t begins innocuously enough. A six-month-old baby, once thriving and cheerful, begins reacting differently to normal sounds such as clapping hands or closing doors. Her parents ice that her limbs twitch and her muscles are not developing properly. She has trouble swallowing and shows signs of mental retardation. What they can’t see is her compromised brain tissue, which began degenerating when ...

There has been an upsurge of interest in moral decision making, which appears to have some distinctive properties. For example, some moral decisions are so strongly influenced by ideas about how sacred entities are to be treated, that they seem to be relatively insensitive to the costs and benefits entailed (e.g., ‘‘do not allow companies to pollute the earth for a fee, even if pollution credit...

Besides its important significance in plant taxonomy and phylogeny, sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn.) might also hold the key to the secrets of aging, which attracts crescent attentions from researchers all over the world. The genetic or molecular studies on this species depend on its genome information. In 2013, two publications reported the sequencing of its full genome, based on which ...

Seminal work in finance and economics has studied theoretical models of ethical behavior. We provide experimental evidence for the role of a universal “sacred value,” namely, truth. We study this value in the context of earnings management, which is an important business setting where the conflict between personal gains and behavior consistent with the value of truth is particularly salient. We...

This article studies the problem of eternal life from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the approaches of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger from contemporary philosophy, and shows that using these three philosophical approaches can better explain certain aspects of revealed theology, such as resurrection of flesh, eternity in a transcendent dimension, and eternal life as the angels in he...

This paper critically explores the political theology of Carl Schmitt. It argues that Schmitt’s analysis, which links the transcendence of God with the political concept of sovereignty, is both too nostalgic and too severe. In the place of Schmitt’s political theology that disdains democracy for the failures of modern liberalism, this paper instead draws on the recent collaborative works of Mic...

In this essay I propose a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred literatures, using the instruments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an ov...

Building upon earlier analysis of Eliade’s ‘sacred’ as ‘the intentional object of human experience that is apprehended as the real’ (Rennie 1996, 21) this article pursues the concept of the apprehension of the sacred in empirical experience as described by Eliade in his discussion of religious symbols. Using a variety of visual analogies an attempt is made to understand what Eliade’s understand...