The reviewer presents the main theses of Martha Nussbaum's latest book and enters into discussion with it. Although the reviewer does not object to Nussbaum's thesis on the important role of religion in the individual's life, she nevertheless believes that what may arouse controversy is Nussbaum's failure to distinguish between a religious community and sects that may be dangerous to their members. Next, since Nussbaum defends Islam by saying that it is compatible with women's rights, the reviewer challenges this (...) statement by pointing out that Nussbaum's charge against European governments may also be levelled against Muslims themselves. The reviewer also charges Nussbaum with not following, on numerous occasions, the very principles she introduces. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the well-being and mental health of populations worldwide. This study sought to examine whether religious coping mediated the relationship between COVID-19-related fear and death distress. We administered an online survey to 390 adult participants (66.15% females; Mage = 30.85 ± 10.19 years) across Turkey. Participants completed a series of questionnaires measuring the fear they had experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, their levels of religious coping and their levels of death anxiety and (...) depression. Our findings revealed that (a) fear of COVID-19 was associated with positive religious coping, negative religious coping, death anxiety and death distress; (b) negative religious coping was associated with death anxiety and depression and (c) negative religious coping mediated the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and death anxiety and depression. These results highlight the detrimental effect of negative religious coping in increasing the adverse effect of the COVID-19 fear on death depression. (shrink)

It can be unnerving to read and teach Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in a world plagued by religious violence. The book’s praise of Abraham as the “father of faith” precisely for his willingness to kill his son Isaac, combined with its suggestion that through faith one could “suspend” ethics, seems to provide a defense and even an endorsement of religiously motivated violence. In order to see why this is a misreading of the text, we will need to go (...) beyond arguments based on the book’s pseudonymous or symbolic nature. Only by considering in detail what Fear and Trembling says about Abraham’s faith can we see that, far from endorsing religious violence, the book provides an insightful contrast between true Abrahamic faith and the orientation of hatred, bigotry, ideological blindness behind today’s religious violence. (shrink)

On the standard view, an agnostic might commit non-doxastically to religion because she wants to receive some goods, which might be either natural or supernatural in kind. I broaden the picture by showing how the agnostic must also take negative factors into account. Negative mundane factors should be avoided as far as possible by the agnostic, and in extreme cases, even at the price of giving up supernatural goods. Negative supernatural factors, like eternal torment, work differently. An agnostic who considers (...) an eternity of suffering in hell a live possibility might rationally make a religious commitment in order to avoid it. Non-doxastic religion is commonly conceived as requiring a pro-attitude. If fear can have the impact I suggest, we must broaden the picture to allow for a negatively based commitment as well. To make explicit the kind of attitude relevant here, I offer an analysis of fear as a rational, non-doxastic attitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Hobbes transforms fear and curiosity from primarily theological to anthropological concerns. Fear and curiosity go from being, most centrally, part of religiousness, or part of worsh...

Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is one of the most widely read works of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight and attention to all three of Kierkegaard’s "problems," dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaard's production and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis (...) of the Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful, well-informed, and fresh manner, Hanson’s claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground. (shrink)

I focus here on the teleological suspension of the ethical as it appears in Fear and Trembling. A common reading of Fear and Trembling is that it explores whether there are religious reasons for action that settle that one must do an action even when all the moral reasons for action tell against doing it. This interpretation has been contested. But I defend it by showing how the explicit teleological suspension of the ethical mirrors implicit teleological suspensions (...) of the epistemological and prudential, and by articulating how it might be necessary for God to suspend the ethical in order to forgive us for our wrongdoings to others. I also discuss whether God’s commands are implicitly conditional, whether religious reasons to act, believe, and forgive are in each case grounded in divine commands, and what role love plays in each type of teleological suspension. (shrink)

Humans clearly have trouble thinking about death. This trouble is often used to explain behavior like delay in writing wills or buying life insurance, or interest in odd medical and religious beliefs. But the problem is far worse than most people imagine. Fear of death makes us spend fifteen percent of our income on medicine, from which we get little or no health benefit, while we neglect things like exercise, which offer large health benefits.

At the present time, when we are experiencing one of the extraordinary conditions in which the basics of life are shaken, exceptional practices concerning the sources of the meaning of the world of life have become one of the urgent issues for the sociology of religion to consider. This study discusses the reactions of people to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the regularity of social life in the early stages in the framework of Muslim religious groups. Since (...) the forms of social organization reveal reactions in their own specific forms, a research design that considers the differences were preferred. The provision that ‘man is social by nature,’ which is the indispensable principle of social sciences, has been the main feature of important issues to elaborate in the restrictions of today’s pandemic. Religious socialization, which is important for the inquiry, is a phenomenon that is desired to be carried out on a continuous basis. Its performative dimension draws attention to important elements that affect the formation and the social ontology of the group, such as consciousness and solidarity. While some religious groups insist on face-to-face interaction and rituals, some of them prefer to use effectively digital tools and channels. This differing approach has become a public issue, especially during the pandemic process. On the other hand, there is a discussion in the context of the digital world of new media tools and the travel possibilities of transportation technology. The theoretical basis of this study, which deals with the insistence of religious groups on face-to-face interaction and rituals is represented from the scope of Erving Goffman. His analyzes face-to-face communication and his comments emphasizing the ritualistic nature of daily life are operationalized through two basic case studies: the first case is the persistence and practice of Tablīghī Djamā‘at, in its annual meetings in the early days of the pandemic. The discussion started with the practice of the religious group in Delhi (Nizamuddin Markaz), since they did not cancel their annual meeting despite the diagnosis of the disease. The second case is based on the ritual insistence of pilgrims in visiting shrines in the Iranian city of Qom. The insistence of the Shiite Islamic understanding on ritual and pilgrimage and the solidarity built with the consciousness based on it is a well-known phenomenon. In the Covid-19 pandemic, the risk of contamination caused by the mobility of the pilgrims coming to the city of Qom from countries such as Pakistan was discussed, as well as the contact and social distance during the Hajj. Two cases were handled with a qualitative design including case analysis method and descriptive analysis technique. The main purpose and intended contribution of the article are to reveal the insistence of face-to-face interaction through the performative based on rituals as an analytical explanatory on the social level. Inferences based on the analysis of religious groups’ response to restrictions in times of emergency build the importance of the issue. Case information identified in the context of the case study shows that groups with traditional interaction forms insist on their own practice in the field of uncertainty and initiative. Unless necessity eliminates the initiative, the determination of this insistence of traditional religious groups is not only theological but also ontological confirmation. It is understood that the members of the group took the initiative to represent their reputation within the group and their extent to dedicate to the group. The fact that Tablīghī Djamā‘at, the largest group of the transnational Islamic da‘wa (call), did not give up on a method based on demographic mobility, has been a matter of discussion. The insistence of the group is because of the methods that require every ordinary believer to accept to convey the da‘wa as his primary duty. On the other hand, Shiism, which stands out with its traditional structure and ritual intensity in the Islamic world, insisted on the initiative process in the pilgrimage phenomenon, on which it attached special importance and built its solidarity and identity on this phenomenon. This insistence aims preserving the dynamics and social ontology of the religious group in the performance of the membership system. Essentially, the individual in the group insists on his position in face-to-face interaction because having a role in a group also means having a face. Thus, this insistence performance by religious groups should also be read as a reflection of self-technologies. In the final analysis, the insistence put forward should be considered essentially in relation to the insistence on the position in social ontology. (shrink)

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just (...) war and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury. (shrink)

The whats and whys of religious belief -- A history of thanatocentric theories of religion -- Measuring faith and fear -- Are people afraid of death? -- The religious correlates of death anxiety -- Death anxiety and religion: causes and consequences -- The future of immortality, literal, and symbolic.

It seems that fearing the death and believing in an almost endless cycle of rebirths is a paradox, but in India it is an actual attitude of the majority of religious local creeds. The painful ways in which death happens, the frightening netherworld in which the dead must be punished, the sad missing of one’s family and friends, the uncertainty of the new form in which the imperishable soul (ātman) might dwell in its new life, all these are the (...) basic elements of such a fear. Therefore the solution can be seen only in nirvāṇa, i.e. to be extinguished or not to go any longer. (shrink)

This article argues that religious emotions are variations of general emotions that we already know from our everyday life, which nevertheless exhibit specific features that enable us to think of them as forming a coherent subclass. The article claims that there is an experience of joy, sorrow, regret, fear, and so on that is specifically religious. The aim is to develop an account that specifies what makes them “religious.” The argument is developed in three stages. The (...) first section develops a phenomenologically inspired account of the emotions by focusing on three of their moments: phenomenal quality, cognitive dependency, and intentionality. Drawing on this theory, section 2 distinguishes the class of religious emotions from similar phenomena. The third and final section examines the main features of religious emotions. (shrink)

In a letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson includes a syllabus—a comparative account of the merits of Jewish morality, ancient philosophy, and the precepts of Jesus. Using the syllabus as a guide, this paper is a critical examination of the influence of ancient ethical and religious thinking on Jefferson’s ethical and religious thinking—viz., Jefferson’s views of the ethics and religion of the Hebrews, the ancient philosophers, and Jesus.

For ages, natural disasters, war and disease have been part of life, sharing themes of not only adversity, fear and death, but also hope. The year 2020 brought a new threat in the form of coronavirus disease 2019, which challenged what humankind understood of all they knew and believed. The significant difference today is the role of the media in sharing news and opinions on this disease that threatens not only lives, but also spiritual well-being. In this study, we (...) focus on people’s religious views on the origin and meaning of this invisible threat to establish how this pandemic impacts on people’s belief systems. The 20th century was marked by a shift whereby actions and events are intellectualised to rationalise cause and effect, and the philosophical theodicies are regarded to limit our critical reasoning. This study, however, shows that COVID-19 reactivates this debate in that it surpasses logic and rational thinking. Data are collected by means of comments, discussions and opinions shared on numerous social media platforms. During times of adversity, the same rhetorical ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions are asked and in this regard, theodicy as a philosophical framework informs this study. Applying a narrative inquiry, data are interpreted and three themes are identified, namely COVID-19 is an act God, COVID-19 has nothing to do with God and God remains in control amidst a devastating pandemic. The sample for this study is random and the medium used allows for representativity in terms of age group, gender, race, religious affiliation of South Africa, but not limited to this country.Contribution: This article provides insight into renewed debates on religious views on pandemics and suffering in the context of COVID-19. It contributes to an understanding of different perceptions on the origin of this disease, how people make sense and find meaning in being part of a global discourse. (shrink)

Exceptionally Common Courage provides an extended, close reading of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's well-known, pseudonymous book about Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. It then fits this (in)famous work into the broader and puzzling corpus that includes both other pseudonymous works and signed discourses by this same mercurial author. Though not the first to tackle Kierkegaard from the direction of either a single work or the whole authorship, this two-in-one book relates whole and part to whole and part in a way (...) that reads like a genuine musical counterpoint. The scholarly debates inevitably generated by any treatment of Fear and Trembling are here addressed in ways that arise from a detailed interpretation of the text itself without letting secondary material interrupt the primary train of thought. Along the way, Kierkegaard's ideas are brought into conversation with a much broader than usual cannon of interlocutors, including such figures as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and James Baldwin, R.H. Tawney and Wendell Berry. And by the end, the complex movement of the entire authorship becomes audible above the various isolated and doctrinaire notes typically highlighted in comparable studies. The recurring melody is about existential courage, about the risk of emotionally investing in earthly goods against the ambiguous inevitability of their loss. Woven throughout Kierkegaard's so-called esthetic and religious writings, this common task of facing threats to the integral meaning of human experience stands out in arresting color. As the chapters unfold, this understanding of faith as a form of courage provides not just direction, but a topographical score for what is originally a highly indirect and elusive textual arrangement. (shrink)

In 2008, renowned Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe remarked that almost everything he has written since the early 1960s has been influenced by Indigenous music “because that was a music … shaped by the landscape over 50,000 years.” 3 His preference for accumulating “an effect of relentless prolongation” through the use of long drones has seen his music fail, until recently, to appeal to an Australian ear attuned to Bach and Mozart. 4 His aim, however, has not been to satisfy the (...) European-trained ear, but to “mirror the Australian outback”; to capture a sense of time and space that many Australians have repeatedly failed to access. 5 Sculthorpe‟s efforts to form connections with the landscape are by no means singular; representations of the bush have dominated the arts from early settlement, albeit in a largely negative fashion. The contradiction between an accepted Australian vision of the landscape as empty, unwelcoming bush or desert, and the social reality of a nation living mainly in coastal communities has not gone unnoticed. 6 Nevertheless, contemplating this “accepted vision” alongside the lukewarm reception of Sculthorpe‟s work gives rise to the following question: what conclusions, if any, may be drawn from insistently negative representations of the landscape? In consideration of this question, I propose an analysis of two texts in which the representations of landscape have been overlooked in favour of feminist or classical readings: Barbara Baynton‟s Bush Studies and Joan Lindsay‟s Picnic at Hanging Rock. If “landscape is personal and tribal history made visible,” what is one to make of Bush Studies? 7 The parallels between Baynton‟s narratives of isolation and her own experiences cannot fully account for her portrayals of the bush as “a lonely, hostile place, antagonistic to its inhabitants,” where time recedes into the vast distances of the plains, and the past and future are uncertain. 8 Baynton‟s settlers, cut adrift from cultural and religious traditions, fail to form communities and conform to the notion that “where si gnificant tradition counts for little, places may be virtually without time,” leading to “no awareness of history.” 9 In short, Baynton‟s settlers are plagued with a sense of timelessness that appears to originate from perception, rather than the environment. (shrink)

Adherence to certain religious beliefs is often cited as both an efficient deterrent to immoral behavior and as an effective trigger of morally praiseworthy actions. I assume the truth of the externalist theory of motivation, emphasizing emotions as the most important non-cognitive elements that causally contribute to behavioral choices. While religious convictions may foster an array of complex emotions in a believer, three emotive states are singled out for a closer analysis: fear, guilt and gratitude. The results (...) of recent empirical studies are examined to evaluate the relative motivational efficiency of all three emotions, as well as the likely negative psychological side-effects of these affective states, such as aggres­sion and depression. While an action motivated by fear of punishment can be seen as a merely prudential strategy, the reparatory incentive of a guilty subject and a desire to reciprocate of the one blessed by undeserved favors are more plausible candidates for the class of genuine moral reactions. The available evidence, how­ever, does not warrant a conclusion that a sense of guilt before God or as a sense of gratefulness to wards God, may produce a statistically significant increase in the frequency of prosocial actions aimed at other humans. (shrink)

You can stand strong in the midst of shaking. Does it feel like all hell is breaking loose in the church right now? This time of shaking is actually an act of God -- a refiner's fire through which He will bring radical, glorious reformation to the church through exposure, confrontation, and cleansing. Through this upheaval, God is seeking to mold and mature His people into the supernatural community that were destined to be! In a dramatic encounter with the (...) class='Hi'>fear of the Lord, author and pastor, Chad Norris received an assignment from God to bring fatherly training, correction, and rebuke to the Church, shaping fellow believers into powerful Kingdom representatives. In God is Shaking His Temple, Chad offers a prophetic invitation to partner with this move of God to manifest His Kingdom on earth. In this book, you will discover... Ancient truths that come with promises of blessing Discernment to distinguish between God's work and the devil's Strength to stand firm in the midst of crisis and chaos Wisdom to walk as a mature child of God, fit to move in signs, wonders and miracles Freedom from religious bondage and false views of God This season of upheaval is an invitation from the Father to incline your ear, hear the Lord's voice, and join His Kingdom army that will bring Heaven's light to this dark world. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James suggests that the human experience of a fundamental and existential uneasiness can be found at the core of most religious traditions, and that these traditions constiute essentially a proposed solution to this uneasiness. The present investigation focuses upon the notion of uneasiness, particularly fear, and its solution in the early Hindu tradition. Through a close examination of textual expressions of both desire and fear from the R̥gveda, the Śatapatha (...) Brāhmaṇa, and the Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, it is proposed that “liberation” in the early Upaniṣadic period, or at least the precursor to the traditional notion of liberation, actually meant freedom from fear, rather than freedom from karma or saṁs̥ra. The Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad suggests that the origin of duality is desire, and duality necessarily results in fear. By relinquishing the sorts of desires so frequently expressed in the earlier vedic literature, together with an understanding of the essentially non-dual relationship between the ātman and brahman, a state of complete freedom from fear (abhaya) may be achieved. (shrink)

In this chapter, Immanuel Kant's focus is on how members of a (true) church should interpret their Scripture. Not surprisingly, Kant's position on this issue is unequivocal: Scriptures must be given a moral interpretation, if they are to have any relevance to a true church. The first mark of a true church is its universality; through it, a church is grounded in pure religious faith. Kant asks us to choose: (a) Will we interpret religious faith as an attempt (...) to satisfy God by obeying nonmoral precepts, motivated by fear of punishment for service withheld and/or by hope of reward for service rendered? Or (b) Will we interpret faith as a form of assurance based on the practical hope that God will bless those who, though still imperfect, have the sincere conviction to walk the path of continual moral improvement in their lifestyle?. (shrink)

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history's most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmaker's art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world. Regarded as the father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction (...) that we must all create our own nature; in this great work of religious anxiety, he argues that a true understanding of God can only be attained by making a personal "leap of faith.". (shrink)

In this rich and resonant work, Soren Kierkegaard reflects poetically and philosophically on the biblical story of God's command to Abraham, that he sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith. Was Abraham's proposed action morally and religiously justified or murder? Is there an absolute duty to God? Was Abraham justified in remaining silent? In pondering these questions, Kierkegaard presents faith as a paradox that cannot be understood by reason and conventional morality, and he challenges the universalist ethics and (...) immanental philosophy of modern German idealism, especially as represented by Kant and Hegel. This volume, first published in 2006, presents the first new English translation for twenty years, by Sylvia Walsh, together with an introduction by C. Stephen Evans which examines the ethical and religious issues raised by the text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Pluralism and Christian TruthJoseph S. O’Leary has been named recipient of the 1998 Frederick J. Streng Book Award for his 1996 volume, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth. Dr. O’Leary was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1949. He studied literature, theology, and philosophy in Maynooth, Rome, and Paris. After teaching briefly in the United States (University of Notre Dame and Duquesne University), he moved to Japan in (...) 1983. He has worked in association with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture and currently teaches English literature at Sophia University (with special emphasis on Joyce and the modernist period) and a course on Japanese values at International Christian University.He has been working on a trilogy in fundamental theology that has taken on an increasingly interreligious character. The first volume is Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Winston/Seabury, 1985), reviewed in Buddhist-Christian Studies in 1987; a French version is in preparation. The second volume appeared first as La verite chretienne a l’age du pluralisme religieux (Paris: Cerf, 1994) and then as Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996). Joseph O’Leary is also coeditor of Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980) and Buddhist Spirituality (vols. 8 and 9 of World Spirituality, New York: Crossroad, 1993 and 1999).Terry Muck: Why did you write this book?Joseph O’Leary: My earlier book, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition, advocated deconstruction of the Greek and Hebrew elements in Christian theology—the need for a radical retrieval of the tradition in the spirit of Heidegger’s “step back” from metaphysical systems to the original phenomena. In Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, I broadened the horizon to see all religion as historical, cultural constructs growing and changing through mutual interaction. Living in Japan brought me a liberating sense of historical and cultural relativity and with it the sense that the Christian tradition should be thought of as an essentially incomplete project, always reaching out to other traditions in search of a fuller vision.But that discovery did not mean giving up on the Christian tradition.No. Rather than sitting back and enjoying the pluralism, I found myself more and more concerned with the question of truth. Followers of Jacques Derrida assured me that “truth” has been exposed as a historical myth. Struggling with Derrida I found rather a recontextualization of the value of truth. Moreover, the “situated truth” (always relative to a given context in culture and praxis) of historically formulated dogmatic propositions turned out to be quite defensible despite Derrida’s demolition [End Page 239] of notions of truth as totality (Hegel) or truth as presence (Heidegger). Christianity has nothing to fear from opening itself up to its historical relativity. Buddhism has long accepted the provisionality of all religious expressions. I focused especially on the notion of skillful means and on the theory of the two truths (conventional and ultimate) in Madhyamaka Buddhism.What does this “opening up” do to traditional Christian doctrines?The notion of God is not only compatible with such a relativized view of the status of religious language, but demands it. The biblical discourse about God consists in a constant deconstruction of old images of God by new ones. As for the role of Jesus Christ, Incarnation is an ongoing event in that the historical significance of Jesus is still unfolding. The uniqueness of Jesus resides not in some ontological amalgamation of divinity and humanity but in the specifics of his historical role. God’s Word is spoken in other ways elsewhere, indeed is spoken in all things, and its specifically “fleshly” (human and historical) and “eschatological” manifestation in the unfolding of the Jesus story should not be divorced from these wider contexts.How have these ideas been received?The most flattering response has come from the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies in granting me the Frederick J. Streng Book Award. Streng’s book, Emptiness, which I read in Pittsburgh in 1982, opened my eyes to the world of Madhyamaka thought.Any criticisms?Predictably, the book has come under fire from two opposing camps. The Revue Thomiste reviewer claimed that I could... (shrink)

Purpose. The paper considers the fear of social alienation of love. It is within the limits of psychoanalytic epistemology, the analysis of which will be presented in the article, the tendencies to monotony and universal solutions with an emphasis on ensuring the objectivity of the problem of gender alienation, to be more exact, the fear of love, which causes the gender process, are viewed most reliably. In view of the above the purpose of the paper is to investigate (...) the conceptual contradictions associated with the reconstruction of basic measurements of the fear of alienation of love within different ideological approaches; to reveal the most significant contradictions that manifest themselves in the differences between secular and religious frames; to determine a philosophical and fundamental foundation for the types of fear: metaphysical, transcendental and social, which to some extent have influenced the development of a gender tradition. The paper investigates the fear of alienation of love, not as an instinct or psychological experience, or as a social factor, but as a correlation between the functional types of fear and the peculiarities of social and cultural processes, and it acts as a dependence of the European societies on the various functional forms of fear of love that influence the processes of social transformations. Theoretical basis. The authors determine that in the gender approach the subject, who is cognized, has specific desires and interests. The process of cognation is local, contextual, in which physiologically and spiritually the fear of alienation of love is closely linked to the conditions of existence of people, with the arrangement of social and individual life. In modern civilization, true love with some exceptions, is fleeting. It is now hindered by the burdens of life, and ideological settings, which go only from the "I", and not from the common "I and You", contributing to frustration and alienation. Originality. The emphasis is placed on the fact that the fear of alienation of love, as a way of identifying the essential characteristics of "I", acts as an existential, which concentrates on the sense-life range of problems. The range of problem in a single topic is in the "point I", surrounded by gender boundaries, it contains as a condition for its manifestation the personality distancing – free or forced consolidation and assertion of the autonomy of the individual. Alienation of love as an existential admits in the register of the intimate, intentional for self-perception, internal state to organize and identify with the "authentic I". Conclusions. The article establishes that gender identity under the conditions of modern socio-psychological crisis is associated with forming a special "picture of fear, anxiety, loneliness" as a part of that internal and external world, generated by alienation from society. The fear of alienated love acts as the essential existential of human being, which is a necessary existential condition of the existential tension that occurs as an antipode and a characteristic of courage, asceticism, and the "beginning of wisdom". The considered phenomenon of the fear of alienation of love is interpreted as the result of the ontological and gender alienation of a person who has lost a sense of security and plunged into a continuous interindividual rivalry. (shrink)

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very (...) souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning. (shrink)

There is increasing research on the inclusion and exclusion of people with disabilities in African spaces, which are perpetuated by religious and cultural fear. Decision to shun or embrace people is defined by the politics of the body and influenced by the religion and culture of fear. In politics of the body, women are discriminated against because their bodies are often controlled and put under surveillance. Women with disabilities experience this discrimination more than their able-bodied counterparts and (...) men with disabilities. Written from the perspective of the ethic of ubuntu, this article examines the fear of disability among the Ndebele of Matetsi in Zimbabwe, as well as how the politics of the body are used by women with disabilities to denounce this fear. These women described how they used and and still use their bodies to call for inclusion in their communities. The article employs findings from the politics of the body emerging from the narratives of women with disabilities to propose an African women’s theology of disability.Contribution: The article problematises fear of disability as a cause of discrimination and exclusion of differently abled people particularly women with. It therefore proposes an African women’s theology of disability that is informed by the interdisciplinary approach of Ubuntu promoting the inclusion of all people including women with disabilities into the web of life. (shrink)

The lack of clarity of religious values in rehabilitation program conducted for prisoners in jails has been the cause of a failure of the rehabilitation process of prisoners. This research aims to examine the implementation of the prisoner rehabilitation program and offer relevant components of humanist values for rehabilitation in prisons. The research method used a naturalistic qualitative approach and an analytical descriptive data analysis technique, and revealed in detail the prisoner rehabilitation program through the developing of religious (...) values for behavioral change. This research showed that the prisoner rehabilitation programs in prisons is a very significant effort to bring behavioral change in prisoners. Despite this, the evaluation undertaken of the rehabilitation program shows sub-optimal results. It was found that application of humanist values can replace prohibitions and punishment which are applied on prisoners. The research has implications for positive changes in prisoner behavior which tend to be more grounded in consciousness than fear of prohibition and punishment. This research provides further evidence as to the effectiveness of the humanist approach in prisoner religious rehabilitation. (shrink)

In one of its most urgent folds, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible juxtaposes negative theology with relational theology for the sake of thinking constructively about today's global climate of religious conflict and ecological upheaval. The tension between these two theological approaches reflects her desire to unsay past harmful theological speech but also to speak into the present silences about the possibility of a future that is not only to be feared. Suffusing Keller's Cloud is the related possibility of (...) living out one's life in conversation with a religious tradition having accepted the nonknowing character of its wisdom. Here, I develop the notion of “hypothetical faith” as an epistemic posture that commits itself to some particular religious tradition even as it acknowledges the unverifiability of that tradition's deepest truths. Understood as operating at the opposite end of the testability spectrum from science, religion-as-hypothesis provides a way of saying and unsaying one's tradition at the same time. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is a cryptogram. Encoded within a series of reflections and commentaries on Genesis 22 is a deeper message directed at a reader or readers presumably capable of deciphering the hidden meaning. That this is true is suggested by the book's epigraph: ‘What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.’.

This essay offers a close reading of "Fear and Trembling" against the backdrop of what the author thinks are weaknesses in how the work has been interpreted by others. Some read the text allegorically, as containing a distinctively Christian message about Pauline soteriology. Others read it anagogically, with an emphasis on the moral psychology of Abraham as a human character. In partial disagreement with each, the present essay assembles and interprets the textual evidence around the threat to human happiness (...) posed by our problematic reliance on what Aristotle calls external goods. (shrink)

The study is a response to the call for papers on African issues and discusses the notion of leadership in the Zimbabwean context. Based on material drawn through an interdisciplinary research process, this article argues that the phenomenon of fear emanating from a Zimbabwean religio-culture cuts across the country’s socio-political structures and affects its different forms of leadership. Therefore, by drawing on primary and secondary as well as literary and non-literary, sources, the article examines how and why religio-culture and (...) especially its elements, such as the phenomenon of fear, continue to influence the people’s understanding of leadership. The quest for a cross-cultural perspective leads to the consideration of both African and non-African scholarly views. In order to draw on concrete data, I focus on the perceptions and experiences of ordinary citizens whether professionals or non-professionals. Furthermore, the study considers arguments and propositions from disciplines such as history, political science, religious studies, anthropology, and African philosophy, among others. (shrink)

Prompted and resolved by acts of volitional imagining, dramatizing figures a situation in which actors share in having something important at stake such that imminently some of their actions will be momentous (making great differences) and fateful (defining of lives). Religious dramatizing does this very ambitiously. In amplifying the stakes of action there is a danger of being inappropriately dramatic, as in Don Quixote’s fantasies or Chicken Little’s ‘The sky is falling!’ But dramatization can be validated by successfully enacting (...) the dramatic heightening of a situation, by conventionally instituting heights of importance, and by having convincing experiences of situations as dramatic. Kant worries about an inappropriately romantic dramatizing of the moral life; Lucretius warns that religious visionaries will make people crazy with fear of divine retribution. The issue is taken seriously within religious dramatizing. For example, apocalypticism seems to entail an irresponsible termination of care for continuing life. Correctives are offered by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theory of ‘theo-drama’ and (Francis’s, 2015) encyclical ‘On Care for Our Common Home’. These examples show how the modulation of dramatizing is no less a religious concern than the dramatic heightening of human life. (shrink)

The present paper suggests to consider Kierkegaard’s use of Abraham’s story in Fear and Trembling in regulative terms, that is, to consider it as a model – not for our moral behaviour but rather for our religious behaviour. To do so, I first rely on recent literature to argue that Kierkegaard should be regarded as a distinctively post-Kantian philosopher: namely, a philosopher who goes beyond Kant in a way that is nevertheless true to the spirit of Kant’s original (...) critical philosophy. Then, I present a post-Kantian reading of Fear and Trembling, focusing on the problematic implications that result from comparing this text with Hegel’s theory of recognition. Finally, I submit that sacrifice in Fear and Trembling is a regulative notion in a Kantian sense. This interpretation addresses some of the most problematic aspects of the text. I conclude that the regulativity of sacrifice may be regarded as an important and perhaps an essential component of Kierkegaard’s overall philosophical strategy. (shrink)

In the literature of philosophy and religious ethics, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has, with few exceptions, been read as a work focused on ethical questions concerning the norms governing human conduct. However, ethical readings of this book not only miss important features of the text, they render its argument internally incoherent. These problems disappear when Fear and Trembling is understood primarily as a discussion of Christian soteriology that symbolically uses the Abraham story to develop the classical Pauline (...) -Lutheran doctrine of justification through faith alone. (shrink)

Why me? -- Sticks and stones -- Hammer of God -- God is great -- The problem of atheists -- Guardian angels -- Nations under God -- God knows.

This commentary argues against the theory that cultural ritual behavior is meaningless or that ritual action is solely a by-product of fear-based precautionary and action-parsing systems. Humans demonstrate the ability to spontaneously change their use of proximate intentions and attribute ultimate intentions to ritual actions that are not dependent upon fear or physical and emotional/mental dysfunction. (Published Online February 8 2007).

Many religious critics argue that biotechnology (such as cloning and genetic engineering) intrudes on God's domain, or plays God, or revolts against God. While some of these criticisms are standard complaints about human hubris, I argue that some of the recent criticism represents a “Promethean” concern, in which believers unreflectively seem to fear that science and technology are actually replicating or stealing God's special deity–defining powers. These criticisms backfire theologically, because they diminish God, portraying God as an anthropomorphic (...) superbeing whose relevance and special nature are increasingly rivaled by human power. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Epistemology of Religion and Conflicting Truth‐Claims The Relation Between Religions Works cited.

The infamous and controversial work that made a lasting impression on both modern Protestant theology and existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus Writing under the pseudonym of "Johannes de silentio," Kierkegaard expounds his personal view of religion through a discussion of the scene in Genesis in which Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command. Believing Abraham's unreserved obedience to be the essential leap of faith needed to make a full commitment to his religion, Kierkegaard himself made (...) great sacrifices in order to dedicate his life entirely to his philosophy and to God. The conviction shown in this religious polemic—that a man can have an exceptional mission in life—informed all Kierkegaard's later writings. His "teleological suspension of the ethical" challenged the contemporary views of Hegel's universal moral system, and was also hugely influential for both protestant theology and the existentialist movement. Alastair Hannay's introduction evaluates Kierkegaard's philosophy and the ways in which it conflicted with more accepted contemporary views. This edition also includes detailed notes to complement this groundbreaking analysis of religion, and a new chronology. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. (shrink)

There is a single unified conception of religious faith in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript: existential faith is absolute trust in an eschatological promise, i.e. a miraculous realization of ethical ideals that is beyond all human power to accomplish or even predict. Faith in this sense has the precondition of "infinite resignation," which is a purified state of ethical willing in which the agent accepts her/his own inability to actualize the ethical, outwardly or inwardly. This (...) condition is explored extensively by Climacus in this discussion of "existential pathos," which shows why the resigned agent has to trust in an absolute source of eschatological possibilities to guarantee the ultimate meaningfulness of his/her ethical striving. The distinction between Religiousness A and B, along with different senses of "the absurd" and "the absolute paradox" can all be explained in terms of different kinds of eschatological possibility. /// Segundo o autor do artigo, há uma única concepção do religioso presente nas obras Temor e Tremor e Postscript Conclusivo e Não-Científico de Søren Kierkegaard, concepção essa fundada na ideia de que a fé existencial consiste numa confiança absoluta na promessa escatológica, ou seja, numa realização miraculosa de ideais éticos que estão para além de todo e qualquer poder humano de os realizar ou mesmo sequer de os antecipar. Neste sentido, a fé tem como condição prévia a "resignação infinita", a qual consiste num estado purificado de vontade ética em que o agente aceita a sua própria incapacidade de actualizar o ético, seja isso de forma exterior ou interior. Esta condição é extensivamente explorada por Climacus na sua discussão do "pathos existencial", o qual mostra precisamente por que razão o agente resignado tem que confiar numa fonte absoluta de possibilidades escatológicas em ordem a poder fazer face ao mais radical sem-sentido inerente ao seu processo de actualização do ético. Assim, o artigo pretende mostrar até que ponto a distinção kierkegaardiana entre Religiosidade A e B, bem como os diferentes sentidos do "absurdo" e do "paradoxo absolute" podem ser explicados em termos dos diferentes tipos de possibilidade escatológica que o pensamento pode identificar. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that religious emotions are variations of general emotions that we already know from our everyday life, which nevertheless exhibit specific features that enable us to think of them as forming a coherent subclass. The article claims that there is an experience of joy, sorrow, regret, fear, and so on that is specifically religious. The aim is to develop an account that specifies what makes them “religious.” The argument is developed in three stages. (...) The first section develops a phenomenologically inspired account of the emotions by focusing on three of their moments: phenomenal quality, cognitive dependency, and intentionality. Drawing on this theory, section 2 distinguishes the class of religious emotions from similar phenomena. The third and final section examines the main features of religious emotions. (shrink)