Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Ninth Day (2004) presents for cultural remembrance a story loosely based on Father Jean Bernard’s short furlough from the Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War, as told in his memoir Priestblock 25487. The film functions as a distinctive site of memory that reveals the demands of faith from the National Socialist and the Christian perspectives. The filmmakers portray the faith and courage of Kremer as he confronts the Nazi temptations to undermine his faith and the church. But more importantly, they reveal the importance of his sacramental imagination in cultivating an eternal perspective of the ordinary that enables him to be an agent of God’s grace and to acknowledge the dignity of all. This sacramental imagination enables Kremer to perceive the evils of National Socialism in ways many Christians in the film do not. The article examines how Kremer confronted the absurdity of the Nazi system, engaged with Nazi temptations of betrayal, cultivated the sacramental imagination to strengthen his resolve, and finally confronted his tempter in a sacramental move. Father Kremer prepared his soul to say “no” to the Nazi temptation, cultivating truly saintly character and courage—a model of Christian faith for modern audiences.
Taking inspiration from the pioneering work of Ellen F. Davis, especially her Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, this article will offer an agrarian reading of the book of Micah, focusing upon Mic 2:1–5, 3:1–12; 4:1–5, and 6:8. The 8th century BCE core of Micah, especially chapters 2 and 3, levels a stinging critique of Judean royal policy (supported by a corrupt religious establishment) that resulted in the loss of land and livelihood by farmers and farm families. Micah called for justice, and he warned that the absence of justice would lead to harsh consequences (see especially 3:12). But the major transition at 4:1 suggests that judgment will not be the final word; and 4:1–5 presents, in distinctly agrarian terms, a transformed future where all are fed, as divine justice intends (see Psalm 72). The final section of the article suggests that our contemporary situation involves realities not unlike those faced by Micah and the other 8th century BCE prophets. The juxtaposition of prophetic critique and the vision of a transformed future conforms to Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the Hebrew Prophets in his The Prophetic Imagination.
The cultic practices of ancient Israel, specifically with respect to ritual eating and sex, serve jointly as a unifying motif for 1 Corinthians 8–11. Eating and sexual intercourse are viewed as sacred acts because of their generative capacity. Sex and food were highly regulated in ancient Israel, yet eating was an essential part of Israelite ritual, while sex was forbidden. Paul’s discussion of various issues in 1 Corinthians 8–11 is linked in his discourse by the common thread of the generative and communicative power of food and sex.
Walter Brueggemann’s work on the Hebrew Bible prophets generally and on the book of Hosea specifically focused on rhetoric, metaphor, and imagination. His emphases on the role of prophetic metaphor in the construction of views of God and on the debate over contested communal identity provide the starting point for this essay. I place these insights into dialogue with emerging work on trauma hermeneutics and Hosea, especially the concept of communal trauma. The imaginative power of Hosea’s rhetoric and metaphors comes into new perspective when seen within the struggle for theological identity and defining practices that follows experiences of communal trauma like the emergence of expanding Neo-Assyrian imperialism assumed by the book’s literary setting.
In the history of Chinese Buddhist translation, Xuanzang has conventionally been associated with a “new translation” style, indicating a departure from earlier “old” translations. This study reconsiders the nature of this “newness” through a corpus-based comparison of Xuanzang’s translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra with two earlier versions by Kumārajīva and Zhi Qian. The analysis reveals greater textual continuity between Xuanzang and Kumārajīva, with a higher LCS retention rate (61.68%) than that between Zhi Qian and Kumārajīva (48.71%). A symmetric LCS check preserves the direction of this result but substantially narrows the contrast. That said, textual continuity should not be equated with direct borrowing. Xuanzang often reworked inherited formulations through expansion and lexical revision, producing a translation marked by greater semantic and conceptual precision. This study argues that Xuanzang’s translation strategies were jointly shaped by target cultural norms, ideological and textual contexts, and his own translation poetics. The “newness” of his translation thus lay less in a complete break with earlier versions than in the selective preservation, expansion, and reconfiguration of inherited textual resources.
Walter Brueggemann’s account of prophetic imagination has illuminated how Israel’s prophets contest dominant cultural assumptions by evoking an alternative consciousness. This essay explores the dynamics behind the prophet’s capacity to perceive and proclaim such an alternative. Through close readings of Zechariah’s first two night visions (Zech 1:7–21), informed by form-critical study of symbolic vision, research on the interpreting-angel motif, and Israel’s priestly and holiness traditions, the essay examines revelation as a pedagogy of perception. The first vision exposes Persian imperial tranquility as a theological stasis by opening Zechariah’s sight to heavenly reconnaissance and God’s renewed movement toward Zion. The second reactivates the covenantal symbolism of altar horns and artisans, disclosing political violence, accumulated impurity, and divine restoration within a cosmic frame. The interpreting angel does not merely decode obscure imagery but guides the prophet more deeply into the vision, while Israel’s inherited temple iconography supplies the symbolic grammar through which its meaning becomes perceptible. I conclude that prophetic imagination is not primarily a creative invention or the communication of new information. It is covenant memory becoming climactic and eschatological through the re-education of perception, enabling the prophet and community to align local practices with God’s larger work of cosmic renewal.
Building on Juan Linz’s well-known distinction between political religion and politicized religion, this contribution adopts the latter perspective, which involves the instrumentalization of religion for political purposes. Within this framework, the article advances the hypothesis that a new form of religiosity is emerging from the communicative practices of certain conservative right-wing and far-right party formations. Their narratives display a strong appeal to religious values by evoking forms of identification and belonging that are largely detached from lived religious practice. Drawing on three corpora comprising electoral programs, political discourses, and interview excerpts from Fratelli d’Italia (Italy), Alternative für Deutschland (Germany), and Vox (Spain), the analysis combines a keyword-in-context approach with qualitative content analysis. The resulting communicative frame is composed of terms and concepts that function as symbolic realities similar to those of traditional religion, such as religion itself, the family, and the homeland, which are rearticulated within fully secularized contexts. This symbolic and narrative reactivation of such elements not only constitutes a strategic use of religious references but also points to the emergence of a distinctively political form of religiosity, which operates both as a stimulus for electoral behavior and as a cohesive force for highly identity-oriented party communities.
AI-mediated forms of guruship are proliferating across South Asia and beyond, yet they have scarcely begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. This article takes their emergence as an occasion to revisit the conceptual vocabulary through which guruship has been understood, asking what becomes of ‘guru logics’ after artificial intelligence. AI gurus are not merely technological curiosities; nor are they straightforward successors to human gurus. This article treats them as analytic provocations through which longstanding conceptions of guruship can themselves be reconsidered. Guru studies had already been grappling with many of the problems that AI now makes newly conspicuous: imitation and performativity; presence in absence; distributed and non-human personhood; the mediation of charisma; embodiment and its displacement; succession and charismatic continuity. AI therefore strains an existing conceptual repertoire while also showing what it can still do. The article develops the notions of ‘code-born syncretism’ and ‘ambient guruship’, alongside ‘Transhuman Guru Worlding’ and ‘guru cosmoi’, to explore what happens when the guru becomes generative and responsive. ‘Doctrine by interface’ further draws attention to the ways theological possibilities are shaped through the design and affordances of AI systems, while ‘simulation as method’ considers what experimental encounters with such systems might contribute to the ethnographic study of guruship. These concepts are developed through discussions of devotional recombination, embodiment, programmed continuity of the guru after death or exile, and the political economies within which AI gurus are made and encountered. The article takes up histories in which the guru has already exceeded the bounded human body, becoming distributed through multiple material and mediated forms, and examines how generative interaction and recombination rework these inherited guru logics, while letting these forms scale and personalise in novel ways. What emerges is therefore neither unprecedented rupture nor straightforward continuity, but a recursive transformation of existing forms of guruship through computational mediation. The article offers a conceptual framework and analytic repertoire for an emerging field of ethnographic inquiry rather than a completed ethnography of AI guruship. Its larger proposition is that AI gurus matter for more than what they might tell us about religion in an age of artificial intelligence. They also provide an unusual vantage point from which to return to the conceptual problems that have long animated guru studies and to ask what artificial intelligence allows us to see differently about guruship itself.
This article offers a thematic classification of traditions attributed to the Companions (ṣaḥāba), the Successors (tābiʿūn), and early Islamic scholars and rulers concerning ring engravings, situating these inscriptions within the framework of aniconism in early Islamic culture. It should be stressed at the outset that the evidence examined here consists of later hadith compilations and ṭabaqāt (biographical) works rather than dated artefacts; the study therefore analyses how the Companions, Successors, and early authorities were remembered and portrayed within a textual tradition committed to writing in subsequent generations, not the objective material history of the earliest Muslim community. The study argues that such engravings were not merely expressions of individual preference, but rather constituted a cultural practice shaped by the aesthetic constraints generated by hadith literature’s cautious stance toward figural representation, a practice that became a shared, collective idiom. The inscriptions are examined under four thematic headings: religious expressions, reminders of death and the transience of worldly life, inscriptions conveying identity and moral counsel, and figural symbols. The expressions and symbols found on rings are then subjected to a sociological reading drawing on the concepts of collective memory, symbolic capital, and productive constraint, within the paradigm of material religion. The findings indicate that figural motifs were at least partially present in the early period, and that written inscriptions subsequently came to occupy a dominant position. This transformation demonstrates that the aniconism in hadith did not merely suppress visual imagery, but functioned as the generative force behind a distinctive symbolic idiom centered on the letter and the word. Furthermore, drawing on Birgit Meyer’s notion of sensational forms, it argues that the ring bound the sacred to sensory experience through legally regulated matter: the prophetic preference for silver over gold, copper, and iron; the Abyssinian stone; the turning of the bezel toward the palm; and the pressure of the seal into clay. Aniconism thus operated not only as a rule about images but as a regime governing the material, tactile, and even olfactory life of a wearable object. While scholarship on Islamic aniconism has focused primarily on monumental art, architecture, and manuscript illustration, this study redirects attention to ring inscriptions as an underexplored domain of material culture, showing that ring inscriptions, though largely overlooked, are informative witnesses to Islamic culture and theology at the most intimate scale of everyday devotional and political life.
The journal retracts the article titled “Loving Sorcery (Hechiceria) in the Andes of the 18th Century” (Culleton 2026), cited above [...]
The Chinese binome zhiguan 止觀 is conventionally associated with śamatha-vipaśyanā. In Chinese breath-meditation texts, however, it also refers to fixing the mind and observing the breath. Related Indic materials use sthāna/sthāpanā and upalakṣaṇā for comparable functions, although precise source terms cannot always be established. Here “translation-induced polysemy” denotes the accumulation of related translation-based associations in one Chinese expression. The native range of zhi—“to cease” and “to abide”—facilitated their overlap; the Chengshi lun’s equation of zhiguan with dinghui was a later exegetical reclassification. This article traces these developments through early Chinese meditation texts, the Chengshi lun, and the Chengshi lun yiji preserved in Haneda 182. Comparison with the Kongō-ji Anban shouyi jing and an Aṅguttara Nikāya parallel shows how “zhi means concentration, guan means wisdom” recast a procedural pair as a hierarchy of temporary suppression and definitive eradication. Haneda 182 foregrounds the treatise’s emptiness discourse in practical glosses and correlates zhiguan with scholastic path categories. This manuscript-level operation is consistent with, but does not independently establish, broader reconstructions of Mahāyāna reframing. The commentary’s uncertain date precludes a demonstrated genealogy with Zhiyi. Comparison with the Xiao zhiguan makes a Chengshi precedent plausible but nonexclusive, indicating selective convergence rather than Chengshi affiliation or direct transmission. These materials show how translation-induced polysemy supported divergent medieval accounts of meditation and liberation.
Prior to the twentieth century, Chinese academia lacked the modern concept of “religion” [...]
Background: Census data in Hungary indicate a substantial decline in declared religious affiliation, with Christian identification falling from 74.4% in 2001 to 42.5% in 2022, underscoring the need for culturally validated measures of religious faith. Methods: This study examined the psychometric properties of the Hungarian versions of the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire (SCSORF-10) and its 5-item short form (SCSORF-5) in a cross-sectional online sample of 430 participants (Mage = 22.28, SD = 9.23). Results: Confirmatory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure for both scales, with acceptable support when considering the full pattern of indices, but with elevated RMSEA as a limitation. All models were estimated with the mean- and variance-adjusted weighted least squares estimator (WLSMV) on polychoric correlations, under which fit improved markedly for the SCSORF-10 (CFI = 0.992, TLI = 0.989, SRMR = 0.040, RMSEA = 0.080). Modification indices identified a single interpretable residual covariance between the two explicitly devotional items, which did not alter the solution and was not retained. Measurement invariance across gender was tested with the sequence appropriate to ordered categorical indicators, and configural, threshold, threshold-and-loading, and strict invariance were all supported. Internal consistency was high (SCSORF-10: α = 0.95, ω = 0.95; SCSORF-5: α = 0.89, ω = 0.89). Convergent validity was demonstrated by strong associations with spiritual well-being, while correlations with self-esteem were weak, providing limited discriminant evidence against a conceptually distant construct. Conclusion: The short form showed psychometric properties closely comparable to the full scale; because its items are a subset of the full version, this correspondence is partly expected. Both instruments appear to be reliable and valid for assessing religious faith in Hungary. Known-group evidence was strong: scores separated self-described religious respondents from atheists (d = 1.37) and from believing-but-not-religious respondents (d = 1.17), and the religiosity category accounted for 27.5% of score variance, whereas scores were unrelated to gender and age.
This article maps research on artificial intelligence (AI) in Christian Religious Education (CRE) during the first phase of rapid development following the widespread adoption of generative AI. A scoping review was conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, the Open Digital Theological Library, and IxTheo, supplemented by Google Scholar. Included were full-text English-language publications from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2026 that addressed AI in Christian educational, catechetical, theological–educational, or formative contexts. The final corpus comprised 23 publications. Data were charted by publication type, geographical and educational context, main topic, and key claims or findings. The results show that the field is recent, methodologically heterogeneous, and not yet well consolidated, but that the emerging debate is organised around four inter-related strands: didactic potential and personalisation, ethical–technical limitations, anthropological–theological reflection, and systemic, institutional, and cultural–geographical conditions. The literature is marked by a tension between AI’s didactic potential and concerns regarding its ethical, theological, anthropological, and institutional implications. The review contributes a thematic synthesis that clarifies why AI integration in CRE requires not only educational innovation but also theologically informed, pedagogically mediated, and context-sensitive frameworks for religious formation. Significant gaps remain, including limited empirical and longitudinal research, insufficient attention to students’ and parents’ perspectives, cultural and linguistic contexts, and a lack of religion-specific, empirically tested didactic models. The review concludes that future research should move toward longitudinal, practice-based, and theologically grounded models for AI use in CRE.
Contemporary pastoral theology has increasingly absorbed the categories and methods of counseling psychology, yet this turn often leaves unexplained the theological ontology of the pastoral caregiver. This article develops a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between Pauline theology, counseling psychology, and the pastoral theology of Witness Lee (1905–1997), proposing an ontological-participatory account of Christian shepherding. After surveying the therapeutic turn and major psychology–Christianity integration models, the study examines Lee’s reading of Paul’s pastoral pattern—nursing mother, exhorting father, and slave of Christ—and his interpretation of “shepherding according to God” (κατὰ Θεόν) in 1 Peter 5:2 as participation in the life, nature, and shepherding activity of the Triune God. Building on Lee’s doctrine of practical deification—believers becoming “God in life, nature, expression, and function, but not in the Godhead”—this article argues that pastoral care is mediated through persons constituted with Christ who minister divine life through cherishing, nourishing, and mutual shepherding. Placed into dialogue with counseling psychology, this vision yields convergences in empathy, presence, and holistic care, alongside tensions concerning anthropology and the telos of human transformation. The article offers an ontological-participatory framework that situates the descriptive achievements of the human sciences within a richer Pauline vision of participation in the Triune God’s ongoing shepherding ministry.
It has become taboo for a parent today to say “no” to a child. Children grow in this “supposed” freedom and child rights, and then some assume an attitude of always having their own way, a character devoid of “home wisdom”, also called “common sense”. It is only their way that matters; others must bow to them. They become arrogant, proud, selfish, insensitive, irresponsible, and lack initiative; simply put, they mold themselves into “beasts”. It is only when this beast of a child turns on their parents that they realize something went wrong and needs to be corrected, which is often too late. This adage has already applied: “it is easier to bend a tender tree than an old one”. In this sacred text, Luke 15:11–32, a father displayed an attitude, which causes the mind to inquire why he consented. Why did the father allow the son to have his way, knowing quite well that the son’s reasoning was wrong? Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm of the day. In the text, the son returned, but today, many children are so consumed in pride, self-righteousness, and arrogance that even when confronted, they will not agree that they are wrong. Others, who realize their abject situation, fail to make amends for fear of being laughed at, which is pride, and they perish in the process. This paper uses narrative criticism within the context of African biblical hermeneutics to explore the reason behind the father’s attitude and the wisdom behind the son’s final acceptance of his situation that motivates him to return. These reasons, this paper hopes, will help serve as a remedy.
This essay theorizes Black prophetic soundwork as a rhetorical framework through which sonic Blackness operates prophetically—not merely as cultural expression or aesthetic resistance, but as a sacred technology of ancestral communion and communal transformation. Drawing on scholarship centered on sonic Blackness, African cosmological frameworks, and the Black prophetic tradition, the author argues that Black sound, music, and musical instruments function as prophetic vessels that transgress linear time, invoke ancestral presence, and contest the spiritual colonization enacted by white Christian hegemony. Through an analysis of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (2024) and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), the essay demonstrates how Black prophetic soundwork enacts two defining rhetorical moves: prophetic rupture, through which sound collapses colonial temporality and makes ancestral presence experientially real, and prophetic witness, through which sound contests white Christian hegemony and affirms African spiritual traditions as living, authoritative forms of Black agency. Ultimately, the author introduces Black prophetic soundwork as an original contribution to Black rhetorical theory that expands existing scholarship on Black prophetic rhetoric into the sonic domain, offering scholars a heuristic for examining how Black sonic practices function prophetically across diverse cultural contexts.
Augustine’s writings are characterized by his opposition to (primarily) three heretical and schismatic groups: the Manichaeans, the Donatists and the Pelagians (although De Haeresibus addresses a much greater range of heresies), as well as criticism of Jerome (within his own communion). This provides the opportunity to demonstrate that Augustine did not adopt a consistent approach towards different heretical groups. Starting with his determination of what constitutes a heretic in De Haeresibus, this article analyzes Augustine’s concept of the Church’s unity and the ecumenical approaches which he adopts towards certain heretical groups to preserve that unity. The article analyses a range of Augustine’s writings, including his correspondence with Jerome, considering the manner in which he engages with his religious opponents, the communication strategies which he adopts in order to further his agenda and how this functions against the background of Augustine’s view of ecclesiastical unity (particularly his understanding of the Church as the body of Christ). The article demonstrates Augustine’s ecumenical overtures to his opponents and his pursuit of “charitable correction” and how this relates to his attempts to employ religious coercion against them with support from the secular authorities, while also demonstrating how Augustine subjected himself to the type of rigorous self-examination which he demanded from his opponents.
Irving Greenberg (b. 1933), among the most influential American Jewish theologians responding to the Holocaust, consistently describes his theological approach as “postmodern”—emphasising the breakdown of absolutes, fragmentation, and the failure of modern certainties. This article argues that the label is misleading. Through a reading of Greenberg’s foundational concepts—the voluntary covenant, tzelem Elokim, the assumption of power, and tikkun olam—set against the conceptual apparatus of continental postmodernism and classical American pragmatism, we will show that Greenberg’s theological method and normative conclusions align far more closely with the pragmatist tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Where continental postmodernism tends toward deconstruction and the dissolution of normative claims, Greenberg’s thought exhibits characteristic pragmatist motifs: fallibilism without nihilism, pluralism without relativism, and a robust meliorism oriented toward world repair. His dictum that “pluralism is an absolutism that knows its limits” echoes William James’s pluralism rather than Derridean deconstruction, and his post-Holocaust ethic of power directly resists postmodern suspicion of agency. Reading Greenberg through the lens of American pragmatism offers a new perspective on post-Holocaust Jewish theology and clarifies how distinct intellectual traditions shape theological responses to catastrophe.
This article reconstructs the historical–theological genealogy linking the Second Vatican Council to the synodality promoted by Francis and continued by Leo XIV, through two fundamental mediations: the conciliar reception carried out at the Second General Conference of CELAM, held in Medellín in 1968, and the development of the Theology of the People within the Argentine Episcopal Conference. The central thesis holds that the contemporary origins of synodality—understood as a way of being Church rather than a management method—can be traced back to Vatican II and have taken on distinctive features in the Latin American pastoral and theological itinerary. The study employs two complementary methodological approaches: a genealogical historical–theological method for the first two sections, based on intertextual criticism of primary sources, and a theological-systematic method for the third, oriented toward analyzing the challenges of the synodal process in its dimensions of sensus fidei fidelium, decision-making, and structural conversion. The results show that the categories of the Theology of the People—people, culture, history, and popular piety—offer specific hermeneutical resources for articulating the participation of the faithful in ecclesial processes of discernment that inform decision-making within the Church, and that the Latin American tradition constitutes a contribution to the contemporary ecclesiological debate on synodality.
