Religious Studies

This article interprets data from five key points in the relationship between the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) and the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) to develop guidelines about how this relationship can help or hinder the work of these two religious orders within the Roman Catholic Church. It concludes that conflictual relationships between the groups tend to hinder their work while collaborative relationships tend to amplify their work. The particular historical events studied are: early Dominican criticism of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the different ways that Dominicans and Jesuits employed Mary in their dealings with Muslims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the de auxiliis controversy about the relationship between grace and free will; the founding of rival Dominican and Jesuit biblical schools at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the positive collaboration between Dominican Yves Congar and Jesuit Karl Rahner at the Second Vatican ...

This article interprets data from five key points in the relationship between the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) and the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) to develop guidelines about how this relationship can help or hinder the work of these two religious orders within the Roman Catholic Church. It concludes that conflictual relationships between the groups tend to hinder their work while collaborative relationships tend to amplify their work. The particular historical events studied are: early Dominican criticism of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the different ways that Dominicans and Jesuits employed Mary in their dealings with Muslims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the de auxiliis controversy about the relationship between grace and free will; the founding of rival Dominican and Jesuit biblical schools at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the positive collaboration between Dominican Yves Congar and Jesuit Karl Rahner at the Second Vatican ...

A comparative reading of the Lotus Sutra, a first century Mahayana Buddhist text and a sermon on Jesus cleansing the Temple by Medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart. The Lotus explains how the Buddha works throughout time to end the suffering of all sentient beings by employing "skillful means," words and actions that flow from the Buddha's infinite, non-discursive wisdom. Eckhart admonishes Christians to abandon all concepts and images of God so that they might give birth to the God-Beyond-Images in their souls in an act of mutual self-creation. The comparative reading suggests that Eckhart was employing something like "skillful means.

This paper deals with Musa Jarullah Bigiyev’s Tatar translation of
the Qur’an within the context of internal Muslim affairs in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Bigiyev’s Tatar translation of the Qur’an, which was completed in 1912, remains one of the mysteries of the academic study of the Qur’an in the Turkic world. Having been barred from publication by the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (the Sobraniye), its whereabouts has been puzzling researchers for the last hundred years. In 2010, a so-called facsimile of it came out in Kazan by Elmira Tagirdjanova and Gareyeva. However, seven years later, in
2017, the enthusiasm turned to disappointment as it turned out to be the exact copy of SüleymanTevfik’sTercüme-i Şerife: TürkçeKur’an-ıKerim (1926), which is one of the first full Turkish translations of the Qur’an in the republican era. Having evaluated Bigiyev’s translation within the context of internal Muslim affairs in Russia, this paper deals with the story of Bigiyev’s failed publication attempt in 1912 and the false promise of the Kazan Edition in 2010.

The present work is an intellectual biography of Musa Jarullah Bigiyev (1875-1949), who was a Tatar Muslim scholar from Russia. His areas of expertise covered a vast area from Islamic jurisprudence to political theory, to name just two fields. Besides, he had a command of multiple languages, i.e., Turkic in its various branches, Arabic, Persian, Russian, and maybe Urdu. The existing literature on Bigiyev often time looks at him through the framework of Jadidist vs. Qadimist binary, which entails certain terminology, such as “reformist,” “modernist,” “jadidist,” “traditional,” “modern,” etc. Although the majority of sources put him on the “reformist” end of the religious spectrum, still some others locate him on the opposite end. There are also reconciliatory approaches that situate him in between. By taking anthropologist Talal Asad's notion of Islam as a discursive tradition as its theoretical framework, this work looks at Bigiyev's place within the Islamic intellectual tradition beyond the established discourse of Jadidism. By looking at the diversity in Islam through Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition, it does not make sense to put it into binaries, such as traditional vs. modern, urban vs. rural, ulama vs. Sufi, reformist vs. traditional, etc. One manifestation of this bifurcation in the study of Islam in Russia and Central Asia is the Jadidist vs. Qadimist binary. For Asad, Islam is a tradition. What makes a tradition is not always agreements, but also disagreements. Asad claims that what determines proper Islamic behavior and practice in a given context is the discourse. This is how he explains the apparent diversity within the Islamic tradition. This work is an attempt to understand the ways in which Bigiyev manipulated tradition to determine the apt Islamic practice in his context.

This paper presents a survey of major economic systems, both contemporary and history, evaluated in light of Catholic Social Thought. The conclusion offers a suggestion as to which system best correlates with the official teaching of the Catholic Church. Submitted in as senior undergraduate thesis in the Division of Theology and Philosophy at Quincy University.