This article argues that Jerusalem has always been virtual. In contrast to studies that associate virtual religion with modern technology, I construct a model of virtual Jerusalem that begins with biblical sources and takes new directions in the modern period, beginning with Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862). The article presents a model of virtual Jerusalem in dialogue with scholarship on the city and grounded in the work of Walter Benjamin. This account of virtual Jerusalem emerges through discussions of biblical texts, Hess, and the modern geographic and photographic histories of the city.
This study examines religious legitimacy during the reign of Caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (717–720) and compares this historical model with contemporary Muslim states. Using a comparative-historical approach, it analyzes early Islamic chronicles alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan, focusing on relations between political authority and the ulamā. The article argues that ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s governance was characterized by justice, ethical restraint, consultation, and scholarly moral accountability. By contrast, modern state institutions often incorporate religious authority in ways that constrain scholarly autonomy. The study conceptualizes moral legitimacy as a normative dimension that conditions the operation of Weberian forms of authority through ethical responsibility and accountability. The findings show how changing institutional arrangements reshape the relationship between religious authority, political legitimacy, and moral critique, offering an analytical framework for reconsidering religion–state relations in contemporary Muslim polities.
This article reconstructs Jain anekāntavāda (the doctrine that reality is many-sided), Marxist ideology-critique, and Kabir’s Sant vernacular philosophy as a shared Indian genealogy of critical theory. These traditions offer tools for questioning hierarchy and epistemic authority. Anekāntavāda’s discipline of qualified assertion functions as a political epistemology that challenges scriptural absolutism and caste ideology. Marxist analysis anchors this critique in the material reproduction of power, illuminating how caste and class are legitimated through religious and ideological apparatuses. Kabir’s vernacular poems translate epistemic pluralism and structural critique into subaltern praxis, articulating anti-caste and anti-sectarian visions accessible beyond textual elites. Through close textual analysis, the article argues that South Asian religious and philosophical traditions are producers of critique in their own right.
Previous studies have elaborated on the complex relationship between religiosity and mental health, particularly concerning gender differences; however, research is scarce within Persian samples. Following the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this cross-sectional study aims to assess the association between religiosity (measured by the 4BDR scale) and mental health (assessed using the GHQ-28) in a Persian sample. We explore gender differences in both mental health and religiosity, examining how the four dimensions of religiosity-believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging-relate to mental health above and beyond gender influence. Our findings negate the prevalent assumptions about religiosity’s protective role, highlighting the need for broader mental health strategies considering socio-political contexts and individual experiences.
This article uses Sara Ahmed’s notion of nonperformativity to analyse the rhetoric and practice of 2021-2024 Synod on Synodality of the Roman Catholic Church. The Synod presented clericalism and synodality as two opposing paradigms and framed them in terms of a linear progress. The article interrogates the effects of this rhetoric in three vignettes based on central metaphors in syondal documents. It is primarily interested not in what synodality is in this framing, but what it does . Arguing that the synod does not do what it says, it proposes three intpretations: as “abuse”, viewing synodal nonperformativity as a way to subdue existing conflicts; as “pressure valve”, seeing it as a process to release enough tension from the “ecclesial system” to maintain its functioning; and a “transformative” reading, which views synodal nonperformativity as revealing for the “gap” between the words and deeds, that can open up possibilities of change by revealing persistent clerical power.
