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The essay aims at introducing the pedagogical vision of the nonviolent tradition. It focuses in particular on Aldo Capitini, the father of the Italian nonviolent movement. It also considers Thoreau, Tolstoj, Gandhi, Alexander Langer. The nonviolent philosophy and movement generated an extensive analysis on society and therefore on education. Education is an emanation of the advent of democracy and with the so-called "child-centric revolution" (Piaget, Dewey, Montessori), but it also carries some specific traits that identify it. The article will focus on these specific traits: the religious (and lay) perspective and the revolutionary tension towards liberation.
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The concessions that are made in conversion have led to the scattering of the whole of conversion and the twilight of the core of conversion as a radical, sometimes sudden event in human life because of the novelty of Jesus Christ. For this reason, conversions are often inconsistent, superficial and neglected. The article aims to point out the radicality and necessity of conversion by presenting the conversion of the Jew Alphonse Ratisbonne to Catholicism, that occurred in 1842 in Rome. This amazing transformation is the greatest conversion through the Miraculous Medal, which is still insufficiently illuminated in our ambience. The second part brings some theological aspects that are always present in the dynamisms of every true conversion. It becomes clear that sudden conversions are possible, that they are intrinsically Christological events which bring fruits for the life of the Church, and which also involve the ≫missionaries of mercy≪ – mediators that God puts on the path of conversion of individuals. The first among them is the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is uniquely summarized in the movement the ≫Militia of the Immaculata≪, at the same time describing the gift and task of every baptized person.
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This privileged relationship with the Italian culture will have a major role in disciplining the studies and the researches developed in the last years of high school and faculty. The interests in orientalism and the history of religions, in the history of the Ancient Near Orient and the misteriozofical currents of the classical tradition, which are more and more profound, that could not be sustained from the scientific point of view in the Romanian culture of that time, were stimulated and directed due to the direct and imediate knowledge of the Italian special studies. Eliade remembers in Memorii how he used to read the clasicist Vittorio Macchioro, the sanscritologist and idiologist Carlo Formichi, the well known historian of Christianity Ernesto Buonaiuti, the historian of religions Raffaele Pettazzoni, the latinist Augusto Rostagni and other Italian scholars’ books and magazines that he received from Italy.
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Rosyjska Cerkiew Prawosławna była i pozostaje największą wspólnotą wyznaniowąna terenie Federacji Rosyjskiej, Białorusi i Ukrainie. Chrześcijaństwowschodnie było stałym elementem życia religijnego w ponadtysiącletniej historiipaństwa rosyjskiego. Wschodnia tradycja chrześcijańska w Europie Środkowo--Wschodniej zakorzeniła się we wszystkich formach życia ludności. Szczególneoddziaływanie widzimy w rozwoju kultu cudownych ikon i w życiu monastycznym,które miało silne oddziaływanie na religijność wielu narodów. Jeszczewiększe znaczenie miała bizantyjska kultura materialna. Jej wtórne oddziaływanienastąpiło po upadku Konstantynopola, kiedy wielu greckich mistrzówsztuki malarskiej udało się na Bałkany i na ziemie ruskie. Ogromna sferabizantyjskiej kultury umysłowej, tak niedostępna społeczeństwu zachodniemu,w Europie Wschodniej była przyjmowana w greckiej i cerkiewnosłowiańskiejwersji językowej. Propagatorami kultury bizantyjskiej byli nie tylko Grecy,ale głównie prawosławni Serbowie, Bułgarzy, Białorusini, Ukraińcy, Rumunii Rosjanie. W końcu XV stulecia Rosja przyjęła rolę opiekuna prawosławnegochrześcijaństwa, a jej władcy uważali się za spadkobierców bizantyjskiej tradycjipaństwowej i kulturalnej. Uświadomienie sobie faktu stałej obecności tej wielkiejtradycji chrześcijańskiej ma fundamentalne znaczenie w zrozumieniu tożsamościreligijno-narodowej Rosjan i innych mieszkających tam narodów.Polityka hierarchii Rosyjskiej Cerkwi Prawosławnej i władz państwowych,zmierzająca do stworzenia z prawosławia religii państwowej, powoduje wspólnewystąpienie państwa i Cerkwi przeciwko ruchom sekciarskim, innowierczym,a nawet tendencjom niezgodnym z tradycyjną kulturą i tożsamością Rosjan.Szczególnie mocno akcentuje się w wypowiedziach duchownych i polityków,że Rosyjska Cerkiew Prawosławna była i pozostaje integralną częścią strukturypaństwowej Rosji. Ewangelizacja ziem ruskich była przeprowadzana przypomocy aparatu państwowego. Rosyjska Cerkiew Prawosławna, podobnie jakCerkiew bizantyjska, była ściśle połączona z państwem. Panujący w Rosji,z wyjątkiem okresu komunistycznego, zawsze dążyli do konsolidacji państwai społeczeństwa przy pomocy Cerkwi. Chrześcijaństwo wzmacniało istniejącąstrukturę społeczną oraz dawało możliwość rozwoju kulturalnego i intelektualnegowszystkim mieszkańcom państwa rosyjskiego. Źródłem przymierza państwai Cerkwi początkowo stały się zasady apostolskie, a w ciągu ostatnich trzech stuleci,wyłączając okres komunizmu, symbioza Rosyjskiej Cerkwi Prawosławneji państwa w Rosji opiera się na obopólnych interesach.
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In the introduction the author presents the ideology system that is known under the folk name old faith. This system tried to establish permanent harmony, especially between the three basic natural elements: fire (sky), earth and water. In Slovenia the name tročan still remains in use for this old faith. In accordance to the tročan principles an ideal spatial organisation consisted of three points of worship that were dedicated to the three forces of nature. Settlements, fields, burial sites, as well as the points of worship themselves were oriented towards one of these points of worship. They were accompanied by the axis mundi that supported the sky. These principles were never an canonized part of the belief, and they were taken into account to a certain degree, depending on the context. However, some solutions were often repeated and showed the core idea. During Christianisation three scenarios were likely for these points of worship: a) churches were built on them, b) they were destroyed, or c) the points of worship were moved to a new point which included a Christian church. Unchanged old belief points of worship are today found very rarely. The text deals with three examples in Croatia. In the Krasno area (North Velebit) the worshiping practice of a fertility stone was moved from the high altitude plateau Jezera into the valley, where the pilgrim’s temple of Majka Božja od Krasna (Mary, the Mother of God) was established. On the island of Pag the three points of worship have clear spatial relations. St. Marija that lies south of St. Juraj is oriented towards St. Vid. With at least a part of its architecture St. Juraj is also oriented towards St. Vid. The latter is located on the highest point of the island and makes excellent use of its astronomic position, for it is oriented towards the sunrise on St. George’s day (24th April). According to the ancient Eurasian calendar this was when the year begun. The worship system was at its strongest in the early medieval period; it is clear that St. Marija continued the point of worship tradition from late antiquity. On the high altitude plateau of Rujno (South Velebit) two points of worship step out. The rock Baba was visited by women while ‘the grave of the virgin child’ (today St. Bogorodica - Mary, the Mother of God) was visited by shepherds, i.e. men. This means that we had a stone for men and a stone for women, and they were oriented towards each other (with the male stone the orientation was later on adopted by St. Bogorodica). The Baba rock is an example of an unchanged point of worship, which with its placement in the surrounding mythological landscape undoubtedly indicates that this is the clitoris of mother earth. In Croatia all of the compounds of the tročan old belief ideology can be found. Even though only a single point was determined on Northern Velebit, and two on the Southern side, this does not mean that this is the exact and final number to be found at these locations, i.e. that these points represented the entire structure. We could thus understand this analysis merely as an encouragement for future researches. There is a great possibility that much of the mythical landscape from the pre-Slavic period survived to the present day, of course it is now full of everything the younger periods have added.
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This article is a continuation of the research and analyses on pre-Christian sacred space on the Island of Pag, which the two authors, Vitomir Belaj and Goran Pavel Šantek have published in the scientific journal Studia ethnologica Croatica, Volume 18 from 2006. The article starts with the assumption that the people in pre-industrial times observed the world holistically: as a unified whole composed of different and mutually connected segments. For pre-industrial man everything in the world which was surrounding him was interconnected and intertwined, and alongside nature and people, the gods and supernatural forces were also part of the system. Therefore it should not surprise us, that the pragmatic, pre-industrial man had found ways to ‘express’ his ideas on forces, phenomena and/or creatures governing the world, in his own landscape, which was the most important for his survival, in the same time carefully preserving the structural relations between different godly creatures, if he preserved the beliefs of the Slavs. The article also presents the development of scientific findings on religiosity of proto-Slavs on the basis of the research of Jan Peisker, Vjačeslav Vsevolodovič Ivanov, Vladimir Nikolajevič Toporov, Radoslav Katičić, Vitomir Belaj and Andrej Pleterski. The research conducted on the Island of Pag pointed to the concluded that even though Peisker’s Zoroastrian interpretation of Slavic pre-Christian sacral sites was wrong, we should not reject all of his insights and the two-part structure he discovered. Namely, Ivo Pilar emphasized two points which were in accordance with Peisker’s theory: St. George and St. Vid which were discovered next to St. Mary as constitutive parts of a larger, three-part structure of Slavic pre-Christian sacred spaces, which were discovered and structurally analyzed by Andrej Pleterski and elaborated on the examples form Croatian regions by Vitomir Belaj. The background of all this research is the central Slavic myth on the divine battle between Perun/Thunder God and Veles/Snake, as reconstructed by Ivanov and Toporov through structuralist methods, and further elaborated by Radoslav Katičić, specifically regarding Southern Slavs and by Vitomir Belaj, from ethnological standpoint. Numerous examples prove the correlation between the pagan sacral site from Pag and its model as presented by Radoslav Katičić and between the three-part structure of pre-Christian Slavic sacred space discovered by Andrej Pleterski. The specific value of the research on Pag was the discovery that the highest point of this structure, Thunder God’s place, the summit of St. Vid, served as solar observatory and hence the knowledge obtained in this way also included in the formation of the sacral structure, i.e., in cultural interpretation of space.
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In the region around the town of Dugo Selo another pre-Christian sacred space shaped like a triangle has been discovered: connecting Martin Breg – Veleševec – Trebovec. The similar mythical interpretative landscapes discovered so far have usually contained at least three distinct points. One was linked with the heavenly God Perun, the other with his opponent (Veles) and the third one with a female saint - substitute for Perun’s wife Mokosh. In the newly discovered case, St. Martin has, due to Christianization, taken up Perun’s place, Veleševac fits well the diagram as the place of the worship of Veles, Proto-Slavic god of the underworld and of cattle, grazing the rich underworld pastures, while Trebovec has obviously been the original place of sacrifice to the Mother (namely, *trêba in Proto-Slavic means sacrifice, and hence Trebovec could mean a place of sacrifice). Hence, we might have discovered another Slavic parish structured around the large pagan holy triangle. Furthermore, there is another interesting relationship between toponyms which has attracted our attention – that between St. Martin and St. Brcko. It seemed that the choice of St.Brcko as the church saint, was not primarily influenced neither by his life nor his character, observed outside the context of his relationship towards St. Martin. Seemingly, the choice of St. Brcko was an attempt to overcome a relationship which existed between pagan gods, between – as it looked – Perun and his son Yarilo. The article discusses the possibility that those loci – St. Martin and St. Brcko with traces of churches build in the Romanesque period – together with an assumed position of the castle Božjako on the river of Zelina as the third locus, form yet another, smaller pagan sacred triangle. It has been noted that all three points of this ‘smaller sacred triangle’ are situated on the Land of St. Martin, which was a preceptorate of the templar knights and after them the followers of St. John. Moreover, they are identical to the locations suggested for the possible ubication of domus (house, preceptorate headquarters) of knights, and archeological excavations have been undertaken on the locus of the church of St. Martin on MartinBreg, in search of its remains. From this we could conclude that the orders of knights might have participated in the process of spreading Christianity, which definitely lasted over few generations, especially if we take into account the fact that the knights used to repossess the pagan holy loci on purpose. Some other indications also support the assumption of the existence of the smaller triangle next to Martin-Breg.
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Jedan je primjer preplitanja poganstva i kršćanstva u Hrvata i drugih Slavena takozvano koledanje. Taj se običaj spominje već u starocrkvenoslavenskim „Zapovijedima svetih otaca“. Sačuvao se donedavna u Hrvatskoj i u gradišćanskih Hrvata, prije svega u onih u Novom Selu kod Pandrofa na samom sjeveru Gradišća. Za razliku od drugih gradišćanskohrvatskih koledarskih pjesama poznatih u najviše jednom zapisu, tekst je novoseoske pjesme poznat u četiri zapisa i time pokazuje koliko je tekstovna predaja bila gipka čak unutar jednoga sela. Tekstovi koledarskih pjesama sadržavaju poganske motive i rekvizite te praslavenske formulacije kao na primjer dvor boga gromovnika Peruna, čudesno drvo, Perunova sina, zlatno sedlo, pticu na kiti i jabuku.
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Proving and confirming religious beliefs and teachings by rational proofs has a long tradition among philosophers of religion and theologians. This approach holds that believing in religious principles and teachings requires their proof and confirmation by rational arguments. Many criticisms has been expressed concerning the justification of this approach, its inapplicability and what has already been achieved with this approach. This paper analyzes and criticizes the efforts of some philosophers of religion to present different arguments among rational arguments (deductive and inductive) in proving religious teachings.
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The research team from the Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy's Ethnological Department was in August and September 1993 in Nepal. It was the first field research of that kind in more than three hundred-year-old history of the University of Zagreb conducted on the subcontinent of India. The team has spent a month in Nepalese Mustang District in the Himalayas, which is at the altitude of more than 3,000 meters. The main aim of the research was to explore ethnologically and to document audio-visually the traditional, originally Tibetan, way of life and Buddhist religion of people living in that part of the Himalayas. This paper is a result of both the author's own field research and the available bibliography.
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The theme of this paper is an extension of Katičić's study "Hoditi-roditi" (Walk-Give Birth) and its aim is to show a number of similarities between a reconstructed old Slavic deity of vegetation and a recent popular belief in the Near East in el-Khader, "the Green". El-Khader is a deity of vegetation; he is called "the Green", he is always on the move, he rides on a white horse, walks over the sea, his sanctuaries are either in oak forests by water or on hills, he brings rain and protects the wounded from arrows. El-Khader-s significant features can be recognized not only in the cults of the Phoenician deities of vegetation, Adonis and Baal, but also in the ancient Egyptian (Oziris), Babylo-nian (Tammuz) and Sumerian (Dummuzi, Inanna) cults. Regardless of a possible, and likely, influence of the religion of horse-breeding invaders from the north, who are very similar to Indoeuropeans (the figure of the thunderer on a horse), the explanation for the above-mentioned parallels should be searched for in the most ancient periods of plant cultivation, on the very threshold of agriculture.
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This article illustrates the typological variety of Question and response in old Romanian literature. With a view to systematisation, the religious/ secular distinction has been taken into account, and within this, the functionality and end purpose of the texts comprising this literature in Romania. The religious texts have been broken down into two categories: canonic (relating to Christian doctrine, religious controversy, ecclesiastical law, exegesis or moral edification) and apocrypha. The end purpose of the majority of the secular texts is predominantly didactic, which is not to disregard the development of this genre of in relation to the celebrated models of Latin and Byzantine literature.
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The article presents the historical context of the formation of the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council Dei Filius. It systematically describes its content, taking into account its hermeneutical significance in the area of God‘s Revelation, God‘s existence, and the relationship of reason and faith. It critically evaluates the ways of grasping the theological questions and problems of that time, presented in Dei Filius, as a response to the political and church changes of the then-society. At the same time, it points to the consequences of the dogmatization of radical changes in the Church. Finally, it outlines the perspectives of their further development.
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