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...

THE FIELD OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES has seen an abundance of computerbased tools and publications during the last few years. Bibliographic databases, full-text databanks, and electronic Bibles are in many ways changing the face of biblical and theological studies. Librarians, according to a recent survey, see themselves as facilitators to electronic information in religion, but actual figures from t...

Department Website: http://nelc.uchicago.edu Program of Study Majors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at the University of Chicago pursue rigorous knowledge about a region of the world that is known as “the cradle of civilization” and the home of several important religious and cultural traditions, as well as one of the most important geopolitical areas of our contemporary wor...

Scientific writing is a general label with a great deal of variation at any period. Empirical evidence of variation within genres of the early periods has been produced by studies of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, as they have shown that umbrella categories like ‘religious treatises’ or ‘scientific writing’ contain very heterogeneous texts (Meurman-Solin 1993, Taavitsainen 1993, 1994a). ...

according to the importance of symbolism in mystical narratives, and of course to the existence of a need for them to be interpreted in order to understand the text and its narrative details, we have analyzed three authentic and effective works: initially tazkirat al-awliyā by attar, secondly kashf-ol-mahjoob by hojviri and at the end resaleh of ghoshairieh by ghoshairi through a semiotic appro...

Descriptions of the human anatomy derived from religious texts are often omitted from the medical literature. The present review aims to discuss the comments and commentaries made regarding the heart and cardiovascular system as found in the Qur'an and Hadeeth. Based on this review, it is clear that these early sources both had a good comprehension of these parts of the body.

Can a cultural memory and identity constructed around traumatic events in the historical past, interpreted as the result of pollution of the sacred center, give a group an evolutionary advantage under the right conditions? This article assesses this question by examining three different waves of religious entrepreneurship that drove the evolution of the ancient Israelite religion between the la...

This article examines the texts used by madrassah or religious schools in Pakistan which are playing a major role in framing the larger part of madrassah students’ worldview. A considerable part of madrassah graduates are busy in what they called it jihad in Afghanistan Northern Pakistan. Comparing these texts with that of the nineteenth century, this study investigates that how a substantial c...