Disputed Statements

Ordination of Women, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Gary Macy's The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (2008) argues that women held roles the medieval church itself called ordained before the twelfth century narrowed the definition of ordination to exclude them, which would make the modern debate partly an argument about what the word ordination has meant rather than only about whether women held such roles. The thesis is influential in the historical literature but not universally accepted, and it sits alongside a live contemporary division: Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism, and the Church of England since 1994, ordain women, while Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity hold they lack the authority to, a position the Catholic church restated in 1976 and 1994. The standing is recorded as contested because Macy's historical claim and the churches' present-day authority claims are two different arguments that tend to get run together.

Source The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, Gary Macy tier 1

Ordination of Women, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Macy argues that women were ordained in the medieval West under a definition of ordination that the twelfth century then narrowed, so that the modern question is partly an argument about what the word has meant. The thesis is influential and is not universally accepted.

Source The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, Gary Macy tier 1

Ordination of Women, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

According To Christianity

Gary Macy's The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford University Press, 2008) documents, through his examination of medieval liturgical and canonical records, that Christian denominations remain divided on the ordination of women today: several Methodist and Baptist bodies, the Mennonites and others ordain women, while Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox teaching does not, a live division rather than a historically settled question.

Source The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, Gary Macy tier 1

Ordo Virtutum, Musical Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Release Year

Currently States 1151

The surviving manuscript places composition around Hildegard's relocation from the Disibodenberg to her new monastery at Rupertsberg, but scholars reviewing that evidence, Eckehard Simon's 2011 survey of the scholarship among them, debate whether 1151 or 1152 is the more precise year, and separately whether the date on record marks the play's composition or its first performance, two different questions the sources do not clearly distinguish.

Source Simon, Hildegard of Bingen and Her Music Drama Ordo Virtutum: A Critical Review of Scholarship, Eckehard Simon tier 2

Ordo Virtutum, Musical Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Documented Liturgical Use

Currently States Almost certainly performed by Hildegard's own nuns for the convent community at Rupertsberg, most likely at either the 1152 dedication of the new abbey church or a ceremony consecrating new nuns.

Scholars have not settled which specific occasion: the abbey dedication and a nuns' consecration ceremony are the two candidates the surviving evidence supports, and neither is confirmed over the other.

Source Simon, Hildegard of Bingen and Her Music Drama Ordo Virtutum: A Critical Review of Scholarship, Eckehard Simon tier 2

Oregon, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States No origin is agreed. Proposed sources include a French word for storm or hurricane, ouragan, and a mapmaker's mislabeling of a Wisconsin river name later misread by early writers as referring to a western river; the word's first documented use is Major Robert Rogers's 1765 petition, and historians have settled on none of the competing accounts.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Original enlightenment (hongaku), Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether a teaching that makes awakening the condition one is already in leaves any reason to practise, and whether it worked to make existing arrangements unquestionable. Both criticisms have been pressed inside Japan and outside it.

Original enlightenment, hongaku, developed within the Japanese Tendai school out of buddha-nature teachings inherited from China, but was pressed further there than in its Chinese sources, to the point of holding that grasses and trees attain buddhahood and that the ordinary world just as it stands is already the buddha realm. Jacqueline Stone's scholarly study of the doctrine's development traces the objection this raised within medieval Japanese Buddhism itself: if enlightenment is the condition one is already in rather than something to be attained, a critic can ask what reason remains to practise at all, and further, whether treating existing conditions as already the buddha realm worked in practice to make existing social and religious arrangements unquestionable rather than to liberate anyone from them. Both criticisms were pressed by figures within Japanese Buddhism, including by founders of schools that themselves emerged out of Tendai in the Kamakura period reacting against aspects of hongaku thought. The debate has not resolved because it is a dispute about the practical consequences of a metaphysical claim, and the metaphysical claim itself is not in question between the parties, only what follows from holding it.

Source Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, Jacqueline I. Stone tier 1

Orkney, Regions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Religious Traditions

Currently States A Neolithic ritual landscape whose beliefs can only be inferred from its monuments and their alignments; then Norse religion and Norse Christianity after the islands were settled from Scandinavia; and the Church of Scotland since the Reformation.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Orthodox Christian Funeral, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church (Kallistos Ware, Penguin Books, 1993) records that Orthodox practice, centred on the Order for the Burial of the Dead with its refusal to soften the fact of bodily dissolution, has generally not permitted cremation, reserving burial as proper to a faith built on bodily resurrection; several jurisdictions hold that position strictly and refuse funeral rites where cremation has occurred, while others have made pastoral provision for a family with no burial alternative available to it.

According To Eastern Orthodoxy

Source The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware) tier 2

Orthodox Christian Funeral, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 725

The service is built from a set of hymns ascribed to John of Damascus, who lived roughly 675 to 749, its own text says, but it uses the word ascribed rather than a firmer claim: how much of the funeral service as sung today reflects his own eighth century composition against later Byzantine compilation attributed to his name is not settled.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Oscar Ichazo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States In Interviews with Oscar Ichazo (Arica Institute Press, 1982), Ichazo himself disputed the popularized psychological Enneagram his former student Claudio Naranjo carried into wider circulation from the early 1970s onward, holding it a divergence from the fuller Enneagram of personality he taught within the Arica School.

Source Interviews with Oscar Ichazo, Oscar Ichazo tier 3

Osei Tutu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1660

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Osei Kofi Tutu I (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Osei Tutu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1717

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Osei Kofi Tutu I (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Osun-Osogbo Festival, Holidays & Festivals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Peter Probst's Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money (Indiana University Press, 2011) follows what changed after the sacred grove where the festival closes, entered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005, began drawing state investment and international visitors alongside the Arugba's traditional procession: Probst reads the heritage economy and the cult of Osun as entangled rather than opposed, while other observers within Osogbo itself describe the same tourism as an intrusion on a devotional calendar that predates any listing.

Probst reads the heritage economy and the cult as entangled rather than opposed; other observers in Osogbo treat the tourism as an intrusion, and no settled position exists between the two readings in the scholarly literature or locally.

Source Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money, Peter Probst tier 1

Other-emptiness (shentong): ultimate reality is empty of what is other than itself, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Proponents hold that a purely negative emptiness cannot account for what the tantras say is realised; opponents hold that the position smuggles a permanent self back in under another name.

Other-emptiness, shentong, the distinctive teaching of the Jonang tradition and read in comparable terms by the Karma Kagyu after the Third Karmapa, holds that ultimate reality, the buddha nature spoken of in the third turning of the wheel of teaching, is empty of the adventitious defilements that are other than it, but is not itself empty of its own luminous nature. Cyrus Stearns's study of the Jonang master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, who gave the teaching its most developed form in the fourteenth century, records that proponents hold a purely negative account of emptiness cannot explain what the tantras describe as actually realised in meditation, while opponents, chiefly the Gelug tradition, hold that positing a nature not itself empty smuggles a permanent self back into the teaching under another name. The dispute was severe enough that the teaching and its textual tradition were suppressed in central Tibet for centuries, with the Jonang lineage surviving at a distance from the center of Tibetan religious authority. The disagreement remains unresolved because it concerns how to read the same third-turning scriptures both sides accept as authoritative, and neither side's reading has been shown to be textually impossible.

Source The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Cyrus Stearns tier 1

Otter, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Ottoman Empire, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Religion

Currently States Islam, with the sultans claiming the caliphate. The account that the last Cairo Abbasid formally transferred the office to Selim I in 1517 is treated by most historians as a later legitimating construction, though the sultans plainly exercised caliphal functions and the claim was politically central under Abdulhamid II

The transfer narrative and the modern scholarly reading of it as an eighteenth-century construction are the two positions; Hassan and the standard Ottoman histories set out the second.

Source Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History, Mona Hassan tier 1

Ou ⲟ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Ovid, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 17

The source gives this death year as approximate (about), while the birth year is dated without qualification.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Owl, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1