Superhero phenomena exploded into 20th- and 21st-century popular culture by way of the visual medium of comic books. In an increasingly secular (yet spiritual) culture that has largely renounced "the gods" (and even religion), what does the return of the superhero through our own pop cultural mythologies say to us-or even about us? This collection of essays from leading and up-and-coming scholars in the fields of comparative mythology and depth psychology considers the return of the superhero as representative of our own unique emergent modern mythology: a wildly diverse pantheon that reflects back to us our most far-reaching hopes and (im)possible (super)human desires. In placing the interpretive tools of comparative mythology and depth psychology alongside the comic book phenomenon, a super-powered palette emerges that unveils the hidden potential of modern readers' own heightened imaginations. The essays in this anthology examine select comic book and superhero characters from the "Silver Age" 1960s through contemporary 21st-century adaptations and innovations, as readers are invited to discover and uncover what the (re)emergence of these perennial gods and goddesses have to say about our own secret super selves today.

In Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Baha'i Faith Mikhail Sergeev offers a new interpretation of the Soviet period of Russian history as a phase within the religious evolution of humankind by developing a theory of religious cycles, which he applies to modernity and to all the major world faiths of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Sergeev argues that in the course of its evolution religion passes through six common phases-formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical, and post-critical. Modernity, which was started by the European Enlightenment, represents the critical phase of Christianity, a systemic crisis that could be overcome with the appearance of new religious movements such as the Baha'i Faith, which offers a spiritual extension of the modern worldview.

Craig Parton argues that religions fail the simplest tests of admissibility for their respective claims, and few religions bother to make testable assertion, relying instead at best on subjective and existential appeal. This work challenges the prevailing viewpoint that all religions are making the same, or even similar, allegations. More troubling than this prevailing view, is that the religions of the world remain diametrically opposed on the issues of the nature of humanity, the reality of evil, the nature of history, and the way of salvation. The author succeeds in sorting out the clashing claims of religions and in bringing insight and clarity to matters normally thought to be solely in the domain of philosophers and theologians.

This volume presents interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interreligious approaches exploring a pneumatological theology in its broadest sense, especially in attempting to conceive of a spirit-filled world. The authors seek to discern the spiritual dimensions in the wider domains of the history, culture, the polis, the cosmos, sciences, and religions. The essays are driven by an intuition: that pneumatological sensibilities, categories, and insights can both inform the construction of a more robust doctrine of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the world and enable the appreciation that we inhabit what can rightly be called a Spirit- and spirit-filled world.

The Old Turkic Yenisei Inscriptions have been significantly less thoroughly investigated than the famous Orkhon Inscriptions, and many paleographical, grammatical, and lexical aspects are still insufficiently examined. This book is the first monograph study of eight inscriptions found near the Uybat River in Khakassia, seven of which are engraved in stone, one in the bottom of a silver vessel. Although all but one of the inscriptions have been the object of research, many problems regarding the glyphs and their reading are unsolved. The present study collects and compares all relevant information available on the Uybat Inscriptions and provides a thorough, revised analysis of the texts. Every inscription is presented in transliteration, transcription and translation, with detailed metadata, exhaustive information on the glyph inventory, and a comprehensive critical apparatus. The book also contains a glossary of all identifiable lexemes and a morphology index. Drawings, photographs and facsimiles are given in the appendix. The study contributes to our understanding of the language, script, and culture of the Old Turkic civilization in the Yenisei area and can serve as a model for further studies on individual inscription groups.

First delivered in 1974 as one of the Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, this book considers and compares traditional or pre-modern and post-traditional or post-modern religions. It assesses the processes as well as the images of change in various cultures - principally Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism - and examines how these religions handle the dialects of rejection, appropriation and integration.

Throughout their shared history, Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches have lived through a very complex and sometimes tense relationship - not only theologically, but also politically. In most cases such relationships remain to this day; indeed, in some cases the tension has increased. In July 2019, scholars of both traditions gathered in Stuttgart, Germany, for an unprecedented conference devoted to exploring and overcoming the division between these churches. This book, the first in a two-volume set of the essays presented at the conference, explores historical and theological themes with the goal of healing memories and inspiring a direct dialogue between Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches. Like the conference, the volume brings together representatives of these Churches, as well as theologians from different geographical contexts where tensions are the greatest. The published essays represent the great achievements of the conference: willingness to engage in dialogue, general openness to new ideas, and opportunities to address difficult questions and heal inherited wounds.

This book examines how the racialization of religion facilitates the diasporic formation of ethnic Vietnamese in the U.S. and Cambodia, two communities that have been separated from one another for nearly 30 years. It compares devotion to female religious figures in two minority religions, the Virgin Mary among the Catholics and the Mother Goddess among the Caodaists. Visual culture and institutional structures are examined within both communities. Thien-Huong Ninh invites a critical re-thinking of how race, gender, and religion are proxies for understanding, theorizing, and addressing social inequalities within global contexts.

This book offers scholars who ground their research in compassion and pacifism a new framework for the socio-political analysis of current global events. By tackling a broad range of critical themes in various disciplines, the essays compose a critical narrative of the ways in which power and violence shape society, culture, and belief. In addition to the contemporary dynamics of international economics, political murder, and the rhetorical antagonism between Christianity and Islam, the book addresses cultural strife in the West, the societal effects of neoconservative hegemony in the United States and the world, and the overall question of religious credence in connection with political action. All such topics are discussed with a view toward providing solutions and policies that are informed by a comprehensive desire to resist violence and war, on the one hand, and to foment cohesion and harmony at the community level, on the other.

This fascinating collection of essays examines religious experience and tradition. The first part focuses on the nature and sources of authority in each of six major religions and considers how freedom is perceived by them. It goes on to examine the religious contexts of two examples of nations divided within themselves: Northern Ireland and Israel. The second part of the book looks at the process of education, the tensions between freedom and authority and their implications for religious education.

This book combines the mainstream liberal arguments for religious tolerance with arguments from religious traditions in India to offer insights into appropriate attitudes toward religious 'others' from the perspective of the devout. The respective chapters address the relationship between religions from a comparative perspective, helping readers understand the meaning of religion and the opportunities for interreligious dialogue in the works of contemporary Indian philosophers such as Gandhi and Ramakrishna Paramhansa. It also examines various religious traditions from a philosophical viewpoint in order to reassess religious discussions on how to respond to differing and different religious others. Given its comprehensive coverage, the book is of interest to scholars working in the areas of anthropology, philosophy, cultural and religious diversity, and history of religion.

In this inspiring, soul-stirring memoir, Lawrence E. Carter Sr., founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel, shares his remarkable quest to experience King's "beloved community" and his surprising discovery in mid-life that King's dream was being realized by the Japanese Buddhist philosopher and tireless peace worker Daisaku Ikeda. Coming of age on the cusp of the American Civil Rights Movement, Carter was personally mentored by Martin Luther King Jr. and followed in his footsteps, first to get an advanced degree in theology at Boston University and then to teach and train a new generation of activists and ministers at King's alma mater, Morehouse College. Over the years, however, Carter was disheartened to watch the radical cosmic vision at the heart of King's message gradually diluted and marginalized. He found himself in near despair-until his remarkable encounter with the lay Buddhist association Soka Gakkai International and a life-changing meeting with Ikeda, its president. Carter knew that King had been inspired by Gandhi, a Hindu, and now Ikeda, a Buddhist, was showing him how King's message of justice, equality, and the fundamental dignity of life could be carried to millions of people around the world. What ensued was not a conversion but a conversation-about the essential role of interfaith dialogue, the primacy of education, and the value of a living faith to create a human revolution and realize at last Martin Luther King's truest dream of a global world house. In these dark and frustrating times, the powerful dialogue between Carter and Ikeda gives hope and guidance to a new generation of reformers, activists, and visionaries.

This book contains essays on current projects from several rising figures in religious ethics, collected into a field-shaping anthology of new work. As a whole, the book argues that religious ethics should make cultural and moral diversity central to its analysis. This can include three main aspects, in various combinations: first, describing and interpreting particular ethics on the basis of historical, anthropological, or other data; second, comparing such ethics (in the plural), which requires rigorous reflection on the methods and tools of inquiry; and third, engaging in normative argument on the basis of such studies, and thereby speaking to particular moral controversies, as well as contemporary concerns about overlapping identities, cultural complexity and plurality, universalism and relativism, and political problems regarding the coexistence of divergent groups.

Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel argues that the Creedal doctrines of "the communion of saints" and the "holy Catholic Church" provided Victorian novelists-both Roman Catholic and Protestant-with a means of exploring religious forms of cosmopolitanism. Building on research exploring the divisions between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in Victorian literature and culture, Teresa Huffman Traver considers the extent to which anti-Catholicism, domesticity, and national identity were linked. Huffman Traver connects this research with cosmopolitan theory, and analyzes how the conception of Catholicity could be used to reach beyond national identity towards a transnational community. Investigating the idea of a "rooted" cosmopolitanism, grounded in the local and limited in scope, this Pivot book offers a new angle on how religion, domesticity, and national identity were constructed in nineteenth-century British culture.

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.

During the last 25 years, homosexuality has played an important role in public debates in Western societies. With globalization, the civil protection of gay rights is spreading rapidly outside the Northern hemisphere and many non-Christian religious traditions are taking public positions on the issues. Favoring a dialogue among various religious systems and an in-depth review of their positions, Pierre Hurteau offers readers new insights into how each of the traditions studied - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Afro-American religions - articulates its own regulatory mechanisms of male sexuality in general, and homosexuality. Moving away from a Eurocentric view, this book reminds readers that sites of non-heterosexual identity are multiple.

As an atheistic religious tradition, Buddhism conventionally stands in opposition to Christianity, and any bridge between them is considered to be riddled with contradictory beliefs on God the creator, salvific power and the afterlife. But what if a Buddhist could also be a Classical Theist? Showing how the various contradictions are not as fundamental as commonly thought, Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin challenge existing assumptions and argue that Classical Theism is, in fact, compatible with Buddhism. They draw parallels between the metaphysical doctrines of both traditions, synthesize their ethical and soteriological commitments and demonstrate that the Theist can interpret the Buddhist’s religious experiences, specifically those of emptiness, as veridical, without denying any core doctrine of Classical Theism. By establishing that a synthesis of the two traditions is plausible, this book provides a bold, fresh perspective on the philosophy of religion and reinvigorates philosophical debates between Buddhism and Christianity.

This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later "neo-Darwinians," as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general. The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.

The three-volume project 'Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions' is a timely review of the history of the study of Chinese religions, reconsiders the present state of analytical and methodological theories, and initiates a new chapter in the methodology of the field itself. The three volumes raise interdisciplinary and cross-tradition debates, and engage methodologies for the study of East Asian religions with Western voices in an active and constructive manner. Within the overall project, this volume addresses the intellectual history and formation of critical concepts that are foundational to the Chinese religious landscape. These concepts include lineage, scripture, education, discipline, religion, science and scientism, sustainability, law and rites, and the religious sphere. With these topics and approaches, this volume serves as a reference for graduate students and scholars interested in Chinese religions, the modern cultural and intellectual history of China (including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities overseas), intellectual and material history, and the global academic discourse of critical concepts in the study of religions.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience. Drawing upon the scriptures of various traditions, ancillary religious writings, psychological and anthropological studies, as well as reports of epiphanic experiences, the book presents and examines epiphanies as they have occurred across global religious traditions and cultures, historically and up to the present day. Primarily providing a study of the great range of epiphanies in their phenomenal presentation, Kellenberger also explores issues that arise for epiphanies, such as the matter of their veridicality (whether they are truly of or from the divine) and the question of whether all epiphanies are of the same religious reality.

This book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of religious identities in the Global South. Drawing on literature in various fields, Felix Wilfred analyzes how religious identities intersect with the processes of globalization, modernity, and postmodernity. He illustrates how the study of religion in the Global North often revolves around questions of secularism and fundamentalism, whereas a neo-Orientalist quality often attends study of religion in the Global South. These approaches and theorizing fail to incorporate the experiences of lived religion in the South, especially in Asia. Historically, the religions in the South have played a highly significant role in resistance to the domination by the colonial forces, an important reason for the continued attachment of the peoples of the South to their religious universe. This book puts the two regions and their scholarly norms in conversation with one another, exploring the social, political, cultural, and economic implications.

The Islamic prophet Muhammad initiated a theological program in theocratic form. The Qur'an challenges Christians and Jews in many ways and invites them to take a stance. This is why an explicitly theological response is legitimate and necessary. This book draws on current scholarly research on Islam and discusses the sources of the Qur'an, the fundamental features of its relationship with Judaism, and its perception of Jesus. This leads to a realistic assessment of Islam and stimulates a renewed Christian self-understanding. The fourth chapter presents the largely unknown insights of the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig and the theologian Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI on Islam. They provide an important perspective - beyond submission.

This book features detailed analysis of an ancient secret scroll from the Middle East known as the Rivers Scroll or Diwan Nahrawatha, providing valuable insight into the Gnostic Mandaean religion. This important scroll offers a window of understanding into the Mandaean tradition, with its intricate worldview, ritual life, mysticism and esoteric qualities, as well as intriguing art. The text of the Rivers Scroll and its artistic symbolism have never before been properly analyzed and interpreted, and the significance of the document has been lost in scholarship. This study includes key segments translated into English for the first time and gives the scroll the worthy place it deserves in the history of the Mandaean tradition. It will be of interest to scholars of Gnosticism, religious studies, archaeology and Semitic languages.

Drawn from over fifty-eight individual, in-depth, qualitative interviews with women of faith in Malaysia and Britain, Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity is a multifaith, multicultural and cross-cultural comparative focus that explores women's religious expressions, as derived from practising Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans and Druids among others. Despite social advances towards women's emancipation and the lacerating critiques from feminist theologians across the Abrahamic religions and beyond, women's religious experiences remain submerged beneath the weight of patriarchal religious leadership and ongoing masculinised, dogmatic interpretations. Even feminism itself has yet to move the spiritual onto their main agenda of inequity in women's lives. This extensive, feminist research monograph challenges these exclusions to centre and amplify women's voices in speaking powerfully of their religious experiences, interpretations and practices. This is an ecumenical and entertaining ethnography where women's narratives and life stories ground faith as embodied, personal, painful, vibrant, diverse, illuminating and shared. This book will of interest not only to academics and students of the sociology of religion, feminist and gender studies, politics, ethnicity and Southeast Asian studies, but is equally accessible to the general reader broadly interested in faith and feminism.