Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Islamic Meditation: Mindfulness Apps For Muslims In The Digital Spiritual Marketplace, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter describes and analyzes three digital sites that offer guided meditations curated by and for Muslims: Sakeenah, Sabr, and Halaqah. My analysis offers thick descriptions of these mobile apps, which first appeared in the online “meditation marketplace” in 2020 and 2021, and identifies resonant themes and questions that I believe are fruitful for the study of religion in digital landscapes and for mapping the shifting contours of lived Islam. Today’s industry of online meditation and mindfulness products is highly profitable, as meditation—and, more broadly, “mindfulness”—has in recent decades been embraced and normalized in contemporary, cosmopolitan life as a key …

Thomas Hooker, Martin Luther, And The Terror At The Edge Of Protestant Faith, Baird L. Tipson

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, early Protestants insisted that individual Christians could be certain that they personally enjoyed God’s favor and would be saved. Their faith in Christ’s redeeming work would give them “assurance of salvation,” and their ministers insisted that every Christian ought to feel that assurance. This article argues that Protestant assurance did not – and could not – banish believers’ anxiety that God’s saving promises had never been meant for them. “Behind” the God who promised salvation lurked a “hidden God” who had decided the ultimate fate of every individual before the beginning of time. Even the …

The Nature Of Food: Indigenous Dene Foodways And Ontologies In The Era Of Climate Change, David S. Walsh

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Climate change leading to a drastic decline in caribou populations has prompted strict hunting regulations in Canada’s Northwest Territories since 2010. The Dene, a subarctic indigenous people, have responded by turning to tradition and calling for more respectful hunting to demonstrate respectful reciprocity to the caribou, including a community-driven foodways project on caribou conservation and Dene caribou conservation which I co-facilitated in 2011. In these ways the caribou is approached as a person. Dene responses to caribou decline can best be understood by ontological theories of an expanded notion of indigenous personhood. However, I argue these theories are inadequate without …

《庄子》中关于身体的诸概念" (Concepts Of The Body In The Zhuangzi), Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay Sommer explores how the Zhuangzi uses such terms for the body as gong 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; shen 身, a site of familial and social personhood; xing 形, an elemental form that experiences mutations and mutilations; and ti 體, a complex, multilayered corpus whose center can be anywhere but whose boundaries are nowhere. The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral human form. Zhuangzi presents the human frame as a corpus of flesh, organs, limbs, and bone; he dissects it before the reader's eyes, turning it inside out …

The National Muslim Forum Nepal: Experiences Of Conflict, Formations Of Identity, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

With Nepal's recent transition to state secularism, the politicization of Muslim religious identity has emerged with increasing vitality. One particular pan-Nepali Muslim organization, the Rastriya Muslim Mane Nepal (National Muslim Forum Nepal), offers a window into the complex relationship between national and religious identity that animates this politicization. Through analysis of the National Muslim Forum's earliest discourses, produced between 2005 and 2006, both immediately before and after the people's revolution that resulted in the declaration of Nepal as a secular state, this essay highlights the ways that experiences of conflict coupled with a national political transition shape and contribute to …

Seeing The World Through Ramist Eyes: The Richardsonian Ramism Of Thomas Hooker And Samuel Stone, Baird L. Tipson

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Using as examples the writings of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, founding ministers of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, this article shows how influential thinkers in early seventeenth-century England and New England saw the world around them through the filters of the Ramist philosophy of Alexander Richardson. It argues that Richardsonian Ramism produced theology and preaching that was less “biblical” and more “Calvinist” than has been conventionally thought.

早期 '地' 和 '土'之观 (Concepts Of Earth And Land In Early Chinese Texts), Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Many studies have explored conceptualizations of heaven (tian 天) in early Chinese thought, but few if any have explored understandings of heaven's later cosmological counterpart, earth (di 地). This article examines Chinese understandings of earth and land (tu 土) in pre-Qin 先秦sources. In ancient texts such as the Book of Odes (Shi jing詩經) and Book of Documents (Shang shu尚書), the earth is not yet the paired counterpart to heaven that it will become in later Warring States (fifth-third centuries BCE) texts. Older works often depict earth and land as passive recipients of heaven's …

The Ji Self In Early Chinese Texts, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In much recent scholarship on notions of self in Chinese studies, the term "self" is usually used in a general sense. In this essay, however, Sommer focuses specifically on unraveling the fields of meaning of one Chinese character: ji 己, which may often be rendered as "self." She compares this ji self with other terms for body and person current in classical times. This ji self is strongly individuated, but it exists primarily in relation to other human beings (ren 人 ). These "others" are almost never one's own kind and are usually people who fall outside one's ascribed …

Nepal, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Nepal is a democratic republic located along the southern region of the Himalayan range, bordering India to the south, west, and east and the Tibetan autonomous region of China to the north. Though a small country in geographic terms (approximately 54,362 square miles [1 mile = 1.6093 kilometers]), its population of approximately 29.5 million people is a complex and heterogeneous mix of both Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups and castes, each with distinct languages and religious and cultural traditions. [excerpt]

Bhutan, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Bhutan (formally the Kingdom of Bhutan) is a small, landlocked Buddhist constitutional monarchy in the eastern Himalayas, located between China's Tibetan autonomous region and India. Its terrain is largely mountainous, and its economy is based on agriculture and forestry. Bhutan's official national language is Dzongkha, and its multiethnic population, reported in the 2005 govrnment census to be approximately 681,000, is 75% Buddhist and 25% Hindu.

Bangladesh, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Bangladesh (formally the People's Republic of Bangladesh) is a Muslim-majority parliamentary democracy located in South Asia. Originally called East Pakistan, it was created during the partition of India in 1947 as the eastern wing of the country of Pakistan. Its name was later changed to East Bengal and then to Bangladesh after its union with West Pakistan was broken following a bloody war of secession in 1971. [excerpt]

Concepts Of The Body In The Zhuangzi, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay Sommer explores how the Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosophical text that dates to the third or fourth centuries BCE, uses different terms for the human body. She explores each term's different fields of meaning: the body might appear as gong 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; shen 身, a site of familial and social personhood; xing 形, an elemental form that experiences mutations and mutilations; or ti 體, a complex, multilayered corpus whose center can be anywhere but whose boundaries are nowhere. The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral …

Images For Iconoclasts: Images Of Confucius In The Cultural Revolution, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Confucius died and was buried in 479 B.C.E., and he was never seen again. Or so one would think. “You may forget me as I once was,” Confucius reminds us in the Zhuangzi, "but there is something unforgettable about me that will still live on." Confucius’s physical frame was concealed from sight below ground, but his body and face were not forgotten either by his followers or his detractors, each of whom remembered him (or remembered him) in different ways. People created semblances of Confucius that reflected their own visions of the past, and constructions of his body took on …

Book Review: Hsieh Liang-Tso And The Analects Of Confucius: Humane Learning As A Religious Quest, Thomas Selover, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Hsieh Liang-tso is the first volume to explore Chinese traditions in the Academy Series sponsored by Oxford and the American Academy of Religion. Most previous titles in the series focus on Christianity, which perhaps explains Selover’s attention to the perspectives of comparative religions and comparative theology in his introduction. There he briefly traces the history of the issues concerning the religious dimensions of the Chinese literati tradition and outlines a comparative framework for approaching eleventh-century Chinese thought. Inspired by Robert Neville’s Beyond the Masks of God, Selover focuses in the introduction on four themes—scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This framework, …

The Art And Politics Of Painting Qianlong At Chengde, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

New Qing Imperial History uses the Manchu summer capital of Chengde and associated architecture, art and ritual activity as the focus for an exploration of the importance of Inner Asia and Tibet to the Qing Empire (1636-1911). Well-known contributors argue that the Qing was not simply another Chinese dynasty, but was deeply engaged in Inner Asia not only militarily, but culturally, politically and ideologically.

Emphasizing the diverse range of peoples in the Qing empire, it analyzes the importance to Chinese history of Manchu relations with Tibetan prelates, Mongolian chieftains, and the Turkic elites of Xinjiang. In offering a new appreciation …

Book Review: Meeting Of Minds: Intellectual And Religious Interaction In East Asian Traditions Of Thought, Irene Bloom, Joshua Fogel, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought, a volume of eleven essays written in honor of Wing-tsit Chan and William Theodore de Bary, proposes to explore how Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions have responded to and have influenced other traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, folk, Japanese nativist, and so on) in China and Japan. The essays are arranged first geographically (seven articles on China precede four on Japan) and then roughly chronologically. All essays, save one, describe Sung or post-Sung developments. A few sentences per essay must suffice in this review. [excerpt]