• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• Other research products close
• DE close
• Religions close
• OpenAIRE close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Her... close

This paper takes a fresh look at the global spread of the Chinese–Taiwanese new religious movement Yiguandao (一貫道; the emic transcription is “I-Kuan Tao”) by directing attention to the concrete places where transnational connections and interactions actually transpire, i.e., temples, shrines, and other sites of worship. Emically known as “Buddha halls” (fotang 佛堂), these places range from large-scale temple complexes, to small niches of worship in people’s private residences. Yet, they all share the potential of becoming venues of transregional interactions through processes of migration, the circulation of personnel, and local outreach. I argued that we need to take the distinct character of these localities more seriously, in order to fully understand the global networks of Yiguandao groups. Through their specific embeddedness in both local affairs and transnational projects, these temples are not simply local chapters of the (mostly) Taiwanese headquarters, but instead they are “translocalities” or even “portals of globalization”—two concepts developed in migration and global studies to help understand the significance of place in the recent phase of so-called globalization. By exploring Yiguandao temples across the globe, this paper critically evaluated these approaches, and their usefulness for the study of global religions. Empirically, it drew on both print and online material, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Taiwan, Vienna (Austria), California, South Africa, and Japan from 2016 to 2018.

An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate, an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is based on Schema$.$org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for their use in a wide variety of situations. An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics, digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying "just enough" Linked Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. An RO-Crate for this article is available at https://www.researchobject.org/2021-packaging-research-artefacts-with-ro-crate/ Comment: 42 pages. Submitted to Data Science

Like other religious traditions, Islam has accommodated notions of the divine logos. The actual elaboration of these notions has been heavily dependent on how the translation of God’s word and commandments to humans were understood as an object of intra-community debate, as well as in polemics with non-Muslims (inter-community debate). These two debates converged in the Muslim critique of the translation, transmission, and interpretation of the divine logos by Jews and Christians in their scriptures, although such convergence took different forms in different historical settings. The present contribution focuses on several examples of the engagement of Muslims with the Bible in the medieval Iberian Peninsula and in exile. The choice of authors and works ranges from the 11th-century Andalusī scholar Ibn Ḥazm to the exile Aḥmad al-Ḥanafī (d. 1049H/1650CE). It is nevertheless not intended as a comprehensive overview of Muslim approaches from the Western Mediterranean region. The objective is rather to discuss several aspects associated with the translation of the divine logos in polemics as a tool of identity that is intimately related to Muslim practices of exegesis and transmission of the Jewish and Christian writings. Particular attention is directed toward the broader issue of how notions of the translation of God’s word have been informed by language practices within contexts of inter-religious contact and competition (either between existing social bodies or as references to a relatively recent past). A preliminary look at Muslim modes of scriptural interpretation suggests that translation and exegesis, as well as the ways in which Muslims understood these practices as performed by non-Muslims, were part of a tradition that took final form and meaning, and that was subject to change when re-enacted in specific contexts. Any understanding of the subject must be read against the backdrop of Muslim configurations of knowledge within the local communities, as combined with tradition.

With the expansion of Islam, the patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were divided from the Byzantine Empire. The Orthodox Christians there still defined themselves as Byzantine Orthodox and began to adapt their liturgical customs by adopting Byzantine liturgical books. When Greek was not understood any longer, they began to translate and copy their liturgical books, thereby creating their own branch of tradition, which is marked by multilingualism, reception of their own Bible tradition as well as the exclusion of “neo-martyrs” from their calendar of saints.

For more than two centuries, Muslims have been retelling different stories about the origin of their call to prayer. While the converging details of these narratives offer a glimpse of Muslim cultural memory and its preservation, the diverging elements reflect different mechanisms that facilitate the adaption of this cultural memory to new contexts and concerns. Based on the work of Jan Assmann, the present study explores how Muslims conserved and adapted their cultural memory to keep their common identity and expand their diversity following distinctive religious, political, or personal forms of belongings. The narratives concerned with the origin of the Islamic call to prayer and preserved in various written text collections offer a fertile ground to analyze how this part of Muslim cultural memory became the vehicle of a permanent but adaptable Muslim identity.

The article provides a thematized discussion of the development of the historiography of European monasticism in northern Europe (north Atlantic, North Sea to the Baltic). Whilst it does not offer a comprehensive overview of the field, it discusses the significance of major currents and models for the development of monastic history to the present day. From focusing on the heritage of history writing “from within”—produced by the members of religious communities in past and modern contexts—it examines key features of the historiography of the history of orders and monastic history paradigms in the context of national and confessional frameworks. The final section of the article provides an overview of the processes or musealization of monastic heritage and the significance of monastic material culture in historical interpretations, both academic and popular.

The present article sets out to answer the question of the extent to which Naḥman Krochmal’s reappraisal of Philo of Alexandria in the light of his Jewish faith reflects a deep spiritual crisis that was engulfing the Maskilic world: the encroaching expansion of modern Hasidism with its transformed understanding of traditional Judaism among Eastern European communities. To this end, a major component of Krochmal’s Jewish historical thought as expressed in his masterful unfinished work Guide of the Perplexed of the Modern Age can be revealed. The examination employs two methods in order to uncover the intent behind Krochmal’s fragmentary presentation of Philo: exploring his utilization of Dähne’s Geschichtliche Darstellung der jüdisch-alexandrinischen Religionsphilosophie to demonstrate the congruence of Philo’s thought with Tannaitic ethics and drawing on similar depictions of Philo found among his circles and pupils. The study claims that Krochmal’s revival of Philo as a key Jewish thinker is politically mobilized for an ideological assault on the Hasidim, with whom the Maskilim had ongoing conflicts. Reconstructing his portrayal of Philo as a paragon of Second Temple Judaism, the paper argues that Krochmal projects his own spiritual crisis from the Maskilic settings of nineteenth-century Galicia onto the Jewish reality of first-century Alexandria, thus reproducing a valiant image of Philo as the embodiment of the Maskilic consciousness that was grappling with the ancient, overly theoretical Hasideans of his days.