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[German Version] I. Religious Studies and History of Religions – II. Death and the Realm of the Dead in the Old Testament – III. Judaism – IV. New Testament – V. Philosophy – VI. Philosophy of Religion – VII. History of Dogma and Dogmatics – VIII. Ethics – IX. Practical Theology – X. Art – XI. Islam – XII. Buddhism – XIII. Hinduism I. Religious Studies and History of Religions 1. General Modern religious criticism regards religion as compensation for human anxiety in the face of death. Although engagement with death contributed essentially to the development of human culture, witn…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Old Testament – III. Primitive Christianity – IV. Church History – V. Judaism – VI. Islam – VII. Asia, Africa, and Latin America – VIII. Social Sciences – IX. Psychology – X. Philosophy of Religion – XI. Practical Theology I. Religious Studies To date there have been hardly any works devoted to men from the perspective of religious studies. Given the androcentrism of traditional scholarship, the category of …

[German Version] The many and varied gender relations interact with their religious context and are also, in many religions, significant as symbols/metaphors. Gender relations are by no means a new phenomenon, but have only become the object of explicit scholarly attention within the study of religions through the influence of gender studies, so that a number of important questions have as yet only been treated in a prelim…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Religions have various assessments and guidelines regarding sexuality, which shape the concrete ways people deal with it and influence certain social attitudes. Religious sexual morality (Sexual ethics) regulates sexual relations through various sexual taboos and by ¶ …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Old Testament – III. Judaism – IV. New Testament – V. Practical Theology I. Religious Studies As an element of burial rites and the cult of the dead (Dead, Cult of the), mourning customs serve not only the survivors but also the departed. Ritual support of the dead or protection against them is usually one of the functions of a mourning period, which often concludes with a change in the status of the departed (e.g. admission to the realm of the dead at the end of a journey into the afterlife). In the light of the religio-historical evidence, both the older interpretation of mourning customs as preventing the return of the dead and their common reduction today to a source of comfort for the bereaved are one-sided. Generally mourning customs structure the lives of mourners by ritualizing various reactions to death. They link the survivors with the departed and are regarded as social and religious obl…

[German Version] The supposed priority of mother symbolism in anthropomorphic ideas of God (God, Representations and symbols of) led many scholars in the past to postulate a “cult of the mother goddess as an archetypal phenomenon” (Heiler, but also van der Leeuw and others). But mother symbolism is only one aspect in the complex world of goddess worship. The definition of the term …

[German Version] As part of an extraordinary transitional phase that includes birth, pregnancy is surrounded by taboos and rituals in ethnic religions, but also in Hinduism and the popular religion of most cultures. The rituals serve in part to ward off malignant influences that might issue from the pregnant woman, but primarily to protect and preserve intact the developing child and assure an easy birth. Pregnancy rituals intended to guarantee the birth of a son are also known. Taboos primarily i…

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[English Version] Schwangerschaft, religionswissenschaftlich. Als Teil einer außergewöhnlichen Übergangsphase, die auch die Geburt umfaßt, wird die Sch. in ethnischen Rel., aber z.B. auch im Hinduismus sowie in der volksrel. Praxis der meisten Kulturen mit Tabus und Riten markiert. Sie dienen z.T. der Abwehr schädigender Einflüsse, die von der schwangeren Frau ausgehen können, v.a. aber dem Schutz und der Unversehrtheit des werdenden Kindes und einer leichten Geburt. Belegt sind auch Schwangerschaf…

[English Version] I. Religionswissenschaftlich und religions- geschichtlich 1.  AllgemeinNeuzeitliche Religionskritik betrachtet Rel. als Kompensation für die Angst des Menschen vor dem T. Obwohl die Auseinandersetzung mit dem T. einen wesentlichen Anteil an der Entstehung menschlicher Kultur hat, rücken die Zeugnisse der frühen Religionsgesch. großteils das irdische Leben in den Vordergrund. Die einzelnen rel. Traditionen gewichten T. und Weiterleben unterschiedlich. Allerdings erweist sich der T. fas…