This book is the first to critically analyze Buddhist-Muslim relations in Theravada Buddhist majority states in South and Southeast Asia. Asia is home to the largest population of Buddhists and Muslims. In recent years, this interfaith communal living has incurred conflicts, such as the ethnic-religious conflicts in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Experts from around the world collaborate to provide a comprehensive look into religious pluralism and religious violence. The book is divided into two sections. The first section provides historical background to the three countries with the largest Buddhist-Muslim relations. The second section has chapters that focus on specific encounters between Buddhists and Muslims, which includes anti-Buddhist sentiments in Bangladesh, the role of gender in Muslim-Buddhist relations and the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiments in Myanmar. By exploring historical fluctuations over time-paying particular attention to how state-formations condition Muslim-Buddhist entanglements-the book shows the processual and relational aspects of religious identity constructions and Buddhist-Muslim interactions in Theravada Buddhist majority states.

In this interfaith book Lucinda Mosher investigates different understandings of destiny, loss, death, and remembrance in America's many religions. Using stories and interviews with a variety of religious adherents and health professionals, the book wrestles with questions such as: how can our religion guide us in making decisions about certain kinds of medical treatment options? What religion-related issues would it be helpful for a healthcare provider to know? How do different religious traditions help manage our grief? In a globalized society religious traditions sit alongside each other as never before, and the need for religious literacy and multifaith chaplaincy is increasingly recognized. By looking at multireligious America, this book provides an essential exploration of different attitudes to death, helping members of all faith communities to become more literate with each other's religious traditions.

Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.

One of the critical issues in interreligious relations today is the connection, both actual and perceived, between sacred sources and the justification of violent acts as divinely mandated. "Fighting Words" makes solid text-based scholarship accessible to the general public, beginning with the premise that a balanced approach to religious pluralism in our world must build on a measured, well-informed response to the increasingly publicized and sensationalized association of terrorism and large-scale violence with religion.
In his introduction, Renard provides background on the major scriptures of seven religious traditions--Jewish, Christian (including both the Old and New Testaments), Islamic, Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Sikh. Eight chapters then explore the interpretation of select facets of these scriptures, focusing on those texts so often claimed, both historically and more recently, as inspiration and justification for every kind of violence, from individual assassination to mass murder. With its nuanced consideration of a complex topic, this book is not merely about the religious sanctioning of violence but also about diverse ways of reading sacred textual sources.

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.

Paradise has been widely perceived as somewhere on ocean islands or in distant mountains where people come together to set up tightly-knit societies so they can live, work and worship in harmony and peace. For the first-time ever, in this widely-researched work that bridges the utopian ideas and visions of East and West, Ambrose Mong explores the writings of influential thinkers from ancient China to Renaissance Europe and today, including Thomas More, Teilhard de Chardin, Confucius and Mo Tzu, and even twentieth century political reformist Kang Youwei.

Egypt's lack of a common national identity is the basis for much of its internal conflict--Coptic Christians have been particularly affected. Once major contributors to Christian civilisation, their influence ended with the 5th century Council of Chalcedon and they endured persecution. With the 7th century Arabization of Egypt, Copts were given dhimma or "protected persons" status. The 1919 revolution granted them greater political participation but the 1952 revolution ended liberal democracy and established a military regime that championed Arab identity. Secular Egyptians rebelled against the Mubarak regime in 2011, yet his successor was the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first Islamist president. In yet another fight over national identity, secular factions removed Morsi in 2013--the Copts suffered the brunt of violence.

In this controversial study, Aaron W. Hughes breaks with received opinion, which imagines two distinct religions, Judaism and Islam, interacting in the centuries immediately following the death of Muhammad in the early seventh century. Tradition describes these relations using tropes such as that of "symbiosis." Hughes instead argues that various porous groups-neither fully Muslim nor Jewish-exploited a shared terminology to make sense of their social worlds in response to the rapid process of Islamicization. What emerged as normative rabbinic Judaism on the one hand, and Sunni and Shi'a Islam on the other were ultimately responses to such marginal groups. The so-called "Golden Age" in places such as Muslim Spain and North Africa continued to see the articulation of this "Islamic" Judaism in the writings of luminaries such as Bahya ibn Paquda, Abraham ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, and Moses Maimonides. Drawing on social theory, comparative religion, and primary texts, Hughes presents a compelling case for rewriting our understanding of Jews and Muslims in their earliest centuries of interaction. Not content to remain solely in the past, he examines the continued interaction of Muslims and Jews, now reimagined as Palestinians and Israelis, into the present.

About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway, which connects the distant rural shrine with urban Pakistan. Now, an increasingly confident minority Hindu community has claimed Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. In Hinglaj Devi, Jurgen Schaflechner studies literary sources in Hindi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu alongside extensive ethnographical research at the shrine, examining the political and cultural influences at work at the temple and tracking the remote desert shrine's rapid ascent to its current status as the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. Schaflechner introduces the unique character of this place of pilgrimage and shows its modern importance not only for Hindus, but also for Muslims and Sindhi nationalists. Ultimately, this is an investigation of the Pakistani Hindu community's beliefs and practices at their largest place of worship in the Islamic Republic today-a topic of increasing importance to Pakistan's contemporary society.

As Christians, we are called to seek the unity of the one body of Christ. But when it comes to the sacraments, the church has often been-and remains-divided. What are we to do? Can we still gather together at the same table? Based on the lectures from the 2017 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the reflections of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians, who jointly consider what it means to proclaim the unity of the body of Christ in light of the sacraments. Without avoiding or downplaying the genuine theological and sacramental differences that exist between Christian traditions, what emerges is a thoughtful consideration of what it means to live with the difficult, elusive command to be one as the Father and the Son are one.

The term 'inter-faith' is a recent innovation in English that has gained significant traction in the discussion of religious diversity. This volume argues that the concept of faiths in the plural is deeply problematic for Christian theology and proposes a Hegelian alternative to the conventional bureaucratic notion of inter-faith dialogue. Hegel pioneered the systematic study of comparative religion. In line with Hegelian principle, Andrew Shanks identifies faith as an inflection of the will towards perfect truth-as-openness. In relation to other religious traditions, this must involve the practice of a maximum xenophilia, or love for the unfamiliar, understood as a core Christian virtue. Shanks's neo-Hegelian theory recognises the potential for God's work in all religious traditions, which may be seen as divine experiments with human nature. This timely book discusses a wide range of interreligious encounters and will be an essential resource for studies in comparative theology and philosophy of religion.

Although the demographics of World Christianity demonstrate a population shift to the Global South, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the preponderance of biblical scholarship continues to be dominated by Western scholars in pursuit of their contextual questions that are influenced by an Enlightenment-oriented worldview. Unfortunately, nascent methodologies used to bridge this chasm often continue to marginalize indigenous voices. In contradistinction, Beth E. Elness-Hanson's research challenges biblical scholars to engage stronger methods for dialogue with global voices, as well as encourages Majority World scholars to share their perspectives with the West. Elness-Hanson's fundamental question is: How do we more fully understand the "generational curses" in the Pentateuch? The phrase, "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation," appears four times in the Pentateuch: Exod 20:4-6; Exod 34:6-7; Num 14:18; and Deut 5:8-10. While generational curses remain prevalent within the Maasai worldview in East Africa, an Enlightenment-influenced worldview diminishes curses as a phenomenon. However, fuller understandings develop as we listen and learn from each other. This research develops a theoretical framework from Hans-Georg Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" and applies it through Ellen Herda's anthropological protocol of "participatory inquiry." The resulting dialogue with Maasai theologians in Tanzania, builds bridges of understanding across cultures. Elness-Hanson's intercultural analysis of American and Maasai interpretations of the Pentateuchal texts on the generational curses demonstrates that intercultural dialogues increase understandings, which otherwise are limited by one worldview.

Taking the theme of learning as central to the responsible practice of interfaith dialogue, Michael Barnes discusses a Christian spirituality which builds on virtues of hospitality and the welcoming of other traditions, whilst maintaining the importance of difference and particularity in the search for meaning. Each chapter explores how faith grows as a person crosses a threshold into another religious world and learns sensitivity to echoes of the known in the unknown. Encounters with the religious other, refracted through texts, conversations, artefacts and places, are used to illustrate the ancient Patristic theme of 'seeds of the Word'. Cumulatively they show that faith which learns how to engage imaginatively with another religious world constantly returns to the 'home' tradition, reinvigorated in its appreciation of the other. This book contributes to current comparative theology studies, using a theological approach to interreligious studies complementary to one based on the experience of interpersonal relations.

The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination is a pioneering multidisciplinary examination of Jewish perspectives on Paul of Tarsus. Here, the views of individual Jewish theologians, religious leaders, and biblical scholars of the last 150 years, together with artistic, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical approaches, are set alongside popular cultural attitudes. Few Jews, historically speaking, have engaged with the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles. The modern period has witnessed a burgeoning interest in this topic, however, with treatments reflecting profound concerns about the nature of Jewish authenticity and the developing intercourse between Jews and Christians. In exploring these issues, Jewish commentators have presented Paul in a number of apparently contradictory ways. Among other things, he is both a bridge and a barrier to interfaith harmony; both the founder of Christianity and a convert to it; both an anti-Jewish apostate and a fellow traveler on the path to Jewish self-understanding; and both the chief architect of the religious foundations of Western thought and its destroyer. The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination represents an important contribution to Jewish cultural studies and to the study of Jewish-Christian relations.

Originally published in 1988, this book offers an important insight into the so-called 'martyrdom movement' that occurred in Cordoba in the 850s. It includes a biographical treatment of the ninth-century Cordoban priest Eulogius, who witnessed and recorded the martyrdoms of over forty Christians at the hands of Muslim authorities. Eulogius' hagiographical task was complicated by the fact that many of the Christians in Cordoba at the time resented the provocative actions of the martyrs that led to their executions, claiming that their public denunciations of Islam were inappropriate given the relative tolerance of the emir. This book will be of value to scholars and others with an interest in the history of Muslim Spain, the history of Muslim-Christian interaction, and historical ideas of sanctity.

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.

This valuable book is the first to bring together theory and policy with analysis and expertise on practices in key areas of the public realm to explore what religious literacy is, why it is needed and what might be done about it. It makes the case for a public realm which is well equipped to engage with the plurality and pervasiveness of religion and belief, whatever the individual's own stance. It is aimed at academics, policy-makers and practitioners interested in the policy and practice implications of the continuing presence of religion and belief in the public sphere.

This volume engages with the work of E. Douglas Lewis, who has made major contributions to the understanding of Eastern Indonesia, ethnography, culture, and religion, as well as a neurobiologically informed anthropology. Lewis' work on the Ata Tana 'Ai (People of the Forest) of Flores has long been regarded as a seminal work on culture and society in Eastern Indonesia. His 'precedence theory' became highly influential among anthropologists in their interpretations of other social groups in the region. In this volume, however, a group of scholars influenced by his work undertake diverse and thought-provoking excursions from Lewis' work, shedding light on his insights on subjects ranging from Eastern Indonesian ethnography, to theorizing culture change, to development, and to the nascent field of 'neuroanthropology'. Of particular note, this book also features an extended contribution by Lewis that is, as Professor James J. Fox notes in this book's foreword, 'the kind of serious contemplation of an intellectual trajectory that every senior anthropologist should be urged to write'.

"Flawless . . . [Makdisi] reminds us of the critical declarations of secularism which existed in the history of the Middle East."-Robert Fisk, The Independent Today's headlines paint the Middle East as a collection of war-torn countries and extremist groups consumed by sectarian rage. Ussama Makdisi's Age of Coexistence reveals a hidden and hopeful story that counters this cliched portrayal. It shows how a region rich with ethnic and religious diversity created a modern culture of coexistence amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism, and the emergence of nationalism. Moving from the nineteenth century to the present, this groundbreaking book explores, without denial or equivocation, the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Arab world. Rather than judging the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, Age of Coexistence describes the forging of a complex system of coexistence, what Makdisi calls the "ecumenical frame." He argues that new forms of antisectarian politics, and some of the most important examples of Muslim-Christian political collaboration, crystallized to make and define the modern Arab world. Despite massive challenges and setbacks, and despite the persistence of colonialism and authoritarianism, this framework for coexistence has endured for nearly a century. It is a reminder that religious diversity does not automatically lead to sectarianism. Instead, as Makdisi demonstrates, people of different faiths, but not necessarily of different political outlooks, have consistently tried to build modern societies that transcend religious and sectarian differences.

This book guides the reader to the emerging Ecozoic Era when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. Indeed, this book calls for an Ecozoic spirituality that is timely and much needed. It also illustrates an important direction for theology and spirituality and for deep ecumenism that is yet to be fully realized and opens more doors for such dialogue. By giving special attention to the integral relationship among God, the cosmos, and humanity, the works of Thomas Berry (1914-2009, USA) and Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073, China) provide insights that speak to the current ecological crisis, a cosmological context for developing an Ecozoic spirituality, while helping to advance clear values and ethical parameters that lead to a more authentic human presence on Earth.

A. Lukyn Williams (1853 1943) presents here a wide range of examples of Christian apologetic writings about Judaism. Taking material from the earliest years of the Christian Church until the Renaissance, the book investigates sources with Syriac, Greek, Spanish, and Latin origins. It includes observations on lost or possible books such as the first 'Book of Testimonies' posited by J. Rendel Harris (with whom Williams did not fully agree) which pre-dated the Biblical Gospels; incomplete early treatises; and scriptural extracts. Concerned more with historical detail than with exegesis, Williams' study provides extensive scholarly commentaries on all the texts included and covers possible dates of origin, sources, intended audience, and biographical information about the authors. First published in 1935 with the aim of offering source material in an area often neglected by scholars, the book remains a useful resource for students and scholars of Christian Jewish relations.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492. Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda. Examining a wide range of source material including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced reading of the ways interfaith couplings were perceived, tolerated, or feared, depending upon the precise political and social contexts in which they occurred. Religious boundaries in the Peninsula were complex and actively policed, often shaped by an overriding fear of excessive social interaction or assimilation of the three faiths that coexisted within the region. Barton traces the protective cultural, legal, and mental boundaries that the rival faiths of Iberia erected, and the processes by which women, as legitimate wives or slave concubines, physically traversed those borders. Through a close examination of the realities and the imagination of interfaith relations, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines highlights the extent to which sex, power, and identity were closely bound up with one another.

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.

Egypt's Christians, the Copts, are the largest Christian community in the Middle East. While they have always been considered an integral component of the Egyptian nation, their precise status within Egyptian politics and society has been subject to ongoing debates from the Twentieth Century to present day. Part of the legacy of the Mubarak era (1980-2011) in Egypt is the unsettled state of Muslim-Christian relations and the increasing volatility of sectarian tensions, which also overshadowed the first years of the post-Mubarak period. The Coptic Question in the Mubarak Era delves into the discourses that dominated public debates and the political agenda-setting during the Mubarak era, explaining why politicians and the public in Egypt have had such enormous difficulties in recognizing the real roots of sectarian strife. This "Coptic question" is a complex set of issues, ranging from the petty struggles of daily Egyptian life in a bi-religious society to intricate legal and constitutional questions (family law, conversion, and church-building), to the issue of the political participation of the Coptic minority. Through these subjects, the book explores a larger debate about Egyptian national identity. Paying special attention paid to the neglected diversity of voices within the Coptic community, Sebastian Elsasser peels back the historical layers to provide a comprehensive analysis of the historic, political, and social dynamics of Egypt's Coptic Christians during Hosni Mubarak's rule.

Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

Yale University religion scholar Miroslav Volf--widely known for the much-publicized course on faith and globalization he coteaches with Tony Blair--places this question at the root of the twenty-first century's most sensitive, and critical, geopolitical concerns. Volf reveals how the prevalent belief that these traditions worship different gods is directly linked to increased hostility and violence around the globe. Theological wars fuel real wars.