In times of crises, be it about climate change, the pandemic corona virus, or democratic struggles, there is an unwaning interest worldwide in the end of times and related themes such as apocalypticism, messianism, and utopianism. This concerns scholarship and society alike, and is by no means limited to the religious field. The present volume collates essays from specialists in the study of apocalyptic and eschatological subjects. With its interdisciplinary approach, it is designed to overcome the existing Euro-centrism and incorporate a broader perspective to the topic of end time expectations in the Christian Middle Ages as well as in East Asia and Africa. Contributors include: Gaelle Bosseman, Wolfram Brandes, Matthias Gebauer, Jurgen Gebhardt, Vincent Goossaert, Klaus Herbers, Matthias Kaup, Bernardo Bertholin Kerr, Thomas Krumpel, Richard Landes, Zhao Lu, Rolf Scheuermann, and Julia Eva Wannenmacher.

This book explores the fascinating world of religious hair observances within six religious traditions that account for 77% of the world's adherents: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Symbolic use of hair has been, and remains, prevalent in all six and carries significant amounts of religious and social meaning. Hair is a unique body substance. It can be shaped and colored, removed from us without pain but still retain an individual's essence, signal our age, sex, and sexual maturity, and much, much more. The book's approach is to situate each practice within its tradition. That requires a study of its foundational leaders and their teachings, sacred texts (where they mention hair), its rites and rituals, ideas of religious power and subsequent historical development. Contemporary practitioners are interviewed for their motivations. Even more insight can be gleaned by searching beyond an overt religious purpose. Social scientists from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related fields bring their research to deliver added perceptions. The author reveals how hair practices are created from ancient psychological and cultural impulses, become modified by time, culture and religious intent, and are adopted by adherents for reasons ranging from personal religious expression to group identity. This book is written for the interested observer of our increasingly diverse society and for the student of comparative religion and sociology. It will change forever how you see hair.

This text is the product of dialogue between a group of leading British Muslim and Christian scholars concerned about the alleged danger to the West of Islamic fundamentalism. It analyzes the ethical and legal principles, rooted in both traditions, underlying any use of armed force in the modern world. After chapters on the history, theology and laws of war as seen from both sides, the book applies its conclusions to firstly, the 1990-91 Gulf War and secondly, the Bosnian conflict. It concludes that Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a myth.

The groundbreaking professional resource for providing spiritual guidance to people from faith traditions other than your own.

This comprehensive resource offers valuable information for providing spiritual guidance to people from a wide variety of faith traditions. Covering the world's faith traditions as well as interfaith, blended and independent approaches to spirituality, each chapter is written by a spiritual guidance professional from that tradition or who works extensively with people from that tradition. Each chapter provides: An overview of the tradition, including basic beliefsMethods for spiritual guidance honored in that traditionCommon spiritual problems encountered by people of that traditionTips, techniques and practicesHelpful resources for further learning

CONTRIBUTORS: Dan Mendelson Aviv, PhD Mans Broo, PhD Rev. Cathleen Cox, MAT, MDiv Ervad Soli P. Dastur Karen L. Erlichman, MSS, LCSW Jonathan Figdor, MDiv Rev. John A. Jillions, PhD Siri Kirpal Kaur Khalsa Rev. Daijaku Judith Kinst, PhD Ozgur Koca Bruce Lescher, PhD Rev. Ann Llewellyn Evans Rev. Dr. Jim Lockard Rev. John R. Mabry, PhD Fr. Scott McCarthy, DMin Moojan Momen, MB, BChir Wendi Momen, PhD Richard K. Payne, PhD Susan S. Phillips, PhD James Michael Reeder, LCPC, CPRP Robert A. Rees, PhD Bharat S. Shah, MD He Feng Dao Shi Joshua Snyder Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW Chief Luisah Teish Christopher Titmuss

Religions CoveredBy Estimated U.S. Population

Evangelical Christianity Roman Catholicism Mormonism Judaism Reformed Christianity Eastern Orthodox Christianity Islam Buddhism Hinduism Spiritual Eclecticism Unitarian Universalism Neo-Paganism Baha'i Faith Sikhism Shinto Humanism New Thought Zoroastrianism Native American Religion African Diaspora Spirituality Daoism Jainism Confucianism"

Like taxes, death is inevitable. Everyone experiences it sooner or later. This book offers perspectives on death and dying from all major religions, written by experts in each of those religions. Focusing on the major world traditions, it offers important information about what death and dying means to those practicing these faiths. The second part of the book adds a necessary and truly unique perspective - a personal look at how people actually die in the various world religions, as told by a hospital chaplain, with anecdotes and experiences that bring the death process to life, so to speak.

Each chapter engages the theology of each religion, giving quotes from the literature of their respective scriptural traditions, to explain the process of dying, death, and the afterlife. In doing so, each author draws on the history of his respective tradition and looks at real-life figures, exemplars of the tradition, showing how practitioners view death and hope to one day engage the death process themselves.

Discover the Power of Dialogue to Heal Religious Division

How can members of different faith traditions approach each other with openness and respect? How can they confront the painful conflicts in their history and overcome theological misconceptions? For more than twenty years, Professors Mary C. Boys and Sara S. Lee have explored ways that Catholics and Jews might overcome mistrust and misunderstandings in order to promote commitment to religious pluralism.

At its best, interreligious dialogue entails not simply learning about the other from the safety of one s own faith community, but rather engaging in specific learning activities with members of the other faith learning in the presence of the other. Drawing upon examples from their own experience, Boys and Lee lay out a framework for engaging the religious other in depth. With vision and insight, they discuss ways of fostering relationships among participants and with key texts, beliefs and practices of the other s tradition.

In this groundbreaking resource, they offer a guide for members of any faith tradition who want to move beyond the rhetoric of interfaith dialogue and into the demanding yet richly rewarding work of developing new understandings of the religious other and of one s own tradition.

In A Need for Religion: Insecurity and Religiosity in the Contemporary World Francesco Molteni tries to answer one of the broadest questions for scholars of religion: why is religiosity declining in developed countries? He does so by inspecting all the different nuances of the insecurity theory, which links the feeling of security typical of modern societies with the diminished need for religion as source of reassurance, support and predictability. In this respect, he notes that much of the evidence is far less clear than expected and that secularization processes are at an advanced stage only in a rather small group of worldwide countries.

Zimbabwe has invested in women’s emancipation and leadership while articulating a strong Pan-Africanist ideology, providing a valuable entry point into understanding the dynamics relating to women’s leadership in Africa. It is also characterised by radical religious pluralism, thereby facilitating an appreciation of the impact of religion on women’s leadership in Africa more generally.  This volume reflects on the role of Zimbabwean women in religio-cultural leadership, with a specific focus on roles within religious organizations. It begins by examining Zimbabwean church women’s leadership roles in long established faith communities. The chapters then hone in on the emergence of churches or ministries founded by women in Zimbabwe, starting from the pre-colonial era and advancing through the last forty years of independence. Hence, the book offers a comprehensive assessment of the challenges and opportunities women in leadership face in religious institutions in the country, before exploring the impact of the pandemic on the ability of women to lead. It will make a major contribution to the advancement of scholarship of gender and leadership in emerging markets.

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

In the early 1970s, accompanying the current wave of globalization, conservative nationalist religious movements began using religion to oppose non-democratic and often Western oriented regimes. Reasserting patriarchal gender relations presumably authorized by religion has been central to these movements. At the Fourth United Nations Congress on Women in Beijing in 1995, Muslim and Catholic delegations from diverse countries united to oppose provisions on sexuality, reproductive rights, women’s health, and women’s rights as human rights. Scholars from eight different Muslim and Catholic communities analyze the political strategies that women are employing in these contexts ranging from acceptance of traditional doctrines to various forms of resistance, religious reinterpretation, innovation, and political action toward change and equal rights.

This book examines and compares the religious experience of an African group with a European one. It offers an ethnographical investigation of the Jukun of north central Nigeria. The author also organically weaves into the narrative the Christianization of the Irish in a comparative fashion. Throughout, he makes the case for an African Christianity connected to a Celtic Irish Christianity and vice-versa -- as different threads in a tapestry. This work is a product of a synthesis of archival research in three continents, interviews with surviving first-generation Christians who were active practitioners of the Jukun indigenous religion, and with former missionaries to the Jukun. On the Irish side, it draws from extant primary sources and interviews with scholars in Celtic Irish studies. In addition, pictures, diagrams, and excerpts from British colonial and missionary journals provide a rich contextual understanding of Jukun religious life and practices. The author is among the emerging voices in the study of World Christianity who advocate for the reality of "poly-centres" for Christianity. This perspective recognizes voices from the Global South in the expansion of Christianity. This book serves as a valuable resource for historians, anthropologists, theologians, and those interested in missions studies, both scholars and lay readers seeking to deepen their understanding of World Christianity.

Peace and War: Historical, Philosophical, and Anthropological Perspectives is an accessible, higher-level critical discussion of philosophical commentaries on the nature of peace and war. It introduces and analyses various philosophies of peace and war, and their continuing theoretical and practical relevance for peace studies and conflict resolution. Using a combination of both historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives, the book is at once eclectic in its approach and broad in its inquiry of these enduring phenomena of human existence.

Bisk and Dror assert that the 21st Century can be the Jewish Century, that no other people is better prepared to face its challenges. However, to do so, a stress on the Jewish Future must replace a preoccupation with the Jewish Past. They offer a neo-Zionist ideological analysis of modern Jewish life as an alternative to both classical Zionism and post-Zionism. They conceptualize a Jewish Grand Strategy by clearly defining and delineating between ideology, policy, grand strategy, strategy and tactics, with compelling proposals for what such a revised Grand Straegy might entail. They suggest a concept of reinvigorated Israel-Diaspora relations based on this new Grand Strategy and the potential of the Information Technology Revolution. They also offer a conception of Jewish spirituality that could be as appealing to secular as to religious Jews. They reject the concept of a "Nation that Dwells Alone." Throughout the ages, Jews have affected and been affected by the world more than any other People they assert. They also reject the view that suffering is the dominant feature of Jewish history as this lachrymose perception cannot inspire needed Jewish ambitions in the young. They stress the needs of the Jewish person and insist that there can be no real significance to the continued existence of the Jewish People unless the real life, concrete needs of the individual are addressed. As former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations and former Cabinent Minister Gad Yaacobi asserts in his foreword, "The book is original, iconoclastic and in some ways revolutionary....It challenges inherited assumptions and calls for positive action. I believe we have before us a book that must become areference point for Jewish policy makers as quickly as possible."

Ritual Studies have achieved prominence since the 1980s, when interest in ritual as an object of inquiry was established, bridging over a number of humanities and social science disciplines. Both connected with religious studies and independent of it; overlapping with social and cultural anthropology, but also with history; related to science and health practices and ranging across the life course to education, Ritual Studies has come to encompass studies of change and dynamism in social life. Rituals are determinate in form, but not static. They enunciate distinctive social values within specific contexts that frame them; and they relate to the wider concerns and issues of their practitioners. Due to this broad and wide-ranging scope, it is often difficult to find a single resource on Ritual Studies, and even more so to find one which moves beyond the beginnings of anthropological theorizing to grapple with the present-day contexts of ritual. Bringing together recent ethnographies of ritual practice and ritualization from across the globe, this Handbook provides case study of ritual in the light of Emotion and Cognition, Identity, Religious Power, Performance and Literature, Ecology and Ecological Disaster, Media, and other topics. While each chapter provides a deep ethnography of a specific society, ritual, or ritualized practice, each also engages with current theoretical and substantive approaches to the relevant topic. The scholars collected here provide original synoptic and indicative pieces as guideposts and pathways through the complex, varied and cross-disciplinary, and vast landscape of scholarship that constitutes Ritual Studies today and points to developments in the future.

This book explores the way in which the study and practice of love creates a common ground for different faiths and different traditions within the same faith. For the contributors, "common ground" in this context is not a minimal core of belief or a lowest common denominator of faith, but a space or area in which to live together, consider together the meaning of the love to which various faiths witness, and work together to enable human flourishing. Such a space, the contributors believe, is possible because it is the place of encounter with the divine. This book is the fruit of a Project for the Study of Love in Religion which aims to create this space in which different traditions of love converge, from Islam, Judaism, and the Christianity of both East and West. Tools employed by the contributors in exploring this space of love include exegesis of ancient texts, theology, accounts of mystical experience, philosophy, and evolutionary science of the human. Insights about human and divine love that emerge include its nature as a form of knowing, its sacrificial and erotic dimensions, its inclination towards beauty, its making of community and its importance for a just political and economic life.

Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Josephin Peladan and the artist Jan Svankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Religious discrimination is the norm in many countries around the world, and the rate is rising. Nearly every country which discriminates does so unequally, singling out some religious minorities for more discrimination than others. Religious tradition does not explain this complex issue. For example, Muslim majority states include both the most discriminatory and tolerant states in the world, as is also the case with Christian majority states. Religious ideologies, nationalism, regime, culture, security issues, and political issues are also all part of the answer. In The Unfree Exercise of Religion Jonathan Fox examines how we understand concepts like religious discrimination and religious freedom, and why countries discriminate. He makes a study of religious discrimination against 597 religious minorities in 177 countries between 1990 and 2008. While 29 types of discrimination are discussed in this book, the most common include restrictions in places of worship, proselytizing, and religious education.

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of "healing cultures," the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretation-namely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

The Way of Mary, Maryam, Beloved of God is a weaving of strands from ancient sources, traditional stories, poetry, and prayers of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and beyond (with full colour illustrations), to reveal, through the illuminated being and twelve life stations of Beloved Mary, the palpable Oneness of all Creation, our Oneness in Spirit. Drawing on passages from the Quran, the Bible, poetry of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi and inspirations of other mystics (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim), classical Islamic sources and ancient Biblical texts, oral traditions recorded by hearts across the centuries such as the Protoevangelium of James and the Lives of the Prophets of al-Tha‘labi, and Biblical apocrypha such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, with awareness of all the elements of nature that rose up in support of Beloved Mary through the stages of her journey, Camille Helminski weaves together a fabric of love to embrace us with healing and new life.

This book presents a semiotic study of the re-elaboration of Christian narratives and values in a corpus of Italian novels published after the Second Vatican Council (1960s). It tackles the complex set of ideas expressed by Italian writers about the biblical narration of human origins and traditional religious language and ritual, the perceived clash between the immanent and transcendent nature and role of the Church, and the problematic notion of sanctity emerging from contemporary narrative.

This book offers ecumenical essays that focus on Reformation Christianity and on current Lutheran-Catholic understandings and relationships. It addresses important issues, including the meaning of the Reformation, the reception of Luther in Germany and beyond, contemporary ecumenical dialogues, and pathways to the future. There is also some inclusion of Jewish and Orthodox traditions as well as attention to global issues. Taken as a whole, the primary method of this book is theology informed by history, hermeneutics, ethics, and social theory. Within the structure of the book can be found the classic hermeneutical circle: What was the meaning of the Reformation for Luther in his own time? What are various ways in which Luther and the Reformation have been interpreted in history? How does knowledge of these things help us today to understand the Reformation and to move forward?

This book sheds new light on the evolution and transformation of polytheistic religions. By applying economic models to the study of religious history and by viewing religious events as the result of rational choices under given environmental constraints, it offers a political economy perspective for the study of Indo-European polytheism. The book formally models the rivalry or competition among multiple gods in a polytheistic system and the monotheistic solution to this competition. Presenting case studies on the transformation and demise of various polytheistic religions, it highlights the pivotal role of the priestly class in driving religious change and suggests a joint explanation for the demise of Greco-Roman religion and the resilience of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. It will appeal to scholars of the economics of religion and religious history and to anyone seeking new insights into the birth and death of religions, and the birth of monotheism in particular.