Religious Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible, A-Z resource, defining and explaining key terms and ideas central to the study of religion. Exploring broad and recurring themes which are applicable in both eastern and western religions, cross-cultural examples are provided for each term to give a comprehensive overview of the subject. Subjects covered include:

• afterlife
• comparative religion
• festivals
• ethics
• gender
• monotheism
• world religions
• modernity
• pilgrimage
• theism
• secularization

With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout, this book provides an inclusive map of the discipline, and is an essential reference for all students, academics and researchers.

Interreligious Friendships after Nostra Aetate explores the ways in which personal relationships are essential for theology. Catholic theologians tell the personal stories of their interreligious friendships and explore the significance of their friendships for their own life and work.

When it comes to faith, there is no "one size fits all" approach, as different people believe in different ways. This book provides a new way of looking at the ways different people understand and relate to the divine, and how spiritual directors need to be aware of this when assessing clients, making recommendations and assessing progress. The book divides into six broad styles and discusses each style with case studies to illustrate each style. Also included are suggestions of useful ways to guide believers in each style group. It also suggest ways to help those in transition from one style to another. As part of the "Spiritual Directors International" (SDI) series, you can be sure that each book offers solid practical advice based on thorough foundations.

This book uses ethnography as theological practice, yielding a theology constructed at the intersection of church, academy and everyday life. Drawing on the author's research in her Baptist church, the resulting 'ethnographic theology' produces creative theological insights, while also proposing fresh alternatives for Christian thought and action.

This collection of original articles, a sequel of sorts to the 2009 Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension (Palgrave Macmillan), is the first sustained reflection, by scholars with expertise in the faith traditions, on how the transhumanist agenda might impact the body.

This book explores centuries of power relations and imperial and civilizing rhetorics, overarching themes highlighted in these infrequently heard accounts by eastern travelers to the West. Considered in depth are evolutions in mental frameworks and practices that led to the emergence of anticolonial consciousness and strategies of protest.

Throughout the history of Indian religions, the ascetic figure is most closely identified with power. Power is a by-product of the ascetic path, and is displayed in the ability to fly, walk on water or through dense objects, read minds, discern the former lives of others, see into the future, harm others, or simply levitate one's body. Using religio-philosophical discourses and narratives from epic, puranic, and hagiographical literature, Indian Asceticism focuses on the powers exhibited by ascetics of India from ancient to modern time. The discourses and narratives show ascetics performing violent acts and using language to curse and harm opponents. They also give rise to questions about how power and violence are related to the phenomenon of play. Olson discusses the erotic, the demonic, the comic, and the miraculous forms of play and their connections to power and violence. His focus is on Hinduism, from early Indian religious history to more modern times, but evidence is also presented from both Buddhism and Jainism, which provides evidence that the subject matter of this book pervades India's major indigenous religious traditions. The book also includes a look at the extent to which contemporary findings in cognitive science can add to our understanding about these various powers; Olson argues that violence is built into the practice of the ascetic. Indian Asceticism culminates with an attempt to rethink the nature of power in a way that does justice to the literary evidence from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources.

In this dynamic and wide-ranging collection of essays, prominent scholars examine the condition of church-state relations in the United States, France, and Israel. Their analyses are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ethnography and demography to political science, gender studies, theology, and the law.

This book takes a theoretical enterprise in Christian philosophy of religion and applies it to Buddhism, thus defending Buddhism and presenting it favorably in comparison. Chapters explore how the claims of both Christianity and Theravada Buddhism rest on people's experiences, so the question as to which claimants to religious knowledge are right rests on the evidential value of those experiences. The book examines mysticism and ways to understand what goes on in religious experiences, helping us to understand whether it is good grounds for religious belief. The author argues that religious language in both Christian and Buddhist traditions is intelligible as factual discourse, and so reports of mystical experience are true or false. The book contends that those experiences can be fruitfully thought of as perceptual in kind and that they are therefore good prima facie grounds for religious belief, in the absence of defeating conditions. The work goes on to explore Christian and Buddhist testimony and how the likelihood of self-deception, self-delusion, imaginative elaboration and the like constitutes a defeating condition. It is shown that this defeater has less scope for operation in the Buddhist case than in the Christian case, and therefore Theravada Buddhism is better grounded. This work will appeal to students and scholars of philosophy and philosophy of religion, and those interested in the study of religious experience.

Introducing a framework to generate new conversations about inter-religious dialogue and create a community of religions, Shai Har-El argues that Islam and Judaism, sister religions, are closely related to one another with roots intertwined in the land, in the language, and in the memories of shared history.

Readers' Choice Awards Honorable Mention One of Nijay Gupta's Best Academic New Testament Books Who is your Jesus? Matthew's teacher? John's Word made flesh? Hebrews' great high priest? What if it turned out that your Jesus is a composite of your favorite selections from the New Testament buffet, garnished with some Hollywood and Americana? Rediscovering Jesus takes us on a gallery tour of biblical portraits of Jesus, from Matthew through Revelation. Our expert guides point out the background and highlights of each New Testament image of Jesus. Then we hit the streets to visit other houses of worship and their scriptures, examining the Jesus of the Book of Mormon and the Qur'an. Popping into a bookstore, we browse the latest on the Gnostic and the historical Jesus. Then we're off on a walking tour of Jesus in America, followed by a film festival of Jesus movies. All along the way our tour guides describe and interpret, but also raise questions: How is this Jesus different from other portraits? If this were our only portrait of Jesus, what would our faith be like? Rediscovering Jesus is an enjoyable, informative and challenging look at how we encounter Jesus in Scripture and our culture. With ample sidebars exploring contexts and the "so what?" questions, it takes us beyond other surveys by probing how our understanding of Jesus can make a difference for faith and life. From the authors of Rediscovering Paul, this is a textbook introduction to Jesus that guides us in our pilgrimage toward seeing Jesus truly.

This collection of essays explores the complex relationship between religion and multiculturalism and the role of the state and law in the creation of boundaries. Western secular democracies are composed of increasingly religiously diverse populations. The idea of "multiculturalism" was formed as a constructive response to this phenomenon, but, in many areas of the globe, support for multiculturalism is challenged by attempts to preserve the cultural and legal norms of the majority.
The State of Israel offers a particularly pertinent case study, and is a central focus of this collection. The contributors to this volume address the concepts of religious difference and diversity, as well as the various ways in which states and legal systems understand and respond to them. Mappingthe Legal Boundaries of Belonging shows that, as a consequence of a purportedly secular human rights perspective, state laws may appear to define religious identity in a way that contradicts the definition found within a particular religion. Both state and religion make the same mistake, however, if they take a court decision that emphasizes individual belief and practice as a direct modification of a religious norm: the court lacks the power to change the internal authoritative definition of who belongs to a particular faith. Similarly, in the pursuit of a particular model of social diversity, the state may adopt policies that imply a particular private/public distinction foreign to some religious traditions.
This volume, which includes contributions from leading scholars in the field, will be an invaluable resource to anyone seeking to understand the legal meaning and impact of religious diversity.

Finnish Women Making Religion puts forth the complex intersections that Lutheranism, the most important religious tradition in Finland, has had with other religions as well as with the larger society and politics also internationally.

This book examines the various Christian responses to Islam in Nigeria. It is a study of the complex, interreligious relationships in Nigeria. Using a polymethodic approach, the book grapples with many narratives dealing with interreligious competition and cooperation in Nigeria.

In this unique collection, theologians born and formed during the Cold War offer their insights and perspectives on theological relationships with such musical artists and groups as Joy Division, U2, Nick Cave, and John Coltrane. These essays demonstrate that one's personal music preferences can inform and influence professional interests.

This concise introduction to science and religion focuses on Christianity and modern Western science (the epicenter of issues in science and religion in the West) with a concluding chapter on Muslim and Jewish Science and Religion. This book also invites the reader into the relevant literature with ample quotations from original texts.

In their third book together, Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller address a seemingly simple question: What counts as the same? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? For that matter, how do we live in harmony with groups who may not share the sense of a common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so much of the world today. Note that "counting as" the same differs from "being" the same. Counting as the same is not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nothing is actually the same. That is why, as humans, we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference. Creating sameness and difference leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. How Things Count as the Same suggests that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same, and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three stand out as especially important and form the focus of the book's analysis: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor.

This book explores the religious foundations, political and social significance, and aesthetic aspects of the theatre created by the leaders of the Occult Revival. Lingan shows how theatre contributed to the fragmentation of Western religious culture and how contemporary theatre plays a part in the development of alternative, occult religions.

India and the Occult explores the reception of Indian spirituality among Western occultists through case studies. Rather than focusing on the activities of Theosophical Society, India and the Occult looks at the 'hard-core' occultism, in particular the British 20th century currents associated with Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Grant, etc.

A comparative investigation of Emerson's Transcendental thought and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, this book shows how both thinkers traced the human morality to the same source in the ultimately moral nature of the universe and developed theories of the interrelation of universal law and the human mind.

This book explores Israeli Religious Zionism and US Christian Zionism by focusing on the Messianic and Millenarian drives at the basis of their political mobilization towards a 'Jewish colonization' of the occupied territories.

This book is based on the 1967 Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion and discusses the Biblical concept of human dominion and the Qur'anic doctrine of Adam as caliph. It explores the Jewish, Muslim and Christian understanding of man in election, the prophet-state and in grace and sonship.

From diverse international and multi-disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume analyze the experiences, challenges and responses of Orthodox Churches to the foundational transformations associated with the dissolution of the USSR.