|
Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Comparative religion
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.
If we want to heal our personal and planetary problems, we have to
move beyond talking to spiritual practice. Pastor Don Mackenzie,
Rabbi Ted Falcon and Imam Jamal Rahman, who have become known as
the Interfaith Amigos, believe truly effective interfaith dialogue
can inhibit the demonization of any religion. Their work together,
which began with the horrors of 9/11, aims to help us see all
authentic spiritual traditions as sacred avenues to a shared
Universal Reality—when we achieve this, the healing of our shared
personal and planetary problems begins. In this, their third book,
the Interfaith Amigos look at the specific issues we face in a
pluralistic society and the spiritual practices that can help us
transcend those roadblocks to effective collaboration on the
critical issues of our time. Focusing on the interconnection of
spirituality and authentic interfaith dialogue, they examine: How
Spiritual Awareness Can Heal Our Own Traditions Beyond
Polarization: Confronting Our Most Personal Obstacle Spiritual
Paths to Environmental Stewardship Spiritual Paths to Social
Justice How to Make Spirituality a Way of Life This book helps
awaken readers to the spiritual consciousness within each of us
that provides the foundation for much-needed healing. Each chapter
includes spiritual practices to aid us in reclaiming the deep
spiritual truths of our own being.
Honest and unflinching, "Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian"
narrates how estreemed theologian, Paul F. Knitter overcame a
crisis of faith by looking to Buddhism for inspiration. From prayer
to how Christianity views life after death, Knitter argues that a
Buddhist standpoint can encourage a more person-centred conception
of Christianity, where individual religious experience comes first,
and liturgy and tradition second. Moving and revolutionary, this
book will inspire Christians everywhere.
While there is a multiplicity of identity markers that affect the
dynamics of intercultural communication, the intersectionality of
gender and religion deserves more scholarly attention. The book
takes the dissimilar cultural concepts and identity performance as
a starting point, exploring the significant role that the religious
indoctrinations play in the construction and performance of gender.
It features contributions by the scholars in the field of
communication, gender and cultural studies, including theoretical
reflections on the socio-cultural formation of identity, dogmatic
impositions on gender roles, and the performance of gender identity
in intercultural settings.
In Indigenous and Christian Perspectives in Dialogue, Allen G.
Jorgenson asks what Christian theologians might learn from
Indigenous spiritualties and worldviews. Jorgenson argues that
theology in North America has been captive to colonial conceits and
has lost sight of key resources in a post-Christendom context. The
volume is especially concerned with the loss of a sense of place,
evident in theologies written without attention to context. Using a
comparative theology methodology, wherein more than one faith
tradition is engaged in dialogical exploration, Jorgenson uses
insights from Indigenous understandings of place to illumine
forgotten or obstructed themes in Christianity. In this
constructive theological project, "kairotic" places are named as
those that are kenotic, harmonic, poetic and especially
enlightening at the margins, where we meet the religious other.
Human cultures, especially religious groups but also secular
artists and performers, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and
books as divine beings. An international team of scholars addresses
this theme of books as sacred beings in this volume through an
impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives.
These studies show the wide variety of ways in which books, bodies,
and beings intermingle in material sacred texts manipulated by
human bodies, and also in literary and artistic depictions of
transcendent textual bodies. The boundary between material
immanence and spiritual transcendence turns out to be very thin
indeed when people use books. The chapters on specific book
practices in different cultures are bracketed by an introduction to
the collection and by a concluding essay that extrapolates on the
widespread theme of books as sacred beings.
Once relegated to the private sphere, or confined to its own
section of the newspaper, religion is now a major part of daily
news coverage. Every journalist needs a basic knowledge of religion
to cover everything from presidential elections to the war in Iraq
to the ethical issues raised by latest developments in medical
research. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News
Media will be the go-to volume for both secular and religious
journalists and journalism educators, scholars in media studies,
journalism studies, religious studies, and American studies.
Comprised of six sections, the first examines how the history of
the mass media and the role religion played in its growth. The
second looks at how the major media formats - print, broadcast, and
online - deal with religion. The next two examines how journalists
cover major religious traditions and particular issues that have
religion angles. The fifth examines the religious press, from the
Christian Broadcasting Network to The Forward. The final section
looks at how the American press covers the rest of the world.
In the human quest for orientation vis-a-vis personal life and
comprehensive reality the worldviews of religionists and humanists
offer different answers, and science also plays a crucial role. Yet
it is the ordinary, embodied experience of meaningful engagement
with reality in which all these cultural activities are rooted.
Human beings have to relate themselves to the entirety of their
lives to achieve orientation. This relation involves a
non-methodical, meaningful experience that exhibits the crucial
features for understanding worldviews: it comprises cognition,
volition, and emotion, is embodied, action-oriented, and
expressive. From this starting-point, religious and secular
worldviews articulate what is experienced as ultimately meaningful.
Yet the plurality and one-sidedness of these life stances
necessitates critical engagement for which philosophy provides
indispensable means. In the end, some worldviews can be ruled out,
but we are still left with a plurality of genuine options for
orientation.
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.
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.
The six lectures that make up this book were delivered in March
2011 at London University's School of Oriental and Asian Studies as
the Jordan Lectures on Comparative Religion. They revolve around
the intersection of two ideas, nothingness and desire, as they
apply to a re-examination of the questions of self, God, morality,
property, and the East-West philosophical divide.
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.
This volume draws on an interdisciplinary team of authors to
advance the study of the religious dimensions of communication and
the linguistic aspects of religion. Contributions cover: poetry,
iconicity, and iconoclasm in religious language; semiotic
ideologies in traditional religions and in secularism; and the role
of materiality and writing in religious communication. This volume
will provoke new approaches to language and religion.
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.
This book explores the experiences of the ethnic and religious
minorities of Iran, such as Jews, Yarsani, Christian, Sabean
Mandaean, Bahai, Zoroastrian, Baluch, Kurd, and others and provides
a historical overview of their position in society before and after
the 1979 Islamic revolution and highlights their contribution to
the country's history, diversity, and development. It also focuses
on the historical, sociopolitical, and economic factors that
affected the minorities' development during the last century.
Author Behnaz Hosseini has shaped this book with authentic material
and has assembled the experiences and opinions of academics of
diverse backgrounds who approach the minorities' issues in Iran in
a constructive and ingenious way: from debating their efforts to
preserve their identity and cultural heritage and ensure their
survival to discussing their relations with the majority and other
minorities, the role of religion in everyday life, and their
contribution to the rich cultural history of Iran.
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.
- The first book to seriously examine the feminine aspect of
Egyptian religion sheds new light on the important role of the
goddess Hathor-Sekhmet.
- This accessible study sheds much new light on ancient Egypt and
provides a powerful new perspective on women's theology.
- The text is accompanied by nearly 200 striking and unusual
illustrations
Drawing from temple art, myths, rituals, and poetry, "Hathor
Rising" is the first book to seriously examine the feminine aspect
of the complex Egyptian pantheon and to shed new light on the
pivotal place held there by the fiery serpent-eyed goddess,
Hathor-Sekhmet. The primary importance of this goddess is
emphasized by the serpent coiled over the forehead of every
pharaoh--the supreme symbol of royal power in ancient Egypt. The
erotic vitality and fierce aggression of the goddess, qualities
commonly perceived as masculine in nature, gives the reigning
Pharaoh the capacity for dynamic leadership. The author explores
the symbolism behind this and other manifestations of the goddess
in Egyptian cosmology and provides new revelations on the rich
tradition of feminine divinity in Egypt. "Hathor Rising" is the
most important study of one of the world's oldest civilizations to
appear in years.
This book offers engagements with topics in mainline theology that
concern the lifelines in and of the Pacific (Pasifika). The essays
are grouped into three clusters. The first, Roots, explores the
many roots from which theologies in and of Pasifika grow - sea and
(is)land, Christian teachings and scriptures, native traditions and
island ways. The second, Reads, presents theologies informed and
inspired by readings of written and oral texts, missionary traps
and propaganda, and teachings and practices of local churches. The
final cluster, Routes, places Pasifika theologies upon the waters
so that they may navigate and voyage. The 'amanaki (hope) of this
work is in keeping talanoa (dialogue) going, in pushing back
tendencies to wedge the theologies in and of Pasifika, and in
putting native wisdom upon the waters. As these Christian and
native theologies voyage, they chart Pasifika's sea of theologies.
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.
|
|