https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomReligious Studies and Theology2023-11-16T13:28:18+00:00David Atkinsonatkinsond@macewan.caOpen Journal Systems<p>For forty years <em>Religious Studies and Theology</em> has published thoughtful, peer-reviewed original research with significance to the inter-related disciplines of Religious Studies and Theology. <a href="https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/about">Learn more.</a></p>https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/27381Introduction2023-12-18T14:19:33+00:00David Atkinson2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/27051Seeing All Things in Relation to God2023-12-18T14:15:39+00:00Mark Husbands
<p>This essay argues that a theology of the intellect is key to understanding the being and calling of a Christian University. It seeks to provide an understanding of the unique foundation and shape of Christian learning by showing that the intellect is a divine gift. Christian thinking and scholarship begins with the mystery of the triune God because the principal object of Christian thinking is the triune God and God’s action in and through Christ. Setting the intellect within the history of God’s reconciliation of all things in Christ lays bare the underlying rationale for Trinity Western University’s guiding vision: “every graduate is equipped to think truthfully, act justly, and live faithfully for the good of the world and the glory of God.” </p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/27032St. Thomas More College2023-12-18T14:17:40+00:00Carl Still
<p>As a Catholic college federated with the University of Saskatchewan, St. Thomas More College (STM) benefits from the arrangements negotiated at its founding by the Basilian Fathers. When the Basilians withdrew from STM in 2013, the College entered a new relationship with its diocesan bishop, but continues to steward the educational culture created by its founders. Now under lay leadership and with an increasingly diverse community, STM faces the dual challenge of renewing its Catholic identity and remaining a sustainable liberal arts college. In its current College Plan, it lays out a strategy for doing both while also engaging with the national work of Indigenous reconciliation.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/27003Belonging2023-12-18T14:19:26+00:00Melanie J Humphreys
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Christian higher education in Canada is caught in a culture war. The pressure to conform to either a faith position or secular position on the topic of sexual orientation is putting institutions and perhaps, more importantly, people at risk. The King’s University (King’s) became a focal point for this issue when in 1991 King’s released an employee who was in a same-sex relationship. The resulting landmark case contributed to establishing sexual minority rights in Alberta and in Canada. This paper describes the journey King’s has been on towards LGBTQ+ inclusion. It will relate the process by which King’s came to a statement on inclusion, the impact on King’s culture and reflect on possible implications for the future of Christian higher education.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26961The Cross and Our Calling2023-12-18T14:16:14+00:00David ZietsmaNicole Benbow
<p>Redeemer University is a Canadian Christian university located in Ancaster, Ontario. Founded in 1983 in the Reformed Christian tradition, Redeemer’s mission is to prepare students to join Christ in his redemptive work through their careers and callings, while also fostering faculty research and scholarship in every discipline from a Christian perspective. Over the past forty years, Redeemer has evolved from a small college with limited degree granting authority to a full university offering a variety of programs including a B.A., B.Sc., B.Ed., B.B.A., B.Kin., and B. Comms. Redeemer currently faces challenges stemming from a post-Christian Canadian culture and the impact it has had on widespread individual belief in the psychological self as the ultimate source for personal identity and <br />understanding. The changing higher education marketplace also contains a proliferation of degree granting institutions, and students are increasingly seeking clear and direct pathways to careers, making institutions like Redeemer with traditional degree nomenclature to appear less relevant and desirable. However, some of these challenges also present opportunities. Post-Christian culture also means that more Christians desire a unique, faith-based higher education institution, as it becomes more difficult to express faith in public spaces.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26956Four short stories on CMU2023-12-18T14:18:38+00:00Cheryl Pauls
<p>“Four Short Stories on CMU” presents an account of how Canadian Mennonite University embodies the significance of its mandate. Seeking to resist common bifurcations of “real university” and “faith-based university,” Cheryl Pauls takes inspiration in a phrase from CMU’s mission statement, “innovative Christian university.” In exploring the provocative potential of the phrase’s blend of inventiveness and faithfulness, Pauls draws connections across the university’s Four Commitments, their theological impulses, the substance of CMU education programs and scholarship, and dimensions of growing relevance to Canadian universities today. Through glimpses into the development and character of CMU, Pauls makes a case for the vitality of theologically generated impulses within the university sector today.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26935The Idea of a University2023-12-18T14:18:04+00:00Gordon T Smith
<p>What are the implications for a liberal arts university that is heir to the Bible college movement of Western Canada. What is the rationale for the transition and the unique challenges in this transition for schools that choose to shift from Bible college to liberal arts university? The essay concludes that while this is the right move and that as such it makes sense, the challenges are yet very real and that the response is one that requires attention to some critical questions that are, perhaps, unique to schools that have made that transition. </p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26908Why go to University? Forming academic friendships at Tyndale University, a private Christian university in Ontario, Canada2023-12-18T14:15:43+00:00Beth Green
<p>This paper considers why Christian Higher Education could offer a hopeful, if metaphysical, answer to the question, “Why go to university”? The paper draws on two examples to argue that a greater diversity of higher education institutions in Ontario would tell a bigger story about what going to university is for. The first example is historic and introduces four female philosophers whose academic friendship impacted postwar moral philosophy in Britain and North America. The second example is contemporary: Tyndale <br />University is a private Christian university in Toronto. The paper argues that Tyndale University is an example of the kind of small to mid-size universities capable of fostering the academic friendships necessary to preserve diversity, resilience and alternate imaginations during times of global disruption.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26895Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality, and Politics, edited by Amélie Barras, Jennifer A. Selby and Melanie Adrian2023-12-18T14:20:29+00:00Emily Victoria Hanlon
<p><em>Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality, and Politics</em>, edited by Amélie Barras, Jennifer A. Selby and Melanie Adrian. University of Toronto Press, 2022. 428pp., 1 b&w map, 6 b&w figures, 1 b&w table. Pb. $42.95. ISBN-13: 9781487527884.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26802Sowing the Seed2023-12-18T14:15:41+00:00Loren Agrey
<p>The history and mission of Burman University, a small faith-based post-secondary institution located in Lacombe, Alberta, is a story of faith and optimism. Its story can be best understood within the history and ethos of Seventh-day Adventist higher education. As the school was established in 1907, it has transformed itself through several stages into a university with programs fully approved by Campus Alberta Quality Council. For more than a century the institution has resided on the “hilltop” and has seen many alumni make positive impact in the world. The institution has experienced challenges, has worked through them with resilience, while maintaining its strong Christian ethos. As the campus statue of The Sower illustrates, seeds that have been sown on campus have resulted in reapings of generations of young people whose lives have been transformed and who, in turn, have helped transform the world.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1448A Tale of Three Women2023-07-18T14:55:24+00:00Susan M Young
<p>Lady Anne Conway (1631–1679) and Margaret Fell Fox (1614–1702) used what Audrey Lorde has called the tools of the Master’s House, in this instance philosophy and religion, as instruments of self-expression and definition rather than silence and oppression. Through rational argument, Conway challenged philosophic and religious positions about the nature of God and his relationship with the natural world. Through disembodied spirit, Fell Fox and the Quakers pushed Protestant doctrine beyond its belief in the authority of the scriptural Word as interpreted by the individual to the authority of Christ speaking within the individual. Drawing on my own experience as both a feminist and a spiritual seeker, I argue that their primary motivation was not political, religious, or social dissent, but rather a determination to walk a radical spiritual path towards self-transformation.</p>
2007-10-05T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2007 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26462C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation, by Gary Slater2023-12-18T14:24:48+00:00Mark Migotti
<p><em>C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation</em>, by Gary Slater. Oxford Theology and Religious Monographs, edited by J. Barton et. al., Oxford University Press, 2015, 242pp., Hb. $145.00. ISBN-13: 9780198753230.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/26435Prophet al-Khidr: Between the Qur'anic Text and Islamic Contexts, by Irfan A. Omar2023-12-18T14:25:12+00:00Carimo Mohomed
<p><em>Prophet al-Khidr: Between the Qur'anic Text and Islamic Contexts</em>, by Irfan A. Omar. Lexington Books, 2022, Hb. 156pp., $93.00, ISBN-13: 9781498595919.</p>
2023-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1418Surveillance in New Religious Movements2023-05-31T12:08:20+00:00Susan Raine
<p>Contemporary discourse on surveillance tends not to account for the types of surveillance and security measures that both traditional and alternative religions adopt. Certainly, many religions have for centuries recorded, and thus, monitored, the lives of their followers. English parish records noting lives, baptisms, deaths and so forth is one such example originating in the sixteenth century. When one thinks of contemporary surveillance, however, more sophisticated strategies involving new technologies typically comes to mind. This article offers an examination of the numerous traditional and newer surveillance techniques of one particular new religious movement—Scientology. This movement employs a variety of stratagems in order to preserve a high level of secrecy regarding both its central doctrines and some of its activities. This article suggests that Scientology’s surveillance methods are driven not only by the group’s desire to protect its interests, but also by the quest for control (and hence, for power) that the group’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, sought throughout his life and left as an institutional legacy after his death.</p>
2009-07-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2009 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1436Desert Spirituality in 17th and 18th Century French Calvinism2023-05-31T11:35:38+00:00Kirk R MacGregor
<p>Between the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the 1735 partial renewal of Protestant toleration, the Huguenots choosing to remain in France were forced to clandestinely practice their religion in the wasteland, or désert, of the Cévennes. Understood within an Old Testament interpretive framework, the Huguenots perceived themselves as the new Israel, which identification was reinforced by their adoption of a covenant theology recognizing only one people of God. Moreover, the decentered character of the désert facilitated direct and universal numinous encounter by its occupants, thereby dissolving traditional boundaries as well as empowering charismata among all those seized by the Spirit. Accordingly, these désert episodes proved instrumental in forging a new Huguenot identity, onto which community members tenaciously clung even following their readmission into French civic affairs.</p>
2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1415Religious Ethics and International Order2022-10-19T22:57:32+00:00Tom Keating
<p>This essay draws from the literature on religion’s revival as an important political force in international relations and assesses the effect that this revival might have on international order. It defines international order as a modicum of stability and co-operation among sovereign states and notes that some observers see religious communities threatening this order by encouraging fundamentalist communities that might undermine the more secular character of international order. After noting how authors have questioned the supposed “secular” character of international order, the essay suggests that religious communities have or could play a significant role in responding to conditions such as poverty and injustice that also threaten international order. As result the revival of religion and the plurality of religious communities throughout the globe might better be viewed as a source of support for international order.</p>
2009-07-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2009 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1416Religion and the “New Terrorism”2022-10-19T23:10:43+00:00Thomas J Butko
<p>There has been an increase in the number of scholars who proclaim the growth of the “new terrorism,” whose core characteristics include: the central role of religion, its increasingly lethal and indiscriminate nature, and the potential use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). As opposed to older terrorist organizations that sought tangible, political goals, the “new terrorism” paradigm claims that Political Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda are primarily nihilistic and, thus, seek the physical destruction and total elimination of their opponents. Conversely, this article maintains that modern religiously-inspired terrorist movements are similar to older terrorist groups in terms of their objectives, tactics, and strategies, as the role of violence remains primarily communicative, and not destructive. In addition, since the views of the “new terrorism,” especially regarding the appropriate counter-terrorism strategies, resonate with American foreign policy goals and geo-political interests, this conception permits U.S. officials to both delegitimize the aims of current terrorist organizations while, in the process, absolving the West of any responsibility in creating the current conditions responsible for their growth.</p>
2009-07-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2009 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1417Christian Zionism and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy2022-10-19T23:20:29+00:00Daniel Friedman
<p>Christian Zionism remains a powerful religious and political force in American politics and continues to greatly impact U.S. foreign policy and geo strategic interests in the Middle East. Despite the fact that many Americans believe that U.S. policy in the region and its unwavering support for Israel accentuates anti-American sentiment in the area, most continue to overwhelmingly support Israel and steadfastly maintain that the benefits of their alliance with Israel significantly outweigh the potential costs. Thus, in the case of Christian Zionism, as both a religious movement and political ideology, it serves to reinforce and solidify the close historical ties between these two allies more than 60 years after the original founding of the state of Israel.</p>
2009-07-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2009 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1419The Lord’s Resistance Army2022-12-24T01:13:44+00:00Jeffrey Kaplan
<p>This essay examines the history, strategy and tactics of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a millenarian terrorist group that originated among the Acholi tribe in Northern Uganda. Today, its operations focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but it is active in Uganda, the Sudan and the Central African Republic. The LRA is composed of approximately 90% kidnapped child soldiers and as a result of its depredations, almost 90% of the Acholi and other northern Ugandan tribes live in squalid IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camps in Uganda. Children in villages and even from some of the so called protected camps, the so-called “night commuters,” must trek as many as 20 miles each night into towns in order to avoid abduction. The article focuses in particular on the religious aspects of the LRA and on its metamorphosis from a local to a regional and ultimately into an international security challenge.</p>
2009-07-17T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2009 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1446Aspects of God’s Relationship to the World in the Theologies of Jurgen Moltmann, Bonaventure and Jonathan Edwards2022-10-18T13:17:37+00:00Don Schweitzer
<p>This paper studies how Jurgen Moltmann, Bonaventure, and Jonathan Edwards use the notion that God’s goodness is self-diffusive and the doctrine of the trinity to understand why God created the world and what this means to God. It first examines Moltmann’s theology, noting some problems in his thought. It then looks at how Bonaventure’s approach avoids these while creating others. This is followed by Edwards’ utilization of the notion of moral necessity and a more complex understanding of infinity to provide a more coherent understanding than the other two, while incorporating insights present in the thought of both.</p>
2007-10-05T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2007 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1447John Updike’s Rabbit, Run2022-10-18T13:55:35+00:00David J Fekete
<p>This article considers the powerful role of language and imaginative literature in cultural and self-formation. Drawing on Richard Rorty’s description of narrative forms as vehicles for meaning, I describe leading metaphors in representative literature of the Modern period. I suggest that Modernism exhibits a cultural loss of meaning, and a “death of God” zeitgeist. Works of that period also show pessimism about erotic relationships. I proceed with a close reading of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which was written just as the Modern period closes. In Updike, the protagonist intuits a strong spirituality and finds rich erotic experience. But in the wake of Modernism’s spiritual vacuity, and erotic pessimism, the protagonist in Rabbit, Run desperately seeks a vocabulary to voice his intuitions which his own culture cannot sustain.</p>
2007-10-05T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2007 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1449The Doukhobor Problem2022-10-18T14:33:27+00:00Julie Rak
<p>This paper analyses the process of the media in British Columbia and in Canada in the stigmatizing of members of the radical Doukhobor Russian religious community known as the “svobodniki” or the Sons of Freedom. This process lasted from the late 1920s through to the end of the 1960s. A key issue of their protest was the disruption to their way of life in the Kootenay region in British Columbia by an unsympathetic cultural environment—secularized and pro-militarist—which they regarded as the antipathy of their values. Despite the clarity of their demands and the open statements of the reasons for their protests, their methods of protest were <br />presented by the media as acts of insanity. When women led the protests, the media portrayed them as monstrous and unfeminine. My analysis of the media shows how female Sons of Freedom protestors presented a direct challenge to the conservative gender roles which middle-class women of the 1950s were being asked to adopt. The response of the state was to declare these protestors “bad mothers” and to imprison their children for up to six years.</p>
2007-10-05T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2007 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1450The Bad Side to The Good Story2022-12-24T00:49:49+00:00Walter Vanast
<p>Between 1909 and 1913, the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta (or Eskimos as they were then known) were all baptized and joined the Anglican Church. These conversions were both sudden and surprising given that evangelization had failed for decades. Why conversion happened and how it changed them—as perceived at the time by ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Anglican cleric Charles E. Whittaker—is what follows here, drawn primarily from diaries, and archival resources.</p>
2007-10-05T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2007 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1433The Role of the Tohunga—Past and Present2022-12-24T00:39:10+00:00Adrian M Leske
<p>In traditional Maori society before the coming of the white man [pakeha], the spiritual leader [tohunga] was the person who was in communication with the gods and spirits [atua] and who maintained the laws of sacredness [tapu] and regulated the life and events of their village. Because of his great authority and power [mana], the tohunga, his instruments and dwelling were tapu. However, with the coming of the white man with his guns, goods, new diseases, and his ignoring of the laws of tapu, the tohunga was seen as losing his mana. Those who continued to use the traditional methods of healing against the new diseases, often with disastrous results, were regarded as charlatans to the extent that legislation was eventually enacted against any who continued to claim to function as a tohunga.</p> <p>However, emerging out of the Maori wars was a new form of tohunga who had accepted Christianity and combined its teachings with some of the Maori culture and customs. Thus they have become the new Maori spiritual leaders and faith healers, exercising not their own power through the strictures of tapu, but the power of God and his holy angels to heal and restore the Maori to fullness of life.</p>
2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1434Reinterpreting the Kwakiutl Hamatsa Dance As an Expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian Synthesis2022-12-24T01:20:40+00:00Alan McLuckie
<p>In Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict appropriates Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian art impulses as the model for her discussion of cultural diversity among North American Indians. However, Benedict’s use of the Nietzschean model not only fails to capture the true ritual significance of the religious or spiritual practices of Kwakiutl Indians of the North West Coast, the result of which portrays the Kwakiutl as primitive savages, but it is also a crude misrepresentation of the Nietzschean model she takes herself to be adopting. While I do not think that Benedict’s position is definitive of current scholarship on this topic, it is my contention that the Apollonian/Dionysian model, properly understood, yields some rather interesting insights into the religio-spiritual practices of the Kwakiutl and so is deserving of further study. This article offers an interpretation of the hamatsa dance of the Kwakiutl Winter Ceremonial as a synthesis of both Apollonian and Dionysian art impulses through which the Kwakiutl construct their ontological and moral worldview.</p>
2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1435Liberating Epistemology2022-10-18T22:41:09+00:00Rubén Rosario Rodríguez
<p>This investigation contends that postfoundationalist models of rationality provide a constructive alternative to the positivist models of scientific rationality that once dominated academic discourse and still shape popular views on science and religion. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, has evolved organically into a cross-cultural, cross-contextual, interdisciplinary conversation that can help liberate epistemology—especially theological epistemology—from the stranglehold of Enlightenment foundationalism. U.S. Latino/a theology provides an alternative to the dominant epistemological perspective within academic theology that is in many ways analogous to the organic, conversational epistemology embodied by the Wikipedia online community. Accordingly, this investigation argues that the work of human liberation is better served by liberating epistemology from the more authoritarian aspects of the Enlightenment scientific tradition—especially popular positivist conceptions of rationality.</p>
2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1437The Victim in Ethical Theology2022-10-18T23:03:13+00:00Paul Rigby
<p>Nietzsche would regard Levinas’ ethical theology, in which the moral subject is responsible for the oppressed as “other,” as a “slave morality” which derives its moral force from resentment. In defence of Levinas’ ethics I turn to the life and reflections of Jean Améry, Jew, philosopher, atheist, resistance fighter tortured by the Gestapo, survivor of Auschwitz. His life is a “trace” of the tragic inhabiting Levinas’ theology. Améry rejects Nietzsche’s view of resentment. Drawing upon Bataille’s distinctive understanding of sadism, Améry claims that oppression is a pitiable degree of loneliness in the face of the tormentor’s lust for domination. This can be righted if the <br />tormentor, by desiring to reverse this situation, becomes a fellow human being. Améry rejects evangelical forgiveness as a sub-moral abandonment of the oppressed’s responsibility for the oppressor. The historical impossibility of this reversal reveals the tragic destiny of the oppressed and of Levinas’ theology of the “other.”</p>
2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1426L’ Église catholique et le nouveau régime socio-politique en Pologne2022-10-19T10:07:53+00:00Franciszek Adamski
<p>The issue of the Church’s involvement in public life of the nation has always generated debate. Particularly under communism, when the Church had to resist the dominance of an atheistic doctrine, the Church was relied upon to articulate the value of religiosity without running afoul of the authorities. It was, in essence, valuable to ordinary Poles who respected its social and cultural importance for their lives. As the analysis here shows, the situation faced by the Church has changed dramatically; it faces the challenge of remaining relevant in a society switching to democratic and culturally secular assumptions. Just how this relationship will develop and what the role will be for the Church in the future is a central concern of this paper.</p>
2008-08-19T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1427The Roman Catholic Church in Poland and Civil Society2022-10-19T11:06:04+00:00Janusz Mariański
<p>In this article, I address the stance taken by the Church viz-à-viz the social and political structures of Polish society. This arises because the new situation of a democratic state presupposes a secular, civil society environment. In my analysis, I show that the Church has moved away from political engagement with this new situation, and is now shaping itself as a key element, but only one of several, in a pluralistic culture. This will mean a quite different Church in the future.</p>
2008-08-19T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/article/view/1428Polish Religiousness2022-10-19T12:20:32+00:00Kamil Kaczmarek
<p>Polish religiousness is a phenomenon composed of many both antagonistic and interdependent (even symbiotic) constituents. Different mental strata, political wings, degrees of engagement and social entities should be presented here to show the complexity of the phenomenon in question. I shall raise only a few of the most important problems. In order to do so, it is useful to draw four main lines of division.</p>
2008-08-19T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2008 Equinox Publishing Ltd.