Mount Putuo, the Chinese Potalaka, is located in the Zhoushan archipelago not far off the coast from Ningbo. The abode of Avalokiteğvara/Guanyin was not only a popular pilgrimage site, but also played a strategic role for the naval control of the archipelago, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In late imperial China, a number of military…[Read more]

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods.

These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshippers derived little or no benefit from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that…[Read more]

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

This paper will look at the way the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have utilised the theological narrative of marginalisation in their quest for identity and self-determination. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are an expatriate black American group who have lived in Israel since 1969, when their spiritual leader, Detroit-born…[Read more]

Some notes on the history of the band, from the band’s extinct website, together with scans of two books of minutes of the old Llangollen Town Band which were discovered some years ago as part of a parcel of books in an antique shop in Yorkshire. It is not known how or when the books became “lost”, but the original books now reside safely with the…[Read more]

If Fernando Pessoa’s Portuguese works contain a coterie of heteronyms, his English poetry also displays an array of fictitious authors: besides Pessoa himself, one finds Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search and—with his poems compiled here for the first time in print—Frederick Wyatt. After Alexander Search’s presence, which dominated the English…[Read more]

Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a s…[Read more]

This article looks at the field of Black Judaism, with a viewto understanding how scholars articulate the distinctionbetween Black Judaism and the Hebrew Israelite move-ment. The Hebrew Israelites are an autonomous AfricanAmerican movement who identify themselves as descen-dants of the Israelites and some of whom self-identify asJews, probably…[Read more]

O livro Fernando Pessoa—The Poet With Many Faces, de autoria de Hubert D. Jennings, é a primeira biografia pessoana em Inglês. Originalmente escrito na década de 1970, o livro deveria ter sido impresso em 1974, mas a Revolução dos Cravos interrompeu os planos editoriais. O dactiloscrito, encontrado numa garagem em Joanesburgo, na África do Sul,…[Read more]

Review of “René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation” By Michelle Elligott. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018. 176 pp. Hardcover. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-63345-050-9.

A period of six months (Dec. 2017 to Jun. 2018) saw the launch of three digital platforms dedicated to the works of Fernando Pessoa, raising the number of such projects to seven published in a decade. Considering this virtual proliferation as a milestone for Pessoan studies, this article aims to reconstruct, at least as a sketch, the history of…[Read more]

Religious practice is shaped by technology. Technological practice is shaped by religion. Since the early 1990s, this parallel formation has become visible through the internet and other digitally networked technologies, as the perception of a barrier between the digital and the non-digital dissolves. Fully rendered 3D temples and churches, prayer…[Read more]

The two books of Robert M. Pirsig have been milestones for Design Theory through the development of a Metaphysics of Quality. This article analyses the design history of his two books that have been in print for more than 40 years. The editions range from cheap mass-market paperbacks to gilded collectors’ hardcovers. The underlying challenge for a…[Read more]

It is well known the harmful effects that savage capitalism has been causing to the environment since its introduction in a sphere in which a different logic and approach to nature are the essential conditions for the maintenance of the ecosystem and its complex relations between humans and non-human organisms. The amazon rainforest is a portion…[Read more]

This article analyses the confluence of Islamophobia and anti-government conspiracy theory in the works of the far-right think tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). He argues that, rather than only being a contemporary form of the religious and racialized demonologies that code ‘Islam’ as being the constitutive outside of ‘the ‘West…[Read more]