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Abstract
In comparative studies, Tenrikyō’s this-worldly, millenarian vision has found little resonance with Christian expectations of going to heaven after death. However, an “earthly turn” in Christian eschatology is redirecting Christian expectations away from heaven and toward bodily resurrection into an earthly Kingdom of God, providing new opportunity to revisit the potential historical and conceptual overlap between Tenrikyō’s view of earthly renewal and that of Christianity—in both its first-century and contemporary “restorationist” forms. This article considers the historical origin of Tenrikyō’s millenarianism against a backdrop of late-Tokugawa yonaoshi (world renewal) and Miroku-based movements. Here, the timeline for the appearance of millenarian views of yonaoshi proposed by Miura (2019) is revised to give Tenrikyō’s foundress primacy as a millenarian innovator. I furthermore suggest that monotheism may have been a catalyst for millenarian yonaoshi development. Finally, I propose “yonaoshi millenarianism” as a cross-cultural, comparative category applicable to both Tenrikyō and early/restorationist Christianity.
Abstract
This article aims to explore how the entanglement of Protestant Christianity and race and racism is manifested in contemporary Dutch society, and to identify which themes for introspection this yields for majority white Dutch Protestant churches. We argue that introspection on perceived superiority of white Dutch Protestantism is crucial to uncover subtle, unconscious mechanisms and ideas that are present in majority white Dutch Protestant churches and that contribute to maintaining racism. Furthermore, we argue that contemporary topical issues such as racism and colonial history run the risk of being pushed to the margins again as long as there is no systematic review of power and privilege of white Dutch Protestantism.
Abstract
This article presents positions on the digitability of religion as they are lived and reasoned about by digital natives who claim to be religious, spiritual, and/or searching and curious in this regard. Data were collected through explorative participant observations and semistructured interviews with digital natives with transmigratory biography elements in Switzerland. Examples of the borders that interlocutors drew between digitable and nondigitable aspects of religion are also presented to provide an overview of the emic assumptions about the possibilities and limits of religious digitability in the field. The analysis revealed that digital natives tended to see almost all aspects of religion but not all aspects of the religious community experience as digitable, and sometimes value the nondigitability of certain nuances of community explicitly.
Abstract
There are 120 Jains living in Switzerland today. Desiring to exchange information about their religion and to expand their knowledge, they started to meet in 2008. This initiated a community-building process in which Jains of different branches took part. Such a process, as well as the diaspora situation itself, is always connected with negotiations and religious transformations, which is also evident in the Swiss context. Following the common meetings, a distinct form of Jainism was created in Switzerland. This new form is supradenominational and universal and based on aspects such as vegetarianism, environmentalism, and nonviolence. Additionally, the Swiss Jains developed new strategies of knowledge transfer. This article focuses on not only the formation of a Swiss Jain community but also its dissolution as no common gatherings have taken place since 2016. Therefore, factors are named that can lead to the dissolution of a community.
Abstract
The role of religion in Western societies has gained renewed attention in recent years. While choirs have been studied to varying extents in the social sciences, the geography of choirs has received little attention, particularly in human geography. Using questionnaire responses from secular choir members, this exploratory study examines the possible differences and/or similarities of secular choir’s sacral and/or secular activity in urban and rural spaces in Sweden. The study reveals two primary findings. First, it reveals that secular choir members engage in a mixture of secular and sacred activities, suggesting that these activities can be considered postsecular. Second, the data challenges the geographical perception of rural environments as more sacred/traditional, as they have a high proportion of secular activities. Likewise, the results questions the geographical perception of urban environments as secular/modern, as they demonstrate an even distribution of sacred activities.
Abstract
Contributing to scholarship on gender in Evangelical Christianity, this article focuses on the notion of male headship. With existing literature concerned with male headship within the marital sphere, this study also investigates beliefs about male headship in church settings, and the interconnections between these two topics. Interviews with ten British, Evangelical women were conducted on male headship, gender roles, and gender discrimination in church. This study found that participants generally affirmed male headship within the marital and familial sphere, showing ambivalence towards male headship in the church. This ambivalence helps participants stay in churches which bar women from church governing roles, despite participants expressing support for women in church leadership.
Abstract
Over recent decades, empirical research on religion has increasingly criticized its primary focus on Western Christianity. This paper has two aims: Firstly, it addresses challenges in applying ‘Western’ empirical research on religion to non-Western contexts (samples, measurement, results and discussion). Secondly, it highlights the convergent approach, bridging the gap between the perceived dichotomy of cultural universalism and cultural relativism. This approach acknowledges both religiosity’s universal commonalities across contexts and particularities in a certain cultural-religious context. Studying religiosity beyond Christianity enables to explore a nearly limitless field of basic research but also provides a robust empirical, social-scientific foundation for various practical applications that are gaining increasing social relevance, such as therapy, migration, and counseling for religious institutions. Such are vital for the future of our field, ensuring its continued relevance in times of accelerated secularization.
Abstract
The relationship between science and religion has been a topical issue in the Western world, both in academic and popular literature. It has, however, been a peripheral issue in Africa, the epicentre of Christianity and where both religion and science play a prominent role. Where African scholars have written about it, it has largely focused on Pentecostal and Charismatic churches to the negligence of mainline churches. This article examines the views and responses of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the largest ecumenical body in the country, to the COVID-19 pandemic in the light of the science and religion debate. The views and responses of the SACC to the pandemic were gathered from the various press statements and documents that the ecumenical body produced between March 2020 and September 2021.
Abstract
Neither the theological perspective of church history nor the “impact–response” framework can sufficiently explain why Catholicism was able to take root in Joseon. Early Joseon converts from Confucianism received a contextualized understanding of Catholicism transformed by Chinese thought. One can describe this as Confucianized or Sinicized Catholicism. The first missionary sent to the Joseon Peninsula was Zhou Wenmo, a Chinese Catholic priest whose interpretation of the development and historical memories of Chinese Catholicism significantly shaped the ways of Joseon’s early converts from Confucianism. China’s historical narrative was so profound that the converted Confucians and other early converts embraced Catholicism, and the vision was constructed from the historical memories of the late Ming and early Qing. Nevertheless, this vision of nationalizing Catholicism was shattered by consecutive persecutions after 1801.