This book explores how media and religion combine to play a role in promoting peace and inciting violence. It analyses a wide range of media - from posters, cartoons and stained glass to websites, radio and film - and draws on diverse examples from around the world, including Iran, Rwanda and South Africa. Part One considers how various media forms can contribute to the creation of violent environments: by memorialising past hurts; by instilling fear of the 'other'; by encouraging audiences to fight, to die or to kill neighbours for an apparently greater good. Part Two explores how film can bear witness to past acts of violence, how film-makers can reveal the search for truth, justice and reconciliation, and how new media can become sites for non-violent responses to terrorism and government oppression. To what extent can popular media arts contribute to imagining and building peace, transforming weapons into art, swords into ploughshares? Jolyon Mitchell skillfully combines personal narrative, practical insight and academic analysis.

Understanding World Religions introduces students to major worldviews including Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Native American, and Marxist through the lens of justice and peace. The second edition has been updated and revised throughout. After an introduction to key themes in studying world religion, chapters help students explore major traditions today. Each chapter takes a similar approach, examining seven dimensions of each tradition experiential and emotional, social and institutional, narrative or mythic, doctrinal and philosophical, practical and ritual, ethical and legal, and material and artistic. Chapters feature profiles of major peacemakers or groups to bring the traditions to life. Profiles range from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Thich Nhat Hanh and Dorothy Day. Further chapters explore liberation theologies, active nonviolence, and just war theory. The second edition features a broader framework than the first edition and includes new material on non-religious ethical norms, Islamophobia, colonial evangelization, religion in China, and an updated examination of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Understanding World Religions remains a powerful introduction to major worldviews with an emphasis on practical connections to peace and justice."

This book explores how media and religion combine to play a role in promoting peace and inciting violence. It analyses a wide range of media - from posters, cartoons and stained glass to websites, radio and film - and draws on diverse examples from around the world, including Iran, Rwanda and South Africa. Part One considers how various media forms can contribute to the creation of violent environments: by memorialising past hurts; by instilling fear of the 'other'; by encouraging audiences to fight, to die or to kill neighbours for an apparently greater good. Part Two explores how film can bear witness to past acts of violence, how film-makers can reveal the search for truth, justice and reconciliation, and how new media can become sites for non-violent responses to terrorism and government oppression. To what extent can popular media arts contribute to imagining and building peace, transforming weapons into art, swords into ploughshares? Jolyon Mitchell skillfully combines personal narrative, practical insight and academic analysis.

Sustainability is now key to international and national policy, manufacture and consumption. It is also central to many individuals who try to lead environmentally ethical lives. Historically, religion has been a significant part of many visions of sustainability. Pragmatically, the inclusion of religious values in conservation and development efforts has facilitated relationships between people with different value structures. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the interdependence of sustainability and religion, and no significant comparisons of religious and secular sustainability advocacy. Religion and Sustainability presents the first broad analysis of the spiritual dimensions of sustainability-oriented social movements. Exploring the similarities and differences between the conceptions of sustainability held by religious, interfaith and secular organizations, the book analyses how religious practice and discourse have impacted on political ideology and process.

A multidisciplinary team of scholars shows how spiritual and religious practices actually do power psychological, physical, and social benefits, producing stronger individuals and healthier societies. In recent years, scholars from an array of disciplines applied cutting-edge research techniques to determining the effects of faith. Religion, Spirituality, and Positive Psychology: Understanding the Psychological Fruits of Faith brings those scholars together to share what they learned. Through their thoughtful, evidence-based reflections, this insightful book demonstrates the positive benefits of spiritual and religious engagement, both for individual practitioners and for society as a whole. The book covers Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other major traditions across culture in two sections. The first focuses on ways in which religious and spiritual engagement improves psychological and behavioral health. The second highlights the application of this knowledge to physical, psychological, and social problems. Each chapter focuses on a spiritual "fruit," among them humility, hope, tolerance, gratitude, forgiveness, better health, and recovery from disease or addiction, explaining how the fruit is "planted" and why faith helps it flourish. Case studies and personal vignettes illustrate key points and discoveries

In her fascinating exploration of feline history, Georgie Anne Geyer explores the connections between the royal and sacred felines of ancient civilizations and the beloved domestic cats of today. Chasing an irresistible mystery across the globe, Geyer conducts exhaustive research into the little-known puzzle of how cats came to occupy their unique position in the lives of humans. Treated with the tenacity, resourcefulness, and narrative instinct of a seasoned foreign correspondent, the investigation yields unexpected answers and poses tantalizing new questions.

It was Geyer's curiosity about her own cats that inspired her to study the history of human-feline relations and especially the exalted status of cats among the ancients as royal or sacred beings. In Egypt, Geyer learned of the cat-goddess Bastet and of the cat's role in the transmigration of souls. In Myanmar she saw Leonardo DiCaprio, Ricky Martin, and the other incongruously named cats of the Nga Phe Kyaung monastery, trained by the monks to jump through hoops. She even met a family who dutifully guards the heritage of the Japanese Bobtail, cultivating the line in--of all places--rural Virginia.

Richly illustrated with photographs of Geyer's journeys and historical cat images, When Cats Reigned Like Kings describes forty-one recognized modern cat breeds plus other popular cats. Every cat lover can, thus, trace his or her cat to these breeds and their many relatives. The result is a remarkable book, bound to delight and amaze cat fanciers and adventure seekers.

Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. For instance, one of the most widely used textbooks used in introductory courses on religious studies, introduces major theoreticians such as Edward Burnett Tylor, James Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, William James, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz. Their theories are based on Western philosophy. In contrast, in Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is a flow with nothing permanent, both the observer and the observed undergoing constant transformation. This volume is based on such innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies.

This book describes the theory and practice of interreligious dialogue, education and action in Israel and Palestine in the context of the political peace process as well as the peace-building processes and programs, by drawing on personal experiences and encounters of more than twenty-five years. Through memorable incidents and inspirational stories, the book offers insights into the obstacles and challenges, as well as the achievements and successes of interreligious dialogue and action programs. In addition, it provides a practical model of interreligious dialogue for people around the world and leaves the reader with a message of hope for the future.

This book tackles the core problem of how painful historical memories between diverse religious communities continue to impact, even poison, present day relations. Its operative notion is that of healing of memory, a notion developed by John Paul II. The different papers explore how the painful memories of yesteryear can be healed in the framework of contemporary efforts. In so doing, they seek to address some of the root causes that continue to impact present day relations, but which rarely if ever get addressed in other contexts. Strategies from six different faith traditions are brought together in what is, in some ways, a cross-religious brainstorming session that seeks to identify the kinds of tools that would allow us to improve present day relations. At the end of the conceptual pole of this project is the notion of hope. If memory informs our past, hope sets the horizons for our future. How does the healing of memory open new horizons for the future? And what is the notion of hope in each of our traditions, so that it might be receptive to opening up to a common vision of good for all? Between memory and hope, the project seeks to offer a vision of healing and hope that can serve as a resource in contemporary interfaith relations.

This Reader presents a diverse and ecumenical cross-section of ecclesiological statements from across the twenty centuries of the church's existence. It builds on the foundations of early Christian writings, illustrates significant medieval, reformation, and modern developments, and provides a representative look at the robust attention to ecclesiology that characterizes the contemporary period. This collection of readings offers an impressive overview of the multiple ways Christians have understood the church to be both the 'body of Christ' and, at the same time, an imperfect, social and historical institution, constantly subject to change, and reflective of the cultures in which it is found. This comprehensive survey of historical ecclesiologies is helpful in pointing readers to the remarkable number of images and metaphors that Christians have relied upon in describing the church and to the various tensions that have characterized reflection on the church as both united and diverse, community and institution, visible and invisible, triumphant and militant, global and local, one and many. Students, clergy and all interested in Christianity and the church will find this collection an invaluable resource.

This book brings together two scholarly traditions: experts in Roman, Jewish and Islamic law, an area where scholars tend to be familiar with work in each area, and experts in the legal traditions of South and East Asia, which have tended to be less interdisciplinary. The resulting mix produces new ways of looking at comparative law and legal history from a global perspective, and these essays contribute both to our understanding of comparative religion as well as comparative law.

The book attends to a historical question - how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts - which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur. The volume foregrounds the primacy of 'choice' and 'agency'- upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an 'indigenous mode of feminism'. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution - albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.

In Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East, Balogh simultaneously redefines one of the greatest figures in the history of religion and challenges the historically popular understanding of ancient Mesopotamian idols as the idle objects of antiquated faiths. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and methods of comparison, Balogh not only offers new insight into the lives of idols as active mediators between humanity and divinity, she also makes the case that when it comes to understanding the figure of Moses, Mesopotamian idols are the best analogy that the ancient Near East provides. This new understanding of Moses, idols, and the interplay between the two on the stage of history and within the biblical text has been made possible only with the recent publication of pertinent texts from ancient Mesopotamia. Drawing from the fields of Assyriology, biblical studies, comparative religion, and archaeology, Balogh identifies a problem with Moses's status, and offers an unexpected solution to that problem. Moses among the Idols centers on the question: What is it that transforms Moses from an inadequate representative of Yahweh who is "uncircumcised of lips" to "god to Pharaoh" (Exodus 6:28-7:1)? In this moment, Moses undergoes a status change best understood through comparison with the induction ritual for ancient Mesopotamian idols as described in the texts of the Mis Pi, "Washing" or "Purification of the Mouth." This solution to the problem of Moses's status explains not only his status change, but also why Moses radiates light after speaking with YHWH (Exod 34:29-35), and his peculiar relationship with YHWH and people of Israel. The comparative, interdisciplinary perspective provided by Balogh allows one to read these and other millennia-old interpretive issues anew, and to do so in a way that underscores the contribution of in-depth comparison to our understanding of ancient civilizations, texts, and intellectual frameworks.

Jesus and Muhammad are two of the best known and revered figures in history, each with a billion or more global followers. Now, in this intriguing volume, F.E. Peters offers a clear and compelling analysis of the parallel lives of Jesus and Muhammad, the first such in-depth comparison in print.
Like a detective, Peters compiles "dossiers" of what we do and do not know about the lives and portraits of these towering figures, drawing on the views of modern historians and the evidence of the Gospels and the Quran. With erudition and wit, the author nimbly leads the reader through drama and dogma to reveal surprising similarities between the two leaders and their messages. Each had a public career as a semi-successful preacher. Both encountered opposition that threatened their lives and those of their followers. Each left a body of teaching purported to be their very words, with an urgent imperative that all must become believers in the face of the approaching apocalypse. Both are symbols of hope on the one hand and of God's terrible judgment on the other. They are bringers of peace--and the sword. There is, however, a fundamental difference. Muslims revere Muhammad ibn Abdullah of Mecca as a mortal prophet. Although known as a prophet in his day, the Galilean Jew Jesus was and is believed by his followers to have been the promised Messiah, indeed the son of God. The Quran records revelations received by Muhammad as the messenger of God, whereas the revelations of the Gospels focus on Jesus and the events of his life and death.
A lasting contribution to interfaith understanding, Jesus and Muhammad offers lucid, intelligent answers to questions that underlie some of the world's most intractable conflicts.

This carefully researched and provocative treatment of the two most influential persons in world history sets aside the cultural prejudices that often hamper open, honest comparison of Muhammad and Jesus. Phipps begins with a thorough biographical investigation of the early lives of the Meccan and the Nazarene and a thoughtful assessment of their later contributions as statesman and reformer. He then debunks many of the invidious myths about Jesus and Muhammad during the course of a careful exploration of the ways in which they interpreted Hebrew Scriptures, their prescriptions for moral conduct, and their attitudes toward rewards and punishment on earth and in the afterlife.

This book offers a fully up-to-date and comprehensive guide to religion in Britain since 1945. A team of leading scholars provide a fresh analysis and overview, with a particular focus on diversity and change. They examine:

• relations between religious and secular beliefs and institutions
• the evolving role and status of the churches
• the growth and settlement of non-Christian religious communities
• the spread and diversification of alternative spiritualities
• religion in welfare, education, media, politics and law
• theoretical perspectives on religious change.

The volume presents the latest research, including results from the largest-ever research initiative on religion in Britain, the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. Survey chapters are combined with detailed case studies to give both breadth and depth of coverage. The text is accompanied by relevant photographs and a companion website.

In this study, Paul S. Chung charts the history of social scientific study of religion from the axial age to the present day, and thereby lays a foundation for a new model of constructive theology in the comparative study of religion, culture and society. Analysing the thought of Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Edmund Husserl, Max Horkheimer and others, Chung deals effectively with material interests, power relations and the history of race, gender and sexuality. The result is a synthesis that is at once innovative, critical, and applicable to current methodology in theology and the social sciences.

Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity and the Theopolitical Problem is a book about the encounter between Jewish and Christian thought and the fact-value divide that invites the unsettling recognition of the dramatic acosmism that shadows and undermines a considerable number of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought systems. By exposing the forced option presented to Jewish and Christian thinkers by the continued appropriation of the fact-value divide, Nature and Norm motivates Jewish and Christian thinkers to perform an immanent critique of the failure of their thought systems to advance rational theopolitical claims and exercise the authority and freedom to assert their claims as reasonable hypotheses that hold the potential for enacting effective change in our current historical moment.

Why is one person a believer and another an atheist? Why does one person demand facts for verification, while another trusts feelings? Why are some who hear voices declared psychotic while others are called saints? The answers to these questions are not mere speculation or amusing distraction; rather they are the essential components in developing curiosity, open-mindedness and tolerance for differences. Meaning in Myth speaks to the various ways in which we all construct our myth, or life story, from our very personal ways of thinking, evaluating , judging, and ignoring. It is nothing less than an invitation to encounter other viewpoints, other faiths and disbeliefs, and ultimately ourselves.

In the Bible, there is a drama of defining who are truly God's people and who are not. Using an array of biblical texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Not God's People explores how ancient Jews and Christians created their own identity in relation to others. The book analyzes how biblical texts define 'us' and 'them, ' how these texts differ in the way they define group identity, and how this process continues to be re-created by Jews and Christians today. Not God's People asks questions such as: How is the outsider defined? Is the ideal insider defined as the opposite of the outsider? It follows up with related questions such as: How were these definitions of 'we' and 'other' in the ancient communities used by later Jews and Christians? Are the processes of community and enemy formation found in the Bible exhibited in most other cultures as well? Not God's People ultimately shows that though the Bible's definitions of the insider and outsider changes dramatically over time, the process are enduring, and eternally true.

The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.

Through an examination of Christian interaction with other religions, Paul S. Chung constructs a theology of comparative religion. In the course of this construction, he employs the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Robert Bellah, and Karl Barth, while offering case studies of transformative interaction between Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Chung's interdisciplinary approach opens up new avenues for inter-religious understanding and melding, for instance exploring the development of a Protestant Islam. Throughout, he provides innovative conceptions of the religions involved and the realities they assert.  

There are some 20,000 utopian communities in present-day America. Most of them keep a low profile, welcoming new members without advertising for them. Nearly all are hidden from view -- in rural America, in city slums, behind monastery walls. A majority of them are motivated by religious faith and seek to approximate heaven on earth. Some are startlingly successful. Utopian communities share a belief in the essential goodness of human nature and the possibility of personal perfection. The glue that binds them is not coercion, but commitment. Most are radically egalitarian. Their members are persuaded that their individual interests coincide with the values of the group, which stands in the place of God. The earliest Christians embraced a communal life of mutual caring, prompting pagans of the time to marvel, "See how they love one another." Contemporary spiritual communities in America enjoy the same motivation. For a disconnected society obsessed with unfettered freedom and acquisitiveness, they demonstrate the power of fellowship and sharing over individual isolation and narrow self-interest. These are their stories. From the outset, settlers freed from the cynicism of the Old World welcomed the opportunity that beckoned in the New. The Puritans conceived of Massachusetts as the biblical City on a Hill. The Quakers made Pennsylvania a Holy Experiment. Like the Israelites before them, the Mormons trekked through a desert to create an empire of the spirit. Even failed utopias offer lessons. The Shakers are remembered today for their furniture, tools, and songs, but in their time they attracted thousands to a devout life of simple abundance in community. It was only because they werecelibate that their numbers decreased. By contrast, the Amish still thrive because their birth rate is three times the national average. Today there are 660 Amish congregations across 20 states -- 14,000 of the simple farmers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania alone. Most of the communes that flourished in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s failed for lack of resources and rules. But some, motivated by spirituality rather than anarchy, have become models of self-sustaining modern Edens. Here, Yount describes the history and place of several utopian communities in America, offering a glimpse into their lives, beliefs, and the ideas that sustain them.