This introduction outlines the motivation and significance of the first special issue dedicated to engaging philosophically with Afro-Brazilian religions in an Anglophone journal of philosophy. It traces the project’s origins, inspired by a need to diversify the philosophy of religion beyond traditional Western paradigms, and explores how Afro-Brazilian traditions like Candomblé and Umbanda challenge the discipline’s predominant focus on belief and intellectualized theism. By examining their ritual-centric practices, embodied epistemologies, and syncretic dynamics, the special issue demonstrates how these underrepresented traditions can enrich philosophical debates on metaphysics, epistemology, and religious diversity. The introduction also highlights the interdisciplinary methodology employed, emphasizing the integration of cultural anthropology and ethnography to explore emic concepts, rituals, and mythic narratives. This special issue seeks to inspire further philosophical engagement with Afro-Brazilian traditions and other neglected religious practices.

The Journal of Law and Religion began publishing as part of the larger revival and reimagination of the academic encounter with religion. More specifically, it sought from the start to examine an entire panoply of issues: secular law regarding religion, religious views of secular law and the state, political philosophy, political theology, religious law, and legal and religious pluralism as overarching ideas. What was at stake to the journal’s founders was not just intellectual curiosity but their conviction that this kaleidoscope of concerns was essential to reconstituting a healthy polity, to play a role in responding to a crisis of values that afflicted both religion and the secular state. The journal has also sought to consider questions across the full range of world religions, including non-Western religions. Again, this is not expanding the canon for its own sake. The larger story of legal systems and religions in all their specificity and complex interactions, as revealed by rigorous and imaginative analysis, could ideally help establish a counter-narrative to the simple pieties of modernity. The challenges today, especially our current state of political polarization, which envelops religion in its wake, are different, but they demand the same careful, expansive, scholarly agenda.

Patients from religious minorities can face unique challenges reconciling their beliefs with the values that undergird Western Medical Ethics. This paper explores homologies between approaches of Orthodox Judaism and Islam to medical ethics, and how these religions’ moral codes differ from the prevailing ethos in medicine. Through analysis of religious and biomedical literature, this work examines how Jewish and Muslim religious observances affect decisions about genetic counseling, reproductive health, pediatric medicine, mental health, and end-of-life decisions. These traditions embrace a theocentric rather than an autonomy-based ethics. Central to this conception is the view that life and the body are gifts from God rather than the individual and the primacy of community norms. These insights can help clinicians provide care that aligns Muslim and Jewish patients’ health goals with their religious beliefs and cultural values. Finally, dialogue in a medical context between these faith traditions provides an opportunity for rapprochement amidst geopolitical turmoil.

In this article we explore the practical conditions of ritual practices of Hui and Uyghur Muslims in China. Ceaseless conflicts among different religious ideas and elements exist, but they are integrated into religious pluralism, which meets the needs of Muslims' daily practices. Furthermore, we probe the reasons for the resulting religious harmony through investigating the historical process of the formation of religious pluralism, and showing present ritual performances in which there is a hierarchically built ritual structure functioning to make religious integration possible, though different opinions regarding diverse religious elements occur elsewhere among Hui and Uyghur Muslims. Finally, the discussion supports the related assertion that rituals can be reliable and effective ways of understanding the sociological and psychological functions of religions, or religious beliefs, and other related socio-cultural realities.

This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.

The lack of electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the South Indian state of Kerala is often explained through the idea of Kerala ‘exceptionalism’, a broad term used to explain the unique historical, political, and developmental trajectory of the state. However, such explanations do not adequately address the systematic and concerted attempts by Hindu nationalist organizations to transform the cultural sphere of Kerala into a fertile ground for its future electoral politics. Through an ethnographic study of three Hindu nationalist organizations in the civil society sphere of Kodungallur, a multi-religious town in central Kerala, this article explores the politics and implications of their cultural interventions. The article argues that, peeved by an ‘absent Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, these organizations are trying to construct new forms of sociality and subjectivity and a grassroots public sphere embedded in Hindu nationalist ideology in Kodungallur. Often described by these organizations as ‘apolitical’ and ‘cultural’, these interventions are indeed a critique of the Kerala public sphere which is characterized by religious pluralism and secular sociality. Hence, the attempt to create a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ by these organizations is a deeply political endeavour aimed at creating an exclusivist Hindu hegemony in the cultural sphere, which they assume will pave the way for their electoral hegemony in Kerala in the long run.

Sulh-i kull or ‘Total Peace’ with all religions was a policy introduced by the Mughal empire in South Asia in the late sixteenth century. It was a radically accommodative stance for its day, especially when compared to the intolerant manner in which other Muslim and Christian polities of the early modern world dealt with religious difference. This article introduces a new perspective on Mughal Total Peace by arguing that it was meant to solve a long-standing problem created by the monotheistic ban on oaths sworn on non-biblical deities. Such a ban restricted the ability of Muslim kings to solemnize peace treaties with their non-monotheist rivals and subjects. In the second half of the article, I examine two pre-Mughal cases, from the eleventh century (Mahmud of Ghazna) and the seventh century (the prophet Muhammad), respectively, to explore what other, less ‘total’, mechanisms were invented to suspend this ban and enable oath-taking and solemn peace-making between monotheist and non-monotheist. In effect, I use the Mughal case to highlight a specific issue that shaped political theology in Islam over the long term.

This article argues that the Mongol empire's famous religious tolerance cannot be explained solely through its adoption of Inner Asian imperial political traditions of ruling over ethnically and religiously diverse subjects. Instead, this pluralism can be ascribed to a wider religious pattern of the Mongols. The first part argues that the analytical category of immanentist religions explains not only the inter-cultic transparency exhibited by the Mongol courts, but also the few explicit instances where the Chinggisid rulers reacted with ‘religious’ violence. The article further explores the strategies employed by the religious vectors, mainly Buddhists and Muslims, to address, accommodate, and subvert the Chinggisids’ patterns of religiosity and primarily their pluralism, and the Mongols’ deified mode of sacralizing kingship. Focusing on the Mongol-Ilkhanid court in Iran, the article examines how religious representatives used conceptual affinities and equivalences between the Mongol traditions and certain principles of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favour, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to the new religious affiliation. Employing this assimilative approach, they manoeuvred within the religious, immanentist paradigm of their nomadic patrons while moulding and manipulating it to their own religious, transcendentalist ends. The article further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Chinggisid patterns became an arena of Buddhist–Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization.