Lifelong Spiritual Learning: Religious Older Adults Going Digital

This qualitative study sought to explore the role of online religious learning in alleviating distress and enhancing wellbeing in later life. Twenty-six religious Jewish individuals aged 70–96 were personally trained in their homes to use an experimental spiritual learning website. Their experiences were documented for six months via interviews, media ethnographies, and monthly follow-ups. Analysis identified the participants’ initial ambivalent attitudes towards online religious learning, which extended the discussion of cultural barriers to the integration of digital technologies for religious observance and the maintenance of communal boundaries. However, this research group’s experience highlighted the intellectual, social, and emotional benefits garnered by participation in online religious learning in later life. The findings indicate that this informal educational channel may supplement religious praxis and fill the lives of older religious adults with positive rewards and, thereby, improve their psychological and social wellbeing.

The Non-Violent Liberation Theologies of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Mahatma Gandhi

This article explores how Gandhi and Heschel developed a liberation theology that was rooted in their religious praxis, which implied an active, non-violent struggle for the rights of the oppressed. A first section discusses what separates the two spiritual giants. A second section describes the affinities between them. The third, main section describes how they formulated a non-violent liberation theology that aims at the liberation of all.

Crisis and Continuation: The Digital Relocation of Jain Socio-Religious Praxis during the COVID-19 Pandemic

In early 2020, Jain diaspora communities and organizations that had been painstakingly built over the past decades were faced with the far-reaching consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and its concomitant restrictions. With the possibility of regular face-to-face contact and participation in recurring events—praying, eating, learning, and meditating together—severely limited in most places, organizations were compelled to make a choice. They either had to suspend their activities, leaving members to organize their religious activities on an individual or household basis, or pursue the continuation of some of their habitual activities in an online format, relying on their members’ motivation and technical skills. This study will explore how many Jain organizations in London took to digital media in its different forms to continue to engage with their members throughout 2020. Looking at a selection of websites and social media channels, it will examine online discourses that reveal the social and mental impact of the pandemic on Jains and the broader community, explore the relocation of activities to the digital realm, and assess participation in these activities. In doing so, this article will open a discussion on the long-term effects of this crisis-induced digital turn in Jain religious praxis, and in socio-cultural life in general.

Confucian Mysticism

Confucian mysticism is a subfield in academic areas of study including Chinese thought, Chinese religions, Confucian studies, and comparative mysticism. Important topics examined in this subfield include, first, a view of the human self that is fundamentally relational, both in an interpersonal sense and because Confucians presuppose various correlations and an integration between, on the one hand, the matter–energy, capacities, processes, and activities comprising the self and, on the other, the elements, forces, patterns, and processes of the world it inhabits. One paradigmatic way Confucians conceptualize the interrelation between the self and the cosmos is their idea and ideal of the “unity of Heaven and humanity.” The Confucian mystical self, provided failings such as unbalanced emotions, selfish desires, and self-centeredness are effectively curtailed, contributes vitally to, because of its profound reverence for life, the generative and life-sustaining process of change that pervades and animates the cosmos. Second, practitioners use various techniques of religious praxis in combination to form multifaceted training regimens aimed at self-cultivation and self-transformation. Examples include a form of meditation called “quiet-sitting,” rituals, textual study, “investigating things,” self-examination and self-monitoring, filial piety, and “reverent attentiveness.” Third, training in these practices can achieve the different mystical aims, experiences, and transformations they seek, all of which relate to the overarching ideal of the unity of Heaven and humanity. These objectives, broadly speaking, include self-understanding, accurately grasping the “principles” of things and affairs, effortless moral virtuosity, “forming one body with all things” (and other types of Confucian mystical union), and exemplifying “sincerity.” Accomplishing them collapses the conventional divide separating several specious dichotomies, such as thought and action, self and other, humankind and nature, internal and external, the subjective and the objective, and moral ought and is. Fourth, the influence that precedent and tradition exert in Confucianism has prompted scholars to devote attention both to notable continuities and to intriguing innovations in comparing ancient mystical ideas, practices, experiences, and aims to later expressions and elaborations of them. At present, much of the scholarship on Confucian mysticism contributes to efforts attempting to provide rich and nuanced analyses of the tradition’s core doctrines, practices, experiences, and ethical and religious aims, by viewing these subjects through the lens of Confucianism’s mystical and spiritual dimensions. Less scholarly attention has been devoted to identifying and explicating the possible contributions that studying Confucian mysticism can make to the scholarship on theories of mysticism and comparative mysticism. Scholars of mysticism have not yet availed themselves of the wealth of data, the possible additional perspectives on contested issues, and the new trajectories for future research that Confucianism offers to these fields. Also, few studies employ the definitions, categories, and theories that have been developed in the contemporary study of mysticism as a methodology for studying Confucian mysticism.

Connectivity and communion: The mobile phone and the Christian religious experience in Nigeria

This article explores the integration of the mobile phone into the religious experience of Christians in Nigeria. Based on the results of an online survey and the author’s observation, it argues that the mobile phone has become an actant in the mediatization of religion, creating dependency among some users and transforming religious praxis in palpable ways. Unsurprisingly, perspectives vary on whether and how the phone should be used during worship. Attitudes coalesce around three viewpoints, leading to the emergence of user groups labelled critics, advocates, and dualists. The accounts of study participants give access into the ways some people seek to (re)configure their engagement with religion by inserting the mobile phone as a multifunctional techno-spiritual gadget.

The Reasons for the Commandments

This chapter analyzes the meaning of halakhah and religious praxis as a signal indicator of the originality, profundity, and influence of a particular mode of thinking in the history of Jewish thought. It looks at Nahmanides's insights into the realm of the Godhead and into the process of emanation from within Absolute Privation. It also explores Nahmanides's ideas about humanity's place in the cosmos and his theories of prophecy and the miraculous. The chapter discusses how Nahmanides invested much energy into supplying reasons for the commandments. It points out Nahmanides's intention to translate his metaphysical and anthropological ideas into a meaningful framework for the performance of the commandments.

Esotericism and Tradition

This chapter clarifies how Nahmanides understands the esoteric medium itself, a medium that wrought profound changes to the meaning of Judaism in the Middle Ages. It talks about the esoteric side of Nahmanides's oeuvre that resembles the ones found in the works of Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. It also analyzes esotericism that alters the meaning of religious life, in terms of both its foundational concepts and beliefs and the structuring of the religious praxis. The chapter looks into the rise of esotericism in the twelfth century, which appeared as a prominent feature in writings as diverse as Ezra's commentaries on the Torah and Maimonides's philosophical treatise “The Guide of the Perplexed.” It also discusses Nahmanides's esoteric component, which concerns biblical secrets and so is written in esoteric code, also merited independent treatment.

Death, Sin, Law, and Redemption

This chapter explores the existential foundations of Nahmanides's worldview. It analyzes the primary elements of the human condition: death, sin, and redemption. It talks also about Nahmanides's view that humanity's fate and existential condition reflect the divine drama itself. The chapter clarifies Nahmanides's conception of the Godhead, the chain of being, and the universe. It talks about Nahmanides's Talmudic novellae that provide two references to his kabbalistic traditions. One reference concerns the difference between a vow and an oath, while the other discusses the theory of prophecy in an aggadic context. It also explains how Nahmanides's kabbalistic ideas do not shape his particular halakhic determinations, even if kabbalah more broadly supplies the internal meaning of religious praxis.