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In this article, I aim to briefly examine the ontological structure of religious life from a phenomenological perspective. By this, I mean how what the subject thinks and does reveals certain principles and patterns of religious life. The first step is to identify the guiding principle. We ask ourselves what the ultimate motivation of the religious human being is. After this, the main thing is to determine how they think of themselves, what image they have of themselves as human beings with regard to the divine. This points to a greater configuration of their consciousness. Next, we look at their habits and the ritualization of their lives. And finally, we examine the relationship they have with their community. Furthermore, we inquire about the implications of being part of that community. The findings are that religious subjects can only be happy as part of their community if, paradoxically, their desire is to abandon their ego (self-interest and desires) and devote themselves to the glorification of their god. However, although we can use the term “religious” to describe the form of life where subjects maximize the glory of the divine, other historically and sociologically constituted religions are moved by a different ontological principle.

This article considers how early Alexei Losev dealt with the concepts of hesychasm, Palamism, and Name-Glorification. It reveals a range of important sources that Losev employed in his essay “Onomatodoxy” while developing his formulas of hesychasm and Name-Glorification, elaborating on the concept of absolute symbolism and touching on his teaching about universals. These sources include “Synodikon of Orthodoxy,” “Philokalia,” and Pavel Florensky’s essay “Onomathodoxy as a Philosophical Premise.” Although Losev follows the main framework of Florensky’s project in his “Onomatodoxy” (1921–1922)—treating Palamism and Name-Glorification as derivatives of Platonism and comprehending the nature of applying the notion “God” to the divine essence and energies—he differs from Florensky in his interpretation of the structure of symbol. In Losev’s later work, “Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology” (1930), he exchanges his understanding of the correlation between Palamism and Name-Glorification with Platonism, which directly correlates with Losev’s changed attitude toward Florensky. However, in the “Essays,” the specific interpretation of the application of the notion “God” to the essence and energies, dating back to Florensky, is preserved.

This article analyzes the evolution of Pavel Florensky’s teachings about language from the end of the 1910s to the early 1920s in the context of the two lines of influence (Humboldtian–Potebnian and Palamite) on the basis of which this teaching developed. In his reasoning about language, Florensky, proceeding from intuition, declares that there is a rigid connection between the word’s sound/phoneme; its morpheme, etymon, and sememe (the given here and now meaning); and its denotate. According to Florensky, this points to the magicism of the word as such. At the beginning of the 1910s, Florensky, having become a participant in the name-glorifying debates, also adhered to the line presupposing a rigid connection between the word’s sound (the name, which is applied to God), its meaning, and its denotate. All these lines converged in Florensky’s thoughts on the nature of language in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. He turned again to the Humboldtian–Potebnian language scheme but rethought it, speaking of the intentionally charged sememe as the word’s inner form. In texts written in the late 1910s and the early 1920s, we single out two aspects of the understanding of the magicism of the word which were key for Florensky, namely the aspect revealed in the discourse of the independent and autonomous existence of words and names and the aspect presupposing the intentionally willed moment in the phenomenon of the magicism of the word.

Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), COVID-19 and Ebola have exposed the magnitude of care-related tasks on women. Most often, because of the gendered nature of domestic and reproductive roles, women are expected to assume unpaid care-related, nurturing and domestic work. Despite the valuable duties, women are economically poor and othered. These unpaid care duties are exacerbated by pandemics and ratified even further by religion. For instance, in Nomiya Church (NC), the first African independent church in Kenya, women’s experience narratives and biblical texts such as the story of the Proverbs 31 virtuous woman are used to glorify unpaid charitable work for women. Women’s virtuous personality, hard work and character are upheld in Christian spaces, thus obstructing sound work theologies. This article employed African Women’s theological lens in view of pointing out repressing and transformative tenets in charitable theologies of work for social and gender justice. While applying womanhood hermeneutics in the passage, the article points to valued behavioural postures of hard work in responding to God’s stewardship mandate. An affirmation of fair reward and accumulation of property is embraced as a familial complementary role, especially in pandemic contexts. The article amplifies the accumulation of property as a human right and the mandate of stewardship for all earth communities. Hence, charity work is a stewardship framework that all earth communities must engage in for replenishment and sustenance for all.ContributionThe article challenges literal biblical interpretations that glorify charity work. It advances a stewardship framework in understanding unpaid and charity work that all earth communities must engage in to replenish and sustain all creation. The framework affirms the dignity of all human persons through a transformational understanding of the theology of work as enabled by the African theological hermeneutics.

The Abraham tradition in the Old Testament is considered a source of Pauline universalism. The outstanding contribution made by early Jewish interpretations of Abraham, however, has been largely overlooked to date. Hymnal and liturgical texts of early Judaism provide further background about this character. Therefore, three central aspects of the apostle’s theocentric universalism will be discussed: ecclesiological (Rom 4:2–17a), christological-soteriological (8:32), and eschatological (15:7–12). The role that Gen 22 played in Jewish interpretation not only for Rom 8:32, but also for Rom 4, which has hardly been considered or discussed in detail to date, will be central. The Abraham tradition is also in the background in Rom 15:7–12 and 13, which is sometimes seen as the sum of Romans. Read in this context, a new approach to solving the linguistic problem of 15:8–9, which is often perceived as difficult, also emerges.

Although the COVID-19 vaccine has been recommended as the safer and more effective prevention for COVID-19 disease relative to other alternative medications, yet across the globe, many people are resistant to receiving it. Setting out to explain such a paradox, we conducted an online survey among a sample of Indonesians (N = 4758) when the World Health Organisation (WHO) granted authorisations for the clinical trial of various vaccines against COVID-19. The results revealed that participants’ support for theories that the COVID-19 vaccine is invented to harm their nation (i.e., COVID-19 vaccine conspiratorial beliefs) positively corresponded with the perceptions that international collaboration in the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial is not aligned with their nation’s actual needs (i.e., the perceived assumptive international collaboration) and negative attitudes towards the vaccine. In turn, the perceived assumptive international collaboration was positively related to negative attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccine. We also showed that the positive relationship between COVID-19 vaccine conspiratorial beliefs and the perceived assumptive international collaboration in the vaccine clinical trial was more prominent among participants who were strongly resistant to take vaccines supplied by other countries due to national pride (i.e., vaccine national glorification).

Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide. Journalistic reporting guidelines were created to curb the impact of unsafe reporting; however, how suicide is framed in news reports may differ by important characteristics such as the circumstances and the decedent's gender. This study aimed to examine the degree to which news media reports of suicides are framed using stigmatized or glorified language and differences in such framing by gender and circumstance of suicide. We analyzed 200 news articles regarding suicides and applied the validated Stigma of Suicide Scale to identify stigmatized and glorified language. We assessed linguistic similarity with 2 widely used metrics, cosine similarity and mutual information scores, using a machine learning-based large language model. News reports of male suicides were framed more similarly to stigmatizing (P<.001) and glorifying (P=.005) language than reports of female suicides. Considering the circumstances of suicide, mutual information scores indicated that differences in the use of stigmatizing or glorifying language by gender were most pronounced for articles attributing legal (0.155), relationship (0.268), or mental health problems (0.251) as the cause. Linguistic differences, by gender, in stigmatizing or glorifying language when reporting suicide may exacerbate suicide disparities.

This part of our study has sought to establish that Edwards’s theology of revival represents a discipline at the root of which lies the sovereign will of God, not the will of man. For Edwards, the engine of any true revival movement is the sovereign work of God and not the work of man and his endeavours to produce revival. Revival from the time of Edwards has been characterised by mysterious and supernatural aspects. The Spirit of God has been the operator of revival and the people of God are entirely dependent upon Him for revival. The theme of God’s sovereignty becomes an important and essential theme for Edwards in the whole process of spiritual awakening.

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie's wry essay \"How Kierkegaard Got into English,\" which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard's principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay.

This article investigates how Trinity features are presented in the Gospel of John and how the early Christians experienced the Trinity in their daily lives. The immanence and ‘lived experiences’ of the divine are fostered by how the immanence of the divine is expounded in terms of the familia Dei: God as Father, the Logos as Son of God, believers as Children of God and the Spirit-Paraclete as the one who constitutes the family and educates the children in the family. Therefore, in this article, the familia Dei will be the facilitating hermeneutical principle used to examine the divine fellowship as well as the ‘lived experiences’ and immanence of the divine in early Christian everyday living. John’s reflection on perichoresis lies embedded in a ‘fellowship’ perspective. The divine fellowship is investigated from the four perspectives of how the divine is identified in John: life in the familia Dei, love in the familia Dei, unity in the familia Dei and glorification in the familia Dei.