JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY最新文献

This article discusses the impact of a “corporeal turn” in early modern religious history on recent publications in Counter-Reformation Catholic History. Scholars increasingly look towards the Church's legal archives in Rome as a source of information about ecclesiastical and theological attitudes to the body and sexuality. The figure of the priest has emerged as one of the most interesting subjects in that inquiry because of the richness of material about clerics which those archives hold. Scholars are now engaged in study of how past generations of theologians, ecclesiastical magistrates, and medics assessed priestly abilities and disabilities, priests' engagement in sexual acts, and their wider performances of masculine identities. Rome's role as a major centre in shaping Catholic masculinities is reinforced in this scholarship but a new study underscores the blurred boundaries between the lay and ecclesiastical in masculinities there. Overall, this research provides much new material both for rethinking historical questions about Trent's impact on reform discourses and also for commenting on contemporary debates in theology and Church politics about the nature of Christian priesthood.

Since the inception of the Evangelical Church of Mekane Yesus (EECMY), women have been part and parcel of the holistic ministry; however, their role has only been limited to providing social welfare activities for a long time. Meanwhile, a communist regime took power in the 1974 revolution and caused severe trials and persecution of evangelical churches, and prominent Mekane Yesus congregations opened for charismatic moves. Such upheavals loosened the stringent structures of the church, allowed women to serve freely and fearlessly, and showed their worthiness amid a brutal government crackdown. Subsequently, the issue of elevating women to ordination began to rise and took several years to realise. This article mainly discusses this historical process from the wider Lutheran tradition as well as in comparison with other Ethiopian mainline evangelical denominations; and how they resolved it constitutionally after intense and long debate by utilising key participant informants, bulletins, magazines, and research work.

This article uses the life and career of Parwati Soepangat as a case study to shed light on the narrative of Buddhist women in postcolonial Indonesia. It contends that, unlike Theravāda Buddhist-majority nations in mainland Southeast Asia, Indonesia's lack of a patriarchal monastic authority allowed Buddhist women, like Parwati Soepangat, to emerge within the Indonesian Buddhayāna movement. This movement, advocating for inclusive and nonsectarian indigenous Buddhism, aimed to promote “Indonesian Buddhism” (agama Buddha Indonesia) as a diverse yet unified religion in harmony with the motto of “Unity in Diversity.” Through the examination of interviews, Buddhist publications, periodicals, and Parwati Soepangat's personal writings, this research delves into her dual minority status — both as a Buddhist and a woman — in a predominantly Muslim nation. As this article will illustrate, Parwati Soepangat championed the concept of “Buddhist feminist theology” (teologi feminis Buddha) and simultaneously advocated for gender equality and women's empowerment as strategic approaches to propagate Buddhist teachings throughout Indonesia and amplify women's participation in the Indonesian Buddhayāna movement.

The subject of this article is the lived religion of lay Catholics devoted to the woman described as one of the greatest saints of the modern era, Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, known as Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). It draws on letters written to the Lisieux Carmel in Normandy at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. Much scholarship on the laity in the interwar years concerns itself with renewal and militancy in the public sphere. By contrast, the body of evidence at hand provides insights into continuities in established forms of devotion and into the religious thinking of the kinds of believers about whom we know relatively little. I argue that Catholics influenced by Thérèse's teachings, notably the “Little Way” and her “Spirituality of the Ordinary,” modelled the saint's destabilisation of the active/contemplative (or public/private) dichotomy. The letters reveal the entanglement of the spiritual and the secular in the lives of ordinary Catholics and how, after Thérèse, they participated in the Christian animation of society beyond the home. In their writing we also see evidence of the correspondents' attachment to the universal Church when they felt, acutely, the uncertainties of the international situation.