Religious Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)

law God’s authority, is what God commands and what humans must obey. Islamic law is practical in the sense that it concerns huma ...

liberation In 1140, the Decretum of Gratian, a textbook, appears to enhance unity within the church as it seeks to reconcile the ...

liminality nothing being able to cling to him. The liberated person lives in the world without sorrow or pain, unbound, free of ...

love on existential communitas, and it represents a label for a variety of uto- pian models of society. Spontaneous communitas i ...

love Jesus’ crucifixion is the selfless example of agape, a higher love, which is unselfish, uncalculating, and sacrificial, and ...

madness scripture, whereas the superior second type is the deep love of God, which arises spontaneously by following one’s emoti ...

madness construct a superhuman body, which would eventually equate him with his deity. Ramakrishna (d. 1886) would sit inert for ...

magic them around the mad person. Therefore, madness can become a symbol of a holy person, a sign of religious realization, and ...

magic harmful practices intended to harm others. Whatever the intention of a magical rite is its strange words are used because ...

material dimension whereas contact implies that things once in contact continue to act upon each other, which he calls contagiou ...

meditation nature by taking land and transforming it by means of roads, trees, houses, and churches. Landscapes are thus shaped ...

memory contemplation and finally absorption (samādhi), a non-dualistic experi- ence of absorption and identity with Brahman, the ...

metaphors The Buddhist Jātaka tales of the Buddha’s former lives are narratives that transmit Buddhist ethical values. Many Budd ...

millenarianism perspective, it is a calculated error that causes new meaning to emerge. It can thus tell others something new ab ...

millenarianism possible political and social change, the pre-millenarians have a vision of the world getting worst until the adv ...

millenarianism on Earth founded by Simon Kimbangu, who considered himself a prophet while his followers interpreted him as a mes ...

modernity MODERNITY This notion can be grasped as a contrast concept because it compares itself with what precedes it in a trans ...

monasticism Cor. 9.26–27; John 12.25), monasticism begins around the third century in the Egyptian desert with St. Anthony, who ...

monasticism repentance, singing, aiding peasants in their work, caring for lepers and outcasts, and begging for their sustenance ...

monasticism with his passing monks have to rely on past monastic precedents and teachings of the founder. The monastic order is ...