Breaking new ground in Christian - Jewish dialogue Deep Calls to Deep uses a new paradigm, one which is marked by "experiential theology": a theology that addresses and emerges out of day to day lived experience of practising Christians and Jews. The product of a unique four year dialogue process - designed, orchestrated and led by Rabbi Tony Bayfield - the book brings together a diverse array of important Christian and Jewish scholars to engage in conversation. Themes discussed include Modern Western culture; how Christians and Jews should live in a modern Western democracy; how Christians and Jews cope with their past; the legacy of our shared Scriptures; the question of religious absolutism; the meaning of respect; Christian particularism; and the land of Israel

Often Christian interfaith engagement has been viewed through the lense of theology of religions where the primary questions are often about the salvific destiny of people of other faiths. 'Faith, Hope and Love' offers an alternative approach asking how do Christian interfaith practitioners live out their discipleship in a multi-faith world? And what, theologically, is being expressed in their activity? Demonstrating a new and innovative approach to interfaith engagement, this book argues for theological reflection on the multi faith reality of our society to focus on the practice of Christian interfaith engagement, drawing on the methodology of practical theology to explore the impact of encounter on Christian self-understanding. It suggests that other faith traditions are no longer a theological problem to be solved or people to be `saved' but a potential `means of grace' in which the Christian disciple learns more about God and grows in their relationship with Christ. Part 1 Towards a Practical Theology of Interfaith Engagement 1. Faith, Hope and Love - Pedagogy for Interfaith Engagement 2. Beyond New Contestations - A Practical Theological Challenge to Particularists and Pluralists 3. Interfaith Engagement, Non-Violence and the Way of Salvation Part 2 Challenging Islamophobia, Affirming Multiculturalism 4. Challenging Islamophobia - A Practical Theological Reflection 5. Rejoicing in the Truth - A Practical Theological Affirmation of Multiculturalism

Today the world is confronted with many religious wars and the migrations of millions of persons due to these conflicts. There is a need for informed dialog as to the roots of the conflicts and ways of addressing these in ways that speak to peoples' minds and hearts. This is what this book attempts to do from the viewpoint of major religious and ethical thinkers. The book relies on Bernard Lonergan's foundational method to address problems systematically with a view to achieve breakthroughs in our openness to one another. The book appeals to the teachings of the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, relying on the mystical and insights of these religious founders as well as those of dozens of their followers so as to find commonalities that can build bridges of mercy. A global secularity ethics plays a leading role in this book's bridging efforts.

Today the world is confronted with many religious wars and the migrations of millions of persons due to these conflicts. There is a need for informed dialog as to the roots of the conflicts and ways of addressing these in ways that speak to peoples' minds and hearts. This is what this book attempts to do from the viewpoint of major religious and ethical thinkers. The book relies on Bernard Lonergan's foundational method to address problems systematically with a view to achieve breakthroughs in our openness to one another. The book appeals to the teachings of the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, relying on the mystical and insights of these religious founders as well as those of dozens of their followers so as to find commonalities that can build bridges of mercy. A global secularity ethics plays a leading role in this book's bridging efforts.

Profound reflection on lament and hope arising out of Africa's immense suffering. There is no more urgent theological task than to provide an account of hope in Africa, given its endless cycles of violence, war, poverty, and displacement. So claims Emmanuel Katongole, a recognised, innovative theological voice from Africa. In the midst of suffering, Katongole says, hope takes the form of "arguing" and "wrestling" with God. Such lament is not merely a cry of pain-it is a way of mourning, protesting, and appealing to God. As he unpacks the rich theological and social dimensions of the practice of lament in Africa, Katongole tells the stories of courageous Christian activists working for change in East Africa and invites readers to enter into lament along with them.

The essays collected here, prepared by a think tank of the Elijah Interfaith Academy, explore the challenges associated with sharing wisdom-learning, teachings, messages for good living-between members of different faith traditions. In a globalized age, when food, music, and dress are shared freely, how should religions go about sharing their wisdom? The essays, representing six faith traditions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist), explore what wisdom means in each of these traditions, why it should be shared-internally and externally-and how it should be shared. A primary concern is the form of appropriate sharing, so that the wisdom of the specific tradition maintains its integrity in the process of sharing. Authors reflect on specific wisdoms their tradition has or should share, as well as what it has to receive from other faiths. Special emphasis is placed on the themes of love and forgiveness and how these illustrate the principles of common sharing. Love and humility emerge as strong motivators for sharing wisdom and for doing so in a way that respects the tradition from which the wisdom comes as well as the recipient. This book offers a theory that can enrich ongoing encounters between members of faith traditions by suggesting a tradition-based practice of sharing the wisdom of traditions, while preserving the integrity of the teaching and respecting the identity of the one with whom wisdom is shared.

This volume sheds light on the transformed post-Holocaust relationship between Catholics and Jews. Once implacable theological foes, the two traditions have travelled a great distance in coming to view the other with respect and dignity. Responding to the horrors of Auschwitz, the Catholic Church has undergone a "reckoning of the soul," beginning with its landmark document Nostra Aetate and embraced a positive theology of Judaism including the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant. Jews have responded to this unprecedented outreach, especially in the document Dabru Emet. Together, these two Abrahamic traditions have begun seeking a repair of the world. The road has been rocky and certainly obstacles remain. Nevertheless, authentic interfaith dialogue remains a new and promising development in the search for a peace.

The papers in this volume form a record of the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions, which was one of the largest interfaith gatherings ever held. Representatives from minority, ethnic and tribal religions took the podium as equals alongside representatives from the world's largest religious traditions. This volume contains major addresses and reflections of this parliament, set in context by an introduction and conclusion by the editors.

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.

How does the Qur'an depict the religious Other? Historically, this question has provoked extensive debate among Islamic scholars about the identity, nature, and status of such religious Others. Today, this debate assumes great importance because of the widening experience of religious plurality, which prompts inquiry into convergences and divergences in belief and practice as well as controversy over the appropriate forms of interaction among different religions. The persistence of religious violence also gives rise to difficult questions about the relationship between the depiction of religious Others, and intolerance and oppression. Scholars have traditionally accounted for the coexistence of religious similarity and difference by resorting either to models that depict religions as isolated entities or models that arrange religions in a static, evaluative hierarchy. In response to the limitations of this discourse, Jerusha Tanner Lamptey constructs an alternative conceptual and hermeneutical approach that draws insights from the work of Muslim women interpreters of the Qur'an, feminist theology, and semantic analysis. She employs this approach to reevaluate, reinterpret, and reenvision the Qur'anic discourse on religious difference. Through a close reading of the Qur'anic text, she distinguishes between two forms of religious difference: hierarchical and lateral. She goes on to explore the complex relationality that exists among Qur'anic concepts of hierarchical religious difference and to articulate a new, integrated model of religious pluralism. Using an interdisciplinary approach to confront existing Islamic scholarship, Lamptey's Never Wholly Other offers a new genre of theology.

Founded by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus in 1994, Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) has fostered a fruitful conversation on the meaning of the gospel in today's world. Over the course of twenty years, ECT has issued nine statements addressing contemporary topics. This one-volume guide, the first collection of the ECT statements, explores the key accomplishments of this groundbreaking, ongoing dialogue. Introductions and notes provide context and discuss history and future prospects. The book also includes prefaces by J. I. Packer and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a foreword by George Weigel, and an epilogue by R. R. Reno and Kevin J. Vanhoozer.

English summary: In this work, Christian Ronning shows how Latin panegyric was part of an elaborate system of signs and rituals to express complex relationships of power and subjection in Roman society. He studies how the interpretative power of the well-trained rhetorician was used to smooth administrative measures and to adapt imperial orders to the structures and demands of an aristocratic elite which ruled the cities of the Imperium Romanum. As a highly specialized code, panegyric was a language of social power that should not be misunderstood as propaganda but rather seen as a means of maintaining the fiction of a tight relationship between emperor and viri boni even in times of growing intransparency of rulership and government. German description: Welche Funktion erfullte die Herrscherpanegyrik der romischen Kaiserzeit? Handelte es sich hierbei um propagandistische Auftragswerke zur Glorifizierung des Machthabers oder um Instrumente einer raffinierten Lenkung des Monarchen unter dem Deckmantel des Lobpreises? Anhand der dichten Analyse exemplarischer Reden aus der Zeit Trajans (Plinius, Panegyricus) und Konstantins (Pan. Lat. 5 u. 12) arbeitet Christian Ronning die Rahmenbedingungen dieser Festreden, die gesellschaftliche und politische Stellung der Redner sowie die individuelle Zielsetzung heraus und stellt sie in ihren historischen Kontext. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt dabei auf der Verschrankung der Panegyrik mit ihrem zeremoniellen Umfeld, auf den Ritualen, die die Rede umgeben und die in sie selbst Eingang gefunden haben. Festreden erscheinen dabei als ein konstitutives Element der Austauschbeziehungen zwischen Herrscher, Stadten und Funktionseliten im Romischen Reich. Sie spiegeln die jeweils aktuellen Machtlagerungen wider und zeugen von der Aneignung und spezifischen Deutung der herrscherlichen Rituale durch die Beteiligten. Die kaiserzeitliche Panegyrik ist damit keine Rhetorik der propagandistischen Beeinflussung oder Verschleierung, sondern ein gemeinsamer Code, dessen sich Herrscher und Untertanen bedienen, um sich ihres wechselseitigen Verhaltnisses zu versichern - und dieses gegenuber den Anspruchen und Interessen Dritter abzugrenzen. Zugleich dient die Panegyrik der Speicherung, Aktualisierung und Re-Interpretation vergangener Ritualhandlungen; sie ist in diesem Sinne von einer auf Zeremonien basierten Gesellschaft nicht zu trennen.

The fascinating story of Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) changing himself while trying to change the religious faith of the Chinese has been told many times. As a Jesuit, Ricci pushed Christian evangelism by claiming a theistic affinity with Confucianism and by presenting himself as a defender of Confucian orthodoxy from Buddhism. Already in his day, Ricci's unusual cultural adaptation was controversial; not surprisingly, scholarly studies have hitherto focused almost exclusively on variations of this controversy. Reacting mostly to Ricci's account of events, this line of research has provided insight, but much more can be learned about the early-modern cross-cultural encounter of Europe and China if the perspective is broadened to include his intricate and intriguing relationships with his Chinese friends. With his distinctively different religiosity, personal charisma, and knowledge of European science and mathematics, Ricci impressed the social and cultural elite of late Ming China, many of whom befriended him and some of whom became Christian converts. However, between him and his Chinese friends there were always disagreements, resulting sometimes from a lack of understanding or misunderstanding, and sometimes even when they apparently understood each other perfectly. Followed closely as the investigative thread of this book, the many kinds of disagreement cast an unusual light on an otherwise long familiar subject and are instructive for the at times tense and even hostile, but in reality always mutually energizing relationship of both competition and complement between China and the West in the early twenty-first century.

This book by Gregg Ten Elshof explores ways of using resources from the Confucian wisdom tradition to inform Christian living. Neither highlighting nor diminishing the differences between Confucianism and Christianity, Ten Elshof reflects on perennial human questions with the teachings of both Jesus and Confucius in mind. In examining such subjects as family, learning, and ethics, Ten Elshof sets the typical Western worldview against the Confucian worldview and considers how each of them lines up with the teachings of Jesus. Ten Elshof points to much that is deep and helpful in the Confucian tradition, and he shows how reflection on the teachings of Confucius can inspire a deeper and richer understanding of what it really means to live the Jesus way.

By all measures, the late twentieth century was a time of dramatic decline for the Islamic world, the Ummah, particularly its Arab heartland. Sober Muslim voices regularly describe their current state as the worst in the 1,400-year history of Islam. Yet, precisely at this time of unprecedented material vulnerability, Islam has emerged as a civilizational force strong enough to challenge the imposition of Western, particularly American, homogenizing power on Muslim peoples. This is the central paradox of Islam today: at a time of such unprecedented weakness in one sense, how has the Islamic Awakening, a broad and diverse movement of contemporary Islamic renewal, emerged as such a resilient and powerful transnational force and what implications does it have for the West? In One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds Raymond W. Baker addresses this question. Two things are clear, Baker argues: Islam's unexpected strength in recent decades does not originate from official political, economic, or religious institutions, nor can it be explained by focusing exclusively on the often-criminal assertions of violent, marginal groups. While extremists monopolize the international press and the scholarly journals, those who live and work in the Islamic world know that the vast majority of Muslims reject their reckless calls to violence and look elsewhere for guidance. Baker shows that extremists draw their energy and support not from contributions to the reinterpretation and revival of Islamic beliefs and practices, but from the hatreds engendered by misguided Western policies in Islamic lands. His persuasive analysis of the Islamic world identifies centrists as the revitalizing force of Islam, saying that they are responsible for constructing a modern, cohesive Islamic identity that is a force to be reckoned with.

While existing scholarship informs us about early contact between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the nature of that interaction, and how it developed over time, is still often misunderstood. Robert Gregg emphasizes that there was both mutual curiosity, since all three religions had ancestral traditions and a commanding God in common, and also wary competitiveness, as each group was compelled to sharpen its identity against the other two. Faced with the overlap of many scriptural stories, they were eager to defend the claim that they alone were God's preferred people. In Shared Stories, Rival Tellings, Gregg performs a comparative investigation of how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters-both writers and artists-developed their distinctive and exclusionary understandings of narratives common to their three Holy Books: Cain and Abel, Sara and Hagar, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, Jonah and the Whale, and Mary the Mother of Jesus. Exposed in the process are the major issues under contention and the social-intellectual forces that contributed to spirited, creative, and sometimes combative exchanges between Muslims, Christians and Jews. In illuminating these historical moments, and their implications for contemporary relations between these three religions, Gregg argues that scripture interpreters played an often underappreciated role in each religion's individual development of thought, spirituality, and worship, and in the three religions' debates with one another-and the cultural results of those debates.

This volume sheds light on the transformed post-Holocaust relationship between Catholics and Jews. Once implacable theological foes, the two traditions have travelled a great distance in coming to view the other with respect and dignity. Responding to the horrors of Auschwitz, the Catholic Church has undergone a "reckoning of the soul," beginning with its landmark document Nostra Aetate and embraced a positive theology of Judaism including the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant. Jews have responded to this unprecedented outreach, especially in the document Dabru Emet. Together, these two Abrahamic traditions have begun seeking a repair of the world. The road has been rocky and certainly obstacles remain. Nevertheless, authentic interfaith dialogue remains a new and promising development in the search for a peace.

The question of Christian-Muslim relations is one of enduring importance in the twenty-first century. While there exists a broad range of helpful overviews on the question, these introductory texts often fail to provide readers with the depth that a thorough treatment of the primary sources and their authors would provide. In this important new project, Charles Tieszen provides a collection of primary theological sources devoted to the formational period of Christian-Muslim relations. It provides brief introductions to authors and their texts along with representative selections in English translation. The collection is arranged according to the key theological themes that emerge as Christians and Muslims encounter one another in this era. The result is a resource that offers students a far better grasp of the texts early Christians and Muslims wrote about each other and a better understanding of the important theological themes that are pertinent to Christian-Muslim dialogue today.

The Community of Believers offers the proceedings of the 2013 Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars under the stewardship of Georgetown University. These essays consider such themes as the Church as mystical body of Christ versus the Church as proclamation; the roots and uses of the term ummah and its development over time; Christian desires for communion, experiences of division, and approaches to unity; the history of Muslim disunity; twentieth-century Christian ecclesiology and its responses to a post-Christendom and post-Christian world; and the Arab Spring as a case study for contemplating accommodationism, conservatism, reformism, and fundamentalism as Muslim strategies to address the pressures of modernism. The volume also includes texts and commentaries used in the seminar's discussions of each topic and a concluding essay summarizing the tone, content, and style of participant exchanges throughout the seminar.

The subject of Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East and indeed in the West attracts much academic and media attention. Nowhere is this more the case than in Egypt, which has the largest Christian community in the Middle East, estimated at 6-10 per cent of the national population. Henrik Lindberg Hansen analyzes this relationship, offering an examination of the nature and role of religious dialogue in Egyptian society and politics. Analysing the three main religious organizations and institutions in Egypt (namely the Azhar University, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic Orthodox Church) as well as a range of smaller dialogue initiatives (such as those of CEOSS, the Anglican and Catholic Churches and youth organisations), Hansen argues that religious dialogue involves a close examination of societal relations, and how these are understood and approached. The books includes analysis of the occasions of violence against and dialogue initiatives involving Christian communities in 2011 and the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, and thus provides a wide-ranging exploration of the importance of religion in Egyptian society and everyday encounters with a religious other. The book is consequently vital for practitioners as well as researchers dealing with religious minorities in the Middle East and interfaith dialogue in a wider context.