Search results for "Religion"
showing 10 items of 2574 documents
Marsilius of Padua and Isaac Abravanel on kingship : the medieval precedents of modern republicanism revisited
2020
Abstract This article offers a comparative investigation of Marsilius of Padua’s and Isaac Abravanel’s ideas on kingship. It looks at how these thinkers transform the “canonical” sources of their respective traditions of political theorizing, i.e., Aristotle’s Politics and the Bible, to articulate the notion that ultimate authority rests with the citizens/people. It also examines how these two writers’ positions on kingship relate to the political realities that prevailed in late medieval Italy. Finally, it illuminates the medieval precedents of modern republicanism in the Christian and Jewish political traditions.
The Influence of the Avicennan Theory of Science on Philosophical Sufism
2020
Abstract This article discusses the application of the Avicennan theory of demonstrative science on taṣawwuf, or the Divine Science (al-ʿilm al-ilāhī), by members of the Akbarian tradition, particularly Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) stepson and most influential disciple, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 1274), and his commentators, among whom the most prominent was Mullā Muḥammad b. Ḥamza al-Fanārī (d. 1431). It aims to find out what kind of relationship was developed between Avicennan logic and Sufism by the two members of the Akbarian school in the post-classical Islamic thought. It also seeks to show that the convergence between different currents of Islamic thought—Sufism and philosophy in this case—…
Freedom from Hate: Solidarity and Non-violent Political Struggle in Poland
2002
Thirty-first August 2001 marked the 21st anniversary of the end of prolonged strikes in Poland that resulted in the forming of the trade union Solidarity. The struggle of Solidarity remains a powerful lesson in political non-violence. In spite of the wide support it enjoyed in Polish society, Solidarity was outlawed in December 1981 and its leaders were imprisoned. If one is suppressed by force, one can answer with force. But Solidarity did not. Was it an ethical standpoint that Solidarity used only peaceful means in its defence or a utilitarian or pragmatic strategy? The paper argues that it was both. The struggle of Solidarity was not only guided by pragmatic considerations on how to achi…
Hors du cloître et dans le monde : Des Sœurs catholiques comme actrices transnationales
2012
Resume Cet article etudie les reseaux missionnaires catholiques entre l’Europe et l’Afrique, en particulier deux congregations africaines basees au Burkina Faso travaillant en Afrique et en Europe. L’analyse de cette forme specifique de la transnationalisation du religieux permet de saisir certaines tendances du processus de globalisation. Les religieuses africaines sont de plus en plus impliquees dans la pastorale en Europe tout en continuant leurs activites apostoliques dans leur continent d’origine. Les religieuses europeennes sont pour leur part de moins en moins presentes en Afrique ou elles operent au travers de reseaux transfrontaliers. Ce renversement des roles missionnaires traditi…
Steven Paas, Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism (edition afem – mission academics 32). Bonn: VTR and…
2013
Secular and sacred? The Scandinavian case of religion in human rights, law and public sphere
2014
Secular and Sacred? The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Sphere (van den Breemer et al. 2014) is an anthology concerned with the shape and development of secularism in ...
Something Mightier: Marginalization, Occult Imaginations and the Youth Conflict in the Oil-Rich Niger Delta
2011
This contribution examines the role of occult imaginations in the struggle against perceived socio-economic marginalization by youth militias from the Ijaw ethnic group in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. It argues that the asymmetric power between the federal government/transnational oil corporations (TNOCs) and the militias may have privileged the invocation of the supernatural as a critical agency of strength and courage by the youth militias. The conflict in the region embodies a cultural revision which has been necessitated by both the uncertainty of the oil environment and the prevailing narratives of social injustice. Hence the Egbesu deity, seen historically as embodying…
“You are special”: othering in biographies of “GDR children from Namibia”
2017
ABSTRACTThe article analyses a historical case of politically induced flight. The so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR) children from Namibia are about 430 people brought to the GDR between 1979 and 1989. They came from Namibian refugee camps and were part of a solidarity project between South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and the GDR. They were educated to become the Namibian elite once the country had been liberated. Their stay was to be temporary, with the children identified as Namibian by SWAPO and GDR. The article reconstructs culturalist and biological-racist forms of othering as characteristic biographical experience of the young people which deny them belonging to…
WISING UP: THE EVOLUTION OF NATURAL THEOLOGY
2012
This essay is in response to Professor Celia Deane-Drummond's 2012 Boyle lectures. The first part calls attention to the value and significance of her “sophianic theo-drama hypothesis” for the contemporary engagement between Christian theology and evolutionary science. In a sense, her proposal itself is a religious “adaptation” to changes within an international, interdisciplinary academic environment. The second part of the essay explores the rapidly shrinking “niche” of Christian natural theology and briefly summarizes an alternative set of hypotheses from the biocultural sciences of religion.