A pesar de que ya el clásico de Cicerón sobre la amistad enfatizaba cuántos daño podría producirse al considerarla “como compañera de los vicios” en vez de “ayudante de las virtudes”, en realidad el concepto medieval de las malas amistades, dejando al margen el significado de ‘amistad’ como ‘tratado’ o ‘confederación’, se explica mejor en términ…[Read more]

The Four Primary Drives: The Need for Meaning, the Need to Belong, the Need for Ideology, and the Spiritual Drive
Religious beliefs are primarily created and generated by four very basic and fundamental “Needs” or “Drives.” From a rather practical and pragmatic approach, in general, religions could be said to involve meaning or purpose, others…[Read more]

George Barton, PhD: “Disaster and sorrow compel either a soul or a nation to seek anew the foundations of life. Times of sorrow are accordingly times of religious growth. The Babylonian exile was no exception. Indeed, the influence of this exile upon the religion of Israel was enormous. This was in part due to the fact that the exile was the e…[Read more]

Three consecutive patriarchs of Esoteric Buddhism were Amoghavajra of India, Huiguo of China, and Kūkai of Japan. This paper foregrounds the usually taken-for-granted but vital historical role of language education and translation in the international spread of religion and culture. There had to be sufficiently educated bilingual or multilingual…[Read more]

Eighteenth-century Spanish music experienced a golden age thanks, especially, to the proliferation of centers such as the chapels, which articulated and structured the musical life of our cities: the main sound activity was centered on ecclesiastical music, both liturgical and paraliturgical, with which religious festivities were solemnized.…[Read more]

Geertz, perhaps the most influential of the anthropologists, contends that symbolism and meaning are central to religion: “The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not o…[Read more]

Geertz, perhaps the most influential of the anthropologists, contends that symbolism and meaning are central to religion: “The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not o…[Read more]

Uno de los muchos manuscritos de la Crónica de Enrique IV de Enríquez
del Castillo,1 en concreto el que hoy reposa en la Biblioteca de El Escorial
(X.II.15), se abre con unos curiosos versos seguramente redactados por el
anónimo amanuense autor de esta copia, fechada en la primera mitad del
siglo XVI.2 El poemita, que creo es inédito (algo lóg…[Read more]

Einstein observed, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration of this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” As the p…[Read more]

‘There is no truth, only perception of truth’, and that perception too changes with time. Lysistrata is one such text where this difference of perception prevails. Written by Aristophanes in 411 BCE, Lysistrata is one of the eleven Old Greek Comedy plays surviving out of forty-two. The play revolves around the Peleponnesian war, when women hav…[Read more]