NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 44, Issue 2, 1990

In the years following World War II Japan wrote history with new religions, the so-called shinkoshukyo. In a few years these religions scored records in conversions unparalleled in religious history. Nowadays, that is to say from 1973, the year of the oil crisis, onwards the same phenomenon is recurring in the shin shin-shukyo, the new new-religions. In this article attention will be paid to these two phenomena in three paragraphs:

1. the growth of new religions in Japan’s history;

2. the concepts of shinkoshukyo and shin shin-shukyo;

3. some characteristics of the shin shin-shukyo.

The book of Esther receives rightly the mark of a wisdom-story. Although the sort novel has a profane and anthropocentric character, we cannot call this tale un-Jewish or unbiblical. Casting a glance at Proverbs and Ecclesiastes Esther fits well in certain rabbinical lines of thought. It is worth wile to recognize the book as a satire. This throws a new light upon several traits of the much-discussed narrative.

In this article the author presents a survey of the major publications in the field of merkavah mysticism and hekhalot literature since Scholem’s epoch-making Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941). He focuses especially on the radically new approaches inaugurated by Peter Schafer and David Halperin in the eighties and stresses the importance of magic in these ancient Jewish texts.

After the publishing, 1978, of Karl Jaspers’ Notes on Martin Heidegger, the Exchange of Letters from 1926-1969 by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers came out in 1985. Hannah Arendt had been a philosophical student of Jaspers and Heidegger. The letters discuss many subjects, like for instance Jewry, Judaism and Israel; the culture and history of Germany; humanity; reason, freedom and university. This article deals with: Judaism and Israel, philosophy and Martin Heidegger. It proves to be noteworthy that Jaspers emphasizes the spiritual, prophetic and religious aspects as essential for Judaism and as in a certain tension or even contradiction with the ‘assimilation’ of the state of Israel.