To utilize the notion of a sacred and a profane is to suggest an explanation and ordering of the world encountered that looks back to the Judeo-Christian traditions often claimed as the foundations of Western society. The term " sacred and profane " , bound together often as a figure of speech, suggests the defining differences between a number of oppositions: good and evil, Godly and Godless o...

The Bible tells that after Methuselah was born, Enoch “walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters.” Then when he became 365 years old, Enoch had a unique homegoing to heaven. The Bible says, “Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him away” (Gen. 5:22). Someone said that God and Enoch were walking and talking together, and God says, “You know, Enoch, it’s c...

Scrupulosity is a moral/religious subtype of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) that remains understudied within the extant literature. Drawing from separate lines of research suggesting that attachment insecurities underlie OCD and that God functions psychologically much like other attachment figures, we examined a purported association between attachment to God and scrupulosity. A large samp...

The Hara, or ghetto, is a place that distinguishes its inhabitants from other religious and cultural groups, acting as a spatial indicator of their difference. When Foucault’s theory of heterotopia is applied, the Hara becomes a hybrid, a place simultaneously of crisis and of deviation. In Albert Memmi’s La statue de sel, the protagonist experiences the Hara as antagonistic, or as a dystopia. I...

Some philosophers claim that it is not possible for God, if God exists, to figure in the phenomenological content of experience. W.T. Stace was one such philosopher committed to this claim, but he offered nothing in the way of an argument for it. William Forgie, however, has argued that on the assumption of two putatively plausible theses about the phenomenology of experience, phenomenologicall...

This article studies the function of the ‘fear of God’ idea in the book of Job. It is argued that, despite the difference in terminology, the ‘fear of God’ is equivalent to the ‘fear of the LORD’ concept of Proverbs. The location of the motif in the final form of the book of Job suggests that the ‘fear of God’ is not being proposed as the answer to Job’s dilemma. Rather, Job is one who maintain...

While standard political economy theories suggest a moderating effect of democratization on income inequality, empirical literature has failed to uncover any such robust relationship. Here we take yet another look at this issue arguing first, that prevailing ideology may be an important determinant of inequality and, second, that the democratization effect “works through” ideology. In societies...