Abstract
The relationship between the spiritual and the material is a perennial, if often unexplored, issue. This essay explores aspects of this relationship with reference to a major Japanese “New Religion”, using Christianity and other world religions as contrasting and comparative cases. Complex theological and anthropological issues are involved in such concepts as miracles, transubstantiation, and relics, and their status in the total economy of a religion. This paper, with detailed reference to the Japanese New Religion Mahikari, discusses the contemporary role of magic and its role in the transformation of material objects into vehicles of spirituality. This is then related to the argument that miracles are not so much to be seen as the suspension of the laws of nature as the expression of a cosmology in which the mutability of matter is assumed, a vie surprisingly close to that of much contemporary physics.
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Clammer, J. (2019). The Material and the Spiritual: The Provisionality of Matter and the Politics of Miracles in Japanese New Religions. In: Giri, A.K. (eds) Practical Spirituality and Human Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3687-4_21
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