Core Of Religion Research Articles

Religious Moderation

Indonesia has religious pluralism, therefore efforts are needed to maintain harmonious relations between religious communities. One way is through religious moderation. The principle of religious moderation is to be balanced on two things, namely understanding religious scriptures (holy books) which must be appropriate to the context, and upholding humanity as the core of religion itself. The aim of this research aims to describe and analyze the understanding and implementation of various moderation practices. Data sources were obtained from interviews and literature reviews regarding various moderations. The results show that although most GKE Kasongan members do not yet understand the term mixed moderation, in practice it has been realized. There is a need for socialization and awareness of religious moderation which can be started by every religious community in Indonesia.

Delimiting Religion

Delimiting Religion

African and african diasporic religions: reflections on the relevance and prospects of african indigenous religion

The importance of Religion in any human community cannot be over emphasized. Man’s need to reach out to the divine being higher and mightier than himself appears to be both basic and universal. Man felt this need when mystified by forces of nature, threatened by ferocious wild beasts and perplexed by death and hereafter. The affirmation of transcendental being is the core of religion. Hardly did any human civilization row in early times without giving due recognition to religion. This paper posits that before the advent of foreign religions there had been the indigenous religion upheld by African forebears and passed on to succeeding generations. The paper argues that African Traditional Religion is the religion which emerged from the sustaining faith held by the forebears of the present African generation and which is being practiced today in various forms and intensities by a good number of people irrespective of their colour, tribe or race, openly or surreptitiously. The studies reveals that African Traditional Religion is not a fossil religion (a thing of the past) but a religion that Africans today have made theirs by living it and practicing it. Although African Traditional Religion with minority of adherents all over the globe had spread to some areas on the planet earth especially where Africans are found and has influenced the lives of even non-Africans. African Traditional Religion is found in America especially, the Caribbean Islands, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Cuba and Brazil among others. The researcher employed historical method in carrying out the research.

Slavo-Iranica: Compound Words with Slav. *mysl- : Iran. *mana-, *mazda- (against Baltic Background)

    The investigation contains the results of a comparative-historical analysis of Iranian, Slavic and Baltic lexical and syntactic units with reflexes of Indo-European root *men- ‘thinkʼ, ‘thoughtʼ. The formation of compound-words and formulaic expressions (stable syntactic combinations, expressing ideological semantics) with the mentioned etymon shows structural-semantic parallelism in three linguistic cultures. This parallelism manifests itself in the complete genetical identity of the etymological composition (except for the formant) of the compared units and in the common organization standards of their cultural semantics, reflecting: 1) dualism at the core of religion and moral relations inside ancient societies (for Iranian and Slavic); 2) religiously unmarked cultural concepts (for Slavic and Baltic). Conclusions as regards the сauses of structural and etymological affinity or semantical and typlogical similarity of compared datas is made.

Norwegian Christian Leaders: The Term ‘Christian Values’ is Divisive and Useless

Church leaders and politicians in several countries make frequent references to Christian values as part of a rhetoric of dividing between wanted and unwanted view and practices. Hence, even more than a source for division between adherents of different faiths, religion divides adherents of the same faith when identifying the core of religion. The article presents findings from a survey and focus group interviews with five groups of Norwegian Christian leaders: church leaders, bishops and deans from the Church of Norway, as well as leaders in mission organization and diaconal foundations. The informants are generally very hospitable towards immigrants, not particularly skeptical of Islam, and highly skeptical of politicians applying the term ‘Christian values’ for protectionist purposes. While distancing themselves from the term ‘Christian values’, informants have a clear understanding of what these values encompass. These attitudes mirror the major attitudes among the so-called church-going Norwegians in the Pew report, “Being Christian in Western Europe”, having higher appreciation of both Islam and immigration than the other groups of informants. The article proceeds by explaining and contextualizing, including how the churches have promoted conviviality in diverse societies and whether the leaders are willing to act when Christianity is applied to legitimize nativism.

‘The grievances from toleration’: Scotland heading towards the Enlightenment

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse some pre-Humean arguments for and against tolerance by early eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers and theologians. I present these in dialogue with the Confession of Faith, which constituted the central doctrinal pillar of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Kirk viewed tolerance rather suspiciously as a danger for its unity, and if the Confession asserted liberty of conscience against the Catholics, it insisted nevertheless on rigid boundaries. This created tensions which the theologians John Simson and Archibald Campbell sought to exploit when they were attacked by Committees for Purity of Doctrine for suspicion of heresy. Simson’s and Campbell’s arguments for toleration revolved around issues of liberty of conscience, scripture interpretation and the necessity of open debate for the moral progress of mankind. George Turnbull and Francis Hutcheson, then, insisted on a moral core of religion and on limitations of the Church’s power. They showed more optimism than David Hume regarding our moral resources to overcome religion’s corruptive potential, under the condition that we are properly guided.

Din Kültürü ve Ahlak Bilgisi Öğretmenlerinin Savaş Ve Barışa İlişkin Tutumları

Ülkeler içi ve ülkeler arasında meydana gelen bitmeyen savaşlar, günümüzde barış kavramı ve barış eğitiminin gündeme gelmesi ve popülerlik kazanmasına sebep olmuştur. Barış ortamının sağlanması ve barış eğitimiyle ilgili somut adımların atılmasında toplumun her bireyinin olduğu gibi öğretmenlerin de büyük bir etkisi bulunmaktadır. Öğretmen, öğrencilerinde davranış değişikliği oluştururken kendisinin benimsemiş olduğu veya toplum tarafından benimsenen değer ve inançları edinmesine de yardımcı olmaktadır. Öğretmenlerin savaş ve barışla ilgili algı, düşünce ve tutumlarının, öğrencilerinin algı, düşünce ve tutumlarını etkileyebileceği düşünülmektedir. Bu nedenle savaş ve barışa ilişkin öğretmen tutumları ayrı bir önem kazanmaktadır. Değerler eğitimi bağlamında barış kavramının öğretiminin yapıldığı ve ilgili kavramla ilgili kazanımları içeren en önemli derslerden biridir ve çatışma kültürü yerine barış kültürünün yapılandırılmasında öncü role sahip olan derslerden biri olarak görülmektedir. Bu nedenlerden dolayı, araştırmanın amacı, Din Kültürü ve Ahlak Bilgisi (DKAB) dersi öğretmenlerinin savaş ve barışa ilişkin tutumlarını tespit etmektir. Tarama modeliyle yapılandırılan çalışmada, karma yöntem ve zenginleştirilmiş desen kullanılmıştır. Araştırmada nicel verilerin sağlanmasında 89 DKAB öğretmenine; Aktaş (2012) tarafından geliştirilen ‘Savaş ve Barış Tutum Ölçeği’ uygulanmış, nitel veriler ise 8 DKAB öğretmeniyle yapılan görüşmelerle toplanmıştır. Araştırma sonunda, öğretmenlerin uluslararası sorunların çözümünde en iyi yolun savaş olduğu, savaşlarda kazanılan başarıların bütün başarılardan üstün olduğu gibi önermelere katılmadıkları; aksine savaşı kazananın da kaybedenin de zarar gördüğü, savaşın suçsuz insanlara acı verdiği, barışın taraftarı olunması gerektiği, insanların dinlerinin çağrısına uymasının barışa katkı sağlayacağı görüşlerini benimsedikleri görülmektedir. Öğretmenler genellikle yalnızca savunma savaşlarının haklı olabileceğini ve desteklenmesi gerektiğini düşünmekte ve DKAB dersi ve öğretmenlerinin barışa katkı sağlanmasında önemli bir yerinin olduğunu düşünmektedirler.

Razón democrática y confesión religiosa

He core of religion remains an unsettling Ereignis, namely something never present that can nevertheless be glimpsed in an incessant hermeneusis, seeking a beginning that has always been postponed and anticipated at the same time: a peculiar beginning, that is simultaneously returned and yet to come, but never fully arrived or departed. Religion always moves between a deferred past and a deferred future, therefore it demands to be transmitted. Keywords: Religion, democracy, revelation, secularization, religatio, christianity.

Moving

Identifying hope and redemption with moving and vitality, the dystopian film Mad Max: Fury Road surprisingly inspires us to develop the implications of moving as the core of religion. For animate organisms life is synonymous with self-moving. Philosophy and biology connect moving with not only vitality, but also with experience, perception and conception. Hope and redemption are qualia of human living. Enduring academic standards tend to halt the moving richness of religions. Taking as radically as possible the primacy of self-moving, an alternative is presented that prefers kinesiology to autopsy. Seven propositions are developed, directed especially to the emerging generation of religion scholars.

The Early Modern Idea of Scientific Doctrine and Its Early Christian Origins

One of most surprising aspects of the shift from scholastic natural philosophy to the new mechanist natural philosophies in the early decades of the seventeenth century is the retention of a doctrinal conception of knowledge. There was an assumption not only among scholastics, but also among many of their seventeenth-century opponents, that philosophy—and especially natural philosophy—had to take a doctrinal form. This is despite the fact that many of the considerations that motivated this view among the scholastics were rejected or ignored by their modernist opponents. The central argument of this essay is that doctrine is not something at the core of religions in general, but rather something of specific concern to Christianity. In looking at how this specific concern informs the development of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, it emerges that it is not a one-way process: in entering into a symbiotic relation, Christianity and natural philosophy are both affected. Christianity becomes largely reduced to its cognitive content, becoming both more science-like and more focused on its doctrinal core, while at the same time the cognitive content of natural philosophy, already somewhat doctrinal in nature, now has this reinforced, as it becomes more like Christianity in its aspirations.

Inter-Religious Contexts and Comparative Theology in the Thought of Evelyn Underhill: Symbolic Narratives of Mysticism and the Songs of Kabīr

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) regards mysticism as the core of religion. All religions include various dimensions: scripture/ mythology, doctrine/ philosophy, ethics/ law, social/institutional features, ritual, material aspects, and personal and communal experience. For Underhill, personal religious experience inspires and influences the development of these other aspects of religion—the heart of which is mysticism. Underhill asserts: “The mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world” (4); “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality”.

ANTROPOLOGI ISLAM DI INDONESIA

This article studies the importance of religion understanding whichis reflected in their culture. The main position of people in Islam indicatesthat we have to understand Allah. Anthropologists learn the culture andsociety to understand the meaning and the core of religion and its role inman’s life. The cultural concept is basically a tool to see, to learn and tounderstand the religion which in its society.

Understanding the anatomy of religion as basis for religion in education

This article sprung from previous structural analyses of religion as onticity, but went somewhat further by placing more emphasis on encounters with the numinous as the core of religion, as well as on the dynamic character of religion. In doing so, this analysis methodologically transcended the limitations of a structuralist view of religion. The post-structuralist approach that was followed, assigns greater prominence to the interpretive and constructivist activities of the actors involved in religious experience. Application of this expanded view of religion to the South African Policy on Religion and Education (2003) demonstrated that the Policy caused a break between the various facets of religion education and resultantly disrupted the wholeness of religion education.

12 What Should an Archaeology of Religion Look Like to a Blind Archaeologist?

ABSTRACTArchaeology understands religion from embodied practices; interrogates the role of materiality in the reproduction of religion, accomplished in ritual; and explores what historical perspectives tell us about how religions persist and change. Archaeology is specially prepared to examine the repetition of practices over time, and their mediation through material forms. Embodied practices, routinized, unquestioned, yet subject to recognition and approval as “right,” are the core of religion in action, or ritual. A pragmatic archaeological approach asks not what religion is, but what it does, and how the material and historical basis of archaeology might change our view of religion.

Deconstructive Religious Education

The article argues that even though deconstruction has indications for action in religious education, the action should be subordinated to the notion of deconstruction as event. Three strategies can be used in the curriculum of religious education inspired by deconstruction. The first strategy is to emphasize the spirit of religion as different from the corpus of rituals. The second strategy concentrates on the common core of religions as a basis for translatability among different religions. Finally, the third strategy deals with providing compatibility between faith and knowledge.

Doubt as Methodology and Object in the Phenomenology of Religion

The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the 'heart', or 'core', of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some 'new' definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and 'apophatic', thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.

Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications (review)

Reviewed by: Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications Mark Verman Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, by Moshe Halbertal, trans. Jackie Feldman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 200 pp. $32.95. By tracing the construct of esotericism from the Rabbinic to the medieval period Moshe Halbertal offers an important and illuminating contribution to understanding the course of Jewish intellectual history. He is a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University and originally published this study in Hebrew in 2001. It follows his monograph on the late thirteenth-century Provencal talmudist and Maimonidean, R. Menahem ha-Meiri. One of the admirable features of Halbertal's current presentation is its scope. He offers substantial selections from significant primary sources, many of which have hitherto not appeared in English. For this reason alone the book is worthwhile for the general readership. It is also greatly enhanced by the accompanying insightful analysis. With equal facility Halbertal edifyingly discusses an impressive panoply of Jewish mystics, philosophers, and exegetes. Concealment consists of 168 pages of text followed by 21 pages of informative endnotes and is divided into 17 compact chapters and an introduction. With the exception of the last and longest one, each chapter is approximately 10 pages in length. Accordingly, one can easily traverse every section in a relatively [End Page 168] short time. In the "Introduction" Halbertal lays out the pervasive nature of esotericism in society: "Esotericism . . . is a tendency to view canonical texts, social phenomena, or even individual behavior as a form of coded manifestation that intentionally conceals something deeper and more meaningful that only the few can decipher" (p. 1). As one would anticipate, throughout the book Halbertal is in dialogue with Leo Strauss and his pioneering work, Persecution and the Art of Writing, originally published in 1952. "At the root of the elitist political esoteric outlook, as Leo Strauss developed it, is the idea that social order will collapse under complete conditions of transparency" (p. 3). Ultimately, however, Halbertal's primary criticism of Strauss is that he is too myopic, in that for Strauss the primary motif for esotericism in Maimonides and his fellow travelers is self-defense. "The philosopher protects himself and the society by going underground" (p. 137). According to Halbertal, this overarching explanation is too limited to adequately explain Jewish esotericism in its fullness, which is a much more expansive and complex phenomenon than addressed by Strauss. In Chapter One, "The Paradox of Esotericism," Halbertal opens with the foundational mishnah from Hagigah 2:1 concerning restrictions on public discussions of both cosmogony and the Divine realm. As the book unfolds it is intriguing to discover that successive luminaries including Abraham ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Nachmanides, and Abba Mari each highlighted this key text, but interpreted it differently. Initially Halbertal presents two distinct perspectives on esotericism in rabbinic texts. One approach posits the notion that "[t]he secret of God's essence is encrypted in the Holy Scriptures, and the knowledge of these secrets grants man possession of magical powers" (p. 9). A second tack was promoted by R. Akiva, whereby "nonconventional exegetical criteria must be applied to the sacred scriptures, since the text possesses absolute semantic fullness" (p. 10). Halbertal concludes the first chapter by introducing a seminal theme that is one of his major contributions to the topic, namely what he characterizes as "the esoteric paradox" (p. 12). He convincingly demonstrates that although the purported intent of the esoteric enterprise is to restrict the content of the special realm of knowledge to an inner circle of cognoscenti, it is fundamentally uncontrollable. Anyone can assert that a particular teaching constitutes an authentic esoteric doctrine of the religious tradition. If challenged, the proponent can simply claim that the reason that it isn't commonly accepted is precisely that it has been hidden. Esotericism can even be used to promote doctrinal subversion and heresy. "We should be reminded that, because of the preferential status of the esoteric, heretical positions acquire a status as the inner core of religion and even as the loftiest pinnacle of religious life" (p. 45). [End Page 169] Chapters Two through Fifteen trace discussions...

Revitalization of religion and religiousness in Serbia: Reality or a myth?

This article has three parts: in the first part the authors discusses two theoretical ways of interpreting revival and revitalization of religion in Serbia. The first way takes religion as a public institution and implies mutual support of religious and non-religious factors, while the other way describes independent, internal religious revival emerging from the very core of religion and church as a divine institution and individual spiritual needs of believers for religiousness (terminal faith). In the second part, the author points to two different interpretations of empirical data on attachment to religion and church in Serbia accumulated in the last thirty years. The third part compares socio-demographic characteristics of religious people from twenty-five years ago and characteristics of contemporary believers.

The future of religion: Intersections of Rorty, Vattimo and Zabala

The following work builds and expands on a number of critical themes that were raised and discussed in a colloquy initiated by Santiago Zabala on the topic ‘the future of religion’ (which carries the title of the published version) with the American philosopher Richard Rorty and Italian political activist Gianni Vattimo. But, on top of the essay's principal aim, a re-appropriation of the critical voices of Nietzsche and Heidegger is all the more necessary to begin with: both are known to have pioneered an examination of the progress of humanity following the death of God, an expression that strikes a broader reference to religion. This essay continues from Rorty's assessment of ‘the weakening and/or death of ontology’, in the post-modern age. (Vattimo would translate this Rortyian position into a ‘philosophical slide into sociology’ or the ‘turn to social sciences,’ while Zabala would set out as far as denying the God of monotheism [and its corollary in organised faith and ecclesiastical authority] of its pre-eminent place among the highest ‘goals of knowledge’). But, notwithstanding an otherwise valid criticism of religion in the light of his deconstructive notion of Being, this essay also hopes to spell out, on the contrary even, that Rorty must have missed the point in conflating religion with ontology or, God with Being in view of which his concept of weak ontology that is derived from the death of God (hence the death of ontology) is quickly drawn. Indeed, there is still Being; though it may still resist definition, as Heidegger underscored rather sardonically in the opening pages of his celebrated work Being and Time, it is no longer the other name for God. As this essay also aims to promote, Being is an expression of the private transcendental or rather an exercise in nihilism that is at the core of religion.

Exclusivism versus pluralism in religion: a response to Kevin Meeker

I argue that Meeker is mistaken in two crucial respects. First, contrary to both myself and Plantinga, he treats exclusivism as a theory about the relation between the religions, and then claims that it is superior to the pluralist theory. But he does not say what his exclusivist theory is. Second, he bases his claim of a fundamental self-contradiction in my pluralist position on a view which I disavow, namely that altruism is the core of religion. He omits the central idea of a profound reorientation in response to the Real, of which altruism is a manifestation.