New article in the JRJ

Very excited to announce (a little late) the publication of my article in Brill’s fantastic Journal of Religion in Japan.

“Dreaming of the World to Come: Yonaoshi Millenarianism and Monotheism in Tenrikyō and Christianity” Journal of Religion in Japan 13 (2-3): 1-38.(Brill 2024)

Here’s the abstract:

In comparative studies, Tenrikyō’s this-worldly, millenarian vision has found little resonance with Christian expectations of going to heaven after death. However, an “earthly turn” in Christian eschatology is redirecting Christian expectations away from heaven and toward bodily resurrection into an earthly Kingdom of God, providing new opportunity to revisit the potential historical and conceptual overlap between Tenrikyō’s view of earthly renewal and that of Christianity—in both its first-century and contemporary “restorationist” forms. This article considers the historical origin of Tenrikyō’s millenarianism against a backdrop of late-Tokugawa yonaoshi (world renewal) and Miroku based movements. Here, the timeline for the appearance of millenarian views of yonaoshi proposed by Miura (2019) is revised to give Tenrikyō’s foundress primacy as a millenarian innovator. I furthermore suggest that monotheism may have been a catalyst for millenarian yonaoshi development. Finally, I propose “yonaoshi millenarianism” as a cross-cultural, comparative category applicable to both Tenrikyō and early/restorationist Christianity.

You can read this article at Brill.com (here)