The purpose of this article is to test hypotheses that meaning in life can be a mediator in the relations between religiousness expressed in terms of a meaning system and subjective well-being. Previous research on religion and well-being has left some questions unanswered. Associations of the religious meaning system and subjective well-being turn out to be complex and suggest the possibility of meaning-oriented mediators in their relations. The results obtained in the current study demonstrated that (...) personal meaning and presence of meaning were partial mediators between the religious meaning system and the cognitive dimension of subjective well-being. In contrast, search for meaning did not have a significant mediational role in those relations and there were no direct or indirect relationships between the religious meaning system and the affective dimension of subjective well-being. The findings suggest indirect relations between religiousness and well-being which are partially mediated by structures of meaning and purpose. (shrink)

In Bearing Witness, Courtney S. Campbell draws on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and a bioethics consultant to propose an innovative interpretation of the significance of religious values and traditions for bioethics and health care. The book offers a distinctive exposition of a covenantal ethic of gift-response-responsibility-transformation that informs a quest for meaning in the profound choices that patients, families, and professionals face in creating, sustaining, and ending life. Campbell's account of "bearing witness" offers new understandings of (...) formative ethical concepts, situates medicine as a calling and vocation rooted in concepts of healing, affirms professional commitments of presence for suffering and dying persons, and presents a prophetic critique of medical-assisted death. This book offers compelling critiques of secular models of medical professionalism and of individualistic assumptions that distort the physician-patient relationship. This innovative interpretation bears witness to the relevance of religious perspectives on an array of bioethical issues from new reproductive technologies to genetics to debates over end-of-life ethics and bears witness against the oddities of a market-oriented and consumerist vision of health care that is especially salient for an era of health-care reform. (shrink)

Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general interpretive theorizing exists. 4E cognitive science, which champions how cognition is embedded in natural and cultural settings, extended into external (...) structures, enacted via motor routines, and embodied via representations rooted in human bodily form, has encouraged interpretive researchers. Theories of embodied cognition especially have embraced a sweeping view of meaning that attends to the emotions’ role and to their evolutionary origins. That inspires a 6E cognitive science that attends to the emotional and evolved dimensions of cognition too and opens up the possibility of general interpretive theories of broadly Darwinian character. Evolved cognitive systems qualify as maturationally natural cognition, which exhibits a distinctive constellation of features. The by-product theory holds that religious representations’ engagement of maturationally natural cognition fosters religions’ success. Representations with some minimal violation of intuitive expectations concerning some ontological category grab attention, stick in memory, and preserve the many automatic inferences accompanying the category. The empirical evidence for this and other elaborations of the by-product view suggests that it discloses dynamics of evolved cognition and associated emotions that tend to guide the pursuit of religious meanings systematically toward well-worn grooves in the semantic landscape. (shrink)

This is one of the best studies to date on the philosophy of emptiness, established by the Buddhist scholar Nägärjuna. It not only presents an exposition of emptiness, the lack of self-existent entities, but also gives the background in India at the time of the formulation of the Mädhyamika and analyzes the structures of religious apprehension in Indian thought. Streng finds three types of religious realization: mythic, intuitive, and dialectical. He clearly sees and demonstrates that the doctrine of (...) emptiness is not a teaching of an unqualified base of phenomena, and thus classifies this system as a dialectical structure. The second part is devoted to a study of the system itself; the third, to placing that system in the context of Indian religious thought; the fourth, to relating the doctrine of emptiness to the general problem of religious knowledge as a means for ultimate transformation. Thus, the book is by no means limited to Buddhologists or Indologists. The almost constant translation of Buddhist Sanskrit terms into English makes this work available to all interested in philosophy and religious thought. The appendix contains translations of the whole of the Mülamadhyamakakärikäs and of the Vigrahavyävartanï both by Nägärjuna. Because the texts are root or fundamental texts, and thus brief, the translations are not easily comprehensible; however, those parts can be skipped over as the principle being exemplified is the same in every instance. Because this book places the concept of emptiness in its proper perspective, distinguishing emptiness from an all-pervasive base out of which phenomena are produced, and yet appreciates the spiritual value of the doctrine, it is a must for all who wish to know more of the more profound aspects of Buddhist philosophy.--P. J. H. (shrink)

As Mircea Eliade’s translator and biographer Mac Linscott Rickett states, Eliade involved the whole discipline of the history of religions in the quest for meaning. The paper examines Eliade’s approach of religious documents, with benefits and shortcomings as appraised by some of his American critics, and looks closely at the Eliadean creative hermeneutics and the ambitious mission he envisaged for the discipline he has founded in the United States.

The Wilderness of Dreams: Exploring the Religious Meanings of Dreams in Modem Western Culture. Kelly Bulkeley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 309 pp. $19.95 (paper).

From the days of discovery, when America was for Europeans more dream than reality, to our own days of disillusionment and faltering hope, poets, philosophers, historians, novelists, and theologians have drawn on religious themes and images to express the meaning of their encounter with America. Here, in more than one hundred selections, is the record of their quest for a New World metaphysics -- a spiritual vision or ultimate idea of order expressive of the American experience.

This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion by Daniel C. FoukeAllison P. CoudertDaniel C. Fouke. The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997. Pp. xi + 257. Cloth, $93.75.In this detailed examination of Henry More’s psychological explanation of enthusiasm, Daniel C. Fouke persuasively argues that previous discussions (...) of seventeenth-century attitudes toward enthusiasm have been marred by misplaced attempts to categorize them in terms of “rationalism,” “empiricism,” and the “new science.” As he says, “a central problem in every account is that anti-enthusiasts and their targets simply refuse to ally themselves according to commitments which, to our eye, should sort them into well-defined genealogies, neat schools, and clear enmities. Clear battle-lines fail to emerge, and any portrait of the typical ‘enthusiast’ never gets so far as a bare outline” (122). The ample evidence he offers to support this point appears in the three main sections of his book, in which he analyzes More’s attack on two types of scientific “enthusiasm,” alchemy, represented by Thomas Vaughan, and the mechanical philosophy, and on the religious and political enthusiasm of radical sects, represented primarily by the Quakers.Fouke points out how similar More’s own views are in many respects to the enthusiasts he excoriates, and he illustrates how tendentious and often unfair his criticisms are. For example, More viciously attacks Thomas Vaughan for his vitalistic, organic view of the natural world when he himself holds similar views. And he later attacks the mechanical philosophers for rejecting the kind of vitalism he had earlier attacked in Vaughan, while chiding them for ignoring the sympathetic effects he had detected with such repugnance in Vaughan.The same inconsistencies and misrepresentations hold true of More’s attack on the Quakers. He criticizes them for relying on the “Inner Light,” when he himself had used the same expression and adhered to the same conviction that religion was a matter of inner experience not outward observance.In both his attack on scientific and religious enthusiasm, More descends, as Fouke amply shows, to a level of ad hominem vituperation at odds with his professed tolerance and good manners. By attributing all enthusiasm to physical disorders, which, in More’s view, arise primarily from carnality and lust, More effectively stigmatized and even demonized his opponents (since the devil was masterful at using physical disorders for his nefarious purposes).What accounts for More’s harshness and inconsistencies? Fouke argues, again persuasively, that one must view More’s attacks on enthusiasm in the context of the political and religious upheavals of the time and in terms of his own metaphysical and cultural outlook. As Fouke points out, all attacks on enthusiasm involved the larger issue of authority. Where should one look for guidance—to the State, the Church, the individual? More was a traditionalist, who deplored the political and religious anarchy of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. But although he was a political conservative and traditionalist, he too had been influenced by religious radicals and believed that an individual’s religion must be heartfelt and not a matter of ritual compliance. In essence More’s attack on enthusiasm was basically an attempt to legitimize his own theology, anthropology, and natural philosophy in the name of an indisputable, higher, religious [End Page 467] authority. The irony of More’s position was that in vilifying enthusiasm and attributing it to insanity, More’s writings became a useful resource in the armory of the deists, materialists and atheists, who were his real targets.Fouke is especially interested in analyzing what he describes as the “poetic source” of More’s attack on enthusiasm. As he says at the beginning of his book:I will argue that More and his “enthusiastical” opponents were offering competing ideals of religious meaning which they expressed by singling out particular kinds of experience as types of religious and moral cognition. I will also show that they differed in their account of the “crisis” experience which provides entry to the spiritual life, grounding this experience in competing theoretical, narrative, and poetical contexts. I will... (shrink)

Purpose. The aim of this article is to analyse the essential features of religious faith as an existential-personalistic model of the formation of a person, his worldview orientations and activities. This requires a consistent solution of the following tasks: a) to focus on different approaches to understanding the phenomenon of "religious faith" ; b) to reveal the spiritual potential of religious faith, its capabilities in boundary situations. Theoretical basis. The author thinks that the interpretation of religious (...) faith as confidence in the invisible is unsatisfactory, one-sided and superficial. Religious faith is the existential, due to which a person overcomes the contradictions between finiteness and infinity. It is the construct of the human spirit, which makes its way into the transcendental realm. In this context, religious faith is a kind of criterion for the "growth" of the "human" in human, the criterion of his spirituality and humanity. Religious faith, being an integral part of human existence, gives it irrational dimensions, makes the possibility of impossible. The existential potential of religious faith serves as the "fulcrum" of a person, thanks to which he self-actualizes, self-fulfills and forms a certain worldview model. Originality. The author has proved that religious faith, which is the projective model of a person, turns out to be one of the possible ways to solve its existential problems, as it concerns not only the nature of the essential characteristics, the properties of the Divine itself but also the ultimate foundations of person in all the uniqueness and specificity of his being. Conclusions. Religious faith, acting as a factor in human activity, builds his value-worldview model of the world. Faith deals with the "ultimate" problems of human existence since it is of exceptional importance in solving life-meaning issues of human existence. The existential experience of the believer acquires the status of an event that opens up a field of new possibilities, a new spiritual experience. The accumulative effect of such experience forms the spiritual and value priorities of human existence, sets certain coordinates of his vital activity, due to which he self-determines, being in dialogue with the Absolute. Religious faith, unfolding as a permanent process of "search and finding" opens the "code" of transcendence, a new level of relations of the Human and Divine. (shrink)

In this book, Paul K. Moser offers a new approach to religious experience and the kind of evidence it provides. Here, he explains the nature of theistic and non-theistic experience in relation to the meaning of human life and its underlying evidence, with special attention given to the perspectives of Tolstoy, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Moses, the apostle Paul, and Muhammad. Among the many topics explored in this timely volume are: religious experience characterized in a unifying conception; (...) class='Hi'>religious experience naturalized relative to science; religious experience psychologized in merely psychological phenomena; and religious experience cognized relative to potential defeaters from evil, divine hiddenness, and religious diversity. Understanding Religious Experience will benefit those interested in the nature of religion and can be used in relevant courses in religious studies, philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, and the history of religion. (shrink)

This book is the result of years of collaboration between the authors on work in religious ethics. The collaboration started when we published the first edition of The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics with William Schweiker as editor and David Clairmont as project assistant. Through the encouragement of our publisher, Rebecca Harkin of Wiley-Blackwell, it was decided that a basic text was needed on the meaning and method of religious ethics, and, further, a book that could (...) be used in connection with the Companion at several levels of academic instruction: undergraduate, graduate, and in the training of religious leaders. Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method is that book. It elaborates and expounds the account of religious ethics developed by William Schweiker as a multidimensional theory of the religious and moral life for our global times. (shrink)

This essay chronicles the development of Catholic health care in the United States during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The author points to the religious pluralism and the respect for that pluralism as well as to the evangelical drive for conversion evident in Catholic hospitals. This essay is a phenomenological study of this commitment to pluralism and the evangelical impulse within the contexts of health care.

Religious marketing is a process of making decisions related to what should and should not be done so that the church could fulfill its mission and serve the parishioners. Religious marketing focuses upon the way the parishioners behave and their satisfaction, because these aspects are very important so that the Orthodox Church could fulfill its mission. A small number of active parishioners is usually interpreted as a sign of incompetence to attract and keep the existing members. Considering this (...) aspect, it is necessary to do the analysis of perceived quality, perceived value and the expectations of the Orthodox related to the religious services. These factors determine the level of their satisfaction and the active involvement in the activities of the church. Motivating and determining the Orthodox parishioners to become loyal to the Orthodox Church would be a great advantage for the fulfillment of its mission, but in order to achieve this it is necessary to know a few marketing elements. (shrink)

It would appear that certain deeper concerns about epistemic status and credibility underlie recent heated controversies about faith schools. The evident hostility of secular liberals to religious education in general and faith schools in particular rests on the deep-seated conviction that religious claims, beliefs and narratives are essentially non-rational, if not irrational, and therefore that no religious instruction could avoid indoctrination. Proceeding via an exploration of the non-literal signification of myth and fiction, this essay sets out to (...) show how religious and other non-literal stories and narratives can be routes to objective meaning and truth that fully engage reason and understanding as well as feeling and emotion. However, the article also acknowledges the likely reservations of some religious believers to any such approach. (shrink)

Emerging Adults' Religiousness and Spirituality seeks to understand how the developmental process of meaning-making encompasses American emerging adults' religiousness and spirituality. This volume does not focus on disentangling religion and spirituality conceptually, but rather emphasizes their centrality in the psychology of human development. It highlights the range of experiences and perspectives of emerging adults in the U.S. grounded in social context, social position, and religious or spiritual identification. Chapters are written by an interdisciplinary group of authors and explore (...) topics such as the benefits and detriments of religiousness and spirituality to emerging adults; contexts and socializing agents such as parents and peers, the media, religious communities, and universities; and variations of religiousness and spirituality concerning gender, sexuality, culture, and social position. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment Kant had declared the moral will to be the purpose of the world, thus subordinating teleology to morality. But in his final notes, published in the Opus Posthumum, morality is increasingly emphasized as a source of religious inspiration. Some passages clearly contradict all that Kant wrote on the autonomy of the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason and anticipate what was to become the moral argument. Thus he maintains that the religious (...) interpretation of all duties is not an addition subsequent to their perception as duties but is immediately and necessarily given with it. This means, as Kemp Smith points out, that “the categorical imperative leads directly to God and affords surety of his reality.” “The categorical imperative of the command of duty is grounded in the idea of an imperantis, who is all-powerful and holds universal sway. This is the Idea of God.”. (shrink)

Referring to basic Weberian notions of rationalization and secularization, I try to find a more accurate sense of the term “secularization”, intending to describe adequately the position of religion in modernity. The result of this query is—or at least should be—a new, original conceptualization of religion as one of finite provinces of meaning within one paramount reality of the life-world, as defined by Alfred Schutz. I proceed by exposing a well known, major oversimplification of the Weberian concept of secularization, (...) very well outlined in Peter Berger’s The sacred canopy, in order to point to the genuine, much more differentiated position of Max Weber in this matter (especially from the period of Foundations of social economic and Economy and society), and, consequently, to return to the roots of Berger’s thought: phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, an attempt to assure the philosophical foundations of Weber’s sociological theory. At a closer glimpse, transformation of religion in the modern process of rationalization does not consist—according to Weber—in eliminating religion and thus depriving society of the religious source of meaning, but in parallel emancipation of many different domains of rationality, including religion itself. Using Schutz’s analysis of the social world as a complex structure of many different final provinces of meaning, I describe religion as such a province and show what does the process of rationalization of this province consist and what it should consist in: a complex, ongoing exchange of cognitive relevances and contents, combined with growing autonomy of many different sub-worlds. Schutz’s theory of symbol, rooted in Edmund Husserl’s description of constitution of complex objects in mono- and polythetic acts of consciousness, moves the analysis to the epistemological level, pointing to a chance of intensifying our cognitive relation to reality through increasing interpenetration of various sub-universes of meaning. (shrink)

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)

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).

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 341-355.

Bryan Rennie (ed.), Changing Religious Worlds. The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001.