Despite the almost 1500 years of coexistence between Islam and Judaism, both religions play a dominant role in the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Besides religion, this conflict has its territorial dimension which dominates the relationship between Israel and Palestine, or rather between Jews and Arabs. This article explores the concept of territoriality within Judaism and Islam and its implications for the Israeli-Palestine conflict. It posits the question: is there any space for peaceful territorial coexistence by two antagonist religions, or just the promise of violent struggle based on different perceptions of territoriality?

This paper presents the findings of ethnographic field research focusing on the worship of the Christ Child as practised by female members of a Fraternity of the Infant Jesus in the main church (kościół farny) in the city of Rzeszów in south-eastern Poland. Based on anthropological analysis of secondary sources and primary data collected through interviews, I try to answer the question of why the women choose to worship God as a Child, and how their choice is connected with their spiritual path. What kind of figures do they embrace as spiritual role models, and why? What is it about the worship of the Child Jesus that they find attractive, and how do they maintain, and contribute to, that form of worship? I will connect these aspects of the worship to women’s strong need for “giving/protecting life” as well as for sensual relationship with the sacred. I treat this need as a self-embraced development strategy combining a fulfilled feminine identity with a religious life as worshippers of Christ

Jewish prayers and holy texts of religious rituals contain messages which are, from a contemporary point of view, highly exclusive and discriminating. However, Judaism treats its texts as sacred,  bestowed directly from God, and therefore, unchangeable. Jewish Orthodoxy refuses to alter even one letter in the traditional texts. Nevertheless, since the reformation of Judaism in the mid-19th century in Germany, and particularly since the mid-20th century in the USA, liberal and progressive Jewish communities have come to the conclusion that human dignity is more important than faithfulness to old texts, and therefore some changes have to be made. These have usually been slight alterations which eliminated exclusive and belittling meanings from the original text. Today, even Orthodox Jews feel unease with this situation, and are considering different solutions. The article deals with the case of the morning prayer “Blessed are You, Lord, for Not Having Made Me a Woman” and its interpretations and modifications from the Middle Ages to modern times.

The impact of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution on religious thinking is beyond dispute. Darwin published his most important work on general biological evolution (On the Origins of Species) in 1859, and in 1871 he applied this theory to the origin of man (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex). From the beginning, most Christian churches rejected Darwin’s view, but most scientists accepted it as the most convincing explanation of the mechanisms of life. A new chapter in this controversy was opened by Richard Dawkins in 2006 with the publication of The God Delusion, in which he not only vigorously defended Darwin’s theory but also rejected any religious dimension of biological reality. An interesting alternative to Dawkins’s theory was elaborated by John F. Haught in his trilogy: God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000); Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and The Drama of Life (2010); and Resting on the Future: Catholic Theology for an Unfinished Universe (2015), in which he elaborated a theology of  evolution wherein he reconciled the theory of evolution with Christian-Catholic theology. The aim of this essay is to ask to what extent this attempt is successful.