The Bible tells that after Methuselah was born, Enoch “walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters.” Then when he became 365 years old, Enoch had a unique homegoing to heaven. The Bible says, “Enoch walked with God, then he was no more, because God took him away” (Gen. 5:22). Someone said that God and Enoch were walking and talking together, and God says, “You know, Enoch, it’s c...

This article examines the teachings of several Christian and Sufi mystics on the position of reason in the spiritual life, from Al-Hallaj (d. 922) to David R. Hawkins (b. 1927). In the plethora of “maps,” “stages,” and “ladders” discussed by mystics, the level of reason is highly regarded as a “rung” of spiritual attainment. However, reason alone is not enough to transport the soul to the most ...

“...the whole world had one language one common speech for all people. The people of the earth became skilled in construction and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach to heaven. By building the tower they wanted to make a name for themselves and also prevent their city from being scattered. God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentio...

Recent work has shown robust associations between morality and cleanliness. However, it is not known whether this association is equally consequential for everyone. I predicted that individuals high (versus low) in god-belief would be more likely to draw upon feelings of cleanliness to represent their moral concerns. To test this hypothesis, I used a two week daily sampling protocol. In an init...

This article examines whether shared religious beliefs and religious social relationships (Durkheim) and belief in a personal, moral God (Stark) negatively affect attitudes toward the acceptability of white-collar crime. In addition, using a large cross-national sample and estimating multilevel models, we test whether effects are conditional on modernization and religious contexts characterized...

The English Dominican Herbert McCabe highlighted some ideas of Thomas Aquinas on the knowability of God and on creation, which can usefully challenge some widespread commonplaces. The purposes of this article are two: to present McCabe’s sophisticated doctrine on the knowability of God and on creation in a systematic way, and to put this doctrine into its historical context. In the scattered an...

Some philosophers claim that it is not possible for God, if God exists, to figure in the phenomenological content of experience. W.T. Stace was one such philosopher committed to this claim, but he offered nothing in the way of an argument for it. William Forgie, however, has argued that on the assumption of two putatively plausible theses about the phenomenology of experience, phenomenologicall...