Walter Brueggemann argued that an important aspect of the prophetic imagination was that of hope, a hope that energized the community of faith to challenge the hegemonic culture of the day. This article adds to Brueggemann’s affirmation of the power of hope, by entering into a discussion of hope found in Ezekiel. In this study, I propose that Ezekiel drew upon Israel’s pre-exilic eschatological traditions, characterized by the cyclical periodization of history. Key to Ezekiel’s confrontation of the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, and the experience of exile, is his use of the Recognition Formula (“then you will know that I am Yahweh”). As it was used in Ezekiel, the Recognition Formula proclaimed Yahweh’s power to bring about the eschaton of the failed first temple period and to create a new era defined by a future temple. Ezekiel’s prophecies energized his traumatized exilic audience by imagining an alternative to Jerusalem’s destruction and the experience of exile in Babylon. Instead, Ezekiel proclaimed that they would recognize the power of Yahweh in the establishment of a second temple era, one that secured the presence of God.
Artificial intelligence is moving from the administrative margins of religious life into doctrinal explanation, personalized guidance, translation, counseling, heritage reconstruction, and embodied ritual representation. This study develops a framework for analyzing these developments in contemporary Buddhism, combining an integrative review of 65 publications, comparative analysis of 30 documented cases, and conceptual framework development. Seven domains of Buddhist life were crossed with seven AI modalities to produce 49 application intersections, classified as observed, emerging, or speculative. Each case was also coded for its initiating actor and purpose, distinguishing purposes stated by the initiator from those inferred from documented function. The analysis shows that religious significance follows less from technical type than from the role people assign to a system. Academic institutions, archives, and foundations initiated most documented applications, and the four cases performing religious authority acquired that position through institutional delegation, commercial substitution, or individual experiment rather than through technical advance. Counterfeit religious authority is distinguished as a separate pathway defined by unauthorized appropriation and concealed origin. The study proposes governance differentiated by role: accuracy, provenance, privacy, and human final judgment for instrumental uses; disclosure and dependency safeguards for relational uses; and doctrinal review, community authorization, and strict authority limits for religiously authoritative uses.
This essay compares the Buddhist classic the Diamond Sūtra to the oldest Christian gospel, the Gospel of Mark, in order to argue that both texts work up complex “theaters of conversion” in order to encourage readers to discard previous convictions about tradition (Buddhist or Jewish/proto-Christian) so as to take the text itself, and its narrative, as the solution to all religious problems. In short, both texts appear to be knowingly designed to function as the centers of new (and rather aggressive) forms of tradition. And, in either case, it is the reader’s desire for the fullest version of tradition that is handily used to draw him or her into imagining radically revised relations with tradition and its authority figures via the reading experience. In a basic sense, then, both texts appear as portable, tradition-making machines, carrying within themselves all that is needed to reinvent tradition.
This article examines the role of obedience in Roman Catholic clerical culture in light of the ongoing sexual abuse crisis and the pervasive influence of clericalism. Analyzed through a virtue ethics framework, obedience is presented as a mean between two vicious extremes—excess and deficiency—embodied by both subordinates and superiors. Subordinates risk self-idolatry (rejecting legitimate authority) or cadaveric obedience (self-negating, unquestioning compliance), while superiors risk hierarchicalist control or neglectful disengagement. The article argues these vicious forms of obedience have directly fostered and concealed clerical abuse. In contrast, virtuous obedience is reframed not as unilateral submission but as a communal, dialogical process of mutual encounter of consciences in which superior and subordinate jointly discern God’s will through trust, vulnerability, and accountability. Drawing on magisterial documents, Thomistic virtue theory, and servant leadership scholarship, the authors contend superiors must relinquish the posture of the all-knowing answer-giver in favor of humble companionship, while subordinates must cultivate honest engagement rather than passive compliance. The article concludes that this relational model of “synodal obedience” offers a pathway for the Church to dismantle clericalist structures and restore accountability and mutual discernment amid the abuse crisis.
This article examines how Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals organizes ritual objects into a relational material system. Focusing on ritual vessels, attire, documents, offerings, ancestral tablets, and domestic spaces, it analyzes how their prescribed positions, uses, relations, and trajectories structure ritual practice. Rather than treating these objects as passive accessories or isolated symbols, the article argues that their significance emerges from their coordination with bodies, spaces, kinship positions, and sequences of action. Through this coordination, distinctions of kinship, status, obligation, and ritual role become materially perceptible and practically enforceable. The article further argues that the material organization prescribed in Family Rituals was not merely an expression or representation of Confucian ritual order, but one of the mechanisms through which that order was produced, enacted, and reproduced. By reading these heterogeneous objects as an interconnected system, the study shifts attention from the symbolic meaning of individual things to the material relations that made Confucian ethical and ritual order practicable in domestic life.
