Historical Religious Traditions Research Articles

Religion Against Violence: Insights of Contemporary Philosophy and Eastern Patristics

This article examines the concepts of violence and religion as social phenomena of modernity. Religion and the church are presented not as specific organizations or denominations, but as important social institutions and are reflected in philosophical and anthropological terms. I carry out the idea that religion as a modern social institute in cooperation with other social communities can resist violence, especially its aggressive forms. Based on some philosophical theories, the causes of the emergence of the different forms of social violence, as well as definitions of violence, are explored. In this context, the article presents the ideas of Hanna Arendt, Carl von Clausewitz, Bertrand de Jouvenel, James Mill, and Max Weber. Special attention is paid to the conception of the mimetic origin of aggression and violence in “primitive” or “archaic religions” elaborated by the French philosopher René Girard. He compares the social roots of aggression and violence in these religions with the Biblical ones and prefers the latter for their potential in preventing and overcoming the imitation types of violence. Girard’s anthropological justification of the mentioned historical religious traditions is presented. A significant part of the paper is devoted to the views of the Eastern Church Fathers of Early Christianity, considered in the concurrence of their humanistic ideas with those of noted contemporary philosophers. I see meaningful ideas for preventing extreme forms of violence and aggression in the contemporary world in the doctrines of the Early Eastern and Byzantine Fathers, especially those of the classical patristic period. In this regard, this article presents the anthropological and humanistic teachings of Athanasius the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus. The Early Church Fathers’ ideas are analyzed from a philosophical point of view, as having rational and anthropological grounds which are relevant for the present day’s human existence.

Is God evolving? Totems in contemporary art

This article explores the evolution of totemic symbolism in contemporary visual art and its profound link with religious concepts, particularly the image of God. It examines how artists reinterpret sacred themes through totems, reflecting both historical religious traditions and modern societal transformations. Through a review of totemic representations from ancient to contemporary artworks, this study illuminates the evolving portrayal of divine figures – from traditional religious icons to more personalised spiritual symbols. This evolution not only signifies changes in artistic expression but also suggests a deepening societal understanding of divinity. The analysis highlights the totem’s role as a mediator between the human and the divine, offering insights into the spiritual connections that transcend conventional religious frameworks. This research not only enriches the discourse on the relationship between art and religion but also underscores the dynamic interaction between cultural heritage and contemporary artistic exploration.Contribution: This study enriches the field of art history and religious studies by tracing the transformative representation of totems in art from ancient symbolism to modern reinterpretations. It underscores the totem’s role as a dynamic symbol in contemporary visual culture, facilitating deeper spiritual connections and dialogues across various cultural and religious landscapes. The findings of this study provide a nuanced understanding of how contemporary art mediates complex theological concepts, thus offering new perspectives on the intersection of art, religion and spirituality.

Religious Origins and Modern Legal Norms: A Dialectical Account

Abstract A significant amount of scholarship in the field of law and religion involves tracing the sources of contemporary legal and political norms to historical religious traditions. But the relationship between historical religious traditions and modern legal norms is often implicit and undertheorized. This article examines three examples of leading scholars who trace the influence of religious ideas to legal norms in strikingly different ways. Highlighting the work of Martha Nussbaum, Jeremy Waldron, and Samuel Moyn helps bring to rational articulation the normative decisions that are made in attempts to trace historical religious traditions to the contemporary norms that shape modern legal systems.

Deep Culture and the Mystical Agency of Mary in Eastern Christianity

The Virgin Mother Mary has always been venerated in Eastern Christianity far beyond her scriptural role. In this paper, we propose a symbolic framework of deep culture and apply it to understanding the prominence of Mary and the manner in which she plays a role in people’s lives through a bewildering variety of Marian icons. The framework begins with a mystical/esoteric perspective to appreciate Mary as a symbol that is multivalent, irreplaceable, archetypal, interior, and manifest yet hidden. We analyze images and stories of five highly venerated icons in Greece, Russia, Finland, and amongst diasporic Orthodox Churches, as well as associated hymns. Our analysis reveals that Mary’s significance for Orthodox faithful is best understood in her role as symbolic doorway to mystical religiosity. This role is highly agentic, although not in the sense in which agency is typically—exoterically—understood as analytical and external, but rather as esoterically affective and internally transformative. We show how a deep culture framework adds to our knowledge of Mary in Orthodox Christianity and how it can be used to examine similar figures in other contemporary and historical religious traditions.

Uncanny and Doubly Liminal: Social Media, Cross-Cultural Reentry, and lds/Mormon Missionary Religious Identity

This study offers a theoretical perspective on the role of social media in the transition home for returning missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (lds/Mormon). Despite a long tradition of strict lds institutional norms aimed at sheltering full-time church missionaries from outside media influences, missionaries are today increasingly encouraged to use social media sites in their proselytizing efforts. Through qualitative, in-depth interviews with recently returned lds missionaries, this study explores the role Facebook plays in facilitating the maintenance of mission relationships after missionaries have returned home, something interviewees said helps them retain the sense of religious commitment and identity developed through missionary service. Interview findings also complicate the potential benefits of social media use, providing evidence for the argument that returning lds missionaries are often caught between media technology, personal media preferences, institutional authority, and popular culture. These individuals seem to occupy a doubly liminal position between full-time proselytizing and life at home, between a historical religious tradition of missionary media isolation and an emerging institutional embrace of social media—all of which results in what might best be described as an uncanny experience.

АРТХАУСНОЕ КИНО О БУДУЩЕМ ЮЖНОЙ КОРЕИ: КИМ КИ ДОК

Analyzing different segments of modern Korean cinema it may be affirmed that its relevant topics are the following: religious ideologies, ideological choice, value orientations of individual life and biography. Within the frame of the Korean history, it becomes obvious that an authentic cultural and religious self-reflection is a major ideological trend of modern South Korean society. This is also true for the films created by South Korean film directors popular in the West. Among them is Kim Ki Duk, whose works focus on the reflections about South Korean Modernity. This article deals with his film "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring" (2003), devoted to the comprehension of the role of traditional ideology in constructing the life project of a modern man. The author of the article proposes the detailed discourse analysis, revealing the key discourse, key ideologemes and the director's central message. According to the author's conclusion, the nodal discourse is devoted to the consideration of Buddhism as a traditional religious culture and world outlook framework for Korean culture. According to Kim Ki Duke's central message, the modern Korean society ought to search for Weltanschauung in its historical religious tradition, which is presented by Buddhism. One can always return to it, and its resource is able to provide support in a situation of desperation and choice.

Measuring Religious Identities in Surveys

The purpose of this article is to acquaint the broader public opinion research audience with what has been a salient issue within the community of scholars of religion. We address the question of how best to conceptualize and measure religious identities in research on contemporary American society. We consider the main approaches to the measurement of religious identification with regard to their backgrounds, their assumptions about the importance of understanding religious identities in historically relevant terms, and the practical considerations of survey measurement. Using data from the General Social Survey, particularly recent innovative efforts to obtain information on subjective association with particular religious traditions and/or movements (e.g., Pentecostal, fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, or liberal Protestant), we compare the two main approaches: the traditional denominational approach, where religious identities are assumed to be associated with religious denominations, and the subjective approach, where religious identities are assumed to be captured by a set of nondenominational reference categories linked to particular historical religious traditions or social movements. We conclude that both approaches have substantial predictive validity, and the most effective strategy for future research may be one that uses a combination of approaches, rather than one that relies entirely on a single method of measurement.

Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (review)

Book Reviews 155 not? That a general index would have been ofhelp to any. reader of this at least partly successful attempt to arouse renewed interest in an all-but-forgotten yet for his time not uncharacteristic and indeed quite popular Jewish musician goes without saying. Admittedly, Hartmut Wecker recognizes the need for considerably more detailed studies. But even this, his fmal statement, is marred by his fatefully global conceptions. For what he has in mind is conclusive clarification as to whether the social and political factors he believes to have been so crucial for his hero's life and work did actually affect "all Jewish composers of the emancipation and assimilation period in Central Europe." Would that the Jewish diaspora experience were that simple! Alexander L. Ringer School of Music University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, by David Sorkin. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996. 214 pp. $40.00. I remember when I first heard of Moses Mendelssohn. It was in the kitchen of my mother's apartment in Germany where I had switched on the radio in the middle of some kind of literary reading. I did not recognize the author nor had I any sense of his philosophical or religious agenda. What riveted me was the beauty ofthe words and the serene progress of the prose. As it turned out, the reading had been from Morgenstunden (Morning Hours), the work David Sorkin deems "Mendelssohn's ... most sustained philosophical work" (p. 147). Since this first encounter with the German "Socrates" ofthe Berlin Enlightenment ofthe late eighteenth century I have been going through various phases ofenchantment and disenchantment with Mendelssohn. David Sorkin has produced a new study of this seminal figure in modem Jewish thought and history which promises to shed new light on an old problem. Mendelssohn, a typical . figure of a period of transition, is hard to pin down. How much of his work must be understood as a contribution to the philosophical movement of Enlightenment, how much of it should be read as a genuine and authentic contribution to modem Jewish thought? Sorkin's answer is Solomonic. As a rigorous historian, he locates Mendelssohn in the context ofa "religious Enlightenment," paralleled in other religious movements of the time (Protestant, Catholic), that sought a fertile compromise between the Enlightenment ideal of clear and distinct use of reason and language on the one hand and the historical religious tradition on the other. Mendelssohn further appears as an important sociological link between Enlightenment as a phenomenon represented by 156 SHOFAR Fa111997 Vol. 16, No.1 individuals and Enlightenment as a movement involving schools, journals, and whole groups of individuals promoting (in this case) Haskalah on the popular level. I always understood Mendelssohn's Hebrew works as a means by which he thought to promote the truths of the Enlightenment among his Jewish contemporaries. For example, as Sorkin amply documents, Mendelssohn's emphasis on studying Hebrew grammar thorougWy instead ofhaphazardly, or his focusing on biblical texts rather than on the Talmud, indicate the predilections ofsomeone who wishes to educate his fellow Jews in ways conducive to the development of knowledge and skills useful to an enlightened citizen of the world. An even more striking case is Mendelssohn's promotion of "proper" German among the Jews of his time. So far there is nothing novel to Sorkin's careful and well documented introduction to Mendelssohn's Hebrew writings. Yet Sorkin seems to want to persuade us that Mendelssohn's familiarity with Jewish sources and his use ofsuch traditional forms of literary exposition as commentary make Mendelssohn a more authentic Jew than has been hitherto assumed. Assumed by whom, I ask myself. Another such somewhat puzzling claim, reiterated with a certain monotony at every possible juncture, is that Mendelssohn revived the "Andalusian tradition of Jewish thought" (mentioned no less than 14 times in 155 pages, usually in strategic places). This school of thought, according to Sorkin, consists mainly of Jehuda ha Levi, and Mendelssohn's connection to this eleventh/twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish thinker seems to exhaust itself in certain similarities that are never fully explored by Sorkin. It is difficult to shed one's suspicion that...

The Role of 'Belief' in the Study of Religion: A Response to W. C. Smith

The concept of belief as an interpretive category in the scholarly study of religion has recently come under heavy criticism from various quarters. The concept of belief, it is argued, is not merely useless in the task of interpreting the meaning of the historical religious traditions, but rather is positively misleading. Consequently, a 'call' is issued to students of religion to move beyond belief in their attempts to understand the religious dimension of man's existence. The 'call' has been sounded in the past in such work as R. Bellah's Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, (I970); and R. Needham's Belief, Language and Experience, (I972); and more recently in D. Z. Phillip's Religion without Explanation, (1976); and W. C. Smith's Belief and History, (I977). It is not an easy matter to classify and analyze the arguments raised against 'belief' in these and other works. They are often confused in such a way that it is difficult to determine whether the criticism is the product of empirical reasoning, philosophical argument, or intuitive or religious insight. It is extremely important, to respond, however, for the 'call' to move beyond 'belief' amounts to a 'call' for a revolution in the study of religion for a radical change of paradigm for interpreting the meaning of religious phenomena. 1 And like most revolutions, the undertaking would be costly. The initial step in such a response, given the presently irresolvable complexities in the multi-

The Religion Game: Some Family Resemblances

HIS paper is an attempt to analyze the nature of religion in terms of its components and characteristics. In Part One, I adopt Wittgensteinian terminology to develop and justify a new approach to the varieties of religious phenomena and structures. Applying to the study of religion some Wittgensteinian reminders for the replacement of essences with a theory of language-games and family resemblances, I suggest that the search for the illusive essence of religion or of religious traditions should give way to the description of religion and religions in terms of how the religion game is played.' Thus, historical religious traditions and their respective components may be seen as members of the religion family, and qualities, characteristics, or functions which these members share may be viewed as their family resemblances.