Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective, by Daniella Talmon-Heller.

Love and “Suffering for”: A Shia Perspective on Rene Girard’s Theory on Violence and the Sacred

When we know and recognize one another, our souls join with those of others. This is called ta’aruf in the parlance of the Qur’an. Ta’aruf increases love and unity, as it decreases violence and enmity. Knowing one another occurs in several ways. One way to know others is to love the same thing that they do. This means that several people will love a similar spiritual being. Fr...

Rituals, ceremonies and customs related to sacred trees with a special reference to the Middle East

Tree worship is very common worldwide. This field study surveys the ceremonies and customs related to sacred trees in present-day Israel; it includes the results of interviews with 98 informants in thirty-one Arab, Bedouin, and Druze villages in the Galilee. The main results are: 1. Sacred trees were treated as another kind of sacred entity with all their metaphysical as well as physical manife...

Islamic bioethics: between sacred law, lived experiences, and state authority.

There is burgeoning interest in the field of "Islamic" bioethics within public and professional circles, and both healthcare practitioners and academic scholars deploy their respective expertise in attempts to cohere a discipline of inquiry that addresses the needs of contemporary bioethics stakeholders while using resources from within the Islamic ethico-legal tradition. This manuscript serves...

Sacred Bounds on Rational Conflict Resolution: The Middle East and Beyond

Increasingly across the world, political conflict is as a moral clash between different sets of sacred values, which a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that precludes comparisons or tradeoffs with instrumental values of realpolitik or the marketplace. In experiments with Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and Hamas students we found that violent opposition to...

Victorian Representations and Transformations : Sacred Place in Charles Dickens ’ s