Journal articles on the topic 'Indian Orthodox Church'

This article introduces Mircea Eliade. His biography and his understanding of religion are outlined and the possibly formative influence of Eastern Orthodoxy is considered, as are recent publications on the issue. His early essays present Orthodoxy as a mystical religion in which, without some experience of the sacred, profane existence is seen as meaningless and he later identified this same basic schema in all religion. Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru Stăniloae are inspected for similarities to Eliade. Ten consonances between Eliade’s thought and Orthodox theology are considered. However, dissonances are also noted, and for every potential Orthodox source of Eliade’s theories there is another equally credible source, causing a controversy over the formative influences of his Romanian youth as opposed to his later Indian experience. It is suggested that Eliade gained insight from Orthodoxy, but that this was brought to consciousness by his sojourn in India. Theology in the form of categorical propositions is present in the Eastern Church but exists alongside other equally important expressions in the visual, dramatic, and narrative arts. The Eastern Church as a multi-media performative theater prepared Eliade to apprehend religion as inducing perceptions of the “really real”—creative poesis exercising a practical influence on its audience’s cognitions. Orthodoxy is a tradition in which categorical propositions had never come to dominate the expression of the sacred, and Eliade wrote from a vantage point on the border, not only between East and West, but also between the scholar and the artist.

The Malanakra Orthodox Syrian Church, which belongs to the family of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, proudly claims to be founded by the Apostle St Thomas. Its history before the fifteenth century is very poorly documented. However, this ancient Christian community was in intermittent relationship with the East Syrian Patriarchate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, which was discontinued with the arrival of the Portuguese, who forcefully converted it to Roman Catholicism. After a union of fifty-five years, the St Thomas Christians were able to contact the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, thanks to the arrival of the Dutch in Malabar and the expulsion of the Portuguese. The introduction of the West Syrian Liturgical rites was completed by the middle of the nineteenth century. The arrival of the Anglican Missionaries in Malabar in the beginning of the nineteenth century provided the Syrian Christians the opportunity for modern English education and thus to make significant contributions to the overall development of Kerala, one of the states of the Indian Republic.

In 1900, the Dominion Iron and Steel Company began production in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Active recruitment of West Indian immigrants created, by 1923, Sydney's most segregated community. In 1928, St. Philip's African Orthodox Church was erected, and it became the fulcrum of the community. Explanations for this success have stressed social or economic factors. This article suggests that although such factors are significant, the explanation is nonetheless religious. Employing the work of the historian of religion Joachim Wach, it argues that the church's success was due to its ability to reflect at once human religious nature, and the temporal and spatial contexts in which this nature is expressed. Examining St. Philip's Church advances what Wach regarded as the goal of the study of religion : to understand both the historical particular and the more general phenomenon of human religiosity.

The year 1998 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the World Council of Churches. Great, but subsequently largely disappointed hopes, greeted it. The movement that led directly to its formation had its genesis in the International Missionary Conference of 1910, an event often cited in popular surveys as marking the beginning of the Ecumenical Movement. This paper will, however, argue that modern ecumenism has a complex series of roots. Some of them predate that conference, significant though it was in leading to the ‘Faith and Order’ movement that was, in its turn, such an important contributor to the genesis of the World Council.Archbishop William Temple, who played a key role in both the ‘Faith and Order’ and ‘Life and Work’ movements, referred to the Ecumenical Movement as the ‘great fact of our times’. This was a gross exaggeration. It is true that the movement engaged, from about 1920 onwards, a very considerable amount of the energy of the most talented and forward-looking leaders and thinkers of the Churches in the Anglican and Protestant traditions. It remained, however, marginal in the life of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II, despite the pioneering commitment of some extremely able people amidst official disapproval. Some leaders of the Orthodox Church took a considerable interest in the movement. However, both the official ecclesiology and the popular stance of most Orthodox precluded any real rapprochement with other Churches on terms that bore any resemblance to practicality. Even in the Anglican and mainstream Protestant Churches, the movement remained largely one of a section of the leadership. It attained little genuine popularity, a fact that was frequently admitted even by its most ardent partisans. One could well say that the Ecumenical Movement had only one really solid achievement to celebrate in 1948. This was the formation, in the previous year, of the Church of South India, the first Church to represent a union across the episcopal–non-episcopal divide. This type of union has yet to be emulated outside the Indian sub-continent.One of the aims of this article will be to try to explain why success in India went unmatched elsewhere. The emphasis will be on the English dimension of the problem, though many of the factors that affected the English situation also obtained in other countries in the Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition. This assessment must be balanced, however, by an appreciation of the real progress made in terms of improved and even amicable church relationships.

The article examines the phenomenon of the late Lev Tolstoy in the context of his religious position. The author analyzes the reactions to his teaching in Russian state and official Orthodox circles, on the one hand, and Indian thought, on the other. Two sociocultural images of L.N. Tolstoy: us and them that arose in the context of understanding the position of the Russian Church and the authorities and Indian public and religious figures (including Mahatma Gandhi, who was under his influence). A peculiar phenomenon of intellectually usL.N. Tolstoy among culturally them (Indian) correspondents and intellectually them Tolstoy among culturally us (representatives of the official government and the Church of Russia) transpires. The originality of this situation is that these im­ages of Lev Tolstoy arise practically at the same period. The author compares these images, based on the method of defamiliarisation (V. Shklovsky), which allows to visually demonstrate the religious component of Tolstoy’s criticism of the political sphere of life and, at the same time, to understand the psychological reasons for its rejection in Russian official circles. With the methodological help of defamiliarisation the author tries to show that the opinion of Tolstoy (as the writer) becomes at the same time the voice of conscience for many of his con­temporaries. The method of defamiliarisation allowed the author to show how Leo Tolstoy’s inner law of nonviolence influenced the concept of non­violent resistance in the teachings of Gandhi.

It is well known that the ecumenical councils convening throughout the history of the Church — the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D., the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D.— were of great import. It is much less known, however, that centuries before the first Christian councils, a similar process was taking place in ancient India. At the Councils of Rajagrha in 486 B.C., Vaishali in 386 B.C., Pataliputra in 250 B.C., Sri Lanka in 29 B.C. and Kashmir in 72 A.D., Buddhist monks resolved to set forth dogmas, to put them in writing and to draw the line between orthodox and false doctrines. Generally speaking, the first councils, both in the West and in the East, were convened due to the need to preserve original doctrines. In addition, original teachings had to be canonised and systematised. Also, the process of including religious doctrines into imperial politics is characteristic of two royal personages, namely, the Indian king Aśoka and the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. Both were actively involved in the councils of their day and contributed decisively to the further development and consolidation of both Buddhism and Christianity respectively.

AbstractThis article focuses on religious pedagogies as an essential part of the practice and the making of modern religion. It takes the case of the Syrian Orthodox communities in Kerala, South India to examine how shifts in pedagogical models and practice have reframed their understanding of knowledge and God. The paper highlights two moments of transformation—the nineteenth-century missionary reforms and twenty-first-century Sunday school reforms—that brought “old” and “new” pedagogies into conflict, redefining the modes of knowing and religious subjectivities they presuppose. For this I draw from historical and pedagogical materials, and ethnographic fieldwork in churches and Sunday schools. The paper diverges from widespread narratives on the missionary encounter by showing how colonial efforts to replace ritual pedagogies with modern schooling were channeled into a textbook culture that remained close to Orthodox ritualism. The “new” pedagogy turned learning into a ritualized practice that continued to emphasize correct performance over interiorized belief. Contrasting this with todays’ curriculum revisions, I argue that educational reforms remain a privileged mode of infusing new meanings into religious practice and shaping new orthodoxies, especially under the threat of heterodoxy. This reflects a broader dynamic within Orthodox Christianity that takes moments of crisis or change as opportunities to turn orthopraxy into orthodoxy and renew the faith. The paper engages with postcolonial debates on religion, education, and modernity, and points to more pervasive assumptions about what makes Orthodox Christianity and the modes of knowing and ethical formation in Eastern Christianity.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico had as its purpose the defense of Spanish religion and Spanish-Catholic culture against individuals who held heretical views and people who showed lack of respect for religious principles. Inquisition trials of Indians suggest that a prime concern of the Mexican Church in the sixteenth century was recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism. During the remainder of the colonial period and until 1818, the Holy Office of the Inquisition continued to investigate Indian transgressions against orthodoxy as well as provide the modern researcher with unique documentation for the study of mixture of religious beliefs. The “procesos de indios” and other subsidiary documentation from Inquisition archives present crucial data for the ethnologist and ethnohistorian, preserving a view of native religion at the time of Spanish contact, eyewitness accounts of post-conquest idolatry and sacrifice, burial rites, native dances and ceremonies as well as data on genealogy, social organization, political intrigues, and cultural dislocation as the Iberian and Mesoamerican civilizations collided. As “culture shock” continued to reverberate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Inquisition manuscripts reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.

In many countries with a strong Orthodox Christian presence there are tensions between Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians. These tensions are rooted in many theological, ecclesiological, and epistemological differences. In practice, one of the crucial causes of tension comes down to different practical understandings of what a Christian disciple looks like. This paper examines key aspects of discipleship as expressed in revival movements in Orthodox Churches Egypt, India and Ethiopia which are connected to the challenges presented by the huge expansion of Evangelical Protestant mission from the nineteenth century. Key aspects will be evaluated in comparison with aspects that are understood to characterize disciples in Evangelical expressions, including: differing understandings of the sacraments and their place in the life of a disciple; ways in which different traditions engage with the Bible and related literary works; contrasting outlooks on discipleship as an individual and a community way of life; and differing understanding of spiritual disciplines.

The article reveals the current situation around religious courts, arbitrations and mediation institutions in the states of North America, analyzes their structure, main functions and activities. Catholic and Orthodox church courts, courts and mediation institutions in Protestant churches and denominations, rabbinical and Sharia courts, conflict resolution bodies of Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, Scientologists are active in the United States. Generally, US authorities do not interfere in their activities if there are no violations of the rights and freedoms of citizens, but sometimes at the state level (Arizona, Wyoming, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas) the use of religious norms in arbitration courts is prohibited. A similar situation has occurred in Canada, where official religious courts operate legally, but in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec the activity of religious courts in the field of family relations was limited (in many respects due to fears of the formation of a parallel “Sharia justice”) The opinions of North American researchers on this issue are divided: some consider the activities of religious courts as a violation of the principle of secularism and think it necessary to ban their activities, others regard them as the realization of religious freedoms and advocate their preservation in the legislative framework...

The most well-known practitioner of dissimulation among early modern Christians of the Eastern Rite is Meletii Smotryts'kyi (ca. 1577–1633), the Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk (in modern-day Belarus), who was suspected of being a Uniate for several years before he was openly charged with apostasy during a council of the Orthodox hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania in August of 1628. For the previous year Smotryts'kyi had lived a double life, outwardly an Orthodox archbishop but secretly a Uniate, having formally accepted the Union with Rome on July 6, 1627. In this period of clandestine Uniatism and the years leading up to it, during which he flirted with conversion, Smotryts'kyi fulfilled his official duties, playing a leading role in Orthodox synods and risking exposure that would bring public disgrace and even physical harm. Smotryts'kyi had a positive reason for keeping his conversion secret: he argued that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition should allow him to remain in office as an Orthodox bishop so that he might convene a council of the Orthodox hierarchy and elite and, “received as a schismatic [an Orthodox], would be able to set forth and to explain the twofold causes of the present discord of the Church & and to cause doubt for them in the schismatic faith (through the reasons that had taught him himself that there was no contradiction in thing [essence], only in words, between the holy Greek and Latin fathers).” Smotryts'kyi concluded his request for secrecy by comparing his situation with that of Jesuits engaged in mission work with non-Christians: “Wherefore, indeed, if the fathers of the Society of Jesus and the other priests in India can live with the heathens in secular habit, this should cause no one scandal, especially since, with God’s help, we will hope for the much greater fruit of holy Union from his hidden Catholicism & than if he were now known by all.”

This article presents a new perspective on the master-slave relationship in New Netherland in order to complement the existing theories on the treatment of slaves in that Dutch colony. It shows how prior to the loss of Dutch Brazil, the West India Company modeled its slave policy after Portuguese practices, such as the formation of black militias and the use of Christianity as a means to foster slave loyalty. It also points out that in the initial slave policy of the Dutch Reformed Church was characterized by the ambition to replace the Iberian Catholic Church in the Americas. While the Reformed Church in the early decades of the Dutch colonial expansion was characterized by a community-building spirit and a flexible attitude toward newcomers, the loss of Brazil shattered the dream of a Protestant American continent and gave way to a more exclusivist approach with a much stronger emphasis on orthodoxy. This led to a dramatic change in attitude vis-à-vis slaves, which is reflected in the segregationist policies―both at a social and a religious level―in later Dutch slave colonies such as Suriname.

First a Man - then a Christian. Grundtvig and Missonary ActivityBy K.E. BuggeThe aim of this paper is to clarify Grundtvig’s ideas on missionary activity in the socalled »heathen parts«. The point of departure is taken in a brief presentation of the poem »Man first - and then a Christian« (1838), an often quoted text, whenever this theme is discussed. The most extensive among earlier studies on the subject is the book published by Georg Thaning: »The Grundtvigian Movement and the Mission among Heathen« (1922). The author provides valuable insights also into Grundtvig’s ideas, but has, of course, not been able to utilize more recent studies.On the background of the revival movement of the late 18th and early 19th century, The Danish Missionary Society was established in 1821. In the Lutheran churches such activity was generally deemed to be unnecessary. According to the Holy Scripture, so it was argued, the heathen already had a »natural« knowledge of God, and the word of God had been preached to the ends of the earth in the times of the Apostles. Nevertheless, it was considered a matter of course that a Christian sovereign had the duty to ensure that non-Christian citizens of his domain were offered the possibility of conversion to the one and true faith. In the double-monarchy Denmark-Norway such non-Christian populations were the Lapplanders of Northern Norway, the Inuits in Greenland, the black slaves in Danish West India and finally the native populations of the Danish colonies in West Africa and East India. Under the influence of Pietism missionary, activity was initiated by the Danish state in South India (1706), Northern Norway (1716), and Greenland (1721).In Grundtvig’s home the general attitude towards missionary work among the heathen seems to have reflected traditional Lutheranism. Nevertheless, one of Grundtvig’s elder brothers, Jacob Grundtvig, volunteered to become a missionary in Greenland.Due to incidental circumstances he was instead sent to the Danish colony in West Africa, where he died after less than one year of service. He was succeeded by his brother Niels Grundtvig, who likewise died within a year. During the period when Jacob Grundtvig prepared himself for the journey to Greenland, we can imagine that his family spent many an hour discussing his future conditions. It is probable that on these occasions his father consulted his copy of the the report on the Greenland mission published by Hans Egede in 1737. It is a fact that Grundtvig imbibed a deep admiration for Hans Egede early in his life. In his extensive poem »Roskilde Rhyme« (1812, published 1814), the theme of which is the history of Christianity in Denmark, Grundtvig inserted more than 70 lines on the Greenland mission. Egede’s achievements are here described in close connection with the missionary work of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in Tranquebar, South India, as integral parts of the same journey towards the celestial Jerusalem.In Grundtvig’s famous publication »The Church’s Retort« (1825) he describes the church as an historical fact from the days of the Apostles to our days. This historical church is at the same time a universal entity, carrying the potential of becoming the church of all humanity - if not before, then at the end of the world. A few years later, in a contribution to the periodical .Theological Monthly., he applies this historicaluniversal perspective on missionary acticity in earlier times and in the present. The main features of this stance may be summarized in the following points:1. Grundtvig rejects the Orthodox-Lutheran line of thought and underscores the Biblical view: That before the end of time the Gospel must be preached out into all comers of the world.2. Our Lutheran, Biblically founded faith must not lead to inactivity in this field.3. Correctly understood, missionary activity is a continuance of the acts of the Apostles.4. The Holy Spirit is the intrinsic dynamic power in the extension of the Christian faith.5. The practical procedure in this extension work must never be compulsion or stealth, but the preaching of the word and the free, uninhibited decision of the listeners.We find here a total reversion of the Orthodox-Lutheran way of rejection in principle, but acceptance in practice. Grundtvig accepts the principle: That missionary activity is a legitimate and necessary Christian undertaking. The same activity has, however, both historically and in our days, been marred by unacceptable practices, on which he reacts with forceful rejection. To this position Grundtvig adhered for the rest of his life.Already in 1826, Grundtvig withdrew from the controversy arising from the publication of his .Retort.. The public dispute was, however, continued with great energy by the gifted young academic, Jacob Christian Lindberg. During the 1830s a weekly paper, edited by Lindberg, .Nordisk Kirke-Tidende., i.e. Nordic Church Tidings, became Grundtvig’s main channel of communication with the public. All through the years of its publication (1833-41), this paper, of which Grundtvig was also an avid reader, brought numerous articles and reports on missionary activity. Among the reasons for this editorial practice we find some personal motives. Quite a few of Grundtvig’s and Lindberg’s friends were board members of the Danish Missionary Society. Furthermore, one of Lindberg’s former students, Christen Christensen Østergaard was appointed a missionary in Greenland.In the present paper the articles dealing with missionary activity are extensively reported and quoted as far as the years 1833-38 are concerned, and the effects on Grundtvig of this incessant .bombardment. of information on missionary activity are summarized. Generally speaking, it was gratifying for Grundtvig to witness ho w many of his ideas on missionary activity were reflected in these contributions. Furthermore, Lindberg’s regular reports on the progress of C.C. Østergaard in Greenland has continuously reminded Grundtvig of the admired Hans Egede.Among the immediate effects the genesis of the poem »First the man - then the Christian« must be mentioned. As already observed by Kaj Thaning, Grundtvig has read an article in the issue of Nordic Church Tidings, dated, January 8th, 1838, written by the Orthodox-Lutheran, German theologian Heinrich Møller on the relationship between human nature and true Christianity. Grundtvig has, it seems, written his poem in protest against Møller’s assertion: That true humanness is expressed in acceptance of man’s fundamental sinfulness. Against this negative position Grundtvig holds forth the positive Johannine formulations: To be »of the truth« and to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. Grundtvig has seen a connection between Møller’s negative view of human nature and a perverted missionary practice. In the third stanza of his poem Grundtvig therefore inserted some critical remarks, clearly inspired by his reading of Nordic Church Tidings.Other immediate effects are seen in the way in which, in his sermons from these years, Grundtvig meticulously elaborates on the Biblical argumentation in favour of missionary activity. In this context he combines passages form the Old and New Testament - often in an ingenious, original manner. Finally must be mentioned the way in which Grundtvig, in his hymn writing from the middle of the 1830s, more often than hitherto recognized, interposes stanzas dealing with the preaching of the Gospel to heathen populations.Turning from general observations and a study of immediate impact, the paper considers the effects, which become apparent in a longer perspective. In this respect Grundtvig’s interpretation of the seven churches mentioned in chapters 2-3 of the Book of Revelation is of crucial importance. According to Grundtvig, they symbolize seven stages in the historical development of Christianity, i.e. the churches of the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, the Germans and the »Nordic« people. The seventh and last church will reveal itself sometime in the future.This vision, which Grundtvig expounds for the first time in 1810, emerges in his writings from time to time all through his life. The most impressive literary monument describing the vision is his great poem, »The Pleiades of Christendom« from 1856-60.In 1845 he becomes convinced that the arrival of the sixth stage is revealed in the breakthrough of a new and vigourous hymn-singing in the church of Vartov. As late as the spring of 1863 Grundtvig voices a contented optimism in a church-historical lecture, where the Danish missions to Greenland and to Tranquebar in South India are characterized as .signs of life and good omens.. Grundtvig here refers back to his above-mentioned »Roskilde Rhyme« (1812, 1814), where he had offered a spiritual interpretation of the names of persons and localities involved in the process. He had then observed that the colony founded in Greenland by Hans Egede was called »Good Hope«, a highly symbolic name. And the church built by the missionaries in Tranquebar was called »Church of the New Jerusalem«, a name explicitly referring to the Book of Revelation, and thus welding together his great vision and his view on missionary activity. After Denmark’s humiliating defeat in the Danish-German war of 1864, the optimism faded away. Grundtvig seems to have concluded that the days of the sixth and .Nordic. church had come to an end, and the era of the seventh church was about to commence. In accordance with his poem on »The Pleiades« etc. he localizes this final church in India.In Grundtvig’s total view missionary activity was the dynamism that bound his vision together into an integrated process. Through the activity of »Denmark’s apostle«, Ansgar, another admired mis-sionary, the universal church had become a locally rooted reality. Through the missions of Hans Egede and Ziegenbalg the Gospel was carried out to the ends of the earth. The local Danish church thus contributed significantly to the proliferation of a universal church. In the development of this view, Grundtvig was inspired as well as provoked by his regular reading of Nordic Church Tidings in the 1830s.

This article discusses an altarpiece by Luca Giordano painted for the church of San Francesco Saverio (now San Ferdinando) in Naples in 1685. Described in contemporary sources as “St. Francis Xavier baptizing the people of Japan,” the painting reveals little about Japan or Jesuit missionary efforts in Asia; instead, the painting discloses much about how Jesuits approached their mission in Naples. Here, Jesuit missionaries found a heterogeneous environment, filled with a variety of different types of potential converts, including unruly nobles, superstitious peasants, fallen women, and a large number of Muslim slaves. Giordano’s altarpiece uses the figures of St. Francis Xavier and St. Francisco de Borja to exemplify two models for the conversions that Neapolitan Jesuits hoped to bring about—the baptism of non-Christians and the religious reform of those who had been born Christian. This article will demonstrate that Giordano’s altarpiece thematized the transformation of heterodoxy into orthodoxy, while also contributing to a Jesuit discourse that characterized Naples as being another “Indies,” an environment mired in religious heterodoxy and thus attractive to ambitious Jesuits who longed for the mission fields of far off lands.

AbstractSt. Nikolaj Velimirović is known as one of the most influential Serbian theologians of the twentieth century. In his work he shows an admirable spiritual strength and contemplative depth that one would not expect from a thinker who was involved in all important ecclesiastical, political and cultural events of his era. He deliberately replaces the language and methods of academic theology with the language of poetry. This enables him to appropriately express the strength of his own mystical experience. He was fascinated by the ascetic and religious tradition of India and tried to explain his idea of a universal unity of all with the idea of Universal Man (Svečovek). Gradually he turns to the theological and ascetic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy. There he finds, in the Christology of the Eastern Church Fathers, the testimony of the same experience of meeting Christ in love and truth.

This article focuses on the general history of the Fourth Way in Finland. The Fourth Way, or simply ‘the Work’, began as a Greco-Armenian man named Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?–1949) gathered groups of pupils in St Petersburg and Moscow in 1912. To these groups, Gurdjieff started to teach what he had learned and synthesized between ca 1896 and 1912 during his travels on spiritual search of Egypt, Crete, Sumeria, Assyria, the Holy Land, Mecca, Ethiopia, Sudan, India, Afghanistan, the northern valleys of Siberia, and Tibet. Neither Gurdjieff nor any of his disciples called themselves a church, a sect, or anything alike, but referred to themselves simply as ‘the Work’, or as ‘the Fourth Way’. The name ‘the Fourth Way’ originates in a Gurdjieffian view that there are essentially three traditional ways of spiritual work: those of a monk, a fakir, and a yogi. These ways do not literally refer to the activities of a monk, a fakir, and a yogi, but to similar types of spiritual work emphasizing exercise of emotion, body, or mind. Gurdjieff’s teaching is a blend of various influences that include Suf­ism, orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and general elem­ents of various occult teachings of both the East and the West. Gurdjieff’s teaching is a blend of various influences that include Suf­ism, orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and general elem­ents of various occult teachings of both the East and the West. It is a unique combination of cosmology, psychology, theory of evolution, and overall theory and practise aiming to help individ­uals in their efforts towards what is called ‘self-remembering’.

The aim of the study is to determine the factors of Life Satisfaction among the Clergy from Indian Orthodox Church in central Travancore, Kerala state. For this study the researcher takes the 75 samples, 25 each from three diocese namely Thumpamon, Kollam and Kottayam. The study is primarily an empirical research using Quantitative methods. The following objectives were proposed for the study.1. To study the life satisfaction of the clergy of the Indian Orthodox Church. 2. To study the impact of Diocese, Age income, Education, Marital status, Duration in Ministry, Number of families in parish, Employment status of spouse, Living arrangement, Number of children, Occupation of children, on the life satisfaction of the study group. 3. To study the life satisfaction of the married and unmarried clergy of the Indian Orthodox Church. From the analysis we found that the major factors affecting the life satisfaction are age, income and number of families in the parish. Also there is no difference between the Life Satisfaction among married and unmarried Clergy. The secular education and marital status have a diminutive influence over the life satisfaction of the clergy. The study concluded with suggestions to the Church, Asrams and Family of the Clergy.

The new Taiwanese religious movement Tzu Chi raises interesting issues for the study of religions. First, as a Chinese form of Buddhism, it embodies an attempt to reconcile or even merge the cultures and mindsets of two utterly different civilizations, the Indian and the Chinese. Secondly, it casts doubt on the presupposition that a sect, as against a church, demands of its members exclusive allegiance. Thirdly, it shows that an emphasis on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy may be modern as well as archaic. Fourthly, it also suggests that the view that secularization is tantamount to a narrowing of the domain of religion cannot be taken for granted. In the case of Tzu Chi there is probably some overlap between the last three issues, in that they show that generalizations about sects formulated by western sociologists have taken Christian sects as their model and may not be universally applicable.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (Wittgenstein 1e). The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the “heart”, or “core”, of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some “new” definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and “apophatic”, thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.The question of how to define religion has had real significance in a number of court cases round the world, and therefore it does have an impact on people’s lives. In Germany, for example, the courts ruled that Scientology was not a religion, but a business, much to the displeasure of the Church of Scientology (Aldridge 15). In the United States, some advocates of Transcendental Meditation (TM) argued that TM was not a religion and could therefore be taught in public schools without violating the establishment clause in the constitution—the separation of church and state. The courts in New Jersey, and federal courts, ruled against them. They ruled that TM was a religion (Barker 146). There are other cases that I could cite, but the point of this is simply to establish that the question has a practical importance, so we should move on.In the classical sociology of religion, there are a number of definitions of religion that are quite well known. Edward Tylor (424) defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings. This definition does not meet with widespread acceptance, the notable exception being Melford Spiro, who proposed in 1966 that religion was “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings” (Spiro 96, see also 91ff), and who has bravely stuck to that definition ever since. The major problem is that this definition excludes Buddhism, which most people do regard as a religion, although some people try to get round the problem by claiming that Buddhism is not really a religion, but more of a philosophy. But this is cheating, really, because a definition of religion must be descriptive as well as prescriptive; that is, it must apply to entities that are commonly recognised as religions. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that religion had two key characteristics, a separation of the sacred from the profane, and a gathering together of people in some sort of institution or community, such as a church (Durkheim 38, 44). However, religions often reject a separation of the sacred from the profane. Most Muslims and many Calvinist Christians, for example, would insist strongly that everything—including the ostensibly profane—is equally subject to the sovereignty of God. Also, some religions are more oriented to a guru-pupil kind of relationship, rather than a church community.Weber tried to argue that religion should only be defined at the end of a long process of historical and empirical study. He is often criticised for this, although there probably is some wisdom in his argument. However, there seems to be an implicit definition of religion as theodicy, accounting for the existence of evil and the existence of suffering. But is this really the central concern of all religions?Clarke and Byrne, in their book Religion Defined and Explained, construct a typology of definitions, which I think is quite helpful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of classical definition. Firstly, there are substantive definitions (6), such as Tylor’s and Spiro’s, which posit some sort of common “property” that religions “have”—“inside” them, as it were. Secondly, functionalist definitions (Clarke and Byrne 7), such as Durkheim’s, define religion primarily in terms of its social function. What matters, as far as a definition of religion is concerned, is not what you believe, but why you believe it.However, these classical definitions do not really work. I think this is because they try to do too many things. For a strict definition of religion to work, it needs to tell us (i) what religions have in common, (ii) what distinguishes religion on the one hand from non-religion, or everything that is not religion, on the other, and (iii) it needs to tell us something important about religion, what is at the core of religion. This means that a definition of religion has to be in three places at once, so to speak. Furthermore, a definition of religion has to be based on extant religions, but it also needs to have some sort of quasi-predictive capacity, the sort of thing that can be used in a court case regarding, for example, Scientology or Transcendental Meditation.It may be possible to resolve the latter problem by a gradual process of adjustment, a sort of hermeneutic circle of basing a definition on extant religions and applying it to new ones. But what about the other problem, the one of being in three places at once?Another type identified by Clarke and Byrne, in their typology of definitions, is the “family resemblance” definition (11-16). This derives from the later Wittgenstein. The “family resemblance” definition of religion is based on the idea that religions commonly share a number of features, but that no one religion has all of them. For example, there are religious beliefs, doctrines and mythos—or stories and parables. There are rituals and moral codes, institutions and clergy, prayers, spiritual emotions and experiences, etc. This approach is of course less precise than older substantive and functional definitions, but it also avoids some of the problems associated with them.It does so by rethinking the point of defining religion. Instead of being precise and rigorous for the sake of it, it tries to tell us something, to be “productive”, to help us understand religion better. It eschews certainty and embraces doubt. Its insights could be applied to some schools of philosophy (e.g. Heideggerian) and practical spirituality, because it does not focus on what is distinctive about religion. Rather, it focuses on the core of religion, and, secondarily, on what religions have in common. The family resemblance approach has led to a number of “new” definitions (post-Durkheim definitions) being proposed, all of which define religion in a less rigorous, but, I hope, more imaginative and heuristic way.Let me provide a few examples, starting with two contrasting ones. Peter Berger in the late 1960s defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant”(37), which implies a consciousness of an anthropocentric sacred cosmos. Later, Alain Touraine said that religion is “the apprehension of human destiny, existence, and death”(213–4), that is, an awareness of human limitations, including doubt. Berger emphasises the high place for human beings in religion, and even a sort of affected certainty, while Touraine emphasises our place as doubters on the periphery, but it seems that religion exists within a tension between these two opposites, and, in a sense, encompasses them both.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church and arch-nemesis of the conservative Anglicans, such as those from Sydney, defines religion as like good poetry, not bad science. It is easy to understand that he is criticising those who see religion, particularly Christianity, as centrally opposed to Darwin and evolution. Holloway is clearly saying that those people have missed the point of their own faith. By “good poetry”, he is pointing to the significance of storytelling rather than dogma, and an open-ended discussion of ultimate questions that resists the temptation to end with “the moral of the story”. In science (at least before quantum physics), there is no room for doubt, but that is not the case with poetry.John Caputo, in a very energetic book called On Religion, proposes what is probably the boldest of the “new” definitions. He defines religion as “the love of God” (1). Note the contrast with Tylor and Spiro. Caputo does not say “belief in God”; he says “the love of God”. You might ask how you can love someone you don’t believe in, but, in a sense, this paradox is the whole point. When Caputo says “God”, he is not necessarily talking in the usual theistic or even theological terms. By “God”, he means the impossible made possible (10). So a religious person, for Caputo, is an “unhinged lover” (13) who loves the impossible made possible, and the opposite is a “loveless lout” who is only concerned with the latest stock market figures (2–3). In this sense of religious, a committed atheist can be religious and a devout Catholic or Muslim or Hindu can be utterly irreligious (2–3). Doubt can encompass faith and faith can encompass doubt. This is the impossible made possible. Caputo’s approach here has something in common with Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard, to whom I shall return later.I would like to propose another definition of religion, within the spirit of these “new” definitions of religion that I have been discussing. Religion, at its core, I suggest, is non-propositional and apophatic. When I say that religion is non-propositional, I mean that religion will often enact certain rituals, or tell certain stories, or posit faith in someone, and that propositional statements of doctrine are merely reflections or approximations of this non-propositional core. Faith in God is not a proposition. The Eucharist is not a proposition. Prayer is not, at its core, a proposition. Pilgrimage is not a proposition. And it is these sorts of things that, I suggest, form the core of religion. Propositions are what happen when theologians and academics get their hands on religion, they try to intellectualise it so that it can be made to fit within their area of expertise—our area of expertise. But, that is not where it belongs. Propositions about rituals impose a certainty on them, whereas the ritual itself allows for courage in the face of doubt. The Maundy Thursday service in Western Christianity includes the stripping of the altar to the accompaniment of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), ending the service without a dismissal (Latin missa, the origin of the English “mass”) and with the church in darkness. Doubt, confusion, and bewilderment are the heart and soul of this ritual, not orthodox faith as defined propositionally.That said, religion does often involve believing, of some kind (though it is not usually as central as in Christianity). So I say that religion is non-propositional and apophatic. The word “apophatic”, though not the concept, has its roots in Greek Orthodox theology, where St Gregory Palamas argues that any statement about God—and particularly about God’s essence as opposed to God’s energies—must be paradoxical, emphasising God’s otherness, and apophatic, emphasising God’s essential incomprehensibility (Armstrong 393). To make an apophatic statement is to make a negative statement—instead of saying God is king, lord, father, or whatever, we say God is not. Even the most devout believer will recognise a sense in which God is not a king, or a lord, or a father. They will say that God is much greater than any of these things. The Muslim will say “Allahu Akhbar”, which means God is greater, greater than any human description. Even the statement “God exists” is seen to be well short of the mark. Even that is human language, which is why the Cappadocian fathers (Saints Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Naziansus) said that they believed in God, while refusing to say that God exists.So to say that religion is at its core non-propositional is to say that religious beliefs are at their core apophatic. The idea of apophasis is that by a process of constant negation you are led into silence, into a recognition that there is nothing more that can be said. St Thomas Aquinas says that the more things we negate about God, the more we say “God is not…”, the closer we get to what God is (139). Doubt therefore brings us closer to the object of religion than any putative certainties.Apophasis does not only apply to Christianity. I have already indicated that it applies also to Islam, and the statement that God is greater. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names—or at least 99 that have been revealed to human beings. Many of these names are apophatic. Names like The Hidden carry an obviously negative meaning in English, while, etymologically, “the Holy” (al-quddu-s) means “beyond imperfection”, which is a negation of a negation. As-salaam, the All-Peaceful, means beyond disharmony, or disequilibrium, or strife, and, according to Murata and Chittick (65–6), “The Glorified” (as-subbuh) means beyond understanding.In non-theistic religions too, an apophatic way of believing can be found. Key Buddhist concepts include sunyata, emptiness, or the Void, and anatta, meaning no self, the belief or realisation that the Self is illusory. Ask what they believe in instead of the Self and you are likely to be told that you are missing the point, like the Zen pupil who confused the pointing finger with the moon. In the Zen koans, apophasis plays a major part. One well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Any logical answers will be dismissed, like Thomas Aquinas’s statements about God, until the pupil gets beyond logic and achieves satori, or enlightenment. Probably the most used koan is Mu—Master Joshu is asked if a dog has Buddha-nature and replies Mu, meaning “no” or “nothing”. This is within the context of the principle that everything has Buddha-nature, so it is not logical. But this apophatic process can lead to enlightenment, something better than logic. By plunging again and again in the water of doubt, to use Wittgenstein’s words, we gain something better than certainty.So not only is apophasis present in a range of different religions—and I have given just a few examples—but it is also central to the development of religion in the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers’s term for the period from about 800-200 BCE when the main religious traditions of the world began—monotheism in Israel (which also developed into Christianity and Islam), Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In the early Hindu traditions, there seems to have been a sort of ritualised debate called the Brahmodya, which would proceed through negation and end in silence. Not the silence of someone admitting defeat at the hands of the other, but the silence of recognising that the truth lay beyond them (Armstrong 24).In later Hinduism, apophatic thought is developed quite extensively. This culminates in the idea of Brahman, the One God who is Formless, beyond all form and all description. As such, all representations of Brahman are equally false and therefore all representations are equally true—hence the preponderance of gods and idols on the surface of Hinduism. There is also the development of the idea of Atman, the universal Self, and the Buddhist concept anatta, which I mentioned, is rendered anatman in Sanskrit, literally no Atman, no Self. But in advaita Hinduism there is the idea that Brahman and Atman are the same, or, more accurately, they are not two—hence advaita, meaning “not two”. This is negation, or apophasis. In some forms of present-day Hinduism, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (commonly known as the Hare Krishnas), advaita is rejected. Sometimes this is characterised as dualism with respect to Brahman and Atman, but it is really the negation of non-dualism, or an apophatic negation of the negation.Even in early Hinduism, there is a sort of Brahmodya recounted in the Rig Veda (Armstrong 24–5), the oldest extant religious scripture in the world that is still in use as a religious scripture. So here we are at the beginning of Axial Age religion, and we read this account of creation:Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal.Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.All that existed then was void and form less.Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.(Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, abridged)And it would seem that this is the sort of thought that spread throughout the world as a result of the Axial Age and the later spread of Axial and post-Axial religions.I could provide examples from other religious traditions. Taoism probably has the best examples, though they are harder to relate to the traditions that are more familiar in the West. “The way that is spoken is not the Way” is the most anglicised translation of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. In Sikhism, God’s formlessness and essential unknowability mean that God can only be known “by the Guru’s grace”, to quote the opening hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib.Before I conclude, however, I would like to anticipate two criticisms. First, this may only be applicable to the religions of the Axial Age and their successors, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and early Jewish monotheism, followed by Jainism, Christianity, Islam and so on. I would like to find examples of apophasis at the core of other traditions, including Indigenous Australian and Native American ones, for example, but that is work still to be done. Focusing on the Axial Age does historicise the argument, however, at least in contrast with a more universal concept of religion that runs the risk of falling into the ahistorical homo religiosus idea that humans are universally and even naturally religious. Second, this apophatic definition looks a bit elitist, defining religion in terms that are relevant to theologians and “religious virtuosi” (to use Weber’s term), but what about the ordinary believers, pew-fillers, temple-goers? In response to such criticism, one may reply that there is an apophatic strand in what Niebuhr called the religions of the disinherited. In Asia, devotion to the Buddha Amida is particularly popular among the poor, and this involves a transformation of the idea of anatta—no Self—into an external agency, a Buddha who is “without measure”, in terms of in-finite light and in-finite life. These are apophatic concepts. In the Christian New Testament, we are told that God “has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong…, the things that are not to shame the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The things that are not are the apophatic, and these are allied with the foolish and the weak, not the educated and the powerful.One major reason for emphasising the role of apophasis in religious thought is to break away from the idea that the core of religion is an ethical one. This is argued by a number of “liberal religious” thinkers in different religious traditions. I appreciate their reasons, and I am reluctant to ally myself with their opponents, who include the more fundamentalist types as well as some vocal critics of religion like Dawkins and Hitchens. However, I said that I would return to Kierkegaard, and the reason is this. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Of course, religion has an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, and in some religions these dimensions are particularly important, but that does not make them central to religion as such. Kierkegaard regarded the religious sphere as radically different from the aesthetic or even the ethical, hence his treatment of the story of Abraham going to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, in obedience to God’s command. His son was not killed in the end, but Abraham was ready to do the deed. This is not ethical. This is fundamentally and scandalously unethical. Yet it is religious, not because it is unethical and scandalous, but because it pushes us to the limits of our understanding, through the waters of doubt, and then beyond.Were I attempting to criticise religion, I would say it should not go there, that, to misquote Wittgenstein, the limits of my understanding are the limits of my world, whereof we cannot understand thereof we must remain silent. Were I attempting to defend religion, I would say that this is its genius, that it can push back the limits of understanding. I do not believe in value-neutral sociology, but, in this case, I am attempting neither. ReferencesAldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa of Christian Teaching”. An Aquinas Reader. ed. Mary Clarke. New York: Doubleday, 1972.Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Barker, Eileen. New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction. London: HMSO, 1989.Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.Caputo, John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.Clarke, Peter, and Peter Byrne, eds. Religion Defined and Explained. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1993.Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995.Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Caqnongate, 2002.Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. London: Penguin, 1992.———. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1986.Murata, Sachiko, and William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.Spiro, Melford. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock, 1966. 85–126.Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. 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