Religious Sense Research Articles

Multifunctional Role of Tamil Material Catholicism

Abstract This comparative study explores the significance of Catholic material religion of the Tamils in India and Malaysia in the celebration of Our Lady of Vēlānkaṉṉi feast which involves a complex interplay of materiality, religious beliefs, and embodied practices. Employing Plate and Bruland’s understandings of material religion, and based on ethnographic study, this essay seeks to unravel the power of material objects and embodied practices to replicate sacred spaces in new locales and to deliver the pilgrims new experiences of religious sensibilities and personal fulfilment in the sphere of divine and human relations. The findings reveal that material religion functions as a tangible, religious and nostalgic link to the original shrine of Vēlānkaṉṉi and as a symbol of filial piety to the motherhood of Mary for the Tamil community in both sites. This paper highlights the role of material Catholicism in fostering Marian devotion and in shaping and displaying people’s personal, religious and cultural identity.

Зло как категория современного политического мышления

The article attempts to analyze the understanding of evil both in contemporary political discourse and in everyday word usage. For this purpose, it is proposed to revisit the problem of theodicy, since evil is almost always used in a religious sense. The article distinguishes between the process of secularization, as a result of which the omnipotence of God becomes the property and instrument of political power, and the deconstruction of Christianity, which allows us to move from political theology to secular theodicy, where our ability to think and recognize evil in the world, rather than the problem of God's justification, comes to the fore. The author argues that this is impossible within the framework of political theology, where political evil always conceals and justifies itself. This is the fate of all theodicies, which Kant calls “doctrinal,” in which reason, making a claim against god (or transcendence) is always able to justify it. Kant considers the Book of Job to be the only “authentic” theodicy in which it is suffering itself, or Job's conscience, immanent to the world, that sues god. This is an important step in the direction of secular theodicy, but it is also limited in its desire to be subsumed by deity or authority. The paper suggests that we should pay attention to Job's wife's call to her husband to “curse the Lord and die.” These words become the origin of an alternative theodicy – a theodicy of action, a theodicy of the victim refusing to speak to god. The author finds the beginnings of such a theodicy in Jules Michelet's historical analysis of the religious massacres of witches, where the latter appear as victims, as well as in Jean Amery's analysis of torture and his idea of the rehabilitation of the ressentiment. The line of rebellion leading from the words of Job's wife to the unprecedented forms of violence of power provoked by the fear of this rebellion leads to the understanding of evil not as religious (opposing good), but as a political phenomenon of the modern world, manifested in excessive violence against the powerless victim.

Burning Affair

In this introduction we want to bring attention to and provide a contextualization and analysis of the last years burning of the Quran that have taken place and still takes place in the Nordic and Scandinavian context. Whilst many countries around the world still have blasphemy laws or laws against religious hatred that protect “religion” (however defined), or religious sensibilities from being desecrated or mocked, most Western countries, including Sweden, Denmark and Norway have removed blasphemy laws and made it possible to offer critique of religion, including the right to criticize religious texts. While this special issue primarily discusses the contemporary practice of public rituals where a physical copy of the Quran is burnt, we argue that understanding why this practice has become so widespread in the Nordic region requires a historical awareness of how blasphemy, as well as freedom of religion and freedom of expression have been understood and practiced in this very specific cultural and political environment of the far corners of Europe. Besides providing a historical background, the introduction includes an overview to how Muslims have discussed how to handle copies of the Quran that have been worn-out and why the intention is important for understanding the controversy around the burning of the Quran.

Religious Soundscape, Sacred Space, and Affective Body: The Experience of Sufi Whirling Ritual Practitioners in Java

This article explores the experience of cultivating religious senses and sensibilities through ritual Sufi dance. In contemporary Indonesia, Sufi dance serves both as a performance and a ritual. As a performance, it is staged at specific events; as a ritual, it acts as a religious practice, engaging the body and fostering a connection with God to experience spiritual ecstasy. Employing a phenomenological approach, the research data were gathered through interviews, participant observation, and social media. This article focuses on the Tari Sufi Mafia Sholawat group, the predominant Sufi dance community in Java, and illustrates how sound and listening during Sufi dance rituals significantly nurture and enhance religious sensibility and the affective body. Furthermore, it identifies various sounds present in the Sufi dance performance that resonate with listeners’ senses and sensibilities. These sounds evoke a range of bodily actions and emotional responses from the performers, such as hand movements, closed eyes, weeping, and screaming. The dancers perform these movements within a sacred space, thereby amplifying their spiritual impact.

Street Evangelists and Transgender Saints

Abstract This article historicizes the religious fervor of the 1969 Stonewall riots—multiple direct actions against the anti-Black and homo- and transphobic NYPD and white-owned bars in Greenwich Village—by examining the political organizing of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, cofounders of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. This article queries and queers the field’s preoccupation with the cisgender and heterosexual regarding religious affiliation and the formation of liberation theologies, and probes at the heart of Johnson’s and Rivera’s critical absences in religious studies on the one hand, and the critical absence of their religious sensibilities in narrations of queer and trans politics on the other.

Integration of religious beliefs and faith-based resources in domestic violence services to migrant and ethnic minority communities: A scoping review

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is a problem that cuts across borders and communities. There is an urgency for domestic violence service providers in multicultural societies like the United Kingdom (UK) to adapt to the diverse backgrounds of victims, survivors and perpetrators to design and provide appropriate support services and interventions. Religious beliefs are an integral part of many people’s lives and identities, while religious mediators often serve as a first point of reference for victimized parties to turn to, with both positive and negative impacts. It is currently unclear to what extent religious sensibilities are being addressed in DVA services, or how best to engage with religious beliefs and faith-based resources effectively. Recognizing this, we conducted a scoping review to identify existing approaches and practices for integrating religious beliefs and faith-based resources in domestic violence services. The review that had an international scope was conducted in English and included 30 publications. The synthesis of the evidence pointed to numerous approaches and efforts in integrating religious beliefs and faith-based resources in DVA services, differences and tensions in generalist and community-based responses, and the need for various measures in DVA services to cater to multicultural populations.

The Paradoxes of Sin: Vengeance as Death Drive in Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre

Abstract If revenge functions to compensate for inequity arising from an initial transgression, thereby restoring equity, can we speak of restoration of an equitable social or personal situation in Janet Lewis’s novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)? This work belongs to Janet Lewis’s series of three novels based on “Cases of Circumstantial Evidence”, of which The Wife of Martin Guerre is the most famous. It concerns the case of Martin Guerre, the sixteenth-century French peasant who apparently returned home to his wife after a long absence but was later revealed to be an impostor. The wife at first believes that the impostor is indeed her husband, then starts to have doubts, gathers information to contest his assertions, develops an exaggerated religious sense of guilt for the sin of adultery, and successfully sues him, leading to his being hanged. Several questions arise: is she justified in feeling guilty for having given in to sexual attraction, thus blinding herself to the available clues pointing to the impostor’s deception? Can the outcome be considered an equitable result, despite the fact that the false Martin Guerre was actually a good administrator, dealing fairly both with his subjects and his wife, and thus created a much more harmonious life for everybody than the lawful husband had done? I consider the story as a case of revenge stemming from an incorrect religious perspective, or alternatively narcissistic damage, which does not bring about redress of a tort, but rather social unhappiness.

Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

Awaken the Awareness of Transcendence: New Strategies for Catholic Schools in the Netherlands to Deal with Secularization

Secularization poses serious challenges for religiously affiliated schools. Catholic schools in the Netherlands find themselves embarrassed regarding their educational endeavor because they are unable or lack the inspiration to talk about this subject in religious terms. This article aims to explore new ways of overcoming this embarrassment. Firstly, an overview is presented of the current situa­tion and of the embarrassment of Catholic schools, in terms of their problematic choice of actions. Based on a critical-dialogical convergence of theological and pedagogical considerations, a Catholic vi­sion on the educational endeavor is subsequently developed that is understood in terms of interrup­tion, the other, and transcendence. From this vision of the educational endeavor, new strategies are presented – at the community level of Catholic schools, and at the individual level of teachers, school leaders, and governors – to promote an openness to receiving new, unexpected insights and possibili­ties. The receipt of these insights and possibilities is closely related to an awareness of transcendence, in both a secular and a religious sense. The initial findings of recent empirical research on the impact of these strategies are presented.

Catholic Democrats and Comunione e Liberazione: Different Perspectives on Faith after the Second World War

Abstract: In the period following World War II, the Catholic world in Italy was veined with different religious sensibilities and differing opinions on the thought of Maritain and the Second Vatican Council. This essay aims to analyze the experience of Azione Cattolica (AC), which, from the fifties onward in Milan, had to come to terms with the affirmation of the Gioventù Studentesca (GS) movement, founded by Don Luigi Giussani. The latter was an organization that considered educational) communities the primary sites for coming into contact with Jesus and judged the work of evangelization carried out by the parishes to be ineffective. Contrary to Maritain's distinction between the actions of a person "as a Christian," consisting in obedience to the rites and dogmas of the Church, implying acknowledgement of an independent area for lay organizations and an omincomprehensive vision of religion, GS (which, from 1970 onward took the name of Comunione e Liberazione [CL]), criticized those Catholics who, in the wake of the new inspiration coming from the Council, supported "mediation" with the modern world. These differences in viewpoint were to lead to disagreements with church policy and even polemics.

Squatted Sacred Spaces: A Left-Radical Political Theology of Hamburg’s Rote Flora

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes Hamburg’s (in)famous squatted Rote Flora to argue that Left-radical squats can be fruitfully read as “sacred spaces.” It uses political theology vis-à-vis sacredness to understand fringe Left-radical subjects, and elucidates their purity concerns of space and political subjectivity. To this end, the paper adapts Bataille’s “left-sacred to the left-radical subject concerned with purity in the sense of being” “unassimilable” or “holy and set apart” from society. This occurs via maintaining a space that is “non-negotiable” to profane societal values, rather than in any deity-oriented or classical religious sense. Within this reading, these heterogeneous spaces must be maintained and kept “pure” of homogeneous profane (capitalist) influences. The paper analyzes these purity concerns via three manifestations: (1) the squat’s spatial purity from profane societal contamination or influence; (2) language and the fear of discursive integration through contracts; (3) the formation and reification of the pure, ascetic identity.

Exploring the Interplay of Faith and Experience: Religious Sensibility in Kamala Das’s Poetry

The key elements in the discussed text revolve around religious sensibility, faith, and experience, particularly within the context of Kamala Das's writings. The exploration into Das's works highlights the intricate interrelationship between faith and experience, portraying a dynamic journey where faith both emerges from and shapes the self. The nuanced depiction of religious sensibility underscores the complexity of this relationship. Kamala Das's narratives, spanning childhood encounters with deities to introspective moments of ecstasy, provide a multifaceted examination of these themes. The convergence of religious awareness, personal experiences, and transformative faith contributes to the richness of Das's literary legacy, offering readers profound insights into the complexities of spirituality and self-awareness.

Bringing Back the Old Religiosity: Interfaith Cosmopolitan Civil Religion (ICCR)

Abstract Highlighting the transformed landscape of political communities in the twenty-first century, I reexamine the discourse of civil religion (DCR). Widely recognized in religious studies and notably in American history, this concept reveals a subtle yet intricately functional framework of community consciousness within political entities. This article posits that the prevalent interpretation of civil religion, and its application across diverse contexts, falls short of effectively reflecting and utilizing the essence identified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robert Bellah—classical and modern architects of civil religion, respectively. Many discussions of DCR often disregard the role of the traditional sense of religion and religiousness. Instead, they fixate on superficial symbols and rituals associated with secular institutional bodies and communities. In this article, I contend that reintegrating the ordinary sense of religion into the discourse is crucial for envisioning and constructing a new community consciousness capable of adeptly responding to the burgeoning demands of our highly multicultural world. Following the conceptual roadmap of civil religion, which seeks transcendent, sacred, and unifying narratives, symbols, and rituals, I introduce a new model termed Interfaith, Cosmopolitan Civil Religion (ICCR). Within this model, ordinary religious agents, through interfaith engagement, assume positive roles in nurturing a broader sense of community and unity.

Ideology of Sarmatism and its Implementation in Polish Piano Music of the XIX – XX Centuries

The purpose of the study is to identify the genre-stylistic specificity of the reproduction of the spiritual and ethical instructions of Sarmatism in Polish piano music of the XIX-XX centuries. The research methodology is based on the application of the following approaches: genre-stylistic, etymological, interdisciplinary, historical-cultural, which reveal the peculiarities of the reproduction of Sarmatian ideology in Polish piano music of the specified period. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by its analytical perspective, which takes into account the peculiarities of the reproduction of the Polish "Sarmatian" image of the world Polish piano (dance) music of the XIX-XX centuries. Conclusions. The Polish national "image of the world", which was historically formed on the basis of the noble ("Sarmatian") spiritual and ethical tradition, formed in the heyday of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and appealed to such dominant qualities as pride, honour, knightly service, honouring the merits of the family, family patriarchal values and traditions in their high spiritual and religious sense, in many ways determined the specifics of Polish culture and the genre and style preferences of its musical art, focused on revealing the special significance of the song and dance tradition in its salon representation. The poetics of polonaise, mazurka, Krakowiak, thought and other genres related to it, corresponding to the spiritual and patriarchal traditions of Biedermeier in its Polish guise (“Warsaw Biedermeier”, “noble Biedermeier”), also determined the historical and evolutionary paths of development of Polish piano music of the 19th and early 20th centuries (F. Chopin, Z. Noskovskyi, V. Malyshevskyi, M. Karlovych, M. Zavadskyi, K. Szymanovskyi, L. Rogovskyi, A. Panufnik) and reproduction of the national "noble-Sarmatian" quality in it. Keywords: Sarmatism, Polish culture and music, noble Biedermeier, polonaise, mazurka, kujaviak, krakowiak.

RÉGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE: THE POLEMIC AGAINST HENRI BERGSON AND MAURICE BLONDEL

Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The research is based on the analysis of some works by GarrigouLagrange himself and treatises by the philosophical opponents of the prominent Dominican priest, as well as on the in-depth study of the researches made by following thinkers and scholars: É. Gilson, G. McCool, F. Kerr, R. Peddicord, J. Kirwan, and M. Minerd. The research objective. The main goal of the article is to highlight the polemical philosophical moves of GarrigouLagrange, as well as to emphasize the role of Aquinas’s synthesis as a highly effective and irremovable theoretical framework for dismantling metaphysically weak philosophical programs. The statement of basic materials. H. Bergson did not associate himself with the Church at all, and M. Blondel was a sincere and devout Catholic, but both of them barely knew enough about the basic essentials of the Thomist tradition. For Bergson the concepts of discursive intelligence were not related to being; their function was merely practical. Instead, Blondel’s philosophy was formed in a pushback from (1) post-Kantian idealism with its highly radical anti-metaphysicalism and skepticism concerning the human possibility of knowing external, extramental entities (“things in themselves”), as well as (2) from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s pessimism about the capacity of the speculative mind to know God and his emphasis on the fundamental importance of subjective religious sensibility.

Ways of Loving God: A New Religious Sensibility in Enlightened Portugal. Censoring the Correspondence of Soror Joana do Louriçal (1779)


 When, in 1779, the nuns of the convent of Louriçal addressed to the Real Mesa Censória a request to print the sixty-two letters that the Poor Clare nun Joana do Louriçal had written to her confessor, they might not have expected their project to be frustrated. Among the problems pointed out, gender bias and a new religious sensibility are among the most striking: bloody penance provokes horror, stigmata arouse mistrust and are considered not suitable for a woman. Furthermore, some aspects of the relation between the nun and her confessor are subject to scandal. I will argue that the political context had changed and with it religious and aesthetic sensibility too. From 1750, an «enlightened» king, D. José I, reigned. Devotion now has to be «regulated», not only in terms of what is heterodoxy, but also in terms of its verbal expression and of another sensibility it conveys.

Eksplorasi Guru Pendidikan Agama Islam dalam Menanamkan Karakter Islami di SMP Muhammadiyah 4 Surabaya

This writing is presenting about the Pendidikan Agama Islam (PAI) class for the pupils. One of the most crucial pillars of character education is Pendidikan Agama Islam (PAI). The development of students' religious sense will be the foundation for a strong character education program; as a result, the PAI lesson serves as a supporting lesson for character education. Through the teaching and learning of PAI, students are taught the importance of believing in God as the cornerstone of their faith, the quran and hadith as their way of life, fiqh as a code of law when studying Islam, the history of Islam as a moral example, and ethics as the standard of human behavior.

Belief in Faith Healing and HbA1c: Exploring the Mediating Role of Meaning in Life

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between belief in divine healing and HbA1c (a biomarker of blood glucose control). Three major findings emerged from our analysis of data from a nationwide survey. First, a set of descriptive analyses suggest that faith healing beliefs are not the sole province of Conservative Christians. Instead, belief in divine healing is more widely spread in the general population. Second, our analyses indicate there is a nonlinear relationship between belief in divine healing and HbA1c values: HbA1c scores are relatively high (i.e., less desirable) among study participants with low levels of belief in faith healing. However, levels of HbA1c are lower among study participants with a stronger belief in the divine. Third, our analyses further indicate that a religious sense of meaning in life, but not a general sense of meaning, mediates the relationship between belief in faith healing and HbA1c values.

The Identity of Fate and the Identity of Choice: Between the Routine of Continuation and the Ordinariness of Rejection

Culture and religion still interrelate with one another. The presence of religious values in social life depends, above all, on the processes of constructing cultural identities in the course of socialization and education, which warrant the experience of the ontological realness of the social world. In the encyclical Veritatis splendor, John Paul II highlights the issue of culture, whose essence is “the moral sense, and which is in turn rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense.”[1] However, in the contemporary culture, there are strong tendencies to separate truth from freedom and faith from morality. As a result, “the moral sense” becomes dissociated from “the religious sense.”
 In this article, I introduce the category of fate which emphasizes reproducibility, the inter-generational reproduction of patterns of religious stances and practices, confessional affiliations on the level of obviousness of the profiles of social personality, and the natural character of the structures of the social world in which Christianity is “like the air” we breathe, indispensable to preserve our existence.
 In opposition to the culture of fate there is the culture of choice, described with the category of prefiguration which sets our imagination free from the obligatory character of the cultural and religious model of the past. The problem hinted at in the title of this article, is illustrated by the results of sociological research, which demonstrates attitudes of selective acceptance/rejection of the Decalogue and which becomes “the inverse Decalogue”,as such fitting into the liquid reality. Its sign is the imperative of choice which contributes to the deconstruction of the axiological invariants which are the basis of Christian civilization.

The Benefits of Music in Teaching Catholic Religious Education in Croatia

Music viewed from the real praxis could trigger positive religious emotions as the path of beauty in those searching for the meaning of life or the higher one in God. The article aims to encourage interdisciplinarity in teaching Catholic RE in Croatia, presenting many benefits of music and examples of positive practices that music can encourage in students. The main purpose of this paper, after recognizing the needs and difficulties of interdisciplinary teaching primarily for teachers in Croatia, is to create a model of implementing music content efficiently in Catholic religious education (RE) in Croatia. The research finds the necessity to unite experts from three fields to make interdisciplinary teaching efficient and progressively constructive: religious education pedagogy and music pedagogy combined with music practice itself through professional conductors. Nevertheless, the text seeks to expose an easily applicable model that leads to efficient and progressive interdisciplinary teaching, which is also the main aim of the work. The research is significant as this model could be examined in different subject areas, highlighting that singing in class could encourage religious sensibility and help improve spiritual and religious competencies. The research findings showed that the advantages and specifics of choral singing could be integrated into the religious education curriculum, making RE more dynamic and challenging for students. The research is based on a literature review, a data analysis, as well as participant observation (teacher and conductor) as methods to prove advantages and possibilities of how to implement music into the RE curriculum.