Place Of Christianity Research Articles

Ads from HELL: Complaining about the use of religion in advertising

HELL Pizza’s advertising is characterized by its provocative art, audacious copy and bold tactics that relishes in its hellish reputation. Rather than merely relying on attention-grabbing stunts, the brand employs strategies that tap into the deep-seated cultural norms of its audience. Often deemed controversial, HELL’s advertising elicits strong public reactions, serving as a mirror reflecting the evolving cultural and moral sensitivities and the place of Christianity in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article critically examines the official complaints about the use of religious references in HELL’s advertising to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using thematic analysis, we analyse how ‘offense’ and references to Christianity are navigated by the public complainant, the ASA and the brand, in 79 rulings between 2005 and 2021. We conclude that while the brand consistently negotiates a fine line between edgy humour and potential offense, the ASA rulings suggest a societal trend leaning towards freedom of artistic expression, even when intertwined with religious undertones, particularly when a brand has a well-established identity.

Crisis of Faith: Today's African Christians and Mami-Wata (Mother-Water) Spirituality

precis: This study provides an analysis of the impact of Mami-Wata spirituality on an understanding of the place and fate of Christianity in Africa today. A section of the Christian population negotiates their Christian beliefs through the prism of their traditional African religious cosmology and worldviews. This new Christian African spirituality is generating waves of faith crises. While previous scholarship has investigated the crises of African Christian faith from the dominant point of view of African culture and context, from Christian-Muslim interaction, or from the influence of Western elements, there are no works that show the multidimensional impacts of Mami-Wata spirituality on Christians and their faith, identity, and theological discourses. Departing from past works, the present work investigates how rudimentary constructs of African spirituality have engaged Christianity on several fronts, from the problem of faith crisis and the engagement of the Mami-Wata deity to how some African Christians wrestle with their devotion to the Virgin Mary vis-à-vis the traditional Mami-Wata deity. This analysis also demonstrates the indispensability of the female divine in spiritual and religious discourses, and it provides a pathway to construct a theology that is both truly Christian and grounded in African realities.

Mobile Based Application Design of the Catholic Church of the Redeemer of Sumbawa Using the Waterfall Method

The church is a gathering place for Christians to carry out worship. The Sumbawa Redeemer Catholic Church is a church that originates from Sumbawa Besar Regency, West Nusa Tenggara Province. This Catholic Church is the only church in Sumbawa Regency. The purpose of this research is to make the Application of the Catholic Church of the Redeemer of Sumbawa. using the waterfall design method and the ADDIE model. The data collection method was carried out using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) method, use cases and activity diagrams ere used as analysis and design tools. The programming languages used include Kotlin and Java, the software used includes the IDE Android Studio 4.0, MS. This research yielded results, namely a program that can be used to make it easier for people to find information about the Sumbawa Redeemer Catholic Church

Religious Freedom in an Age of The Global War on Christianity: A Nigerian Christian Perspective

Nigeria ranks as the world’s most violent place for Christians today. Christianity and Islam, the major religions in Nigeria, are known to preach love and peace worldwide. A brief review of the grim reality of the practical implications of these claims against endemic violence questions the meaning of religion in Nigeria. This article relates the abuse and violation of rights and, therefore, proposes the universal human right of religious freedom as a more reliable path to peaceful coexistence, as against tolerance, which today has been acknowledged as a failed strategy for enduring peace.

Lost in Translation: Tangible and Non-Tangible in Conservation

This paper addresses the special issue theme of the response of conservation practice to shifts in heritage theory towards the intangible, through exploring some specific aspects of practice and statutory process in the UK. The paper starts with an overview of conservation in the UK, and the extent to which it does or does not interface with developments in heritage theory. It explores the conventional understanding of significance—here termed ‘subtractive’—which reflects the antiquarian concerns from which conservation developed. It then considers the Ecclesiastical Exemption, a parallel consent mechanism within UK law for Christian places of worship that remain in use, which specifically recognises their need to change over time to ensure their survival. Evidence for a growing appreciation of non-tangible value and community participation in heritage is provided in recent research by The National Churches Trust into the economic and social value of church buildings to local communities across the UK. The paper concludes that a positive response to changes in heritage theory requires conservation to undertake its own theoretical work; this will involve a recognition of living buildings as central rather than peripheral both to conservation and to heritage more broadly, and a move towards a ‘generative’ understanding of significance.

Architettura per la liturgia nelle chiese dell’occidente. Appunti di un liturgista

Virtually all religions have their spaces of worship. In fact, the very term “temple” derives from the Greek verb temno, “to cut off,” which points to a space that is cut off from the whole and dedicated to a deity. Likewise, after Christ’s resurrection, Christians would need a venue for ritual worship that would become a place of encounter with God the Trinity. That place would not be an equivalent of the Jewish or pagan temples, which were determined by the presence of a deity and considered sacred and sanctifying on account of that presence. A place of Christian worship would be identified mainly by action, that is, by the celebration of the misterium with Christ at its center. Here, Jesus in present by the power of His word. The faithful gather in His name when they are called to remember Him: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) and “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). In a temple, a meeting of the faithful was due to chance, whereas in a Christian place of worship, the meeting is integral to the sacred place itself. The individual believers are its living building stones, and the Holy Spirit is the unifying force that binds them together. In other words, for a Christian, there is no material place where God lives, and no place can contain Him. Over the years, the noun denoting a congregation of Christians, that is, ecclesia (“church”) was adopted to describe the place in which the congregation is taking place.

Leone Ceatani’nin Varaka b. Nevfel, Abdullah b. Cahş, Zeyd b. Amr ve Osman b. Huveyris Adlı Hanifler Hakkındaki Görüşleri

With the birth of Islam and the influence of other religions around it, there were those who opposed it. Islam has imposed itself on the world and brought peace and justice to the regions where it spread. In the following times, such an acceptance of Islam could not be accepted by members of other religions, especially Christians. The Westerners, who could not achieve the desired goal against Muslims in the Crusader attacks, changed their tactics and chose to weaken Islam, misrepresent it, and break it from its historical truth. With this, baseless allegations were made about the religion and its primary source, the Qur’an and its prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, and perception studies were initiated within this framework. Within the scope of these studies, many orientalists were trained in Western countries. These people, who carried out research in political, economic, and cultural fields, especially in Islam, were supported by the state they were affiliated with and produced many studies on the values of Eastern societies. Leona Ceatani from Italy was included in these studies in the West with his work titled Annali Dell’Islām. In this work, Ceatani distorted the basic principles of Islam and reached some conclusions of his own. As stated in Mustafa Asım Köksal’s refutation, in Ceatani’s work titled History of Islam, he made heavy accusations against our religion, our Prophet, and the Companions. In addition, the translation and presentation of Ceatani’s work as a reliable source caused some unrest in the public opinion of the newly established Republic of Turkey, and falsifying information about the Prophet, the Qur’an, and Islam was put forward. Ceatani, in his History of Islam, refers to the Hanif religion and its adherents and claims that these people were not Hanifs. The most important belief of all prophets during their prophethood was the belief in tawhid. Although the prophets differed in the system they applied during their mission of notification, their main duty was their determination in the belief of tawhid. Prophet Abraham, the sign of the belief in tawhid, has an important place in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the term “Hanif” is used for him in the Qur’an. Hanifism expresses the principles common to the messages of all prophets. In the Qur’an, the word “Hanif” is used against idolatry and against the corrupted belief in the tawhid of Jews and Christians. It is stated that there were people in Arabia who adopted the religion of Abraham before the Prophet Muhammad’s message. It has been observed that these people had moved away from the religion of Prophet Abraham in Arabia and questioned this situation. According to the sources, these people did not commit polytheism, rejected the wrong beliefs and customs of the tribe they belonged to, and thought of the existence of a single Creator by retreating in seclusion away from the oppression of their tribes. In this study, we have examined Ceatani’s evaluations of Hanīfiyyah and the Hanifs known in our sources, such as Waraga b. Nawfal, Abdullah b. Jahsh, Zayd b. Amr and Uthman b. Huwayris, according to Islamic sources and found that he has wrong assumptions about this subject.

Winning over a crisis: Understanding the ‘ποιεῖν’ in Matthew 7:24–27 from the nostalgia perspective

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7 has played a pivotal role in the history of Christianity. Occupying a crucial place in Christianity, Matthew 7:24–27 was considered to be the closing entry, as well as the passage’s concluding remark. In the passage, Jesus emphasises the importance of the ποιεῖν [to do] in his teachings rather than merely hearing Him. What does the meaning of the word ποιεῖν truly entail? What exactly did Jesus hope to accomplish through the word for a community that was entrenched in deep crisis? Utilising the notion of nostalgia in psychology research, this article concluded that, through Jesus’ word ποιεῖν, He urged believers to lead a ποιεῖν lifestyle, in order to evoke personal nostalgia apropos of God. This personal nostalgia is then expected to build up the ‘inner resource’ of the gospel’s readers, so that they can face the various life crises, which were portrayed as three forms of natural phenomena. Thus, the conclusion was aligned with the notion of ‘God with us’, which became the main theme of this gospel.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article demonstrates the role and benefits of empirical psychological research on nostalgia in understanding ποιεῖν in Matthew 7:24–27.

Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750–1776. By Gary L. Steward

The role of colonial American clergy in furthering the cause and course of the American Revolution, especially in the deeply religious culture of New England, has been a matter of scholarly discussion and dispute since the nineteenth century. Because the place of Christianity in the founding of the American republic has been central to the debate over whether the United States was established as a so-called “Christian nation,” an academic question has also become a significant political controversy. In Justifying Revolution, Gary Steward largely eschews the latter, focusing very single-mindedly on clerical thought, particularly with regard to political resistance and how and why so many came to support it. Yet in making his case, Steward further seeks to counter the arguments of major historians, including Bernard Bailyn, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden, who have emphasized the role of “real Whig” and republican thought in shaping and escalating a radical resistance ideology that led to revolution.

King Olaf's men? Contextualizing Viking burials at S:t Olofsholm, Gotland, Sweden

AbstractThe discovery of burials at S:t Olofsholm, a site associated with the Saint Olaf cult on Gotland in Sweden, has enabled a bioarchaeological contextualization of medieval legends and sagas in conjunction with the archaelogical record. This study seeks to illuminate who were buried at S:t Olofsholm, through a biocultural lens, and whether these burials can be linked to folklore and sagas associated with the site. Five burials of possibly six individuals (cal. AD 980–1270) were assessed macroscopically and through stable isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S, 87Sr/86Sr, and δ18O) of incremental dentine, bulk enamel, and bone samples. Sagas and legends associated with S:t Olofsholm mention episodes of conflict and contact involving King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway (later canonized as Saint Olaf), Gutes and Icelanders, and travels between Norway and Kyiv Rus. Two (or three) burials show signs of violent deaths, including evidence of sharp force trauma and burning. Isotope analyses indicate local and non‐local signals, with possible links to southern Scandinavia, Britain, Iceland, the Baltics, and Kyiv Rus. In general, the evidence neither challenges nor confirms the legends and sagas associated with S:t Olofsholm. Instead, the findings illustrate the site's function as an early Christian place of worship within a wider Viking world that was characterized by travel and contact across the Baltic Sea, Scandinavia, and beyond. The burials at S:t Olofsholm are likely to be non‐normative as indicated by their place of interment and the violent cause of death of most individuals.

Locating Heaven: Modern Science and the Place of Christ's Glorified Body

Locating Heaven: Modern Science and the Place of Christ's Glorified Body

ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ ОБРАЗА МАРИИ МАГДАЛИНЫ В СЮЖЕТЕ «ПИР У СИМОНА ФАРИСЕЯ» В ИТАЛЬЯНСКОЙ ЖИВОПИСИ

Mary Magdalene occupies a special place among the Gospel characters. Her name is mentioned several times in all the synoptic Gospels. Being a participant in the central events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, she appears already in the earliest Christian images. The rich pictorial tradition associated with her expanded as her fascinating and controversial biography developed, blending the features of various heroines with the name Mary or nameless sinners. This article considers the process of composition, as well as semantic and artistic transformation of the plot, which became widespread in European fine art — "The Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee" on the example of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the High Renaissance. This selectivity is justified by the fact that the key processes in the formation of iconographic schemes took place in early Christian and medieval art and underwent qualitative changes in Proto-Renaissance and Renaissance art in Italian art schools. In turn, the Italian High Renaissance art in this case is limited to the Venetian school, since it was within this national school that the most characteristic processes were observed. The study uses historicalformal, iconographic and iconological methods.

A New Church in the Rising Sun: Saint Francis Xavier

Among the wealth of buildings consecrated to the Shinto religion, Yamaguchi has a Christian place of worship: the Sanctuary of Saint Francis Xavier. The lot chosen is the same on which the previous church stood, symbol of the city and destroyed by a fire in 1991. Consonances and relations could be found with spaces that have wished to express with force the tension towards the Absolute not only in our Western world but also in the spaces of Oriental architecture, in particular Japanese, where the striving towards that spoliation and essentialness of things that is, a bottom, a thirst for truth is perceived. Finally, our effort had as its aim to make the architecture speak a universal language of the hearth of man, rapt to the infinite desire to experience beauty and to find himself once again within it to have an authentic experience of interior joy.

The Place and Importance of Christianity in The Political Thought of the Medieval Europe: Influence of Patristic Philosophy on the Political Thought

Ortaçağ, Avrupa düzleminde bakıldığında, dini bir öğreti olan Hıristiyanlığın düşünsel, siyasal ve kültürel olarak baskın olduğu bir zaman dilimini bize vermektedir. Erken Ortaçağ’da kültürel ve sosyal bir olgu olarak ortaya çıkan Hıristiyanlığın, doktrinel ve kurumsal olarak oluşumunda temel teşkil eden Patristik felsefe ve onun düşünsel yapılanmasını teşkil eden Kilise babaları, özellikle siyasal ve düşünsel olarak Avrupa’nın bundan sonraki yaklaşık bin yılının ana belirleyicisi olmuşlardır. Kilise babaları arasında da Augustinus’un (354-430) ortaya koymuş olduğu eserler ve görüşlerin, bu etkinin Hıristiyanlık içinde neredeyse Thomas Aquinas’a (1225-1274) sürdürülen teolojik ve siyasal bağlamda oluşan doktrinlerin temel belirleyicisi olduğu genel bir kabuldür. Bu çalışmada, öncelikle Hıristiyanlığın, sonra da Avrupa Ortaçağ düşünce ikliminin temel belirleyicisi olan Patristik felsefenin ne olduğu temsilcileriyle birlikte ortaya konulmakta, daha sonra da bu anlayışın Ortaçağ dünyasının siyasal ve düşünsel anlayışını etkilemesindeki temel parametreler tarihsel ve teorik olarak irdelenmektedir. Çalışmada son olarak da Patristik felsefenin en belirgin figürü olan Augustinus’un düşünsel ve siyasal olarak Hıristiyanlık üzerindeki teolojik ve doktrinel belirleyiciliği ele alınmakta ve çalışma bir “sonuç ve değerlendirme” ile nihayetlendirilmektedir. Çalışmada bir sosyal bilimler metodu olarak “derinlemesine içerik analizi” kullanılmakta, metin konuya dair “dolaylı” ve “birebir” alıntılama yöntemi ile okuyucuya sunulmaktadır. Çalışmanın sınırlılıkları, zamansal olarak Erken Ortaçağ dönemi, coğrafi olarak da Roma üzerinden Avrupa düzlemi olarak belirlenmiştir. Ayrıca Hıristiyanlık düşüncesi içinde Patristik felsefe dışındaki geleneklere metinde değinilmemiştir.

Christian Religioscapes in the Levant: The Question of Geo-Religious Materiality of a Minority in Decline

The Levant has diachronically been a highly contested region in terms of rights and entitlement, and, ultimately, in terms of sovereignty over territory. This is not a new phenomenon, particularly in a region that is laden with history. Religion has been, and still is, central in the demarcation and distinction of territorial custodianship, administration, and ownership, as it codetermines the terms and limits of boundaries by way of materiality in the public sphere. Antitheses and frictions are frequent over disputed territories and spatialities, where religioscapes overlap or intersect in a non-harmonious fashion. Especially at times of political unrest, religion, as a value system, as cultural heritage and as a collective identifier of self-perception, has a central role in the signification of (pre)dominance over territory. This holds true particularly for the Christian minorities in the Levant, with immediate consequences on their religious sites and their overall religiocultural heritage. In this light, I argue that this issue deserves extensive further study, to better understand and explain the complex georeligious landscape in the region, and specifically the place of Christianity therein by way of its materiality, given that the latter is mutatis mutandis under threat.

The Death of the Soul: Christ’s Descent into Hell in the Thought of Calvin, Lefèvre, and Cusa

ABSTRACT A lacuna in scholarship currently exists on the place of Christ’s descent into hell in the theology of John Calvin. The impression given by this lacuna is that Calvin had little to say about the descensus. However, the reformer devoted more energy explaining the descensus than any other clause of the Apostles’ Creed, an explanation already developed in his first treatise the Psychopannychia. This article shows how the French humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’ reliance on Nicholas of Cusa demonstrates an organic stream of teaching in the late medieval period within which Calvin’s theology of Christ's descent into hell is clearly situated. Calvin, Lefèvre, and Cusa all understood the descent into hell as Christ’s experience of the second death, or the death of the soul. Calvin’s descensus theology was far from novel and exceeds a mere metaphorical reference to the crucifixion despite suggestions to the contrary in popular scholarship.

EVALUASI PENERAPAN PROTOKOL KESEHATAN DALAM MENCEGAH PENULARAN COVID-19 DI GEREJA-GEREJA WILAYAH KECAMATAN GUDO KABUPATEN JOMBANG TAHUN 2021

In March 2020 the government determined that the COVID-19 outbreak was a national disaster that spread through splashes, so gatherings of large numbers of people could increase the risk of spreading COVID-19. The church is a place for Christians to carry out religious activities. During this activity, there was interaction between congregations that could increase the potential for the spread of COVID-19. The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate the application of health protocols in preventing the transmission of COVID-19 in churches in the Gudo District, Jombang Regency in 2021. This study uses a descriptive observational method. The variables of this research are socialization and education of COVID-19 health protocols, use of masks, hand washing facilities or hand sanitizers, disinfection, social distancing systems, thermoguns, restrictions on the number of congregations and duration of worship, as well as air circulation and floor types. Data collection used observations and interviews to describe the implementation of the COVID-19 health protocol in seven churches in Gudo District, Jombang Regency. Data analysis in this study is to collect data, process and compile, then presented in tabulation then each variable is analyzed descriptively. Observation results show that all churches get the Good category with a minimum score of 76.92%. The results of the interview show that the manager has facilitated the congregation in implementing the COVID-19 health protocol. The conclusion from this research is that the implementation of the COVID-19 health protocol is not optimally implemented, namely socialization and education of the COVID-19 health protocol and measuring body temperature. Suggestions for other researchers who want to continue this research are researching the implementation of the COVID-19 health protocol in places of worship using quantitative research methods.

Sacrificio e violenza sacra nella propaganda crociata di età avignonese: Marino Sanudo e l’immagine della Terra Santa

After reviewing the scholarly debate on the sacralization of war and the symbolic centrality of Jerusalem in the notion of crusade, this essay focuses on the propagandistic elaboration of the Holy Land image in the context of the debates of the Avignon period, paying specific attention to the works of Marino Sanudo. In this context, the temporal distance from the first crusades and the need to assert continuity with their tradition enhance the recovery of the image of Jerusalem, the place of Christ’s sacrifice and of the crucesignatus’s military and penitential itinerary.

Informal Networks in the Black Sea Region

Abstract In 2014, local community members nailed a pig’s head to the door of a Muslim boarding house in Kobuleti, a small town in Adjara, to argue that ‘this is a Christian place.’ They expressed fears about the building owner, who was thought to be of Turkish origin. Enlargement of the boarding house was perceived as a possible Islamization of the town and an increase of transborder flows in the region. In this article, I examine the agency of the boarding houses in Adjara through human and non-human actors. At the same time, I look at the legal responses of the state and official structures for controlling informalities embedded in the boarding houses’ networks.

The Abolition and Reconstruction of a Church A Case Study of Christian Localization in Nu Village within the North Sino-Myanmar Boundary

The church is an important place for Christians to practice their faith. It has also become an important symbol to highlight the history memory of the village in the ethnic areas of the North Sino-Myanmar Boundary. Christianity was introduced into Nu people for nearly one hundred years, Christian faith has become an important part of its cultural tradition. A history of the construction of the Christian church is the history of the Christian faith. To explore the process of the construction, abolishment and reconstruction of the Christian church is to reveal the dynamic change process of the Christian faith from the outside to the native. Taking the Christian church in Laomudeng which is a village of Nu people as an example, this paper aims to explore the Socio-cultural implications of “Christian localization” by presenting the religious practices of Nu Christians in building churches in different history periods.