This book documents the ultramodern rise of the multifaith movement, as mulitfaith initiatives have been increasingly deployed as cosmopolitan solutions to counter global risks such as terrorism and climate change at the turn of the 21st century. These projects aim to enhance common security, particularly in Western societies following the events of September 11, 2001 and the July 2005 London bombings, where multifaith engagement has been promoted as a strategy to counter violent extremism. The author draws on interviews with 56 leading figures in the field of multifaith relations, including Paul Knitter, Eboo Patel, Marcus Braybrooke, Katherine Marshall, John Voll and Krista Tippett. Identifying the principle aims of the multifaith movement, the analysis explores the benefits-and challenges-of multifaith engagement, as well as the effectiveness of multifaith initiatives in countering the process of radicalization. Building on notions of cosmopolitanism, the work proposes a new theoretical framework termed 'Netpeace', which recognizes the interconnectedness of global problems and their solutions. In doing so, it acknowledges the capacity of multi-actor peacebuilding networks, including religious and state actors, to address the pressing dilemmas of our times. The primary intention of the book is to assist in the formation of new models of activism and governance, founded on a 'politics of understanding' modeled by the multifaith movement.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. But in "Inheriting Abraham," Jon Levenson reveals how the increasingly conventional notion of the three equally "Abrahamic" religions derives from a dangerous misunderstanding of key biblical and Qur'anic texts, fails to do full justice to any of the traditions, and is often biased against Judaism in subtle and pernicious ways.

This invaluable volume gathers together the cumulative insight of more than fifty years of Leonard Swidler's work on dialogue. The founder and president of the Dialogue Institute, Swidler offers through experience and research his theory and tools of interreligious, intercultural, and international dialogue.

This volume of the Building Bridges Seminar, Power: Divine and Human, Christian and Muslim Perspectives, comprises pairs of essays by Christians and Muslims which introduce texts for dialogical study, plus the actual text-excerpts themselves. This new book goes far beyond mere reporting on a dialogical seminar; rather, it provides guidance and materials for constructing a similar dialogical experience on a particular topic. As a resource for comparative theology, Power: Divine and Human is unique in that it takes up a topic not usually explored in depth in Christian-Muslim conversations. It is written by scholars for scholars. However, in tone and structure, it is suitable for the non-specialist as well. Students (undergraduate and graduate), religious leaders, and motivated non-specialists will find it readable and useful. While it falls solidly in the domain of comparative theology, it can also be used in courses on dialogical reading of scripture, interreligious relations, and political philosophy.

Who is my neighbor? As our world has increasingly become a single place, this question posed in the gospel story is heard as an interreligious inquiry. Yet studies of encounter across religious lines have largely been framed as the meeting of male leaders. What difference does it make when women's voices and experiences are the primary data for thinking about interfaith engagement? Motherhood as Metaphor draws on three historical encounters between women of different faiths: first, the archives of the Maryknoll Sisters working in China before World War II; second, the experiences of women in the feminist movement around the globe; and third, a contemporary interfaith dialogue group in Philadelphia. These sites provide fresh ways of thinking about our being human in the relational, dynamic messiness of our sacred, human lives. Each part features a chapter detailing the historical, archival, and ethnographic evidence of women's experience in interfaith contact through letters, diaries, speeches, and interviews of women in interfaith settings. A subsequent chapter considers the theological import of these experiences, placing them in conversation with modern theological anthropology, feminist theory, and theology. Women's experience of motherhood provides a guiding thread through the theological reflections recorded here. This investigation thus offers not only a comparative theology based on believers' experience rather than on texts alone but also new ways of conceptualizing our being human. The result is an interreligious theology, rooted in the Christian story but also learning across religious lines.

Interfaith Just Peacemaking is a collected work by 27 Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars and religious leaders on the ten 'practice norms' of the peacemaking paradigm called 'Just Peace.'Just Peace theory, like the paradigm it most resembles, Just War theory, is a list of specific practices that are applied to concrete contexts.

Political theology has traditionally explored the legitimization of political authority on the basis of divine revelation and of natural reason informed by religious authority, texts, and traditions. New challenges emerging in the postwar era gave rise to ongoing debate about the place of religion in public life, in the United States and in other established democracies, and this debate has dramatically reshaped the way scholars, policymakers, and religious leaders think about political theology. Political Theology for a Plural Age provides historic and contemporary understandings of political engagement in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, engaging political theologies not merely as a set of theoretical concepts but as religious beliefs and principles that motivate specific political action. The essays in this volume, written by leading thinkers and practitioners within each tradition and their secular counterparts, examine a number of core issues at the intersection of religion and politics. They contest the definition of political theology, establish a common discourse across the three Abrahamic traditions, and closely examine how globalization, secularization, and pluralism affect the construction and plausibility of political theologies. Finally, the essays offer insight into how political theologies might adapt to the shared global challenges of the twenty-first century.

Christianity has changed. Formerly known as the religion of Europe and North America, it is now a religion of the Global South: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, Christianity has never been merely a Western phenomenon - it has always been a borderless religion. Indeed, in six of the world's eight cultural blocks, Christianity is the largest faith. With convenient maps, helpful statistics, and concise histories of each of the world's major cultural blocks, The Changing World of Christianity is a dynamic guide for understanding Christianity's new ethos. From Ireland to Papua New Guinea, Argentina to China, South Africa to Russia, this book provides a clear and encyclopedic look at Christianity, the world's largest and most global religion.

Sam Cherribi is a Moroccan Muslim who became a naturalized Dutch citizen and member of the Dutch Parliament. In this book he draws on his personal experiences with European politics and media, extensive fieldwork in Dutch mosques, and interviews with imams. In recent years, the Netherlands has been swept by the same forces of change that have swept the rest of Europe: the consolidation of the European Union, a massive influx of Muslim immigrants and the rising voice of Islamic fundamentalism. Cherribi argues that this small country has amplified these forces, providing a useful lens through which to examine trends in all of Europe. The portents are troubling, he notes, as evidenced by the murders of journalist Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, after which riots broke out, mosques were burned, and Muslims were openly reviled by the public and the media. Cherribi himself was voted out of Parliament in the anti-migrant fervor that engulfed the Netherlands after these murders and, like many other Dutch Muslims, he emigrated to the United States. Looking back on these events, and bringing to bear his skills and training as a sociologist, Cherribi provides an invaluable account of one country's encounter with some of the most troubling trends of our times.

The Vatican II Council of 1965 signaled a new era in the relationship of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Determined to free the Church of the anti-Jewish polemic which led to such widespread suffering of the innocent, Catholic authorities completely revised their conceptions of Jews and Judaism. Soon, many mainstream Protestant churches also issued a series of official statements that affirm the eternal nature of God's ancient covenant with Israel. An entirely new category of theology emerged as part of the developing Jewish-Christian dialogue, and gradually Jewish theologians began to respond. Opening the Covenant represents a significant advance in Jewish thinking about Christianity. Michael Kogan delves deep into the theologies of the two faiths to locate precise points of difference and convergence. He sees Christianity as the breaking open of the original Covenant to include Gentile peoples. God has brought this about, says Kogan, through the work of Jesus and his interpreters. If Christianity is a divinely inspired movement, then Judaism must reevaluate its truth-claims. This will in no way compromise the truth of Judaism itself but will cause Jews to understand their own faith more fully by locating it in the larger context of God's universal redemptive plan. Kogan calls for each tradition to receive the wisdom of the other as a means of self-understanding. Once each faith is freed to find God's purpose in the other, the way will be open to a liberating pluralism in which Jews and Christians come to see each other as Israelite siblings sharing a universal role as God's witnesses, the builders of God's Kingdom on Earth. Neither faith can do this world-redemptive work alone. Kogan argues that an affirmation of one's own religion can still provide space for the truth of the "other," and presents a theory of multiple revelations of truth flowing from the one God of all.

This original and ambitious book considers the terms of engagement between Christian theology and other religious traditions, beginning with criticism of Christian theology of religions as entangled with European colonial modernity. Jenny Daggers covers recent efforts to disentangle Eurocentrism from the meeting of the religions, and investigates new constructive possibilities arising in the postcolonial context. In dialogue with Asian and feminist theologies, she reflects on ways forward for relations between the religions and offers a particularist model for theology of religions, standing within a classical Trinitarian framework.

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads explores the development of ideas of morally justified or legitimate war in Western and Islamic civilizations. Historically, these ideas have been grouped under three labels: just war, holy war, and jihad. A large body of literature exists exploring the development of just war and holy war concepts in the West and of jihad in Islam. Yet, to date, no book has investigated in depth the historical interaction between Western notions of just or holy war and Muslim definitions of jihad. This book is a major contribution to the comparative study of the ethics of war and peace in the West and Islam. Its twenty chapters explore two broad questions: 1. What historical evidence exists that Christian and Jewish writers on just war and holy war and Muslim writers on jihad knew of the other tradition? 2. What is the evidence in treatises, chronicles, speeches, ballads, and other historical records, or in practice, that either tradition influenced the other? The book surveys the period from the rise of Islam in the early seventh century to the present day. Part One surveys the impact of the early Islamic conquests upon Byzantine, Syriac, and Muslim thinking on justified war. Part Two probes developments during the Crusades. Part Three focuses on the early modern period in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, followed by analysis of the era of European imperialism in Part Four. Part Five brings the discussion into the present period, with chapters analyzing the impact of international law and terrorism on conceptions of just war and jihad.

Why Jesus’s historic and cultural influence makes him fascinating, provocative, and relevant for everyone, not only Christians.

Two thousand years after his birth and death, Jesus of Nazareth continues to be of vital interest. Yet much of the scholarship around Jesus focuses on his religious significance. Jesus for Everyone examines his most famous teachings from a fresh perspective, exploring how they have continued to shape ethics and civilization in the West for two millennia.

Even for those who reject faith, Jesus’s life and his philosophy are important to study, writes renowned biblical scholar and author Amy-Jill Levine, because of the insights they hold for us today. Poring through scripture, analyzing what historical scholarship has revealed about Jesus’s views on a number of subjects—including women—reveals surprising messages sure to be fascinating to all readers.

Placing Jesus of Nazareth within his historical context, Levine brings him vividly into focus and invites everyone from faithful Christians, agnostics, and the most committed nonbelievers to appreciate his lasting impact on the modern world.

Robert McKim's goal in On Religious Diversity is to distinguish and examine a number of possible responses to the knowledge of other religious traditions that are available to all of us today. He argues that the issues raised will be very pressing throughout the century we have just begun. There is no escaping the fact that the presence of competing traditions now confronts each of the traditions in a new and forceful way. More than ever there is a widespread if inchoate recognition of genuine religious sensibilities in others and of genuine religious seriousness that looks familiar. How might the awareness that there are so many traditions affect a member of a particular religious tradition? What attitudes should be taken to the beliefs and salvific prospects of members of other traditions? McKim examines various proposed answers to these questions. He argues that these are generally best thought of as guidelines that in turn admit of considerable further specification. What look like well-defined and discrete positions dissolve somewhat under scrutiny, revealing significantly different possibilities. And what look like clear distinctions are sometimes better understood as a matter of degree. McKim suggests where best to look for the most plausible answers, paying particular attention to the religiously ambiguous nature of our circumstances.

How can the world's many religions overcome ideological differences and come together to promote understanding, justice and peace? In this groundbreaking volume, James L. Heft and fifteen other leading scholars of the world's major religions show how to answer this crucial question.
Structured as a scholarly dialogue, Catholicism and Interreligious Dialogue contains essays by five Catholic scholars who have committed to extensive study of and dialogue with another world religion. Each scholar presents an assessment of the present state of interreligious dialogue between the Catholic Church and practitioners of a a particular faith, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. These assessments are followed by critical responses from two scholars of the tradition under discussion, as well as concluding comments from the Catholic scholar who offered the assessment.

This book explores "A Common Word Between Us and You," a high-level ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue process. The Common Word process was commenced by leading Islamic scholars and intellectuals as outreach in response to the Pope's much criticized Regensburg address of 2007, and brings to the fore, in the interest of developing a meaningful peace, how the Islamic and Christian communities representing well over half of the world's population might agree on love of God and love of neighbor as common beliefs.

Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document, ''A Common Word Between Us, '' to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a ''theological conversation'' with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice.
The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sixteen Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim scholars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignorance.''

How can ecumenism succeed and under what preconditions? Silke Dangel examines these questions by considering the conflicts between identity and difference in contemporary interdenominational dialogue. She shows that successful ecumenism depends upon a dynamic notion of identity. The ecumenical process in turn updates and modifies the nature of denominational identity.

Offering an analysis of Christian-Muslim dialogue across four centuries, this book highlights those voices of ecumenical tone which have more often used the Qur'an for drawing the two faiths together rather than pushing them apart, and amplifies the voice of the Qur'an itself. Finding that there is tremendous ecumenical ground between Christianity and Islam in the voices of their own scholars, this book ranges from a period of declining ecumenism during the first three centuries of Islam, to a period of resurging ecumenism during the most recent century until now. Among the ecumenical voices in the Christian-Muslim dialogue, this book points out that the Qur'an itself is possibly the strongest of those voices. These findings are cause for, and evidence of, hope for the Christian-Muslim relationship: that although agreement may never be reached, dialogue has led at times to very real mutual understanding and appreciation of the religious other. Providing a tool for those pursuing understanding and mutual appreciation between the Islamic and Christian faiths, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Islam, the Qur'an and the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

Antagonistic Tolerance examines patterns of coexistence and conflict amongst members of different religious communities, using multidisciplinary research to analyze groups who have peacefully intermingled for generations, and who may have developed aspects of syncretism in their religious practices, and yet have turned violently on each other. Such communities define themselves as separate peoples, with different and often competing interests, yet their interaction is usually peaceable provided the dominance of one group is clear. The key indicator of dominance is control over central religious sites, which may be tacitly shared for long periods, but later contested and even converted as dominance changes. By focusing on these shared and contested sites, this volume allows for a wider understanding of relations between these communities. Using a range of ethnographic, historical and archaeological data from the Balkans, India, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Turkey, Antagonistic Tolerance develops a comparative model of the competitive sharing and transformation of religious sites. These studies are not considered as isolated cases, but are instead woven into a unified analytical framework which explains how long-term peaceful interactions between religious communities can turn conflictual and even result in ethnic cleansing.

Perhaps no other nation is or has ever been as religiously diverse as the United States. For elected officials, school principals, corporate leaders, and many others, this diversity poses unique challenges. Leaders bring their own faiths to public life, and they daily encounter followers of similar and different faiths. Good leadership must draw together people from varied backgrounds in order to achieve something in common. This is no simple task.
How should leaders deal with menorahs and crosses, veils and turbans, prayers and holidays? How do they and their followers turn the cacophony of beliefs and practices into a kind of citizenship worthy of the American tradition of religious freedom? How can they honor the religious convictions of all Americans? In With God on All Sides, Douglas A. Hicks provides a roadmap for leaders as they traverse the post-9/11 landscape. Although the devout possess moral and spiritual resources that can enrich civic life, leaders must also be prepared to cope with nearly inevitable conflicts between people of different faiths. Yet wise leaders can find ways to transform the problem of diversity into an opportunity. Drawing on their moral and spiritual resources, Americans of all creeds have the capacity to enhance the quality of our civic debate. Their faith-based practices create occasions for mutual learning.
Hicks tells the stories of how diverse Americans have transformed public controversies into cases of cooperation. The key to good leadership, Hicks writes, is to engage one another across lines of difference with a spirit of humility, build communication and trust, and offer an inclusive vision that is true to America's principles. Based on years of research and practical experience, With God on All Sides provides an invaluable and thought-provoking guide to leadership--and citizenship--in our devout and diverse nation.

This book is a theory-informed, comparative and historical exploration of the notion of the public sphere within Western and Islamic traditions. It situates the emergence of the modern public sphere in a wider historical and theoretical context than usually done in conventional analyses. The work traces cross-cutting genealogies spanning conventional borders between tradition and modernity, and in particular between the Western and the Islamic world. This approach unsettles received, evolutionary views of the public sphere as an exclusive legacy of Western political cultures. The public sphere is finally reconceived as a complex platform for the modern cultivation of culturally diverse, competing, yet intersecting discourses.