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The recent digital turn has had an unprecedented impact on the identity of the academic disciplines that study religions. Expectedly, this shift has brought about a dramatic change in the power dynamics between the main research actors and funders. In particular, historians and humanist scholars have taken the brunt, mostly replaced by data scientists, software engineers, statisticians, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists alike. Consequently, multimillion-dollar projects aimed at testing historical hypotheses and massive agent-based simulations have been implemented on shaky methodological and epistemological grounds. Concurrently, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, private religious bodies have increasingly replaced public funding, raising important but still unaddressed moral questions about transparency, independence, and potential conflicts of interests. The present article explores the ethically troubling relationship between the boom of Big Data and computational approaches to the study of religions past and present and the infiltration of religious philanthrocapitalism in contemporary neoliberal academia.

Combining literary analysis with historical study, this interdisciplinary article examines how, in interwar Lithuania, the Catholic youth organization Ateitis made use of the vaidilutė – a fabled p...

Chinua Achebe and Kalyan Rao, the Nigerian and the Telugu Dalit writers, authors of two groundbreaking novels, Things Fall Apart and Untouchable Spring, belong to two different socio-cultural traditions and historical contexts. Both are the products and chroniclers of societies that faced oppression and exploitation as well as literary misrepresentation. The individual identity, humanity and dignity of their people was negated through stereotypical and superficial portrayals in popular imagination and dominant discourses. Both writers seek to restore the dignity and self-respect of their communities through the two novels that interrogate negative and inauthentic representations and provide challenging, alternative perspectives. They are simultaneous narratives of protest and assertion and choose similar narrative thrust points to achieve their objectives.

This article is a historical study of how newspaper editors at Red River and New Westminster dealt with the subject of Aboriginal title across the 1860s. In so doing, the article responds to Bain Attwood’s injunction of how “historians must seek to recover the realpolitik of the frontier, what actually happened in colonial settings and how aboriginal title was shaped by relationships between colonizers, colonized and the imperial and colonial state.” At both Red River and New Westminster, editors commented extensively about how Indigenous property rights had not yet been dealt with, lobbying for local and imperial authorities to take action. But while this support for the recognition of Aboriginal title remained consistent over time in Red River, writers in New Westminster eventually quit their advocacy. Through this analysis, the article also reckons with Stuart Banner’s argument that the recognition or non-recognition of Aboriginal title in British and American sites across the Pacific region was driven primarily by local factors rather than by imperial policy. With this theory in mind, of key importance to this article are the significance of treaty-making precedents and the degree to which editors understood or cared about Indigenous conceptions of land tenure.

The theory according to which the Yoruba ancestors were Coptic Christians seemed unpopular amongst many Yoruba people despite the fact that the theory was proposed by the most revered Yoruba historian, Samuel Johnson. The aims of this research are firstly, to study Johnson’s Coptic theory of the Yoruba origins and secondly, to highlight the circumstances that might have informed him to associate the Yoruba people with the Coptic Church. This research is achieved through a historical study of a possible interaction between certain ethnic groups in Nigeria and the Coptic Church, and through a comparative study of Church liturgies amongst the Copts and those of the Yoruba traditional churches. The researcher explained that Johnson’s Christian background influenced his narrative of connecting the Yoruba origins with the Copts. The researcher is of the opinion that there is no evidence provided by Johnson according to which the Yoruba people originated from the Copts.

This study investigated how Paul’s Jewish background, including some elements of pre-rabbinical Jewish literature, influenced the letter to the Galatians with regard to the concept of adoption (υἱοθεσία) (Gl 4:1–7). As Paul was writing to a Gentile audience, wanting to persuade them to return to the true gospel, metaphors of adoption, embedded in the understanding of the Graeco-Roman household, became effective communication bridges to reach his audience. Within this framework, Israel’s God was depicted as the caring father of the household, who through his son Jesus Christ redeems all human beings from the status of slaves to that of children with full rights of inheritance. Contribution:God’s redemption is not merely a forensic sense of justification but also the imagery of relationship in the household by which God does not merely set one free from sin by securing us through Jesus Christ into the society of the righteous, but also adopts us into his family.

espanolResumen El estudio del empleo de la palabra adelphos (“hermano”) en el Nuevo Testamento en las ultimas decadas ha tendido a un consenso donde se favorece la perspectiva literal en la cual se asocia a Jesus de Galilea “hermanos” carnales, segun los testimonios de los textos griegos. Sin embargo, desde otra perspectiva como la antropologia del parentesco y la historia social parental, los datos que atestigua el Nuevo Testamento no son univocos y se interpelan a la luz de la estructura familiar exogamica extendida -aspecto crucial- para senalar que los textos aportan datos e informacion, pero no son en si la respuesta. A lo cual, se abre una perspectiva mas rica en matices y aspectos del parentesco de Jesus y los lazos parentales en Galilea del siglo I d.C. EnglishAbstract The critical historical study of adelphos (“brother”) in recent decades has tended to a consensus thatfavors theperspective in which Jesus of Galilee is recogniged as “carnal brothers”, according to the testimonies of the Greek texts. However, from the parental anthropology and the social- parental history, the data attested by the new testament are not univocal and are addressed in the light of the extended exogamousfamily structure, a crucial aspect, to point out that the texts provide data and information, but they are not the answer in itself. To which, a richerperspective opens in nuances and aspects of the kinship of Jesus and the parental ties in Galilee of the 1st century AD.

The following study is devoted to the phenomenon of unmanned aerial vehicles used throughout known history on the battlefield or for military purposes. The purpose of the following text is to familiarise the reader with an overview with the contemporary and historical employment of the unmanned vehicles on the battlefield. The study also aims to show that the concept of unmanned combat vehicles, also unmanned aerial combat vehicles, is far more ancient than is it is widely known. The article is based on theoretical research methods, mostly multinational academic literature. The author starts with an introduction on the role of limiting soldiers’ fatalities and the concept of removing military men from the battleground. Then, the author presents known examples of using unmanned ships in battles from Thucydides’ times to the invention of the Hell-burner of Antwerp. Further, the case of first unmanned combat aerial vehicle is presented, the bombing balloons from the nineteenth century, followed by a more contemporary study of the military use of unmanned aircrafts. The article is concluded with an analysis of the present employment of drones when they tend to substitute manned aircrafts on various occasions, especially when a mission is deemed “dull, dirty or dangerous”.

This historical study will demonstrate that each age constructs an image of Jesus out of the cultural hopes, aspirations, biblical and doctrinal interfaces that make Christ accessible and relevant. From the earliest times, the missionaries and the church were of the opinion that Africans had no religion and culture. Any religious practice which they came across among the Africans was regarded as heathen practice which had to be eradicated. While references to other Pentecostal denominations will be made, this paper will focus on the first Pentecostal church in Zimbabwe, namely the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM). Scholars are not agreed on the origins of Pentecostalism. However, there is a general consensus among scholars that the movement originated around 1906 and was first given national and international impetus at Azusa Street in North America. William J. Seymour’s Azusa Street revival formed the most prominent and significant centre of Pentecostalism, which was predominantly black and had its leadership rooted in the African culture of the nineteenth century. Despite this cultural link, when Pentecostalism arrived in Zimbabwe from 1915 onwards, it disregarded African culture. It must be noted that in preaching the gospel message, missionaries have not been entirely without fault. This has resulted in many charging missionaries with destroying indigenous cultures and helping to exploit native populations for the benefit of the West. The main challenge is not that missionaries are changing cultures, but that they are failing to adapt the Christocentric gospel to different cultures. Often the gospel has been transported garbed in the paraphernalia of Western culture. This paper will argue that there is a need for Pentecostal churches to embrace good cultural practices in Zimbabwe.

Muslim puritan-dengan semangat kembali pada al-Quran dan Sunnah menjadikan Islam pada masa Nabi saw sebagai model yang otentik dan Final. Dengan pendekatan tekstualis, mereka memahami Islam secara rigid sehingga segala tampilan Islam yang bercampur dengan lokalitas setempat (non-Arab) harus disterilisasi supaya murni kembali. Berbeda dengan muslim moderat, sekalipun mempunyai faham yang sama kembali pada al-Quran dan sunnah, namun tidak menggunakan pendekatan tekstualis tetapi menggunakan pendekatan kontekstualis ataupun filosofis. Kajian ini didasarkan pada kajian kesejarahan dengan pendekatan deskriptif-kualitatif. Islam pada masa Nabi saw dipandang oleh muslim moderat sebagai Islam yang mampu berdialektika dengan sosio-kultur masyarakatnya, karena mereka memahami Islam secara lentur dan fleksibel. Dengan pendekatan yang berbeda dalam gerak kembali pada al-Quran dan Sunnah menyebabkan episteme ber-Islam kedua kelompok ini berbeda, sebagaimana tampak pada isu kedudukan perempuan. Hanya saja dalam panggung sejarah, kelompok muslim puritan seringkali menggunakan cara kekerasan atas nama agama untuk mempertahankan dan menyebarkan ideologinya. Puritan Muslim and moderate Muslims (Readings on the Women Status). Puritans Muslim -with a spirit of the Quran and Sunnah- made Islam in the time of Prophet Sawas an authentic and final model. Using a textual approach, they understand Islam rigidly so that all the features of Islam mixed with local locality (non-Arabic) are considered to be viruses and must be sterilized to get pure. In contrast to moderate Muslims, though both of them are in line with the Qur'an and Sunnah, they are not using a textual approach but contextualist or even philosophical. Islam at the time of the Prophet saw was viewed by moderate Muslims as a historic and dialectical Islam with socio-cultural society, because they understand Islam flexibly. With different approaches in the return movement in the Quran and Sunnah, the two Islamic epistemes are different, as seen in the issue of women's position. In the history, Puritan Muslims often use violence in the name of religion to defend and spread its ideology. The above study is based on historical study with descriptive-qualitative approach.

The relationship between Methodism and the armed forces dates from the very early days of the movement. The Methodist soldier preachers of the eighteenth century have been the subject of considerable historical study; the navy has received much less attention. Owen Spencer Watkins recognized that evidence of Methodism in the Royal Navy ‘was at most very occasional. The result is that a most interesting chapter in the history of our Church is lost to us.’1 There is a paucity of material, certainly in comparison with the army; however, it is possible to give sufficient evidence of a thriving Methodist subculture in the Royal Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

This article responds to Leonardo Ambasciano's review of The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 by Kocku von Stuckrad. It criticizes a narrative that presents naturalism and science as the ultimate system of knowledge. Contesting this rhetoric, the article underscores the plurality and hybridity of knowledge systems, which is the main topic of the book under review.

This article is a series of reflections by a historian who is also a theologian on some of the theological challenges raised by historicism and the historical study of Christianity. In particular, the question is raised as to whether it is still meaningful to speak of Christianity as having some form of normative “core” given at some point in the past, or an unchanging normative “essence” by which all forms of Christianity can be evaluated. The article begins with a brief look at Adolf von Harnack’s lectures on the essence of Christianity from 1900, before moving into reflections on historical change, relativity and normativity. The author rejects the idea of a religion having an unchanging normative core or essence. Like any other human institution, Christianity has been continually changing and adapting to new contexts, even though its representatives might claim an unchanging continuity. The article concludes with some reflections on the possible contours of a modest theology informed by these historic...

This paper will examine the historical study of Shiism in Western Academia. It will argue that until the last four decades, Western scholarship studied Shii Islam primarily through a Sunni lens. It will also show that since the 1980s, various socio-political factors like the Islamic revolution in Iran, the emergence of Ḥizbullāh in Lebanon and the American invasion of Iraq forced Western scholars to look at Shiism in a different light. Consequently, they explored different facets of Shiism ranging from the Shii concept of centralized authority during the occultation of the Imam to Shii liturgies, rituals and Shii political theory.

The main ideas as an excellence book entitled The Venture of Islam Conscience and History in a World Civili- zation were prepared by Marshall GS Hodgson with a critical historical study. The book which consists of three volumes is interesting to review. Although other than the author is not a follower of Islam, the objective in analyzing the data in his study needs to be reviewed. The writing in the form of this review aims; 1) reviewing the aspects in which the work has strength both in terms of methodology, objectivity of data studies on Islamic history and 2) examining the weak- nesses of the analyst

Focusing on the impact of Revisionism upon the historical study of the non-Puritan “conformist” or “high-church” group in the Church of England, this essay argues that Revisionism’s influence was complex and also reflected divisions among Revisionists themselves. This was partly because Revisionists were engaging with a religious historiography that had already been in the process of rewriting our understanding of English Protestantism, leaving it unclear which approach required rejection—either the “Anglican/Puritan” paradigm or the more recent “Arminian/Calvinist” one. Different Revisionists adopted either ofthese paradigms in ways that continue to influence the writing of religious history.

El presente artículo recurre a la microhistoria para analizar los archivos municipales de la Plana de Castelló, con el objetivo de obtener nuevas referencias sobre la evolución climática de la fachada mediterránea peninsular durante un periodo cronológico concreto: el siglo XVIII, enclavado en los estadios finales de la Pequeña Edad de Hielo. Con esta finalidad, se abordarán las principales sequías, precipitaciones extremas, plagas y epidemias acontecidas en la Plana de Castelló durante el Setecientos, y aquellos recursos, tanto religiosos como seculares, utilizados para prevenir, primero, y erradicar, después, las adversidades climáticas, biológicas y sanitarias. This paper discusses a micro historical study of the climate in lands along the Mediterranean coast of Spain at a specific time in history, namely the 18th century, towards the end of the Little Ice Age. Data obtained from the municipal archives of La Plana (Castelló) has been used to obtain information about climate variability, including droughts, extreme rainfall, plagues and epidemics occurring around Castelló during the 1700’s. Likewise, information upon the resources, both religious and secular, used to prevent firstly and later eradicate said climatic, biological and health hazards.

Too often disconnected from one another, the historiography of Jewish childhood and of childhood more broadly are actually very similar to one another. They have evolved at the same rhythm, with the first paving the way for the second in terms of sources and lines of inquiry. For those who are interested in childhood experiences of war in the twentieth century, the moment always comes when historical reflection is confronted with the ultimately horrific moment of the genocide of the Jews of Europe during World War II. Reconciling fundamentally different childhood experiences through historical study is, nevertheless, possible.

This article examines the chain of wars which occurred in the Islamic military history based on reports by the most authoritative historian in the 8 th H./14 th C.E. century, Ibn Kathir al-Dimashqi (700-774H./1301-1373C.E.) in his masterpiece al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah (The Beginning and The End). This study gave emphasis on the written entry by Ibn Kathir on the series of wars which occurred in the eras of Rasulullah (p.b.u.h.), the Rightly-guided Caliphates, the Umayyads, the ‘Abbasids, the Ayyubids and the Mamluks. The objectives of this study are to showcase the biography and stature of Ibn Kathir as the grand Islamic historian in the Mamluk era and to highlight the chain of war events according to his masterpice. In this work, a qualitative method was employed via historical study and content analysis by researching the Islamic military historical data available in the work of Ibn Kathir. This study argues that Ibn Kathir was the most prominent scholar and most authoritative historian during the times of the Mamluks; and his book al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah was his greatest contribution to the discipline of Islamic history and civilisation; in particular the field of Islamic military history.

This paper will examine the historical study of Shi‘ism in thewestern academy and argue that until the last two decades, westernscholarship looked at it primarily through a Sunni lens. Thischanged during the 1980s due to various socio-political factors,among them Iran’s Islamic revolution, Hizbollah’s emergence inLebanon, and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq,forced western scholars to look at it in different light. Consequently,they began to examine different facets of this branch ofIslam, ranging from its concept of centralized authority during theTwelfth Imam’s Greater Occultation to liturgies, rituals, and politicaltheory.

This chapter attempts to show some important implications of the relational theory of religion set forth in Chap. 3. The first implication is that the theory offers a new perspective on the historical differentiation of religion and state. The second implication is that central historical religious changes and developments can be analysed in a different light when religions are regarded as embedded in a relational field consisting of but not limited to other significant religions. The third implication of the theoretical outline is the suggestion that state religious policies have played a crucial role in countries other than Denmark, suggesting this is a general phenomenon. As an example, the historical study by Jonathan Israel is used to show that tolerant religious policies of William of Orange during and after the Glorious Revolution was also informed to a significant extent by state reason and defence considerations. On the basis of these examples as well as the following case study, the book suggests that the relational approach to the study of religion set forth in Chap. 3 can solve some of the inherent problems in secularization theory in particular and sociology in general.

Although live births in America have been the subject of increasingly sophisticated historical study, pregnancy loss has not. This piece presents Abigail Adams’s own account of her pregnancy that ended in stillbirth, one she wrote to her husband, John. It presents, too, his response to her. As was true throughout their correspondence, they both drew on the gendered language of sensibility, which is therefore the other chief subject of the piece. It concludes by placing this language in the general context of its ambiguous value to white American women in the Revolutionary era.

This article consists of two parts: first, a methodological part and secondly, a historical example. The aim is to discuss the understanding of the theological study of church history in comparison to historical study in general. This is done through the example of two influential Danish scholars on Luther from the 20th Century. Secondly the article gives an introduction to the Danish reformer Hans Tausen in order to point to two things: an example of the method presented in the first part and an area of research in progress. Strangely enough, Hans Tausen has not been subject to profound scholarly investigation for many years, even though he is one of the most important persons in Danish Reformation history.

This article explores how Jeff Astley’s work on ordinary theology can enrich historical study of late medieval lay religion. Ordinary theology provides scholars with a new set of vocabulary and methodological approaches for accessing the religious discourses of “everyday” Christians and allows medievalists in particular to reach beyond contested labels for lay belief. The article begins with a discussion of the promises and limitations of Astley’s theories for historians of religion and concludes with a test case of how they might guide future research, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 152 wills from fifteenth-century Norfolk. The results highlight the diversity of beliefs about the afterlife and associated doctrines among medieval laypeople even as they demonstrated commitment to orthodox Christianity and their local parishes.

John Myhill, Language, Religion and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East: A Historical Study, John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2006 (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 21).

The Foucaultian methodology of genealogical research is applied to the critical and historical study of fundamentalism as a kind of cosmovision present in religion, philosophy and the academy in general, since Descartes. Fundamentalism is viewed as aesthetics of existence, a relationship to the Truth in an authoritarian, absolutist, and intolerant way. In the second part of the essay, the focus is on the biblical hermeneutics of Christian Fundamentalism, especially on the fascination that hermeneutics exerts on religious people.

This article is an historical study of the Nicaraguan revolution that makes a case in favor of interpreting revolutionary stances/action as driven by religious dialogue. To this end, seminary dialogues that assumed revolutionary significance during the 1970s in Solentiname, Nicaragua, are studied. Institutional shifts in religious meaning, both in the region and Nicaragua, are historically detailed. Three dialogues fromThe Gospel in Solentiname, a four-volume collection of Bible-centered dialogues, are analyzed. These are evaluated in terms of their role for revolutionary outlooks. Innovative and developmental features of dialogue are identified in order to underscore the revolutionary potential of dialogue.

Recent scholarship on the Qur'an has noted the need for more attention to the historical content of the Qur'an, and in evaluating how the historical study of the Qur'an compares to the long tradition of Biblical studies in Europe and North America. This paper examines the question of the historicity of the Qur'an's contents with particular attention to how historical information in the Qur'an has traditionally been used and compared to the historical narrative drawn from Biblical scholarship by Muslim exegetes. In particular, this study focuses on the question of the ‘Arab’ prophets Hūd, Sālih, and Shucayb: of all the prophets mentioned by name in the Qur'an, only these three appear not to be mentioned in the Bible, and, as such, they provide a helpful example with which to examine the treatment of historical materials in the Qur'an. In addition to Islamic exegesis, this paper uses a number of non-Qur'anic literary sources, and archeological findings, to demonstrate that there is a fair amount of evidence external to the Qur'an for the historicity of the Arab prophets, suggesting the need for a much more varied and wider consideration of the phenomenon of prophecy in the ancient world as the common heritage of the religions of the Book.

Much research in the cognitive science of religion has dealt with ritual. Two forms of ritual have been focused on, those characterised by repetition and routinisation, the characteristic most often attributed ritual, and the less noted forms in which ritual performance is infrequent and irregular but highly emotional and arousing. I hope, in this essay, to suggest the utility of cognitive theorising for the historical study of ritual with examples from the religions of the Roman Empire, especially, the Hellenistic Mystery Religions and the early Christianities, and to arouse interest in pursuing such studies further in the history of religions.

The interest of this paper lies in the distinction between θεoτόкoς (‘Theotokos’), ‘God-bearer’, and words or phrases which are more precisely translated as ‘mother of God’, especially μήτηρ θεoυ̂ (‘mētēr theou’) and θεoμήτωρ (‘theomētōr’) in Greek and mater Dei in Latin. It concentrates on the usage of Greek and Latin Christian writers between the later fourth century and the eighth century. For those who believe that ‘mother of God’ is the only proper rendering in English of θεoτόкoς, it must seem a non-issue. Indeed, insofar as they have most of the tradition on their side, this enquiry may appear redundant, impertinent, or sectarian. To leave the matter there, however, would be to leave important questions unasked. Historical study is not best served by the indiscriminate translation of θεoτόкoς as ‘mother of God’, or at least by a translation that fails clearly to distinguish between θεoτόкoς and direct equivalents of ‘mother of God’.

MichaelJ. Puett's To Become a God is an important contribution to the study of early Chinese religions, and it offers dense, ambitious, radically novel, and utterly fascinating reinterpretations of the major religious and philosophical works of early China. Puett can be counted among a number of scholars of early China who, over the past decade or so, have come to take pride in their efforts, convincing or not, to dismantle several of the most seemingly foundational pillars for the study of early Chinese thought, including textual classification (Confucian, Daoist, Legalist, etc.), geographic and cultural difference, and the role of myth and shamanism. Puett pursues these trends to an extreme degree in attempting to overturn many of the even more basic assumptions held by modern scholars in regard to early China. He argues that the worldview of early China is best characterized not by an essential harmony between humans and nature, but by a theistic and agonistic dualism producing a similar tension with the world that, in the West, gave rise to ethical rationalization. To Become a God is Puett's attempt to demonstrate that this worldview reveals a fundamental tension between humans, on one side, and spirits and deities, on the other, in which humans strove to separate their spirits from their bodies to become gods controlling all other spirits and natural phenomena. Puett claims that it is only by recognizing this tension that we can come to understand the central motivation underlying the thought of early China: "I will attempt to provide a full historical study of the relations of humans, spirits, and the cosmos from the Bronze Age to the early Han. ... Once we move away from a commitment to seeing a lack of tension between humans and divinities as a guiding theme in early China, we may discover a rich, and perhaps more troubled, world of debate concerning humans, divinities and sacrificial practice than previous analyses have accustomed us to expect from Chinese texts" (pp. 24-25). Puett quickly adds the rejoinder that "the recurrent references in the secondary literature to 'schools of thought' in early China-such as Con

SUMMARY The historical study of theological views of people with mental retardation leads us to be hopeful about the present view of people with mental retardation, yet honest about needs for further growth. An understanding of the issues of people with mental retardation can inform general theology shaped in a pastoral context. The questions raised by people with mental retardation and their parents bring insight into issues of God's love, acceptance and human suffering. While views of people with mental retardation are changing, those with severe retardation are still segregated from society and not given necessary care.