Search

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, currently used as a set of standards by socially conscious investors to evaluate a company's operations before investing, are becoming an important global trend today. In particular, environmental and ecological crises are increasingly being seen as issues that will determine the sustainability of human civilization. Scholars of religion have been paying more attention to the issue as well. In fact, religion and environmentalism have emerged as sub-disciplines in, among others, religious ethics, religious studies, the sociology of religion, and theology. In view of this development, this paper aims to reexamine Minjung theology, literally meaning "the people's theology", which arose as a form of liberation theology in South Korea in the 1970s, from an ecological perspective, particularly focusing on the former's view on the relationship and interrelationship between the individual and the environment. The paper pays special attention to the work of Ahn Byung-Mu, a founding scholar of Minjung theology, shedding light on the connection between his concept of gong, literally meaning "publicness", and ecology, the characteristics of his ecological thoughts and their relevance to his view of god, and his views on bapsanggongdongche, literally meaning "the table community". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Rosemary Radford Ruether is widely, and rightly, acknowledged as a prophetic Catholic scholar–activist, her interest in and experience of mysticism is rarely emphasized. However, Ruether had an impactful mystical experience as a young woman, and the themes of this experience echo throughout her body of work. This paper paints a portrait of Ruether as both a profoundly prophetic scholar–activist and a spiritually attuned seeker of the very divinity that she encountered in her twenties. In the process, this paper first offers a democratized and demystified vision of mysticism by drawing on the work of Bernard McGinn, Dorothee Söelle, and Jess Byron Hollenback. Next, it offers a biographical sketch of Ruether, contextualizing her early mystical experience within the broader pattern of her spiritual and intellectual path. It interprets Ruether's mystical experience, through which she encountered the divine as a feminine presence suffusing creation, as a meaningful source of inspiration for her decades-long commitment to an anti-patriarchal, ecofeminist theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on an ethnographic study which aims to examine female asceticism in the Chaitanya Vaishnava sect, a Hindu devotional school found in the region of Vrindavan in Northwest India. Asceticism, meaning to renounce worldly life, is deeply rooted in Hindu practice. Yet, despite its wide acceptance, female asceticism has remained on the margins of Hindu religious experience. Despite the lack of a model of asceticism for women, scripturally and sociologically, female ascetics are a growing religious group in India. This paper seeks to use empirical data collected during two years of fieldwork to examine how asceticism is articulated and performed by women living in Vrindavan. It builds upon recent interventions in key areas of feminist scholarship and asceticism in South Asia by engaging a religious sect which has received little attention by feminist scholars. This engagement, it is believed, can productively enlarge the field of feminist theologizing and South Asian asceticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race's typology has been widely used outside of the Christian tradition; however, it has been constructed in the light of the epistemological and soteriological concerns raised by Christian approaches towards other religions. Even though different questions generate the Christian and Islamic theologies of religions, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars have used Race's classification to present the Islamic theology of religions. This paper presents different usages of Race's three-fold typology and shows that Race's threefold classification is not fully applicable to the Islamic theology of religions. The inclusivist position in the Islamic theology of religions (or its application to them) seems to be the most problematic issue. This is not because no inclusivist theology exists in the Islamic theology of religions, but rather because some scholars emphasise soteriology when applying Race's inclusivism to the Islamic theology of religions, whilst others take epistemological concerns into account. Unlike these scholars, this paper eventually offers that contemporary Muslim theologians offer two-sided arguments. The supersessionist theory (Islam is the only true religion that supersedes other religions) is the best way to distinguish between these positions. According to Knitter's classification, this paper considers this theory as a form of exclusivism, which would be seen as the "Replacement Model". Contemporary discourse on the Islamic response to religious pluralism takes place between exclusivists who believe that Islam is the only religion that has superseded other religions and pluralists who think the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geography, histories, and ethnic composition of the Latin American continent pose a great challenge when attempting to identify and describe the region's constitutive religious traditions and experiences. This task is further complexified by the hybridity, fluidity, and porosity of the region's cultural groups. However, there is an aspect of Latin American religiosity that shares a significant family resemblance across the continent: the small community settings in which religiosity often emerges and consolidates as a worldview, commonly known as Ecclesial base communities. Informed by liberation theology, these communities are a uniquely generative experiment in social, political, and religious life. Scholarly accounts of liberation theology fail to identify key aspects of how Ecclesial base communities generate ways of being, knowing, and making meaning. While many of these accounts depict liberation theology as a socio-political discourse of theological origin, they do not unearth the multidirectional interaction between political practice and theological thought at the heart of these communities. In this paper, I aimed to fill this gap in the literature by reframing liberation theology as a set of social imaginaries, making use of Paul Ricoeur's theories of memory and cultural imagination to provide the philosophical ground to understand the lived theology of Ecclesial base communities. In doing so, I maintain that liberation theology is not only a theoretical discourse that emerges from these communities, but also the inarticulate background of their ways of thinking, communicating, and living, one that provides an existential orientation through which Latin Americans can provide coherence to their collective action and recognize their own capacity to change their reality of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As awareness grows of global warming and ecological degradation, words such as "climate anxiety", and "eco-anxiety" enter our vocabularies, describing the impact of climate change on human mental health and spiritual wellbeing. Distress over climate change disproportionately impacts children, who also are more susceptible to the broader health, economic, and social effects brought about by environmental harm. In this paper, I explore children's vulnerability to climate change and climate anxiety through the lens of ecofeminist practical theology. Ecofeminism brings the liberatory concerns of feminist theologies into engagement with those theologies focused on the life of the planet. Drawing on ecofeminism, practical theology must continue and deepen its own ecological conversion, and practical theologies of childhood must take seriously the work of making an ecological home, oikos, in which children are embedded as a part of the wider ecology that includes the more-than-human world. This requires foregrounding religious education with children toward the inhabitance of the earth in good and just ways. However, these theologies also must address children's lived realities of increased anxiety over planetary changes that endanger life through practices of spiritual care with children that engage and support them in their distress toward participatory empowerment for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions in South Africa are still dominated by colonial traditions, course content, staff with colonial privileges and attachments, and discriminatory structures and systems. Practical theology and theologians are no exception. This article seeks to investigate the correlations between social just pedagogies and social justice. Social just pedagogies consider the role of the students, lecturers, and non-human phenomena as contributing to epistemology and agency formation. Normative pedagogies remain important criteria for knowledge production and graduate attributes within the South African higher education landscape. Within practical theology, the pedagogies that are used to form students and impart knowledge are still dominated by classical teaching methods that are power-centred and biased towards the privileged. The aim of this article is thus not to replace the normative pedagogies but to challenge the normativity and essentialism that has characterised colonial, race-related, and top-down knowledge production. I will introduce a social just pedagogy of teaching practical theology that critically engages and challenges the privileged normative position of classical practical theology. A social just pedagogy will bring the centre of learning and teaching into the structure of the lecture room, a participatory method of knowledge production, students, and the lecturers. The hierarchical structure of the South African university system will be engaged with as an instrument of traditional classical knowledge production systems. Teaching practical theology through social just pedagogies will also contribute to social justice within democratic South Africa. The question that I will address is how teaching practical theology at higher education institutions can contribute to the agency of social justice in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francisco de Osuna's Fifth Spiritual Alphabet of 1542, subtitled Consolation for the Poor and Warning for the Rich, is a Spanish text on economic inequality in Western Europe. Osuna treats the life-threatening political divisions of his day, including those intended to reduce people to objects of uselessness and slavery, with spiritual and practical advice that defines free will as true wealth and focuses on the responsibility of the rich for producing poverty. I examine Osuna's theology and sensorial, embodied imagery in dialogue with Francis' encyclical Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship (2020), particularly Francis' concept of a "beautiful polyhedral reality", through the lens of twenty-first century decolonial feminist and social theory. I argue that Osuna's work is a compelling Franciscan precedent for combating avarice and indifference that is best understood through scholarly perspectives critical of the legacies of patriarchy and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades ago, feminist theologians emphasized the importance of "naming" in achieving justice. They argued not having a name for something makes it more difficult to understand its influence on our lives. Naming elements of our lived reality (including patriarchy, specific barriers to women's flourishing, the patterns and values of relationships, and so forth) was seen as key to claiming the power to name ourselves and thereby claiming agency in a world of complex relations and interlocking injustices. Colonialist epistemologies and anthropologies that shape dominant culture in the U.S. prioritize universal over local knowledge, text-based propositions about objects rather than relational knowledge of subjects. While recent science draws attention to the interconnection and interdependence of human persons and our biological environment, there is little value given to local environmental knowledge of plant life. Feminist wisdom implies that this loss of naming for our own environment entails a loss of agency as well as a loss of understanding. Bringing feminist theology into conversation with science and indigenous ways of knowing, this paper argues that we cannot name ourselves if we do not have words for the plants with which we are interconnected on every level from basic sustenance to daily interaction to complex microbiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the middle of the Ming Dynasty, with the Chinese language becoming the mother tongue of Muslims in mainland China, the religious education of Chinese Muslims faced a dilemma. Meanwhile, a rejuvenated educational system was established by Hu Dengzhou (胡登洲) in Shaanxi during the Wanli (萬歷) period. This system, which was called Jingtang education (經堂教育) after a long time, has epoch-making significance in the history of Chinese Islamic thought. Through Hu Dengzhou's disciples, this educational system gradually spread to North China and Jiangnan, where Shandong School and Jinling School were formed. Sufism played an important role in the two early schools' teaching arrangements and academic activities. In the middle and late Qing periods, Shaanxi School and Yunnan School emerged one after another. Scholars of these two schools paid more attention to rational sciences represented by philosophical theology and attempted to use theological theories to explain Sufi texts. Overall, the establishment of Jingtang education was not only an urgent requirement for Muslims in mainland China to explain Islamic classics in Chinese, but also a fruitful attempt to replace official schools with private schools. The early Shandong School and Jinling School attached great importance to Sufism for two reasons: (1) Sufism became a prominent study after the 12th century, and most of the teachers of early Jingtang education had a close relationship with the Sufis. (2) These scholars live in a Chinese cultural background with Neo-Confucianism as the mainstream, and there are many commonalities between Sufism and Confucianism, which helps Muslim scholars to use Confucian terms to explain Islamic teaching. In the later period, Shaanxi School and Yunnan School turned to pay more attention to philosophical theology for two reasons: (1) In order to deal with the emergence and ideological differences of Chinese Islamic sects in the mid-Qing era. (2) This change was not unrelated to the influence of the Shixue (實學) thought trends in China, especially the Qianjia School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in spiritual abuse is a fairly recent phenomenon in research. Originally, it received attention only in the context of child sexual abuse perpetrated by the clergy in the Catholic Church before it was recognized as a specific form of abuse in its own right. In line with Paul Ricœur, I agree that a narrative best describes a person's identity. I, therefore, give space to the voices of three women who were spiritually abused as adults in France in the context of new religious communities that originated after the Second Vatican Council: Sophie Ducrey, Anne Mardon and Marie-Laure Janssens. The social constructionist method allows the uniqueness of each of their narratives to be recognized, while also accounting for shared experiences such as the dynamics of control, desocialization and intrusion into the private spheres of life. Spiritual abuse, which is at the hinge point between the moral and spiritual and the psychological realms, is perpetrated by a spiritual leader who has power over women. The abuse serves to fulfill the psychological or sexual needs of the leader. Abuse of the conscience, theology and spirituality are the spiritual means used, alongside the psychological ones, to cause the women to become dependent. In the process, their desire for God and the affective needs that some may have are abused. The consequences are many, but the loss of self, of which faith is the core, summarizes it well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an Indian artist working in the field of cross-cultural visual theology, I have taken the open well as a common feature of the landscape where I live as a motif that I can connect with the biblical story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well. This leads to a discussion around the symbolic significance of the water of life. The landscape provides natural elements that are both particular and local but also universal in their cultural significance. The meeting between the thirsty traveler, who is Christ the teacher, and a socially marginalized woman who comes to draw water in the midday heat provides the occasion for a dialogue in the context of asking for water. There is a similar story in the Buddhist tradition where Ananda, the disciple of Buddha, meets with an 'outcaste' woman at a well. Water, which is always found at a lowly place, becomes a symbol for the socially depressed. What is below must be lifted if the living water is to renew and transform the searcher. The encounter at the well can become the basis for a dialogue between religions concerning the need for social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic women's movements, networks and initiatives have a long history of advocating for an equal role in the Church—especially in the North American world. In recent years, their presence and visibility has been increasing in Europe too, also in relation to a series of initiatives and events, such as the Mary 2.0 campaign in Germany, which led to the launch of the Catholic Women's Council (CWC) in 2019. This article focuses on the emerging discourse on women and gender promoted by the developing network of initiatives related to the role of women in the Catholic Church in different European countries. After reconstructing the map and history of this network, the contribution explores its emerging discourse, drawing on a triangulation of data: key-witnesses' interviews; the magazine Voices; social network pages and profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Canada legalized Bill C-14, which removed from the Criminal Code medical assistance in dying (MAID) under certain circumstances. In essence, the Bill legalized what is commonly described as euthanasia, under the provisions that the patient has a terminal medical diagnosis, anticipates extreme suffering, is at least 18 years old and still maintains their own medical power of attorney, has received the same diagnosis from two separate doctors, and requests such a procedure without duress. The bill exempts doctors and nurses from culpability in murder, along with those aiding the medical staff. The bill replaces sections of the Criminal Code that criminalize death by suicide. In this article, I first review the theological and historical interpretation of suicide within the Christian church. I then offer a specifically Lutheran feminist framework of our baptism into death, Luther's explanation of the First Commandment, and Christian freedom to affirm Christians' faithful decisions in seeking medical assistance in dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the German Reformer, Martin Luther, makes a contribution to a Christian feminist theology of mothering. His preaching and theology about child-bearing stand out in the Christian theology of his time because of the realistic way in which he describes the experiences of pregnancy and birth, especially in contrast to conventional descriptions of the Virgin Mary's maternity. Yet Luther is no feminist. He maintains essentialist views of women and attaches women too closely to home life. But his optimistic view of the female child-bearing body subverts the traditional Christian views of the cursed female body and affirms the power that women have in God's activities of creation and new creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]