Blog

Photo by Lightscape on Unsplash Scholar Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One, highlights the differences in doctrine, goals, and practices within the two major branches of Buddhist tradition, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism Theravada, translating to “The Way of the Elders,” is the oldest form of Buddhism. It’s prevalent in countries like Sri […]

Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash In Buddhism, the problem is suffering (dukkha), and the solution is nirvana. Nirvana literally means “blowing out” and refers to the notion of extinguishing, or eliminating, suffering. The technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold path, which is derived from the Four Noble Truths. It touches on well-known Buddhist

Photo by Baran Lotfollahi on Unsplash Creation myths are core narratives found across cultures that explain the origins of the universe, the Earth, life, and humanity. These myths are crucial for exploring how different societies and cultures conceptualize the world and their place within it. American philologist David Leeming, throughout his work The World of Myth

Photo by Chris Chow on Unsplash In David Chidester’s Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, he uses the metaphor of the Church of Baseball to connect secular (non-religious) activities to religious practices and sentiments. Let’s examine some of the bases on which he makes his claims: Baseball creates rituals. Baseball is rich with rituals parallel to those

Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash The Four Noble Truths compress the problem, solution, and techniques of Buddhism into what is considered to be the simplest doctrinal summarization of Buddhist teachings. The First Noble Truth says that human existence is characterized by dukkha, meaning suffering. It says that while there is joy along the way, each

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash Diana Eck, Harvard theologian, explores the significance of visual perception in Hindu worship through the concept of Darsan in her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Darsan refers to the act of seeing or being seen by a deity through idols or sacred images in Hindu worship. Darsan itself

Photo by Alok Verma on Unsplash Jennifer Knust, an American Biblical scholar out of Duke, posits Esther and Jezebel as two archetypal female figures—models of the feminine—in her writings on female figures in the Bible. In the Bible, Esther and Jezebel were both queens. Esther was a Jewish woman who married the Persian King Ahasuerus and convinced

Photo by Ali Köse on Unsplash I’ve previously written on Durkheim’s take on the sacred versus the profane (click to read). Therein we explore Durkheim’s take on religion as a social institution and his views on life’s major delineations: the sacred and the profane. With that base in mind, we can go a level deeper and

Photo by Martijn Vonk on Unsplash French Sociologist Émile Durkheim posited the sacred and the profane as two distinct aspects of human life which play into his idea of religion as a social institution. Let’s break it down. Durkheim first defines the “sacred” as things which are set apart from everyday life considered powerful, holy, or deserving

Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash Binary structures in myth were popularized by British anthropologist Edmund Leach and detail how core binary oppositions are mediated via mythology. Let’s break that down. (I’ve also written articles specifically on binary oppositions and mediation — check the article list link at the bottom to access those!). He first introduces the notion of binary