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We investigate whether and if so, how religious belief promotes farmer entrepreneurship in rural China. We find a significant and positive relationship between religious belief and farmer entrepreneurship. Our results show that a family member’s religious belief, especially a male member’s religious belief, spills over to the family’s engagement in farmer entrepreneurship. In addition, the religion effect is more pronounced in eastern China, where conditions for developing entrepreneurship are more favourable. We demonstrate that compared with Western religions, Eastern religions have a stronger influence on farmer entrepreneurship in China. Our results have important implications for policymakers in other developing economies who seek to achieve sustainable rural economic development.

Recounting the founding purpose and later development of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, Walls characterizes OMSC as a “a niche branch of theological education” that has kept pace with the dramatic changes in the World Christian movement during the twentieth century. In light of these changes, Walls argues for the need of a renewed "World Christian consciousness" across the theological curriculum in the West. He offers four “subversive statements” from his own field of Christian history that point the way forward.

The Yale church historian, Sydney Ahlstrom, had just emerged somewhat dazed from the Sixties when he reviewed the religious trajectory of the United States during that decade. He wrote that by 1966 it was clear that ‘the post-war religious revival had completely frittered out, that the nation was moving towards acrise de la conscienceof unprecedented depth’. As well as a ‘growing attachment to naturalism and “secularism”’ he mentioned ‘a creeping or galloping awareness of vast contradictions in American life between profession and performance, the ideal and the actual’ and ‘increasing doubt concerning the capacity of present-day ecclesiastical, political, social and educational institutions to rectify these contradictions’. As Ahlstrom made clear in a later essay, he saw the crisis faced both by the Roman Catholic Church and by the ‘mainline’ Protestant Churches as part of a wider loss of ‘confidence or hope’ in American society and a passing away of ‘the certitudes that had always shaped the nation's well-being and sense of destiny’.

This article explores how Rahner’s work can fit within an Asian theological approach of understanding God. For many Asians, religion is a lived experience and being a Christian is a choice that can be counter-cultural. Christianity is still commonly perceived as a Western religion in many parts of Asia. This may result in a re-thinking of what it means to be an Asian Christian beyond the Western context. This article will offer some thoughts on the Asian approach to theology and then consider aspects of Rahner’s thought that can appeal to Asian sensibilities. Though Rahner comes from a Western context, there is a commonality in his work, which can speak to the Asian lived faith experience and their orientation towards the divine.

This chapter anticipates some challenges to a cross-species paradigm, and shares some challenges it’s already had to deal with. These include the general hurdles of an ambitious interdisciplinary project, like the struggle to serve multiple masters and still be an expert, which is a challenge every project of this scope has to address. More specific to this particular study are challenges that arise from the strong urge in many humanistic disciplines to denounce science, a general human nature, or animal similarity in the late-twentieth century, or the strong urge in Western religion and philosophy to draw distinct lines between one species and all of the other species (which it ironically then groups into equal categories of the human and the animal).

The word “anthropocentrism” derives etymologically from the Greek words anthropos (human) and kentron (center) and is used to classify systems or perspectives centered on the human, on humankind. The Greek suffix -ismos (Latin -ismus) expresses the general scope of the word to which it is added. Thus anthropocentrism refers to the different doctrines that privilege man as the supreme being—the only being having an intrinsic, absolute, and unconditional value. It considers man as the center (as well as the beginning and end) of all thoughts and actions to whom everything else should be subordinated. Anthropocentrism has been the dominant perspective of Western religions, cultures, and philosophies.

Environmental innovation is an important way for enterprises to take social responsibility. Based on upper echelons theory, this study constructed a model of the relationship of religious beliefs, political ties, and environmental innovation. The CEOs of 196 Chinese private enterprises were selected as the research sample, and the multiple regression analysis method was used to test the influence of the CEOs' religious beliefs on the environmental innovation of the enterprises, as well as the moderating role of the CEOs' political ties. The results showed that CEOs' Eastern religious beliefs had a positive effect on the incremental eco‐innovation of the private enterprises and a negative effect on radical eco‐innovation. However, the CEOs' Western religious beliefs had a negative effect on the incremental eco‐innovation of the private enterprises and a positive effect on radical eco‐innovation. In addition, the results showed that political ties played a positive moderating role between the CEOs' Eastern religion beliefs and the incremental eco‐innovation and between CEOs' Western religion beliefs and the radical eco‐innovation of the private enterprises.

The development of Christianity as a non-Western religion since the middle of the 20th century has generated changes that distinguish it from the expressions of faith inherited from the West. Christian religious innovation and new ways of expressing the faith have become the hallmarks of African Christianity. One way in which these religious changes are discernible is the use of “signs and tokens”, that is, physical substances that in the hands of religious functionaries acquire a sacramental value and that for example serves as support to the sorts of interventionist ministries associated with Pentecostal/charismatic ministries. A classic example of the new sacramental substances is the widespread use of the anointing oil. The anointing oil has become an important “point of contact” in African Christian rituals of healing and supernatural interventions. The use of oil for anointing is not necessarily new in the historic Christian traditions. However, in contemporary African Christianity, it has been reinvented and instituted in healing and deliverance and exorcism rituals that go beyond what was familiar in the older religious traditions. In this essay, we reflect on new sacraments also re-designated as signs and tokens such as the reinvention of the anointing oil as a therapeutic substance in contemporary forms of African Christianity. The new ritual order and the perception of sacraments as therapeutic substances helps us to understand what non-Western Christians, through popular religious innovations, consider important in a faith whose liturgical standards were originally set by Western missionaries.

This chapter argues that Western religion today, besides losing public importance, has also largely been transformed in accordance with this cognitive shift to the ‘this-worldly’. The chapter shows how arguments like ‘believing but not belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ do not discredit the secularization thesis; nor does the idea that Christianity gave rise to Western modernity and therefore the West must be religious. The decreasing salience of Christianity became undeniable in the Victorian age. The 1960s saw this trend intensified and diffused more widely; this cognitive shift is illustrated in both the workings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and in the World Council of Churches Uppsala Assembly (1968). The Christianity that the mainline Western churches exhibit today has become internally secularized, evidenced in characteristic works of modern academic theology.

Perennial Philosophy (Philosophy Perennis) is the most monumental work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's thought, and with that thought he succeeded in bringing together the religion of Islam, philosophy and Science which he said would remain forever. As a universal religion Islam is a continuation of the religions that have been revealed to the apostles, starting Adam a.s. arrived at the Prophet Muhammad. the whole religion is called al-Islam, which in essence is a total surrender to God. Even so according to Nasr, even though Islam and western religions and traditions have equality in several respects, Muslims must not take Western values and views for granted. There must be cech and balance, there must be criticism and auto criticism regarding Western ontology, especially dealing with modern science. The importance of criticizing the basis of modern science ontology, according to Nasr, is because ontology is the most fundamental part of the development of science. Keyword : Religion, Philosophy Perennis, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr

We propose that family firms with religious founders have less risk than other family firms. Using a sample of 4159 family firms in China, we find that firms founded by religious entrepreneurs have lower leverage and less investment in fixed and intangible assets compared to firms founded by nonreligious entrepreneurs. These findings are consistent with our proposition. However, these findings primarily hold for entrepreneurs who adhere to Western religions but not to Eastern religions. As such, our paper makes important contributions to the literature on family-firms and their risk-taking and the literature on the relation between religion and risk aversion.

Editor's introduction to this issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Explores the East/West dichotomy in religious studies, situating the discussion within the framework of cultural and human geography (specifically processes of proximity and distance). Also introduces a two pieces related to the Bulletin's affiliation with NAASR (an interview with the new president, Russell McCutcheon, and the NAASR Notes).

One way the alleged conflict between science and religion is often presented is the claim that Western religions represent human beings as the pinnacle of creation. Science, however, has progressively shown this perspective to be false, specifically through the discoveries that we are not at the universe's center, that the universe is much larger than we once thought, and that we evolved from “lower” life forms. While these discoveries are valid, the interpretation that they mortify vain human pretensions to significance is not. In this essay we assess this claim of mortification and argue that it is a myth.

Simone Weil’s reflections on the world religions bulk large in her writings. She was, indeed, a pluralist ahead of her times, since she expressed her, sometimes controversial, views on the world religions in the’thirties and’forties. She argued, for example, that the Greek’s understanding of suffering implied the notion of grace and denigrated Judaism for dismissing a priori the historical texts of the Hebrew Bible. Weil’s thoughts bear a striking similarity to today’s comparative theology, as expressed by such theologians as F.X. Clooney . Weil notes that Western concepts should not be imposed on non-Western religions. Her understanding of religious pluralism gives today’s theologians a new way of doing theology and offers hope for the future of interreligious dialogue.

Students of comparative religion, cognitive scientists, art historians, and historians sometimes use paradigms from non-western religions to raise questions about the role of material objects in Christianity. Recently, such discussion has focused on images and controversies about them. This article argues that the most important material manifestation of the holy in the western European Middle Ages was the Eucharist and suggests both that understanding it is enhanced by the use of comparative material and that considering it as a case study of divine materiality leads to a more sophisticated formulation of comparative paradigms.

The Edwards et al. (2011) paper is an important review of several rape myths that are prevalent in American culture. When discussing religion, Edwards et al. (2011) present a rather thorough review of the presence of such rape myths in Christianity but lack a discussion of rape myths in other religions. Given the profound influence of religion on culture, notably the treatment of women, it is important to go beyond Christianity in a discussion of rape myths. Although there is much attention given to the treatment of women in Islam, the current paper will address religions that often receive less attention as well. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review the treatment of women and the use of rape myths in non-Western religions.

The belief that some misfortunes are punishments sent from God has been affirmed by many different cultures and religions throughout human history. The belief has proved a pervasive one, and is still endorsed today by many adherents of the great western religions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Invariably, what is believed is that a present misfortune is divine punishment for a past sin. But could a present misfortune in fact be divine punishment for a future sin? That is, could God prepunish people for their future transgressions? The aim of this paper will be to show that there are solid philosophical grounds for supposing that he could and would do so.

Tasan Chŏng Yag-yong 茶山 丁若鏞 is in large part interpreted as either 1) pro-Catholic under the guise of Confucianism or, 2) a primitive, 'original' Confucian with no deep relevance to Western Learning. The notion of a personified Heaven, or 'a lord above' (上帝), in Tasan's work naturally provokes the image of the God of Western religion or the fearful Heaven of ancient Confucianism, which in turn causes researchers to assume that such a view was held only by those who were against Neo-Confucianism or even "pro-Catholic" (親西派). What is interesting, however, is that the writings of Kyŏnggi Southerners - the faction to which Tasan ideologically belonged, who were neither against Neo-Confucianism nor even anti-Catholic (攻西派), make frequent reference to a personified Heaven with power and authority. This article first reviews how Tasan's contemporaries envisioned Heaven by examining the letters and manuscripts of such Kyŏnggi Southerners as Ch'ae Che-gong 蔡濟恭, An Chŏng-bok 安鼎福 and Yi Ka-hwan 李家煥. It shall be demonstrated that a number of thinkers before Tasan had already described such key notions as an 'inclination' (嗜好) towards goodness as the true nature (本性) of Heaven. The second part of this article describes Tasan's theory of human mind, especially the three elements of its immaterial core, namely, nature (性), capability (才), and implementation (行事). It will be argued that Tasan's explanation of the human mind bears a striking resemblance to the traits of Heaven as narrated by the Kyŏnggi Southerners previously examined. The final part explores the significance of Heaven in the worldview of Kyŏnggi Southerners and the philosophy of Tasan. For them, Heaven was not an omnipotent being waiting to judge our lives after death, but the object of a 'humane relationship' (人倫) - like a father, a king, or a teacher, along with all their accompanying strengths and weaknesses.

Building on a distinction between three conceptions of death and the relationship between the living and the dead (porous, neutral and moral death), the authors examine trends that shaped the development of religion and the law in China and the West. Both cultures experienced a critical transformation involving the rise of moral death, in which the living imagine postmortem judgement and retribution, with the dead being segregated into one class that is rewarded and another that is punished. Among the chief qualifications to this generalisation is that in China the dead are judged by legal and in the West by moral standards. Further differences include a more profound connection of religion to family and less autonomy or purity in the concept of neutral death in China than in the West. Still, family ties affect Western religion in the Roman cult of the manes and in the suffrages descendants devote to their deceased parents. Although the advent of beliefs in postmortem retribution appears to have occurred earlier in the West than in China, in both cultures it was clearly present by the time the Han and Roman imperial states had consolidated their rule.

Universiti Brunei DarussalamBetween 10 to 20 per cent of all the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Lahu people now subscribe to one or another version of the Christian religion.The largest proportion of present-day Lahu Christians inherited the genre of this Western religion propagated by American Baptist missionaries in the former Kengtung State of Burma (from 1901 to 1966), in Yunnan (from 1920 to 1949), and in North Thailand (from 1968 to 1990). For this reason, it is often thought that pioneer American Baptist among the Lahu, William Marcus Young (1861–1936), was the first to induct a representative of this people into the Christian faith.In fact this is not the case. The first Lahu Christians lived in North Thailand, baptised by long-time Chiang Mai-based American Presbyterian missionary, Daniel McGilvary. This was in 1891, thirteen years before Young’s first baptism of a Lahu in Kengtung, Burma, in October 1904.The paper addresses three questions. Why were Lahu living in upland North Thailand in the early 1890s? Why did one small Lahu community decide to embrace the Christian religion? Finally, why, in stark contrast to Baptist Christianity in the Lahu Mountains, did this fledgling Lahu Presbyterian community disappear, apparently without trace, sometime after 1920?

This paper addresses Mark Silk's theory of “unsecular media” through a case study of a visit the Dalai Lama made to the United States. Silk contends the themes (what he calls “topoi”) media use to cover religion are derived from Western faiths. Thus, according to Silk, when Western religious principles are used to write about Western religious practices, those practices are generally evaluated positively. In the analysis that follows, I examine the extent to which Silk's topoi were used to report about Buddhism, an obviously “Eastern” religion. The basic findings suggest that Silk's topoi were readily applied in the stories analyzed here, but more important that the tone of coverage this produces was quite positive. These findings raise a very important question: Are the topoi that Silk has delineated the direct product of Western religion, or are they more accurately the reflection of general moral principles that are accepted by journalists and a large part of their audience?

Plato's account of the making of the world by a supreme divinity has often been felt to foreshadow the natural theology associated with orthodox western religion. This paper examines some significant ways (having more than merely antiquarian interest, it is hoped) in which the Timaeus scheme differs from more familiar orthodoxy.

This paper reviews the Western learning the Joseon envoys encountered in Beijing on the basis of their travel records from the first half of the nineteenth century. Contact with Western civilization decreased in the nineteenth century, and the limited contact was caused by the difficult political situation at home and abroad. First, the suppression against Catholicism was severe and the West was considered the supporting force of Catholicism. Second, Western ships frequently anchored off Joseon, arousing a sense of crisis. Third, the declining Qing dynasty prohibited Western religion, which caused many trade conflicts with the West. With such conditions, the only place Joseon envoys could make contact with Western civilization in the first half of the nineteenth century was at the Russian Diplomatic Office in Beijing. This is in contrast with the major route of contact, the Catholic Church, in the eighteenth century. The envoys had a keen interest in the portrait of Jesus Christ on the cross, Russian mirrors, and the camera at the Russian Diplomatic Office. Most of the envoys recorded their shock at the portrait of Jesus Christ on the cross, and Russian mirrors that had been imported to Joseon at that time also attracted interest. In 1863, the Joseon envoys had their pictures taken for the first time at the Russian Diplomatic Office. Lee Hang-eok left a precise record on the process of taking and printing pictures, which was typical merchandise of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

本研究では、「満州事変」以降の半島兵站基地化期における朝鮮総督府の宗教政策を、非西欧系宗教と西欧系宗教との比較をとおして分析した。日本は、それまでの時期と同様に、各宗教に対して異なった方法論を用いた。各宗教に対する政策は、同一の統治理念に依拠していたにもかかわらず、具体的な適応方法と過程において顕著な差異を見せた。総督府は、既存の宗教を用いて「心田開発運動」を展開した。ここには、自らの統治体制にとって好都合な価値観と宗教心を半島全体に植えつけようとする意図があった。総督府は、韓国人主導の非西欧系宗教(仏教、儒教)に対しては直接的に介入する「直線的な政策」をとった。その一方で、宣教師中心の西欧系宗教(キリスト教)に対しては、宣教師の存在と働きに配慮する「迂回的な政策」をとった。総督府にとって、半島における西欧列強の代表および象徴である宣教師は、決して無視できない存在であった。このような背景のゆえに、この時期におけるキリスト教政策の方法と内容は、仏教政策や儒教政策と大きく異なっていた。, This study, with a comparison of policies toward non-Western religion and Western religion, analyzes the religious policies of the government-general of Chosen in the period of the conversion of peninsula into commissary base after the 'Manchurian Incident.' Japan applied different methods toward each religion in the same way of the previous periods. Although they were derived from one identical ruling idea, the policies toward each religion differed from one another in terms of the specific application. The government-general of Chosen, utilizing the existing religions, enforced 'Campaign of Mental Field Development.' Here was an intention to plant and raise the value sense and religious mind in the whole peninsula, which were favorable for its ruling system. The policies toward Buddhism and Confucianism, which were initiated by Korean people, were 'direct and straightforward' since Japan intended to concern itself with them. On the other hand, the policy toward Christianity, which was led by missionaries, was 'indirect and roundabout' because Japan took the missionary existence and work into consideration. The missionaries were not disregardable for the government-general of Chosen, for they were the representative and symbol of the Western Powers in the peninsula. Due to this background, the method and detail of the Christian policy in this period was dissimilar to those toward Buddhism and Confucianism., 論文(Article)