bynum's scholarly personality that may be regarded as comparativist. She is interested in comparison with regard to periods of time, with regard to ritual and gender‐based religious practices in the Christian West, and with respect to similarities that might be claimed between elements of Christian and non‐Christian cultures. Her thoughts about morphology, materiality, and gender extend beyond medieval Europe to the world at large. Her coedited volume Gender and Religion (1986), the first of its kind, has figured importantly in the development of the field many call comparative religion. Here Bynum's impact on selected scholars of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religion — as well as of non‐Western Christianity — is assessed. This essay concludes with the text of a response delivered by the author, who is a scholar of Hinduism, to Bynum's Lionel Trilling Lecture at Columbia University, "Am I My Body? Medieval Theories of Bodily Resurrection and Some Modern Implications" (1991). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a contribution to a panel discussion on Dana Logan's Awkward Rituals , this essay addresses the first chapter of the book, in which Logan discusses the rites of Freemasons in the early American republic. It considers the particular significance of Masonic ritual practice with respect to Logan's arguments about patterns of change in pre- and post-Revolutionary America; and reflects on the general theoretical import of this notion of ritual awkwardness, embodied by the Freemasons, considered as a form of purposive activity. It raises questions about the broader applicability in comparative religious studies of Logan's insights, both for studying history and for thinking about ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver featured a book panel on Dana W. Logan's Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (University of Chicago Press, 2022). This essay introduces a forum based on the panel, featuring four scholars representing diverse subfields in religious studies: Ian MacCormack, Charles McCrary, Constance Furey, and Marko Geslani. It argues that Awkward Rituals , though embedded in ritual studies and the historiography of American religion, is a generative theoretical text for many areas of inquiry in the wider study of religion: the disjunctures and incoherences in religions; the practical applications of a mind/body dualism; the uses of the personal experiences of the scholar; and the endurance of comparison as a method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has recently stated that we live in a "poly‐crisis" world. This context raises questions about finding common ground with people of other faiths or no faith for the common good. How do Christians practise ecumenical diakonia in the public sphere and offer transformative diaconal services in their contexts? To explore these questions, I reflect on the essence of faith in Korean Sŏn Buddhist monk Chinul (知訥, 1158–1210) and that of the contemporary Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall to identify implications for the practice of ecumenical diakonia and its commitment to interreligious dialogue. Chinul and Hall agree that faith encourages reaching out to others. Buddhists and Christians can be companions on the journey of working together across differences for the common good of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief background of how Comparative Theology is understood today, to point out features of how it is practiced that are responsive to issues peculiar to contemporary Catholicism, and to suggest how a version of CT might be developed that is more consistent with Islamic traditions of thought on related issues. In order to accomplish this last goal, a brief introduction to the traditional “Islamic sciences” is provided. It will be suggested that an Islamic Comparative Theology (ICT) can be understood as a multidisciplinary field that draws on several Islamic sciences, as well as research in religious studies. I argue in favor of a blurring of the distinction between Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology, and point out that relevant discussions are to be found across a variety of traditional Islamic sciences, but that it would be advantageous to collect these discussions together and to augment them with information gleaned from both secular and Islamic approaches to the teachings of Muslim thinkers about theological issues, broadly understood, in comparison with what is found in non-Islamic traditions in such a manner to enrich our own understandings of the issues and those with whom we engage in dialogue.

With regard to the assertion of the nature of the world, primitive Buddhism advocates “all phenomena that arise from causes” and opposes the existence of “God” or “Creator”, who created everything in the universe, which is significantly different from monotheistic beliefs such as Brahmanism, Christianity, and Islam and is therefore often called “atheism”. This paper introduces the Buddhist cosmology of Mount Sumeru and the tri-sahasra mahā-sahasra lokadhātu under the perspective of comparative religions and the first human beings who came to this world from the ābhāsvara-deva as recorded in the Buddhist scriptures and explores the question of whether Buddhism is atheistic. It is believed that the key to the debate between Chinese and Western scholars on whether Buddhism is atheistic is the difference in understanding the concept of “God”. Buddhism does not deny the supernatural power of “ghosts and gods”, so its essence is still theism.

The concept of eschatology remained a captivating theological subject that theologians dedicated substantial time and resources to comprehend. Contrary to popular belief, some Christians may not prioritise theological discussions about eschatological details. Eschatological discourse – the fate of the universe, including humans and the physical world – may also be prioritised. Death, the second coming of Christ, judgement, rewards, heaven and hell are some of the eschatological themes that fascinate and disturb people because of limited understanding about the afterlife. African tradition religion (ATR) has been criticised for omitting eschatology in its belief system which this study debunks. This study showed that Christianity and ATR have the concept of eschatology and identified the main points of convergence and divergence in their eschatologies to demonstrate that ATR’s eschatology is well-established but different from Christianity’s. This paper adopts theoretical research, often referred to as conceptual research, since it is aimed at advancing knowledge. Christianity and ATR agree that physical death ends life in the body, and death symbolises the afterlife. Earthlings have limited time to fulfil their duties. Both sides agree that the soul and spirit survive death and resurrection. Christianity and ATR share many beliefs and traditions across sects, ethnicities and regions. These factors influence the eschatology of each tradition. Both faiths agree that present decisions impact fate and eternity. They also agree that God opposes immorality, but the virtuous will inhabit a place of joy. Positive and negative conduct are punished differentially. Intradisciplinary and/interdisciplinary implications: This work discusses end-of-life issues that strongly relate to systematic theology and African traditional religion, emphasising that while their eschatologies differ, they share a belief in life after death. African traditional religion should not be mocked as a religion without eschatology.

Music has played a central role in Indian religious experience for millennia. The origins of Indian music include the recitation of the sacred syllable OM and Sanskrit Mantras in ancient Vedic fire sacrifices. The notion of Sound Absolute, first in the Upanishads as Śabda-Brahman and later as Nāda-Brahman, formed the theological background for music, Sangīta, designed as a vehicle of liberation founded upon the worship of Hindu deities expressed in rāgas, or specific melodic formulas. Nearly all genres of music in India, classical or devotional, share this theoretical and practical understanding, extending to other Indic religions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. What is less documented is how rāga music has been adopted by non-Indic communities in South Asia: Judaism (Bene Israel), Christianity (Catholic), and Islam (Chishti Sufi). After briefly outlining the relation between religion and the arts, the Indian aesthetics of Rasa, and the basic notions of sacred sound and music in Hinduism, this essay reveals the presence of rāga music, specifically the structure or melodic pattern of the morning rāga known as Bhairava, in compositions praising the divinity of each non-Indic tradition: Adonai, Jesus, and Allah. As similar tone patterns appear in the religious experiences of these communities, they reveal the phenomenon of "shared religious soundscapes" relevant to the comparative study of religion and music, or Musicology of Religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces Religion & Development Vol. 2, Issue 3 – Special Issue on "Religion and Ecology: Perspectives on Environment and Sustainability across Religious Traditions." The articles delve into the intricate relationship between religion and ecology from diverse perspectives. The prevailing academic discourse on religion and ecology is centered on three fundamental aspects. Firstly, it underscores the potential of religious communities to actively combat climate change by shaping worldviews and guiding community and personal activities. Secondly, it scrutinizes the practical implementation of these contributions by religious communities, exploring both obstacles and facilitators for their environmental engagement. Lastly, it emphasizes how religious communities furnish theological and spiritual arguments in support of environmental protection, thereby motivating believers to take proactive measures. This special issue contributes to these ongoing discussions by presenting insights from all three perspectives, enhancing the discourse with distinctive viewpoints from Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, African Traditional Religions, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and interfaith perspectives. The incorporation of diverse religious traditions complements recent dialogues on development and sustainability, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of the intersection between religion and ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article provides a brief background of how Comparative Theology is understood today, to point out features of how it is practiced that are responsive to issues peculiar to contemporary Catholicism, and to suggest how a version of CT might be developed that is more consistent with Islamic traditions of thought on related issues. In order to accomplish this last goal, a brief introduction to the traditional "Islamic sciences" is provided. It will be suggested that an Islamic Comparative Theology (ICT) can be understood as a multidisciplinary field that draws on several Islamic sciences, as well as research in religious studies. I argue in favor of a blurring of the distinction between Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology, and point out that relevant discussions are to be found across a variety of traditional Islamic sciences, but that it would be advantageous to collect these discussions together and to augment them with information gleaned from both secular and Islamic approaches to the teachings of Muslim thinkers about theological issues, broadly understood, in comparison with what is found in non-Islamic traditions in such a manner to enrich our own understandings of the issues and those with whom we engage in dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that people who are religious may volunteer because religion is innately prosocial (i.e. inclination) or perhaps because religious communities provide volunteering chances (i.e. opportunities). Using data from Statistics Canada (General Social Survey, Cycle 33), we explored the relationship between different religious and nonreligious identities and volunteering behaviors, time commitments to volunteering, and organization types for which respondents volunteered. Results indicated a complex relationship between religious/nonreligious identity, religious attendance, and prayer. We found that (1) atheists were more likely to volunteer than religious individuals who were low on religious attendance; (2) atheists were less likely to volunteer than religious individuals who were high on religious attendance; (3) the difference in volunteering between atheists and religious individuals was driven by the latter's volunteering in a religious context, not in the broader community. The results suggest that atheists likely have fewer opportunities to volunteer but are similarly inclined to volunteer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which was originally a contribution to the 2022 Scott Holland Symposium in Durham, explores two passages to China in the context of R.H. Tawney's life and legacy. It contextualises Tawney's observations during these visits in relation to his increasing concern with macro-historical questions on the global scale throughout the 1920s. Tawney was especially sceptical of a single standard of progress, and of teleological history, but he did not reject the need for progress and became an advocate for social policy in a distant land. His encounters in China allowed him to develop comparative approaches to civilisational structures, even though he remained more attached to granular empiricism than his contemporaries such as Troeltsch and Toynbee. The interest Tawney took in China offers a basis to explore his legacy as a global historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Tertullian’s innovative syntagm “religious freedom” (libertas religionis) from several perspectives, presenting the historical and literary context that enabled the Carthaginian thinker to coin this idea. In the second part of the study, which is devoted to a critical reflection on the relationship between religious freedom and religious pluralism in Tertullian’s optic, it becomes clear that when the principle of religious freedom emerged at the end of the 2nd century in North Africa, at least in the case of the Carthaginian teacher, there was no talk of any religious indifferentism. Tertullian makes the greatest Pauline-like concession to other religions in merely recognising that other religions, even if unconsciously, already worship the one true God, the God of the Christians. For Tertullian believes that every human soul is already Christian by nature, but this belief cannot be equated with a principled acceptance of religious pluralism in the sense of indifferentism.

This article seeks to investigate the methodology of Ismā'īl Rājī al-Fārūqī, a contemporary Muslim scholar recognised as an authority on Islam and comparative religion, in the study of Christianity based on his masterpiece "Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of its Dominant Ideas." The goal of this article is to study al-Fārūqī's genuine and comprehensive work through which he presents a new approach toward the understanding of Christianity, highlighting its ethical aspect. Its signifi cance lies in defi ning the value of the methodology he used in the study of Christian dogma and ethics. This article uses historical, descriptive, and interpretative analytical methods throughout the entire work. This study discusses: (1) al-Fārūqī's short biography; (2) al-Fārūqī's work on Christianity; and (3) the interpretive analysis of al-Fārūqī's methodology in the light of selected texts from his work on "Christian Ethics." The outcomes of this research provide new insights into the existing body of knowledge concerning Muslims' experience in the study of other religions, which is very advantageous for contemporary scholars of comparative religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese director Ninagawa Yukio, who directed all four of the Roman plays between 2004 and 2014, noted the challenge he faced in making Shakespeare's Roman settings accessible for native audiences, his typical strategy being Japanisation. Ninagawa's Brechtian strategy works two ways in offering audiences a helpful perspective on cultural difference while harnessing Shakespeare's humanism to the anti-rational energies of his theatre that modernity had earlier suppressed. This article explores the mythopoeic aspect of Ninagawa's project first in the context of comparative religion and then with an analysis of his Antony and Cleopatra (2011), which was innovative in casting a Japanese-Korean actress from the western Kansai region as Cleopatra against an established Tokyo actor. The polytheism that native Shinto has in common with ancient Roman religion is a significant subtext. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of studies on the History of Religions conducted in Turkey has been increasing in recent years. Therefore, there is a need for studies that examine the progression of the History of Religions in Turkey numerically and thematically. Some studies on this subject have been conducted so far. This study aims to present numerical ratios, thematic data, and brief evaluations of postgraduate theses in the field of the History of Religions in Turkish universities. This study is limited to theses completed in 2021 due to the abundance and diversity of theses in the History of Religions from the past to the present. It was carried out using document analysis, one of the qualitative research methods used in the Social Sciences. The research data were obtained by scanning postgraduate theses on the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) National Thesis Center website. Fifty-seven theses met the relevant criteria, and the data set was created. The study presents these theses under thematic categories by listing their full details and Turkish-English short summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music has played a central role in Indian religious experience for millennia. The origins of Indian music include the recitation of the sacred syllable OM and Sanskrit Mantras in ancient Vedic fire sacrifices. The notion of Sound Absolute, first in the Upanishads as Śabda-Brahman and later as Nāda-Brahman, formed the theological background for music, Sangīta, designed as a vehicle of liberation founded upon the worship of Hindu deities expressed in rāgas, or specific melodic formulas. Nearly all genres of music in India, classical or devotional, share this theoretical and practical understanding, extending to other Indic religions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. What is less documented is how rāga music has been adopted by non-Indic communities in South Asia: Judaism (Bene Israel), Christianity (Catholic), and Islam (Chishti Sufi). After briefly outlining the relation between religion and the arts, the Indian aesthetics of Rasa, and the basic notions of sacred sound and music in Hinduism, this essay reveals the presence of rāga music, specifically the structure or melodic pattern of the morning rāga known as Bhairava, in compositions praising the divinity of each non-Indic tradition: Adonai, Jesus, and Allah. As similar tone patterns appear in the religious experiences of these communities, they reveal the phenomenon of “shared religious soundscapes” relevant to the comparative study of religion and music, or Musicology of Religion.

It is well known that translations of songs and poems not only break rhythm and rhyming patterns, but can also result in loss of semantic information. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Hindu philosophical text originally written in Sanskrit that features a conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna prior to the Mahabharata war. The Bhagavad Gita is also one of the key sacred texts in Hinduism and is known as the forefront of the Vedic corpus of Hinduism. In the last two centuries, there has been a lot of interest in Hindu philosophy from western scholars; hence, the Bhagavad Gita has been translated in a number of languages. However, there is not much work that validates the quality of the English translations. Recent progress of language models powered by deep learning has enabled not only translations but a better understanding of language and texts with semantic and sentiment analysis. Our work is motivated by the recent progress of language models powered by deep learning methods. In this paper, we present a framework that compares selected translations (from Sanskrit to English) of the Bhagavad Gita using semantic and sentiment analyses. We use hand-labelled sentiment dataset for tuning state-of-art deep learning-based language model known as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). We provide sentiment and semantic analysis for selected chapters and verses across translations. Our results show that although the style and vocabulary in the respective translations vary widely, the sentiment analysis and semantic similarity shows that the message conveyed are mostly similar.

In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname 'Mūbad', travelled widely across India to record encounters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān's universalist project reflects a widely held theory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse populations was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article provides a close reading of the Dabistān's shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expressions of 'Universal Peace' (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān's project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revelation as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the 'religio duplex phenomenon' in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period. The free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance— Those shackled by seeking liberation are not truly free. For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?— There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād). —'Mūbad' Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s ah/1650s ce) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the hypothesis that Reissner's fiber, an enigmatic, anomalous, thread-like structure that runs from the center of the brain to the end of the spinal cord, is the neural substrate of suprasensory perceptions of the divine. Justification for this hypothesis derives from a comparative study of descriptions of the "subtle body" from ancient esoteric traditions, testable speculations about altered states of consciousness correlated with the subtle dynamics of the fiber, and the fiber's evolutionary trajectory in humans from its perinatal involution to its potential regeneration. While adequate testing of the hypothesis will require new technologies, preliminary investigations are underway. The goal of this research is to promote research about Reissner's fiber with the hope that it could lead to the discovery of a universal religious experience underlying the transcendent unity of religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the legacy of Rudolf Otto, the most famous German phenomenologist of religion. First of all, it characterises his critics and shows that they all find the religious theory of R. Otto and his concept of mystical experience built around a religious experience that departs from rational schemes, which indicates its link to the psychological description of religious experiences by W. James. Further, referring to the works of R. Otto Kantisch-Fries’sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie: zur Einleitung in die Glaubenslehre für Studenten der Theologie (1909), Das Heilige (1917), and West-Östliche Mystik: Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung (1926), the article refutes claims of these critics. The article also examines Otto’s comparative analysis of the two mystics: the Indian philosopher Shankara and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Otto observes that the numinous aspect, imposed on the metaphysical systems of Shankara and Meister Eckhart, turns the metaphysical systems into mystical. The article examines the methodological question of R. Otto if it is possible to speak of mysticism as a whole and discusses his division into two types, i.e. the mysticism directed inward, and mysticism directed outward. Besides, the article raises the question of to what extent it is possible to consider Otto a follower of F. Schleiermacher. It is concluded that Otto’s system cannot be called irrationalism; on the contrary, he sharply opposes all forms of irrational knowledge that reduce all religious life to emotions and experiences.

In this article, I discuss the relevance of the study of mysticism for Christian analytic theologians and philosophers of religion. I begin with a brief consideration of some reasons Christian academics might be reluctant to enter this field, and indicate that, somewhat surprisingly, the study of mysticism is something but seldom addressed in Christian analytic circles. With this background in place, I proceed to the primary two sections of the article. Section I deals with demarcating mysticism: for the purposes of this article alone, an experience will count as mystical if and only if it is strongly unitive, transcends everyday consciousness, and (allegedly) conveys epistemic certainty as to the veracity of the insights acquired. These three criteria are discussed in some depth. Section II turns to the challenge mysticism in this sense might present to the Christian philosopher or theologian. I argue that the phenomenon of mysticism might be seen plausibly to imply one of two conclusions, both of which appear to be unpalatable for the Christian. First, it might suggest certain metaphysical views which prima facie call key tenets of orthodox Christianity into question. Secondly, mystical experience might be understood as the 'inner meaning' of Christianity which renders the better part of orthodox Christian belief equally problematic (as evidenced in three Christian mystics I discuss). I then conclude with a reflection on how the discussion might proceed, suggesting once more that Christian analytic theologians and philosophers of religion have scarcely begun to ask the relevant questions, let alone answer them in any persuasive manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, religious reviewers often compare the phenomenon of diversity with misalignment when placing the object being compared. The study is related to the doctrine and theology of religions. But there is a comparative method used to analyze religions proportionately. One of the characters is Wilfred Cantwell Smith. There are three things that concern the author: First, the existence of Smith as an expert in Islamic studies and the Science of Comparative Religion, Second, the concept of personification which consists of several levels and levels that become the peak, which has the value of togetherness, responsibility and parallel. Third, how to compare the doctrine or theology of several religions uses proportional methods of comparative religion. The object being compared is based on the beliefs of each adherent of that religion. The comparative method of Religion that Smith studies is a way of analyzing religions by comparing where the object being compared has a parallel or parallel relationship. This comparison method is a way of behaving by an analyst in gathering religious information.