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.

This book addresses issues central to today's Catholic Church, focusing on the relationship between various religions in different contexts and regions across the world. The diverse array of contributors present an inclusively interfaith enterprise, investigating a wide range of encounters and perspectives. The essays include approaches from the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Baha'i traditions, in a variety of geographic contexts. Contributors reflect on Muslims in the West, Christian-Buddhist social activism, and on Chinese, Indian, and Japanese religions. The volume also explores the experiences of communities that are often marginalized and overlooked such as the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia and the Karen tribal peoples of Thailand. Contributors examine the works of the Focolare, Gulen, and Rissho Kosei-kai movements, and integrate the vision of Raimon Panikkar and Ken Wilber. Chapters incorporate discussions of dialogue documents such as Nostra Aetate and Dabru Emet, and methodologies such as Receptive Ecumenism, Comparative Theology, and Scriptural Reasoning. Among other goals, the book seeks to offer glimpses into interfaith dialogues across the world and examine what Christians can learn from other religions and global contexts.

Iconic images of medieval pilgrims, such as Chaucer's making their laborious way to Canterbury, conjure a distant time when faith was the only refuge of the ill and infirm, and thousands traveled great distances to pray for healing. Why, then, in an age of advanced biotechnology and medicine, do millions still go on pilgrimages? Why do journeys to important religious shrines - such as Lourdes, Compostela, Fatima, and Medjugorje - constitute a major industry? In "Miracle Cures", Robert A. Scott explores these provocative questions and finds that pilgrimage continues to offer answers for many. Its benefits can range from a demonstrable improvement in health to complete recovery. Using research in biomedical and behavioral science, Scott examines accounts of miracle cures at medieval, early modern, and contemporary shrines. He inquires into the power of relics, apparitions, and the transformative nature of sacred journeying and shines new light on the roles belief, hope, and emotion can play in healing.

This book provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the challenges faced by pastoral ministry in South African Pentecostalism as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as some interventions being made to manage these challenges. Contributors present descriptive approaches to churches' reactions to lockdown measures, and especially the adaptations generated within Pentecostalism in South Africa. Through a variety of approaches-including pastoral care, virtual ecclesiology, social media, and missiology-contributors offer intervention techniques which can help readers to understand the unique role of Christian ministry during the pandemic, in South Africa and beyond.

The Handbook of Religion and Society is the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of a vital force in the world today. It is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, policy makers, and other professionals seeking to understand the role of religion in society. This includes both the social forces that shape religion and the social consequences of religion. This handbook captures the breadth and depth of contemporary work in the field, and shows readers important future directions for scholarship. Among the emerging topics covered in the handbook are biological functioning, organizational innovation, digital religion, spirituality, atheism, and transnationalism. The relationship of religion to other significant social institutions like work and entrepreneurship, science, and sport is also analyzed. Specific attention is paid, where appropriate, to international issues as well as to race, class, sexuality, and gender differences. This handbook includes 27 chapters by a distinguished, diverse, and international collection of experts, organized into 6 major sections: religion and social institutions; religious organization; family, life course, and individual change; difference and inequality; political and legal processes; and globalization and transnationalism.

The essays create an interdisciplinary conversation about the nature and function of sacred and devotional objects across the globe during the medieval and Early Modern period. Topics include the veneration of relics of the Buddha, the cult of the saints in medieval and early modern Ireland, medieval surveys of pagan and Christian Rome.

This detailed study by Jutta Sperber shows how the magisterium of the Roman-Catholic Church, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and various parts of the Muslim world from Saudi Arabia to Iran have been engaged in Christian-Muslim dialogues. The mainly anthropological topics range from tolerance and human dignity, the position of women and children, media and education, to mission, resources and nationalism. They paint an interesting picture of the position of Man before God and the world in both Christianity and Islam.

This book is an exploration into the paradoxical structure of pluralistic thinking as illuminated by both Western and Eastern insights-especially Jainism. By calling into question the most fundamental assumptions of religious pluralists, the author hopes to contribute to a paradigm shift in discourse on religious pluralism and conflicting truth claims.

This is the first historical study of the whole body of late Viking runic inscription stones in Scandinavia. The 2300 inscriptions which are more or less complete yield unexpected information on a wide range of topics, including the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, the growth of royal power, and, most important of all, the inheritance customs of the period.

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904-2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu-Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism. Barua argues that the characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations were modulated by a shifting array of socio-economic and socio-political parameters. It is within these contexts that Rabindranath, Nazrul, and Annada Shankar are developing their thoughts on Hindus and Muslims through the prisms of religious humanism and universalism.

This book presents a reading of Martin Heidegger's philosophy as an effort to strike a middle position between the philosophies of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche. Duane Armitage interprets the history of Western philosophy as comprising a struggle over the meaning of "being," and argues that this struggle is ultimately between materialism and idealism, and, in the end, between atheism and theism. This work therefore concerns the question of the meaning of the so called "death of God" in the context of contemporary Continental Philosophy.

This work by Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is widely considered to be one of the most important early texts in the fields of psychology and anthropology. At the same time, by applying modern methods of comparative ethnography to the classical world, and revealing the superstition and irrationality beneath the surface of the classical culture which had for so long been a model for Western civilisation, it was extremely controversial. Frazer was greatly influenced by E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (also reissued in this series), and by the work of the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, to whom the first edition is dedicated. The twelve-volume third edition, reissued here, was greatly revised and enlarged, and published between 1911 and 1915; the two-volume first edition (1890) is also available in this series. Volume 2 (1911) explores different types of vegetation worship and the roles of gods.

This work by Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is widely considered to be one of the most important early texts in the fields of psychology and anthropology. At the same time, by applying modern methods of comparative ethnography to the classical world, and revealing the superstition and irrationality beneath the surface of the classical culture which had for so long been a model for Western civilisation, it was extremely controversial. Frazer was greatly influenced by E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (also reissued in this series), and by the work of the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, to whom the first edition is dedicated. The twelve-volume third edition, reissued here, was greatly revised and enlarged, and published between 1911 and 1915; the two-volume first edition (1890) is also available in this series. Volume 3 (1911) is concerned with the concept of taboo, and its presence in all religious systems.

This work by Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is widely considered to be one of the most important early texts in the fields of psychology and anthropology. At the same time, by applying modern methods of comparative ethnography to the classical world, and revealing the superstition and irrationality beneath the surface of the classical culture which had for so long been a model for Western civilisation, it was extremely controversial. Frazer was greatly influenced by E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (also reissued in this series), and by the work of the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, to whom the first edition is dedicated. The twelve-volume third edition, reissued here, was greatly revised and enlarged, and published between 1911 and 1915; the two-volume first edition (1890) is also available in this series. Volume 9 (1913) considers the role of the scapegoat in maintaining the stability of the community.

This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.

In this study of everyday religious culture in early modern Syria and Palestine, James Grehan offers a social history that looks beyond conventional ways of thinking about religion in the Middle East. The most common narratives about the region introduce us to the separate traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, highlighting how each one has created its own distinctive traditions and communities. Twilight of the Saints offers a reinterpretation of religious and cultural history in two countries that are today associated with division and violence, by exploring everyday religious habits of ordinary people from the late seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, when the region was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Grehan shows that members of different religious groups participated in a common, overarching religious culture that was still visible at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Most obvious in the countryside, though present everywhere, this religious mainstream thrived in a society where few people had access to formal religious teachings. This older, folk religious culture was steeped in notions and rituals that the modern world, with its mainly theological conception of religion, has utterly repudiated. Only by uncovering this lost lived religion, argues Grehan, can we appreciate the largely unacknowledged revolution in religion that has taken place over the last century. As this book demonstrates, the people of Syria and Palestine today would hardly recognize religion as it was experienced in the not-so-distant past.

The miracle stories of the founders and saints of the major world religions have much in common. Written by international experts, this Companion provides an authoritative and comparative study of miracles in not only Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism, but also, indigenous religions. The authors promote a discussion of the problems of miracles in our largely secular culture, and of the value of miracles in religious belief. The miracles of Jesus are also contextualized through chapters on the Hebrew Bible, classical culture to the Romans, Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. This book provides students with a scholarly introduction to miracles, which also covers philosophical, medical and historical issues.

The long twentieth century in China and Taiwan has seen both a dramatic process of state-driven secularization and modernization and a vigorous revival of contemporary religious life. "Chinese Religiosities" explores the often vexed relationship between the modern Chinese state and religious practice. The essays in this comprehensive, multidisciplinary collection cover a wide range of traditions, including Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Confucianism, Protestantism, Falungong, popular religion, and redemptive societies. Contributors include: Jose Cabezon, Prasenjit Duara, Ryan Dunch, Dru C. Gladney, Vincent Goossaert, Ji Zhe, Ya-pei Kuo, Richard Madsen, Rebecca Nedostup, David Palmer, Benjamin Penny, and Mayfair Mei-hui Yang.

Humanity's long history of intermittent conflicts and contemporary violence undermines Christian's (and their Jewish and Muslim fellow believers) religious confidence in and moral commitment to world peace. The principal issue is the ambiguity of God's presence and action in the world as we experience it. In A Contemporary Theology for Ecumenical Peace, this problem is addressed by relating biblical theology to contemporary philosophical and theological perspectives to motivate and sustain the practice of love and justice in the context of civil religion.

This book presents a unique approach to person-centered anthropology, providing a new form of practice theory that incorporates and explains sources of cultural change. Built around the learning and use of autobiographical narrative forms, it draws from, and expands on, phenomenological, psychological, and moral anthropological traditions. The author draws on extensive original fieldwork in Thailand to explore questions including: how Buddhism has dealt with the appearance of global capitalism; and why some Thais continue to pursue nirvana-oriented Buddhist practices when karma-oriented reward-systems seem to be more satisfying as a whole. Where previous person-centered ethnographies have explored the ways in which social forces cause individuals to conform to cultural norms, this work advances the analysis by focusing on how ideas are transmitted from individuals to into wider society. This book will provide fresh insights of particular interest to psychological, phenomenological and narrative anthropologists; as well as to researchers working in the fields of religious and Asian studies.

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.

Beyond the Threshold introduces readers to afterlife beliefs and experiences in world religions. The second edition has been revised and updated throughout, including a new chapter on afterlife beliefs and practices in selected African traditions, new research on the afterlife and near-death experiences, the addition of key words and definitions to each chapter, and more. Christopher M. Moreman offers an introduction to afterlife beliefs in ancient cultures, which are essential to understanding the roots of many modern ideas about death. He examines the folklore and doctrines of major world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese religions, and several African traditions. He also discusses psychic phenomena across traditions, such as mediums, near-death and out-of-body experiences, and past-life memories. While ultimately the afterlife remains unknowable, the second edition of this unique, in-depth exploration of both beliefs and experiences can help readers reach their own understanding of the afterlife and how to live.

The impact of faith on modern society is without question. Religion is frequently at the centre of global issues and cultural conflict, and continues to provoke intense debate. It is more important than ever that we engage intelligently and respectfully with the thought and practices of those who follow the world's various faiths. This book examines the discipline of religious studies and clearly explains the origins, beliefs, sacred texts, customs and practices of eight religious traditions. Every chapter is written by a leading expert, all but one of whom are also members of the faith communities they write about. The information given is authoritative and balanced, but also provides the believer's perspective so that the reader may understand and appreciate people of different faiths. Glossaries at the end of each chapter provide clear and concise definitions of key terms. Questions throughout the book invite personal reflection from the reader and further reading lists point the way to additional study. A Guide to Religious Thought and Practices is ideal for those following an introductory course on religious traditions or for anyone interested in learning about other faiths.