This paper will respond to James Sterba’s paper “An Ethics without God That is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution”. In his paper, Sterba argues that God cannot be the source of morality. Sterba maintains this position because he believes that his problem of extreme suffering entails that God cannot exist. Furthermore, Sterba argues that divine command theory has a number of serious problems confronting it. Alternatively, Sterba maintains that one can account for objective morality without appealing to God’s nature and/or commands. In response, this paper grants that Sterba presents a logically consistent account of objective morality without appealing to God’s nature and/or commands. However, this paper also cites a couple of reasons why one might think that God is still the better explanation for objective morality. This paper furthermore argues that Sterba’s objections do not demonstrate that divine command theory is false. The main thrust of this paper, though, focuses on Sterba’s argument about horrendous suffering. This paper argues that Sterba’s argument on horrendous suffering (while challenging) does not prove that a morally perfect God could not exist.

In terms of his reception in East Asia and the legacy of his commentaries and compendia in translation, Vasubandhu 世親 (ca. 320–400 centuries CE) is among the most important figures in the textual history of Indian Buddhism. Although perhaps best known by modern scholars through his works concerning abstruse intellectual ideas presented from the Yogācāra or mind-only and Abhidharma perspectives, his legacy is arguably best represented as an authoritative voice concerning the Pure Land of Amitāyus buddha. Both Nāgārjuna 龍樹 (ca. 150–250 CE) and Vasubandhu are considered to be patriarchs (soshi 祖師) for Jōdo Shin 浄土真宗 Buddhists, following Shinran’s 親鸞 (1173–1263) teachings. In this paper I investigate the textual history of these two Indian masters who are considered to be patriarchs by Pure Land and Shin Buddhists in Japan. No one believes these individuals transmitted some sort of true mind or essential teaching from one to another as in the Chan or Zen 禪宗 tradition; they are recognized because of fundamental texts with key ideas that are ascribed to them. These key texts were never singled out in any Chinese or Indian set of special texts, nor were they highlighted in various catalogs to the Buddhist “canon.” This research demonstrates how the sacred teachings ascribed to Vasubandhu, and to a certain extent Nāgārjuna as well, by Pure Land and Shin Buddhists reveal how and why Pure Land practices were expected to be seen as mainstream Mahāyāna Buddhism and nothing at all like a reformation for a later age.

In an age in which the post-secular condition and digital capitalism are increasingly interwoven, the question of what role religion ought to play in the public sphere—and how it might regain critical and constructive force amid deepening crises of meaning—has become urgent. Contemporary digital capitalism, characterized by the pseudo-sacralization of algorithmic logic, generates a persistent absorptive power marked by ecstatic effects. This elevates technological rationality and market logic to a level of pseudo-sacral authority, exercising a form of symbolic and spiritual domination. Returning to Paul Tillich’s thought, this article reconstructs his vision of religious socialism not as a historical artifact, but as a critical public theology capable of resisting this form of demonic domination. Tillich’s central insight is that the crisis of capitalism is not merely economic but ontological: its culture of “autonomy” severs itself from its religious ground, allowing finite forms—now amplified by digital technology—to elevate themselves into ultimate meaning and thereby consolidate into self-absolutizing, demonic structures. Against this background, the article argues that Tillich’s religious socialism is not a proposal for institutional replacement, but a public theological practice rooted in “ultimate concern.” Its task is to expose the structures of usurpation operative within digital capitalism and to reconfigure the order of meaning through the symbolic vision of theonomy. Through this symbolic practice, religion is recovered as a deep dimension of culture capable of critically piercing the regimes of meaning-occlusion. Moreover, it is precisely the unfinished and open-ended characteristic of religious socialism that enables it to regain theoretical and symbolic vitality in the post-secular present.

Avery Dulles, in The Catholicity of the Church, conceptualizes catholicity in terms of its vertical dimension and its horizontal dimension, articulating the principles necessary to preserve catholicity in ecumenical contexts. His work redefines the relationship between catholicity and Catholicism. In Models of the Church, Dulles integrates these two aspects through a dual ecclesiological model: the Church as Sacrament and as Community of Disciples. His ecclesiology enables the Church to engage with the secular society through concrete discipleship and public witness. Dulles’s vision, when expanded through Moltmann’s insights, offers a compelling theological model for contemporary ecumenism. Transcending mere doctrinal convergence, this model fosters a united Christian witness against secular atheism. This integrated approach advances a renewed understanding of ecclesial identity, rooted in discipleship, sacramentality, and social responsibility.

The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨), a Qing dynasty spirit-writing (fuji扶乩) text, is widely known through the Wilhelm–Jung translation lineage, where jinhua 金華 is rendered as “Golden Flower” and read as mandala-like symbolism. Based on a close reading of the Daozang Jiyao 道藏輯要version, this article argues that in the Chinese text jinhua is not primarily a floral image but a technical and experiential term for luminosity in Daoist inner-alchemical cultivation. Hua 華 is resemanticized from botanical “flower/flourishing” into “radiance,” and the work explicitly defines the key term as “jinhua is light”. The text further organizes cultivation into a three-stage trajectory—“sudden emergence”, “circulation”, and “great condensation”, through which qi 氣 is refined into light and luminosity stabilizes as spirit (shen 神). Finally, the analysis situates this luminous grammar within the work’s explicit Three Teachings (sanjiao 三教) framing: Confucian “illuminating virtue” (mingde 明德) and Buddhist idioms of luminous mind-nature (xin-xing guangming 心性光明) and dharma-body language function as a shared vocabulary for describing non-grasping awareness and embodied realization. On this basis, jinhua is best understood not as a decorative metaphor or a purely psychological symbol but as a practice-oriented mechanism of ontological luminosity, clarifying both the inner-alchemical logic of The Secret and the stakes of its modern reception.

Clarke provides a critical analysis of Pentecostalism as a tool for attaining the theological and political objectives of Pan-Africanism. However, this seems to suggest that, at least, African Pentecostals and African Pentecostal researchers may not be aware of the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2013, or, at worst, they find no interest in engaging with Agenda 2063 if they are aware it exists. Using religion and politics—particularly Pentecostalism and politics—as a framework, this article notes that there are some points of convergence between their praxis and some of the seven aspirations of Agenda 2063. It addresses this phenomenon by using Mzondi’s Ubuntu Pentecostalism as a theological lens to reflect on how some of the actions and praxis of African Pentecostals relate to the African Union’s Agenda 2063. Ubuntu Pentecostalism holds to a holistic view of life and embraces William Seymour’s Pentecostalism, influenced by an African worldview, and either embraces or denounces ancestral veneration. The latter form of Ubuntu Pentecostalism is used in this article and placed alongside Pan-Africanism and African identity to provide a perspective on the third and fifth aspirations of the African Union’s Agenda 2063. The article further shows that (a) although African Pentecostals may not be aware of or do not bother to engage with the AU’s Agenda 2063, (b) their praxis and actions either support or contradict the third and fifth aspirations discussed in the article.

The Thin Red Line is a film by Terrence Malick that is usually read in a Heideggerian key, due precisely to the intellectual formation of the author, who was a professor of phenomenology and translator of Heidegger before becoming a filmmaker. However, read in the light of some of his later works, it can be seen as an oblique preamble for the manifest theism that The Tree of Life and A Hidden Life, two manifestly 21st-century religious films, unfold. In The Thin Red Line, Malick gives cinematographic form to some Heideggerian concepts in order to go beyond Heideggerian post-Christian philosophy and make the viewers adopt a mystical gaze that allows them to contemplate creation from a point of view that is neither utilitarian nor technical, but rather characterised by the perspective of Gelassenheit. A religious reading of this Heideggerian idea allows access to Heidegger’s source, which is Meister Eckhart, who is as present in Malick’s film(s) as Heideggerian philosophy itself.

This paper critically examines Lu Guolong’s interpretation of tianren heyi, arguing that his portrayal of it as an inherent virtue of Chinese culture—and his positioning of Daoism between Confucianism and Buddhism—remains conceptually inadequate. Through a textual analysis of oracle-bone inscriptions, the Shangshu, and the Guoyu, the study reconstructs the notions of shenmin bu za and the four historical “transgressions”, thereby demonstrating that tianren heyi is not a singular, unchanging tradition but a historically generated and internally diverse phenomenon. By distinguishing between the Confucian model of you ren zhi tian, the Daoist model of you tian zhi ren or you ziran zhi ren, and the Daoist practice of yi ren zhi tian, this paper highlights the Daoist distinctive emphasis on the embodied dimension—pursuing tianren heyi through corporeal cultivation and the twin disciplines of waidan and neidan. The modern trend of celebrating tianren heyi as an emblem of Chinese cultural excellence calls for cautious reinterpretation—one that carefully distinguishes its ontological meaning from its practical and historical articulations.

This article will bring together and explore the relations between four aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks on, and his relation to, religious language. The first is his sense of the special role that religious language can play in the lives of people. The focus is not on traditional issues in the philosophy of religion—not the Ontological Proof of the existence of God; not any of Aquinas’ Five Ways; not the argument from Design or the Cosmological Argument; and not any other philosophico-religious matter concerning arguments for the existence or non-existence of any deity. His interests lie elsewhere. Second, we see that what Wittgenstein is centrally concerned with is the life-structuring power that religious language can possess and exert; it concerns both the sense-making power of pattern-lives in religious narratives and the metaphorical content of religious ways of thinking and perceiving. The third aspect is the distinctive, and in its way transcendental, way of seeing the world and existence sub specie aeternitatis, that is, under the aspect of eternity. Or, I will suggest, under the aspect of timelessness, or of having the sense of being above and outside of time. Wittgenstein said that he was not a religious person, but that he could not help but to see every problem from a religious point of view. In this third theme of the article, I will attempt to explicate what that remark can mean—how it reveals what Wittgenstein elsewhere in his work calls “a way of seeing.” And then fourth, this article will connect these three aspects to the special, non-pragmatic (and often in the above sense, transcendental) way that we view works of art. In his Notebooks of 1914-16, Wittgenstein wrote, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” At the close, I suggest that the way we learn to see the world through and within religious language (again, apart from any theological claim concerning divine existence or not) is parallel to one important way of seeing art—where the parallel is one that casts light from each side to the other. Along with some other works, my most central example in art will be the paintings of Morandi: in conveying an unmistakable sense of timelessness, they both convey, and in viewing them invite us to enact, the special way of seeing objects sub specie aeternitatis.

This article aims to examine the transformations of the concept of pulchrum that took place in the thirteenth century between Thomism and early Franciscan thought. Specifically, it explores and compares the theme of “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent”, introduced by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, and the theme of “creatural” beauty, introduced by Francis of Assisi and then taken up above all by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, identifying these as pivotal moments of transition in the medieval discourse on the pulchrum.