This study explores the new strands of an emerging theodicy among Uyghurs living in diaspora. This study is based on material collected from recorded discussions generated during online introductory classes on the Qur’an, and from interviews with Uyghur Imams residing in Canada and Turkey. The ongoing persecution of Muslims in the Uyghur Homeland by the Chinese government (recently recognized as a “genocide” by the governments of eight countries) has led many Uyghurs to attempt to explain these atrocities through an Islamic religious lens. Similar strategies have been noted in the Jewish theodicy that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust—where the suffering of victims of genocide were interpreted as either a divine test or punishment. Using to these new examples of theodical thinking found among Uyghurs living in the diaspora, we have crafted a typology of four different approaches to the problem of evil and suffering. These include the gnostic argument, the mythic argument, the apocalyptic argument, and the mystery argument. Special attention will be given to the mystery argument because it appears to be an incipient pastoral theodicy that poses a challenge to the test-or-punishment paradigm by valorizing political activism and emphasizes the intergenerational transmission of Uyghur identity. Affinities between Uyghur theodicy and certain Jewish Holocaust theodicies are explored, with a focus on covenantal paradigmatic thinking, the political quietism of Hasidic Hungarian borderland Grand Rabbis in the early 1940s, and the dynamic “broken theodicy” of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro.

This article explores the role of evolved pattern recognition in the development and divergence of mental frameworks underlying creative and metaphysical thought in Hominid species. It examines the emergence of figurative artistic expression through the lenses of Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gaboran honing theory, testing the limits and overlap of these methodologies when applied to humanity’s archaic relatives. This is contrasted with complex philosophical and artistic traditions of a relatively recent human society, Early Modern Persia. There is something of a taboo around the application of evolutionary psychology in some sociological circles due to its frequent misuse in pop science to dismiss societal change: an appeal to antiquity rebranded as biological determinism. This article will expand the use of evolutionary psychological methodologies in moderation as an additional tool in the study of archaic humanity and its relatives. It finds there is an evolutionary substratum to the development of creative thought, but that its recognisable features for a modern human were unlikely to have initially been selected traits themselves: this evolutionary substratum is a basis of sensory and conceptual pattern recognition traits, generating a mental atmosphere conducive to the development of collective strata of conceptual association, and is traceable to prehistory.

When P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) is noted today, it is generally as a quondam pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff (c.1866–1949), and the author of In Search of the Miraculous, an account of his time with Gurdjieff. Ouspensky had a considerable reputation in Russian esoteric circles before he had met Gurdjieff, and it is sometimes asserted that Ouspensky’s standing as an independent thinker has been underestimated. The English translation of his book Tertium Organum has been cited as evidence that Ouspensky had already anticipated some of Gurdjieff’s leading ideas. However, a comparison of the 1911 Russian-language edition with the 1920 English translation of the 1916 Russian revision of Tertium Organum establishes that the 1911 original lacked key ideas found in later editions, most of which are distinctively Gurdjieff’s. This shows the extent of Ouspensky’s debt to Gurdjieff, and casts a different light on the relationship between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; namely, that there was more collaboration than previously known, and that Ouspensky’s account of his agreement with Gurdjieff about committing Gurdjieff’s ideas to writing, was tendentious, if not misleading.

This article discusses Orara, a religious festival in Oye-Ekiti which is lacking in scholarly attention. Orara was conceived to appease the spirits and pray to Olodumare through rituals and public performances. The study used sociology, ethnography, anthropology, and historical research methodologies to elicit data. These include primary and secondary sources. The primary data included oral tradition, participant observation, in-situ field notes (i.e., record­ing immediately after observations of events), conversations and interviews, and photographs of the embodied experience of the festival and survey. Secondary sources comprised journal articles, textbooks, and other relevant documents. Using qualitatively analysis, the study engaged Victor Turner’s theory of per­formance in explaining the functionality of Orara in enabling social order in Oye-Ekiti society.

This article explores aspects of visualisation and healing practices found within Tibetan Tantric traditions of deity yoga, with particular focus on the deities Avalokiteśvara, Parṇaśavarī and Tārā. The article looks at some innovations and continuities between contemporary developments of these practices and their more ancient counterparts, through the lens of their use for healing. It explores the relationship of Tantric visualisation practices to waking life, dreamtime, and death processes, identifying some ways in which they were employed in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Concepts from memory studies and place/ space studies are here used to explore how narratives and history are interpreted, particularly locations with mythic dimensions. These locations are of importance to distinct communities, from treasure seekers to those who claim Indigenous belonging to the land. Sites have memories and stories attached to them, but in some cases recent interpretations have superseded older meanings. New narratives and stories have overlaid traditional understandings. From sites of ancient importance and Indigenous ownership, through veneration of the dead, to locations of conspiracy ideology, multiple narratives are created and adopted by differing groups. Where one person might only see the historical, another with a different view will see other aspects of the same site. I situate these locations and narratives within a dual framework of memory studies and place/ space studies to analyse how narratives are created and developed to facilitate new identity formation. New narratives are adopted or made prominent, and in some cases are claimed to be the only acceptable history of a location, even sites with multiple contested histories. Such claims are crucial for those whose identity is entangled with the new story, and whose goals may be communal, individual, political, or religious.

This article serves to expand several points in the recently published “The Many Gods of Deuteronomy,” including noting a number of potential readings of Deuteronomy 32:1–43 which overtly indicate a polytheistic origin for the hymn. This includes several references to both named and unnamed deities, which have gone neglected in the discussions on whether or not the passage indicates Israel’s earlier phases of polytheism. Further, the works attempting to reread Deuteronomy 32 as non-polytheistic are critiqued for a number of other failings in their methods and specific data points.