Abstract Religion is an important but understudied domain of language policy. Inspired by the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, an influential theoretician in the comparative study of religion, this article aims to advance research on the religious domain by mapping out two contrasting ‘topographies’ and their attendant language policies. A locative topography is a religious orientation that emphasizes fixity, sacrality, hierarchy, and purity, while a utopian (“no-place”) typography valorizes freedom, movement, interconnection, and the transcendence of boundaries. The Russian Orthodox maintenance of Church Slavonic and Catholic support for Esperanto serve as respective examples, with the continuance of Latin in Catholicism presenting a mixed case. The article suggests that the locative-utopian distinction can also shed light on secular policies, such as the Russian government’s entrenchment of the Cyrillic alphabet and the widespread use of the Frutiger typeface in major world airports.

ABSTRACT This article investigates how the Yugoslav National Movement ZBOR, led by Dimitrije Ljotić in the 1930s, employed religious language as a tool of political legitimacy in a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. Moving beyond the institutional paradigm of clerical fascism, the study focuses on the ideological dimension by analysing Ljotić’s writings, speeches, and party publications to trace how religious tropes such as martyrdom, Christian unity, anti-Semitism, and divine mandate shaped ZBOR’s rhetorical framework. Religious rhetoric provided both a moral scaffolding for authoritarian nationalism and a strategic means of embedding radical-right positions within familiar moral and biblical frameworks. These references also allowed ZBOR to evade censorship while mobilizing its base. The analysis highlights a central tension in ZBOR’s rhetoric: inclusive appeals to Christianity as a unifying, supra-confessional force contrasted with an increasing privileging of Serbian Orthodox narratives, particularly during crises like the concordat dispute. This duality exposed the limits of religious pan-Yugoslavism and underscored the instability of fascist projects in multi-ethnic and multi-religious states. Situating ZBOR within broader European fascism, the article demonstrates how religious discourse could simultaneously unite and fracture, offering insight into the adaptability and contradictions of fascist ideologies in plural societies.

Religious and spiritual concerns often occur during suicidal crises; however, little is known whether religious language in suicide-related online discourse tends to be emotionally negative (e.g., despair, guilt, abandonment) or positive (e.g., hope, comfort, meaning). Using a large and publicly available body of Reddit posts drawn from suicide-related communities, this study examined the emotional tone associated with religious language in suicide-related posts. The researcher conducted a secondary analysis of the Suicide and Depression Detection dataset (Kaggle), restricting analyses to posts labeled “suicide” (N= 116,037). Religious language was operationalized using a transparent keyword-based lexicon. Emotional tone was estimated through VADER sentiment scoring. Prevalence estimates were reported and two logistic regression models were tested: (a) whether religious language predicted high negativity and (b) whether religious language predicted high positivity, controlling for post length. Religious language appeared in 10.91% of suicide-labeled posts and was associated with heightened emotional polarity and a significantly more negative overall sentiment. Controlling for post length, religious language predicted greater odds of high negativity (OR = 1.50, 95% CI [1.44, 1.57], p < .001) and lower odds of high positivity (OR = 0.79, 95% CI [0.75, 0.83], p < .001). Findings suggest that, within suicide-related Reddit discourse, religious language is more frequently embedded in negative emotional framing than in positive emotional expression. Ethical safeguards for sensitive public data research are discussed, along with implications for spiritually integrated crisis communication and future cross-cultural studies.

ABSTRACT As the far-right ecosystem continues to evolve, scholars have noted a rise in religious language across the spectrum of far-right extremist groups. 1 To better understand the role of religion in far-right groups, we used content analysis to identify religious language in samples of online discourse from six violent American far-right groups. To uncover the underlying role of Christian and religious rhetoric in far-right groups, we identify how Christian moral frameworks are used to legitimize far-right ideologies, how Christian labels are used to identify in-groups and out-groups, and how apocalyptic rhetoric is used to emphasize a crisis narrative. We find partial support for all three of our hypotheses, and our discussion unpacks the importance of the variation in religious language across the six groups.

Mystical experience illustrates a fundamental aspect of human relations with the ultimate reality within the framework of religiosity. This article explores the mystical experiences of Hallaj and Meister Eckhart, both of whom came from different religious traditions. Employing a hermeneutic approach, this article attempts to read the experiences of both mystics by interpreting one with the other. Inevitably, although both mystics use different religious language and symbols, there is a strong resonance that allows us for inter-experiential reading of such mystical experiences. This article argues that mystical experience can be the strong basis of interreligious dialogue wherein although each mystical experience is personal and subjective in nature, there is something foundational that can be found as a pulse that is connected and can explain each other, rendering our interreligious understanding richer and more profound.

This article examines how religious experience is articulated through genre in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī (d. 1674), focusing on the striking contrast between his ghazals and non-ghazal compositions. While Neshāṭī’s qaṣīdas, mathnawīs and other formal genres employ an explicit and direct religious language—addressing God, the Prophet, sacred figures, and doctrinal themes—his ghazals are dominated by imagery of wine, love, and the beloved, which at first glance appears markedly profane. Rather than reading this contrast as a sign of secularization or doctrinal inconsistency, the article argues that it reflects a conscious poetic strategy shaped by the expressive style of the ghazal. Through a close reading of Neshāṭī’s Dīwān, the study demonstrates that religious meaning in ghazals is not absent but deliberately rendered implicit. Drawing on motifs such as the mirror, secret (sirr), annihilation (fanāʾ fīʾllāh), and states of spiritual contraction, Neshāṭī transforms the language of human love into a vehicle for divine experience. In this context, the ghazal emerges as a genre particularly suited to conveying religious meaning through ambiguity, emotional intensity, and symbolic indirection rather than overt doctrinal exposition. By situating Neshāṭī within both the Mawlawī tradition and the aesthetics of Sabk-i Hindī, this article highlights how genre manifests religious expression in Ottoman poetry. It proposes that divine encounter in Neshāṭī’s work is realized less through explicit theological discourse than through the affective and symbolic potential of the ghazal. In doing so, the study offers a new reading of Neshāṭī’s poetry and contributes to broader discussions on the relationship between literary/lyrical genre, mysticism, and religious experience in Islamic literary traditions.

ABSTRACT A study in the history of sentimentality. Chaucer’s interest in the language of the emotions is manifest throughout his career in his explorations of the rhetoric of affective piety, which he uses in a great variety of ways, as his serious early studies in this rhetoric later give way to more complicated experiments. In the religious prologues and stories of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s sense of the power of affective religious language mingles with an acute sense of how that power can be abused. Critical responses to these texts have been more conflicted than in almost any other part of his work. However, in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also investigates the secular and social use of the rhetoric of religious sentimentality, turning it into matter for high comedy. This article argues that, in his later writings, including the religious Tales, Chaucer’s view of this rhetoric is always potentially disengaged and critical.

This study explores the importance of the Arabic language for Kurdish-speaking students at universities in the Kurdistan Region, emphasizing its role as a scientific, cultural, and religious language that supports cognitive identity and effective academic engagement. Using a descriptive-analytical approach supported by an inductive method, questionnaires were administered to students of the Arabic Department at Soran University. The findings revealed that students recognize Arabic as a core element in reinforcing Kurdish cultural identity (64%) and as a gateway to broader professional opportunities (69%). The religious dimension was highly prominent, with 76% associating Arabic with the Qur’an and Islamic practices. Politically, 67% acknowledged its significance as the official language of the state and a medium for interacting with governmental institutions. However, more than half of the participants (52%) perceived the current curricula as traditional and insufficiently aligned with labor market needs. The study concludes that Arabic plays a crucial role in students’ cultural, religious, political, and professional development, while highlighting the need to modernize curricula to better meet students’ academic and practical requirements.

The aspect of the Lotus Sutra that is highlighted in this study is the descriptive feature of repeatedly mentioning the Lotus Sutra itself, that is, the ‘self-referential’ expression. Such self-referential expressions are logically contradictory. Previous studies have argued that this is ‘inserted by the editor(s) of the Lotus Sutra.’ However, the fact that even the oldest-level of the sutra classified by previous studies include self-referential expressions is problematic. Therefore, this discussion examined this issue through a literary critical approach. According to Genette’s theory, the Lotus Sutra is also a hypertext. This is because it seems that the Lotus Sutra contained content referring to itself from the very beginning. If so, self-referential expressions can be recognized as unique characteristics of this text that determined the direction of the Lotus Sutra itself, rather than being inserted arbitrarily at a specific point in time. In addition, the Lotus Sutra consists of more than one level of narrative and can be divided into the ‘outer Lotus Sutra’ and the ‘inner Lotus Sutra.’ The content conveyed in the form of quotations through the speaker’s mouth is the ‘inner Lotus Sutra.’ However, there are inner stories in the inner stories, and when we trace the innermost stories, we find that the ‘Lotus Sutra’ itself is the referent object, not a specific doctrine or proposition. In other words, what the Lotus Sutra is trying to convey is the ‘Lotus Sutra’ itself. These narrative levels of the Lotus Sutra show the process in which the object of faith is replaced from the content of the doctrine to the sutra itself, and further, to a single word, the name of the sutra. The Lotus Sutra seems to have been formed as a hypertext from the very beginning, and to have achieved its purpose of being disseminated to a larger audience through a strategy of multiple narrative levels. Viewing the Lotus Sutra with concepts of narratology is an exploration that recalls the nature of the Lotus Sutra as a text. This discussion presents an alternative perspective on how to view religious language.

The dilemma of religious language is more prominent in two influential twentieth-century philosophical thoughts: logical positivists’ verificationism and Wittgenstein’s language-games theory. The contention is whether religious language can be meaningfully intelligible and cognitively credible in light of verificationist criteria of meaning and non-cognitivist interpretations of religious discourse. This paper analyses logical positivist claim that the verification principle renders metaphysical and theological statements cognitively meaningless and examines Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language-games and forms of life, as a response that relocates meaning within communal practice rather than empirical verification. It adopts philosophical analytic method by combining textual evaluation with comparative theoretical analysis. The study reveals that both Logical positivists’ and Wittgensteinian approaches are internally coherent yet philosophically insufficient when taken in isolation. The logical positivists’ principle of verification fails to account for non-empirical yet meaningful expressions of religious experience, while Wittgensteinian non-realist readings risk reducing religious language to expressive or regulative functions devoid of truth-claims. The paper contends that neither strict empiricism nor radical contextualism adequately captures the full semantic scope of religious discourse. Conversely, a mediating posture that integrates symbolic reference, communal usage, and rational evaluation is proposed, drawing insights from analogical and critical realist theories of religious language. The study concludes that religious language remains a legitimate subject of philosophical inquiry and requires interpretive models capable of sustaining both meaningful practice and claims to truth.

Adequate representation of donors from diverse ancestral populations in blood, stem cell and organ transplantation is critical to ensuring equitable access to these lifesaving therapies. Because of population-level differences in genetic markers, patients from racialized groups may have unique transfusion and transplantation needs. However, racialized populations remain underrepresented as donors, exacerbating existing health inequities. This narrative review synthesizes the factors contributing to disparities in donor representation across donation products, identifying common barriers and proposing potential solutions. Racialized populations are significantly underrepresented in donor pools across all donation types, limiting access to optimal donation products and increasing the risk of adverse outcomes. Common barriers to donation for racialized peoples include healthcare mistrust, lack of knowledge and sociocultural factors such as religious beliefs and language barriers. Facilitators include culturally tailored education, community engagement and policy-driven initiatives. Addressing disparities in donor representation requires a multifaceted approach integrating education, community trust-building and systemic policy changes. Cross-disciplinary efforts are essential to diversify donor bases and reduce inequities in access to optimal donation products.

Existing scholarship has studied the Church’s role in facilitating emigration through providing various forms of assistance. However, there is limited research about the characteristics of the migrants benefiting from such aid, particularly in terms of the combination between social embeddedness and religious devotion. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the Neo-Protestant churches in Romania help in the emigration process, and explains the support they provide as a type of religious capital. Based on primary data from an online survey and semi-structured interviews with Romanian emigrants in the US, the analysis reveals that the Churches’ assistance is directed more toward individuals with strong ties to the religious community, those facing linguistic barriers, and those migrating for the purpose of family reunification.

Abstract Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, which analyses the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy which emerged in colonial Brazil, for its dialoguing with the ancient poetic tradition. She has published articles on topics ranging from religious language in Augustan poetry to the legacy of Virgil in Portuguese epic and Brazilian poetry. She held the Andrew Heiskell/Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize in Ancient Studies at the American Academy of Rome in 2021–2022 and a Loeb Prize Fellowship in 2024–2025. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception. The appearance of Fama in The Lusiads is of tremendous importance for cementing her status as a fixture of Lusophone epic and for coining a Portuguese lexicon for her representation, but it is by no means the end of her story. This article seeks to identify a topos of receptive engagement here termed ‘aggregative reception’ through a case study of the appearances of Fama, the divine personification of ‘rumour’, in five Portuguese epics published over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, each one interesting in its own right for its unique contribution to an expansive vision of Virgil’s monstrous figure: Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s Ulisseia, ou Lisboa Edificada (1636), António Sousa de Macedo’s Ulyssippo, Poema Heróico (1640), Miguel Mauricio Ramalho’s Lisboa Reedificada (1780), Vicente Carlos de Oliveira’s Lisboa Restaurada (1784), and Teodoro de Almeida’s Lisboa Destruída, Poema (1803). By reading the appearances of Fama in Portuguese epic together as not competing, but rather complementary, diffused across texts, aggregative reception offers a framework for reading receptions sympathetically by accommodating, and even encouraging, a diachronic consideration of the afterlife of a topos with its contextualization in a literary longue durée. The consideration of her appearances as cooperative allows for apparent inconsistencies to present opportunities for increasing complexity.

The apparent incongruity between a transcendent Creator and seemingly trivial divine commands presents a challenge for religion, raising the risk of either misrepresenting Gods nature or rendering the commands meaningless. This paper starts by examining how conventional frameworks, such as rationalist theism and projectionist psychology, either domesticate divine transcendence or reduce orders to human fabrication, failing to avoid these errors. Then, it argues that an apophatic linguistic analysis, grounded on contemporary theories of metaphor and semantic underdetermination, offers a reconciling model based on Thomas Aquinas's triplex via and more effectively illuminates the inherent limitations and function of religious language. This method reinterprets some commands as floating signifiers whose meaning is operationalized in practical contexts. Lastly, it examines the implications of this apophatic-reconciliatory framework, showing how it reframes the human struggle against finitude as the lived site of encounter with the divine, grounds obedience in Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, and converts the paradox of scale into a pedagogy of relational trust.

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 research is motivated by the importance of preserving cultural values in the Mangupa-upa tradition of the Mandailing Batak people, which has religious, social, and moral significance. The problem addressed in this research is how Mandailing cultural values are reflected in the Mangupa-upa tradition. The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze the cultural values in the Mangupa-upa ceremony in relation to Koentjaraningrat's cultural elements theory. This research uses a descriptive qualitative approach with observation, documentation, and literature study techniques on the implementation of Mangupa-upa. The results of the research indicate that the Mangupa-upa tradition encompasses five cultural elements: the religious system, social organization, knowledge system, language, and arts.

Citizenship, Recognition and belongings: An insight from Karen's lived experiences in Myanmar

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in large language models, have intensified debates about machine understanding, interpretation, and meaning. In religious contexts, these debates acquire particular philosophical urgency: can artificial intelligence meaningfully “understand” religious texts, rituals, and symbols, or does its competence remain confined to formal linguistic and statistical operations? Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics and the philosophy of religious language, this article argues that AI’s apparent interpretive capacities do not amount to genuine religious understanding. Religious meaning is not reducible to semantic coherence or predictive accuracy; it presupposes existential involvement, symbolic participation, and openness to transcendence. By examining religious texts, symbolic language, and ritual practices, the paper delineates the cognitive and ontological boundaries of AI with respect to religion. It concludes that while AI can function as a powerful auxiliary tool in religious studies, it cannot replace the interpretive subject nor access the dimension of meaning constitutive of religious understanding.

In June 2023, veteran Nigerian gospel musician Tope Alabi, came under fierce public scrutiny for using expressions associated with the Yoruba traditional religion and worship of orishas (deities) in her Christian music. The particular expression that many took offence to was her utterance of “Aboru Aboye”, an expression of greeting particularly associated with the worshippers and followers of the Yoruba traditional religion of Ifa. This paper investigates the ensuing controversy, employing Speech Act Theory. Through a thematic analysis of online reactions, the study explores the perlocutionary effects of linguistic choices of Tope Alabi on her audience, many of whom regarded her utterance as taboo. Also, reactions of commentators vary from outright denouncement to full embrace of the utterance as a valid expression of cultural identity and artistic freedom. By examining the diverse responses to music of Alabi, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding cultural appropriation and the nature of religious language in a multicultural context.

This article examines how President Joko Widodo’s political communication model responded to and managed religious sentiment during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. Employing a descriptive qualitative approach, the study analyzes selected posts from President Jokowi’s official Instagram account using Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis framework, which emphasizes the dimensions of text, discursive practice, and social practice. The findings reveal that the intersection of politics and religion in the context of pandemic governance generated significant resistance from segments of religious communities, manifested in distrust of Covid-19 information, vaccine rejection, conspiracy narratives, and opposition to burial procedures following health protocols. In response, the Jokowi administration strategically incorporated religious language, symbols, and institutional religious authority, such as references to the Indonesian Ulama Council and the notion of halal vaccines, into its communication strategy. This approach sought to align public health policies with dominant religious values in Indonesian society. The study demonstrates that religious discourse functioned as an instrument of symbolic power to stabilize public opinion and increase compliance with state policies. Contributes to political communication scholarship by showing how religious instrumentalization can function as a pragmatic crisis communication strategy in a democratic yet highly faith-oriented society.