Curated category
Polytheism
- TaoismTaoism opens with a paradox spoken in the first line of the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao that can be told is not eternal Tao." The word at its center, written 道 in…
- PolytheismPolytheism, the worship of or belief in more than one deity, got its name from an argument. The Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria coined the word, joining…
- BuddhismBuddhism rests on the teachings of one man, a śramaṇa and religious teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE and came to be called the Buddha, "the…
- HinduismHinduism is an umbrella term, and that single fact unsettles almost everything a newcomer expects from a religion. It has no founder.
- MonolatryMonolatry sits in a precise, uncomfortable space between polytheism and monotheism. The word itself comes from two Greek roots: monos, meaning single, and…
- Canaanite religionCanaanite religion shaped the spiritual lives of people across the southern Levant for roughly three thousand years before the common era.
- Chinese folk religionChinese folk religion has no single name. The Chinese language historically had no overarching word for "religion" at all.
- ConfucianismConfucianism is a system of thought and behavior that began in ancient China, and people have argued for centuries about what to call it. Is it a philosophy?
- Aztec religionAztec religion is the system of belief that held together one of the most powerful empires in Mesoamerican history. At its heart sat a concept called teotl…
- TengrismTengrism is a belief system born on the Eurasian steppes, rooted in shamanism and animism, and built around a single sky deity whose name stretches across a…
- ShintoEight million kami. In Japanese, that number does not mean a precise count. It means infinity, a way of saying that supernatural entities are present…