This volume presents Theodore Abu Qurrah's apologetic Christian theology in dialogue with Islam. It explores the question of whether, in his attempt to convey orthodoxy in Arabic to the Muslim reader, Abu Qurrah diverged from creedal, doctrinal Christian theology and compromised its core content. A comprehensive study of the theology of Abu Qurrah and its relation to Islamic and pre-Islamic orthodox Melkite thought has not yet been pursued in modern scholarship. Awad addresses this gap in scholarship by offering a thorough analytic hermeneutics of Abu Qurrah's apologetic thought, with specific attention to his theological thought on the Trinity and Christology. This study takes scholarship beyond attempts at editing and translating Abu Qurrah's texts and offers scholars, students, and lay readers in the fields of Arabic Christianity, Byzantine theology, Christian-Muslim dialogues, and historical theology an unprecedented scientific study of Abu Qurrah's theological mind.

Religious and ethnic diversity have become crucial and pressing concerns in Europe: in particular, the presence of Muslims, their integration, citizenship, and how to deal with the influx of refugees. Can we draw on the resources of religions and their leaders for models of peaceful coexistence or do religious identities constitute obstacles to cooperation and unity? This volume treats "Islam, Religions, and Pluralism in Europe" based on a 2014 conference in Montenegro. Experts analyze Islam and Muslim issues as well as Christian perspectives and state social policies. Case studies drawn from Western and Eastern Europe including the Balkans, constructively review and interrogate diverse theological, philosophical, pedagogical, legal, and political models and strategies that deal with pluralism.

Ausdrucke wie "mit Leib und Seele" und Begriffe wie "Psychologie" und "Seelsorge" belegen, dass der Terminus "Seele" aus unserer Sprache nicht wegzudenken ist. Gleichzeitig scheint es sich um ein Relikt zu handeln, verzichten doch gerade die Wissenschaften auf den Gegenstand der "Seele". Aus den Perspektiven von Physik, Psychologie, Philosophie und Theologie erklart der Band diese Diastase und fragt nach der Phanomenalitat der "Seele". Er zeigt, dass die Rede von der Seele zwar durch Befreiung von dualistischen Klangen reformbedurftig, aber unverzichtbar ist, will man der Phanomenalitat menschlichen Werdens gerecht werden. Der Band beruht auf einer erweiterten Diskussion der Jahrestagung 2015 der Karl-Heim-Gesellschaft.

Wie ist es moeglich, Burger Europas und gleichzeitig Muslim zu sein? Die Autorin vergleicht aus differenzhermeneutischer Perspektive die Antworten von drei zeitgenoessischen muslimischen Denkern. Sie zeigen, dass Europa und Islam durchaus zusammen gedacht werden koennen. Durch den Vergleich wird aber auch ein innerislamisches Spannungsfeld deutlich. Dieses bildet nicht nur die Vielfalt islamischer Wege ab, sondern stellt auch die kategoriale Unterscheidung von "islamisch" und "nichtislamisch" in Frage. Unter Betrachtung von Fragen der Partizipation, der Religionsfreiheit und des Miteinanders in einer wertepluralen Gesellschaft sind diese muslimischen Ansatze wertvolle Stimmen im Diskurs, wenn es nicht mehr nur darum geht, ob der Islam in Europa beheimatet werden kann - sondern "wie".

New religious movements both read the Bible in creative ways and produce their own texts that aspire to scriptural status. From the creation stories in Genesis and the Ten Commandments to the life of Jesus and the apocalypse, they develop their self-understandings through reading and writing scripture.

A collection of essays in which the possibilities of a deeper dialogue, by means of the contemplative traditions of the Abrahamic Faiths is explored. The book expounds an ageless, profound means of overcoming religious hatred and violence and awakening the beauty of unity in diversity.

Retheorizing Religion in Nepal is an engaging and thought-provoking study of Religion in South Asia, with important insights for the study of religion and culture more broadly conceived. Grieve uses ethnographic material as well as poststructuralist and postcolonialist approaches to critique and expand religious studies as a discipline.

A fresh look at how Christianity and Judaism became two distinct religions through the parting of their intellectual traditions   How, when, and why did Christianity and Judaism diverge into separate religions? Emanuel Fiano reinterprets the parting of the ways between Jews and Christians as a split between two intellectual traditions, a split that emerged within the context of ancient debates about Jesus’s relationship to God and the world.   Fiano explores how Christianity moved away from Judaism through the development of new practices for religious inquiry. By demonstrating that the constitution of communal borders coincided with the elaboration of different methods for producing religious knowledge, the author shows that Christian theological controversies, often thought to teach us nothing beyond the history of dogma, can cast light on the broader religious landscape of late antiquity. Three Powers in Heaven thus marks not only a historical but also a methodological intervention in the study of the parting of the ways and in scholarship on ancient religion.

Provides the first extensive collection of traditional and academic Jewish approaches to the religions of the world, focusing on those Jewish thinkers that actually encounter the other world religions -that is, it moves beyond the theory of inclusive/exclusive/pluralistic categories and looks at Judaism's interactions with other faiths.

Der Autor konzipiert "Interreligioese Religionspadagogik" auf interdisziplinaren Grundlagen. Sein Konzept bezieht sich auf das Verhaltnis zur deutschen Minderheit der Muslime. Es bietet zugleich Raum fur den allgemeinen interreligioesen Dialog. Die Grundlagen stammen aus der Sozialisationsforschung sowie der Anthropologie von Martin Buber. Erkenntnistheoretisch folgt die Studie wichtigen Positionen der Kognitionspsychologie und Naturwissenschaften. Damit schafft sie ein religioeses Bewusstsein fur individuelle Selbstfindung im Glauben und befahigt, religioese Differenzen konstruktiv zu verarbeiten. Dieses Konzept mundet in einer Theologie des Weges, die im religioesen Leben (Mystik, Meditation, Tao) seit jeher eine grosse Rolle spielte und fur den zukunftigen interreligioesen Dialog entscheidend sein wird.

This collection of essays explores the development of the New Confucianism movement during the twentieth-century and questions whether it is, in fact, a distinctly new intellectual movement or one that has been mostly retrospectively created. The questions that contributors to this book seek to answer about this neo-conservative philosophical movement include: 'What has been the cross-fertilization between Chinese scholars in China and overseas made possible by the shared discourse of Confucianism?'; 'To what extent does this discourse transcend geographical, political, cultural, and ideological divides?'; 'Why do so many Chinese intellectuals equate Confucianism with Chinese cultural identity?'; and 'Does the Confucian revival of the 1990s in China and Taiwan represent a genuine philosophical renaissance or a resurgence in interest based on political and cultural factors?'.

This volume assesses contemporary church responses to multicultural diversity and resisted categories of social difference, with a central focus on whether or how racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender differences are validated by churches (and especially black churches) torn between competing inclusive and exclusive tendencies.

This collection of essays by major scholars analyze the religious diversity in Chinese religion, bringing together topics from traditional and contemporary contexts and Chinese religions' encounters with Western religion.

This book analyzes the evolution of the Hojjatiyeh movement in Iran, a semi-clandestine movement which emerged in the 1950s as an anti-Baha'i movement, went underground in the 1960s, and re-emerged openly after Iran's 1979 revolution with its members coming to occupy some of the highest echelon posts in Iranian politics

This volume offers a sample of reflections from scholars and practitioners on the theme of death and dying from scholars and practitioners, ranging from the Christian tradition to Hinduism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, while also touching on the themes of the afterlife and near-death experiences.

This book examines the competing regimes of law and religion an offers a multidisciplinary approach to demonstrate the global scope of their influence. It argues that the tension between these two institutions results from their disagreements about the kinds of rule that should govern human life and society, and from where they should be derived.

Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt addresses the extraordinary rise and inner life of the Egyptian pietist movement in the first half of the thirteenth century. The creative engagement with the dominant Islamic culture was always present, even when unspoken. Dr Russ-Fishbane calls attention to the Sufi subtext of Jewish pietiem, while striving not to reduce its spiritual synthesis and religious renewal to a set of political calculations. Ultimately, no single term or concept can fully address the creative expression of pietism that so animated Jewish society and that left its mark in numerous manuscripts and fragments from medieval Egypt. Russ-Fishbane offers a nuanced examination of the pietist sources on their own terms, drawing as far as possible upon their own definitions and perceptions. Jewish society in thirteenth-century Egypt reflects the dynamic reexamination by a venerable community of its foundational texts and traditions, even of its very identity and institutions, viewed and reviewed in the full light of its Islamic environment. The historical legacy of this religious synthesis belongs at once to the realm of Jewish culture, in all its diversity and dynamism, as well as to the broader spiritual orbit of Islamicate civilization.

MSIA, the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, has been called the Cadillac of cults. Those interested in new religions may only know of MSIA from these kinds of labels. However, when looked at from a qualitative sociological perspective, a more complex story of religious innovation and cultural change can be told.

In recent years, the extent to which contemporary societies are secular has come under scrutiny. At the same time, many countries, especially in Europe, have increasingly large nonaffiliate, 'subjectively secular' populations, whilst nonreligious cultural movements like the New Atheism and the Sunday Assembly have come to prominence. Making sense of secularity, irreligion, and the relationship between them has therefore emerged as a crucial task for those seeking to understand contemporary societies and the nature of modern life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in southeast England, Recognizing the Non-religious develops a new vocabulary, theory and methodology for thinking about the secular. It distinguishes between separate and incommensurable aspects of so-called secularity as insubstantial - involving merely the absence of religion - and substantial - involving beliefs, ritual practice, and identities that are alternative to religious ones. Recognizing the cultural forms that present themselves as non-religious therefore opens up new, more egalitarian and more theoretically coherent ways of thinking about people who are 'not religious'. It is also argued that recognizing the nonreligious allows us to reimagine the secular itself in new and productive ways. This book is part of a fast-growing area of research that builds upon and contributes to theoretical debates concerning secularization, 'desecularization', religious change, postsecularity and postcolonial approaches to religion and secularism. As well as presenting new research, this book gathers insights from the wider studies of nonreligion, atheism, and secularism in order to consolidate a theoretical framework, conceptual foundation and agenda for future research.

This book explores the story of the Israelites' worship of the Golden Calf in its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts, from ancient Israel to the emergence of Islam. It focuses in particular on the Qur'an's presentation of the narrative and its background in Jewish and Christian retellings of the episode from Late Antiquity. Across the centuries, the interpretation of the Calf episode underwent major changes reflecting the varying cultural, religious, and ideological contexts in which various communities used the story to legitimate their own tradition, challenge the claims of others, and delineate the boundaries between self and other. The book contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of the relationship between Bible and Qur'an, arguing for the necessity of understanding the Qur'an and Islamic interpretations of the history and narratives of ancient Israel as part of the broader biblical tradition. The Calf narrative in the Qur'an, central to the qur'anic conception of the legacy of Israel and the status of the Jews of its own time, reflects a profound engagement with the biblical account in Exodus, as well as being informed by exegetical and parascriptural traditions in circulation in the Qur'an's milieu in Late Antiquity. The book also addresses the issue of Western approaches to the Qur'an, arguing that the historical reliance of scholars and translators on classical Muslim exegesis of scripture has led to misleading conclusions about the meaning of qur'anic episodes.