A groundbreaking book about Americans searching for faith and mutual respect, The Faith Club weaves the story of three women, their three religions, and their urgent quest to understand one another.When an American Muslim woman befriends two other mothers, one Jewish and one Christian, they decide to educate their children about their respective religions. None of them guessed their regular meetings would provide life-changing answers and form bonds that would forever alter their struggles with prejudice, fear, and anger. Personal, powerful, and compelling, The Faith Club forces readers to face the tough questions about their own religions. Pioneering, timely, deeply thoughtful, and full of hope, The Faith Club's caring message will resonate with people of all faiths.

The separation of Church from Synagogue was not a one-time act, but a long-lasting, multilayered, and diversified process. The attempt to explain this process, namely the process of parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity in the years 30-313 AD, constitutes the main research subject of this publication. The aim of this study is the presentation of the dynamism of Christian-Jewish relations in the first three centuries of the existence of the Church, taking into account mainly historical and theological (but not the only) factors which influenced these relations and finally led to the creation of two separate religions. The two religions existing side by side were in many aspects connected with each other mostly because both originated from biblical Judaism.

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.

This book reconstructs Hindu-Muslim relations from a European standpoint. Drawing from the Indian context, the author explores options for Western Europe - a region grappling with the refugee crisis and populist reactions to the growth of Muslim minorities. The author shows how India can serve not only as a model but also as a warning for Europe. For example, European liberals may learn not only from the achievements of Indian secularism but also from its crisis. Based on extensive interviews with Indians from diverse backgrounds, from politicians to social activists and from the middle class to slum dwellers, the volume investigates a wide range of perspectives: Hindu and Muslim, religious and secular, moderate and militant. Relevant, engaging and accessible, this book speaks to a broad audience of concerned citizens and policy makers. Scholars of political science, sociology, modern history, cultural studies and South Asian studies will be particularly interested.

Holy sites are often at the center of intense contestation between different groups regarding a wide variety of issues, including ownership, access, usage rights, permissible religious conduct, and many others. They are often the source of intractable long-standing conflicts and extreme violence. These difficulties are exemplified by the five sites profiled in Governing the Sacred : Devils Tower National Monument (Wyoming, US), Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi (Uttar-Pradesh, India), the Western Wall (Jerusalem), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem), and the Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif (Jerusalem). Telling the fascinating stories of these high-profile contested sites, the authors develop and critically explore five different models of governing such sites: "non-interference," "separation and division," "preference," "status-quo," and "closure." Each model relies on different sets of considerations; central among them are trade-offs between religious liberty and social order. This novel typology aims to assist democratic governments in their attempt to secure public order and mutual toleration among opposed groups in contested sacred sites.

As Hans Kung said, "No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions. No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundations of the religions." Accommodation and Acceptance is a crucial work in both promoting interreligious dialogue and exploring the turbulent history of Christian faith and identity in Asia down the years. From the reaction to missions, often inextricably linked with the practice of colonialism, to the rise of religious pluralism, Ambrose Mong examines the relationships between the leading faiths of Asia up to the present day. Whether practicing pluralism or exclusivism, the history of Christianity in Asia is long and fascinating. Ambrose Mong delves into the biography of intercultural pioneers like Matteo Ricci and Timothy Richard to understand better the theology - as well as the pragmatism - behind cultural accommodation, and the necessary mutability of an eternal church.

Before they were both internationally renowned philosophers, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig were young German soldiers fighting in World War I corresponding by letter and forming the foundation of their deep intellectual friendship. Collected here, this correspondence provides an intimate portrait of their views on history, philosophy, rhetoric, and religion as well as on their writings and professors. Most centrally, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig discuss, frankly but respectfully, the differences between Judaism and Chiristianity and the reasons they have chosen their respective faiths. This edition includes a new foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer along with his original introduction, and essays by Dorothy Emmet and Alexander Altmann, who calls this correspondence "one of the most important religious documents of our age" and "the most perfect example of a human approach to the Jewish-Christian problem."

Rabbi, writer, teacher, activist, and organizer, Marc H. Tanenbaum was for more than three generations at the center of the struggle for religious understanding and human rights. As a pioneer in ecumenical dialogue, Tanenbaum left an inedible mark on many communities of faith.This rich collection of Tanenbaum's most influential writings underscores his contributions to civil and human rights, international affairs and-above all-the development of Jewish-Christian understanding and mutual respect. Special features of this book include a biographical essay and introductions to the major issues and the essays.

Racontant l'histoire d'une communaute d'eboueurs installee sur les flancs du Muqattam au Caire, ce livre raconte comment cet espace urbain marginal est devenu le coeur vibrant d'une nouvelle tendance charismatique au sein de l'Eglise copte. Telling the history of a community of garbage collectors living on the slopes of the Muqattam mountain in Cairo, the book recounts how this marginal urban space became the vibrant heart of a new charismatic trend within the Coptic church.

Global Citizens is a study of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement, which was founded in 1930 in Japan, spread rapidly after WWII, and has since developed a world-wide following. The book provides an historical overview of the importance of the development of the movement as an educational reform society, its development into a sect of Nichiren Buddhism. The book also explains the success of Soka Gakkai Buddhism with reference to continuity between Soka Gakkai teachings and the experience of people living in urban, industrial environments and Soka Gakkai's response to the surrounding social and cultural environment.

Black Zion explores the myriad ways in which African American religions have encountered Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. The collection's unifying argument is that religion is the missing piece of the cultural jigsaw puzzle, and that much of the recent turmoil in black-Jewish relations would be better understood, if not alleviated, if the religious roots of those relations were illuminated. Ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Hebrew Israelites and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Martin Luther King, Jr., the book sheds light on a little examined but vitally important dimension of black-Jewish relations in America.

Are Islam and the West on a collision course? From the Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein, the image of Islam as a militant, expansionist, and rabidly anti-American religion has gripped the minds of Western governments and media. But these perceptions, John L. Esposito writes, stem from a long history of mutual distrust, criticism, and condemnation, and are far too simplistic to help us understand one of the most important political issues of our time. In this new edition of The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Esposito places the challenge of Islam in critical perspective. Exploring the vitality of this religion as a global force and the history of its relations with the West, Esposito demonstrates the diversity of the Islamic resurgence--and the mistakes our analysts make in assuming a hostile, monolithic Islam. This third edition has been expanded to include new material on current affairs in Turkey, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Southeast Asia, as well as a discussion of international terrorism.

These dialogues began in 1993 as an outgrowth of a 1990 conference on Catholic-Jewish relations that commemorated the 25th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document encouraging dialogue between the Catholic church and non-Christian religions. This volume contains a record of the first five Nostra Aetate dialogues, and it brings together an impressive array of Jewish and Catholic scholars. The conversations here take up "the Jewishness of Jesus" (John Meier and Shaye Cohen); "the Death of Jesus" (the late Raymond Brown and Michael Cook); "Catholic-Jewish Dialogue and the New Millennium" (Ismar Schorsch and John Cardinal O'Connor); "Jerusalem in Jewish and early Christian Thought" (Robert Wilkins and Michael Fishbane); and Abraham Joshua Heschel as "prophet of social activism" (Eugene Borowitz and Daniel Berrigan). Moderators and respondents include religion journalist Peter Steinfels, Rabbi Burton Visotzky and Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel's daughter. The volume is a solid introduction to some of the most important historical work on Christian origins, Jewish-Christian relations and the historical Jesus. The discussion of contemporary issues, especially between Brown and Cook and between Heschel and Berrigan, is lively and accessible. This collection serves as a model for interreligious dialogue.

This volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. Its design is premised on two important insights. First, interreligious dialogue offers to comparative religious ethics a new, more persuasive rationale, agenda of issues, and practical orientation. Second, comparative religious ethics offers to interreligious dialogue an arsenal of critical tools and methods which will enhance the sophistication of its practical work. In this way, both theory (a dominant concern and strength of comparative religious ethics) and praxis (a dominant concern and strength of interreligious moral dialogue) are joined together in mutual effort, each contributing to the benefit of the other.The volume's contributors share this vision of collaboration, drawing explicitly from both communities of discourse in a manner that crosses disciplinary and professional boundaries to deal creatively and constructively with important methodological and global moral issue. Although theory and practice cannot easily be separated in such a collaborative project, for the purpose of clarity, the volume is divided into two main parts. The first specifically engages questions of method, theory, and the social role of the public intellectual; the second, on substantive moral themes and issues, many of which were raised at the 1993 Parliament. Taken together, the volume's essays articulate and illustrate new ways of approaching contemporary moral concerns cross-culturally yet with a rigor appropriate to our complex and pluralistic world.

The mid-seventeenth century saw both the expansion of the Baptist sect and the rise and growth of Quakerism. At first, the Quaker movement attracted some Baptist converts, but relations between the two groups soon grew hostile. Public disputes broke out and each group denounced the other in polemical tracts. Nevertheless in this book, Underwood contends that Quakers and Baptists had much in common with each other, as well as with the broader Puritan and Nonconformist tradition. By examining the Quaker/Baptist relationship in particular, Underwood seeks to understand where and why Quaker views diverged from English Protestantism in general and, in the process, to clarify early Quaker beliefs.

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians' location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India's ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia's Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavours, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly "untouchable") and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.

Focusing on the dilution of state sovereignty, this book examines how the crossing of state boundaries by religious movements leads to the formation of transnational civil society. Challenging the assertion that future conflict will be of the "clash of civilizations" variety, it looks to the micro-origins of conflicts, which the contributors argue are as likely to arise between states sharing a religion as between those divided by it and more likely to arise within rather than across state boundaries. Thus, the chapters reveal the dual potential of religious movements as sources of peace and security as well as of violent conflict.Featuring an East-West, North-South approach, the volume avoids the conventional and often ethnocentric segregation of the experience of other regions from the European and American. Contributors draw examples from a variety of regions and world religions and consider self-generated movements from "below" (such as Protestant sectarianism in Latin America or Sufi Islam in Africa) in contrast to centralized forms of organization and patterns of diffusion from above (such as state-certified religion in China). Together the chapters illustrate how religion as bearer of the politics of meaning has filled the space left by the decline of ideology, which has created a novel transnational space for world politics.

Many studies written about the Jewish-Christian relationship are primarily historical overviews that focus on the Jewish background of Christianity, the separation of Christianity from Judaism, or the medieval disputations between the two faiths. This book is one of the first studies to examine the relationship from a philosophical and theological viewpoint. Carefully drawing on Jewish classical sources, Novak argues that there is actual justification for the new relationship between Judaism and Christianity from within Jewish religious tradition. He demonstrates that this new relationship is possible between religiously committed Jews and Christians without the two major impediments to dialogue: triumphalism and relativism. One of the very few books on this topic written by a Jewish theologian who speaks specifically to modern Christian concerns, it will provide the groundwork for a more serious development of Jewish-Christian dialogue in our day.

The truth claims of Christianity appear compromised by the division of Christ’s followers into different denominations. The Great Commission (Matt. 28:16-20) calls Christians to spread the Gospel, but that goal is hindered as the church remain fractured. What, then, keeps Christians separated, retreating to their corners labeled “Catholic,” “Orthodox,” “Protestant,” and the like? Building on the great ecumenical work of Christians in generations past, Elizabeth M. Smith Woodard accounts for Christian disunity in terms of ecclesiology (how each group of Christians understands the definition of what it means––or what it looks like––to be “the Church”), episcopacy (the significance of the historic succession of bishops in relation to the authority of Church leadership and oversight), and apostolicity (what it means to claim that the Church today is the same Church Christ handed on to the apostles): in brief, Who are we? Who is in charge? And are we who we say we are? Smith-Woodard argues that the controversial issues dividing Christians today––abortion, gay marriage, the role of women, Eucharistic theology––stem from these questions of authority and identity. What would it look like, Smith-Woodard asks, if Christians did not insist on making any “others” more “like us,” but instead worked toward all of “us” becoming more and more like Christ? She answers that growing in cruciformity should serve as the basis for unity Using recent unity-achieving Anglican-Lutheran discussions as a case study, she examines the crucial intersection of ecclesiology, episcopacy, and apostolicity to argue that Christians grow in Christ’s mission and receptive heart as they continue to grow in cruciformity. Christ isthe heart of true ecumenical work, and of a truly Christian life.

This Reader brings together nearly 80 extracts from major works by Christians and Muslims that reflect their reciprocal knowledge and attitudes. It spans the period from the early 7th century, when Islam originated, to 1500. The general introduction provides a historical and geographical summary of Christian-Muslim encounters in the period and a short account of the religious, intellectual and social circumstances in which encounters took place and works were written. Topics from the Christian perspective include: condemnations of the Qur'an as a fake and Muhammad as a fraud, depictions of Islam as a sign of the final judgement, and proofs that it was a Christian heresy. On the Muslim side they include: demonstrations of the Bible as corrupt, proofs that Christian doctrines were illogical, comments on the inferior status of Christians, and accounts of Christian and Muslim scholars in collaboration together. Each of the six parts contains the following pedagogical features: -A short introduction -An introduction to each passage and author -Notes explaining terms that readers might not have previously encountered

This book reconstructs Hindu-Muslim relations from a European standpoint. Drawing from the Indian context, the author explores options for Western Europe - a region grappling with the refugee crisis and populist reactions to the growth of Muslim minorities. The author shows how India can serve not only as a model but also as a warning for Europe. For example, European liberals may learn not only from the achievements of Indian secularism but also from its crisis. Based on extensive interviews with Indians from diverse backgrounds, from politicians to social activists and from the middle class to slum dwellers, the volume investigates a wide range of perspectives: Hindu and Muslim, religious and secular, moderate and militant. Relevant, engaging and accessible, this book speaks to a broad audience of concerned citizens and policy makers. Scholars of political science, sociology, modern history, cultural studies and South Asian studies will be particularly interested.

Nikos Nissiotis (1924-1986) was one of the foremost and formative intellectuals of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. As professor of philosophy and psychology of religion at the University of Athens, director of the Bossey Institute, and Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he interpreted the Orthodox spiritual tradition for a Western audience and highlighted the role of Christian thought in the modern world. This collection of his most fundamental and significant articles - some of which have been largely inaccessible until now - includes an introduction by the editors to the ecumenical and theological legacy of this exceptional thinker.

"Noone raises provocative questions about Christianity more kindly than PhilipGulley. " --Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us"Everyserious Christian ought to read this book, ponder it, wrestlewith it, but above all, be grateful for its presence in today's urgentconversation about what we are and are becoming as a people of God." --Phyllis Tickle, author of The GreatEmergenceRenownedQuaker minister Philip Gulley, bestselling author of If the Church WereChristian, delivers a practical, insightful guide to developing aliving, flexible, personal Christianity--a faith that allows you to confront theprofound challenges facing every believer in today's difficult world.

This commemorative volume discusses aspects of the life and work of the internationally famous scholar Professor W. Montgomery Watt (1909-2006). His writings on Islam and on Muslim-Christian relations gained him great prestige and respect, not only in the West but also - and perhaps more significantly - right across the Muslim world. The book includes contributions by Professor Carole Hillenbrand, Professor Fred Donner, Bishop Richard Holloway and the late Professor David Kerr, as well as substantial excerpts from Professor Watt's unpublished writings, copies of which he entrusted to Professor Hillenbrand.