El Filioque es una de las cuestiones mas largas y complejas de la historia del dogma cristiano. Se cuenta todavia entre las causas de la division entre catolicos y ortodoxos. En 1995, a peticion de Juan Pablo II, el Pontificio Consejo para la promocion de la Unidad de los Cristianos publico un breve texto que expresa la comprension catolica del problema. Entre sus diversas implicaciones, el documento, conocido como Clarificacion romana, se centra en los aspectos dogmaticos, que expone a partir de una amplia base de referencias patristicas. El presente estudio analiza la Clarificacion en dos partes. La primera presenta los precedentes historicos y magisteriales del texto, su genesis y sus fuentes, y ofrece una sintesis de las reacciones ecumenicas que siguieron a su publicacion. Como via para un entendimiento, la segunda parte del texto propone una consideracion detenida de las fuentes patristicas, orientales y occidentales. En ella se presentan los principales pasajes sobre el origen del Espiritu Santo y su relacion con el Hijo, contextualizados en el pensamiento trinitario de cada Padre. En funcion de el se valora el uso que ha realizado la Clarificacion de sus fuentes.

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.

Relations between Christians and Jews over the past two thousand years have been characterised to a great extent by mutual distrust and by Christian discrimination and violence against Jews. In recent decades, however, a new spirit of dialogue has been emerging, beginning with an awakening among Christians of the Jewish origins of Christianity, and encouraging scholars of both traditions to work together. An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations sheds fresh light on this ongoing interfaith encounter, exploring key writings and themes in Jewish-Christian history, from the Jewish context of the New Testament to major events of modern times, including the rise of ecumenism, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel. This accessible theological and historical study also touches on numerous related areas such as Jewish and interfaith studies, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, international relations and the political sciences.

It is generally accepted that the Middle East witnessed the ancient rise of monotheism and its dissemination. The three faiths predominantly concerned - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have retained their separateness and have been in different degrees torn asunder by schisms; but less well known has been the degree of co-operation between the three faiths and their multifarious sects, throughout history. First published in 1969, Religion in the Middle East aims to give a factual account of these three religions and their sects, in concord and conflict, from an historical perspective. The focus was on the significance of Islam, considered to be the dominant religion of the Middle East since the seventh century. Experts from many parts of the world contributed individual chapters, and the whole work was co-ordinated by a team of leading scholars, making it an erudite study that will be of interest to anyone interested in the historical impact of Islam in the Middle East.

Shared ritual practices, multi-faith celebrations, and interreligious prayers are becoming increasingly common in the USA and Europe as more people experience religious diversity first hand. While ritual participation can be seen as a powerful expression of interreligious solidarity, it also carries with it challenges of a particularly sensitive nature. Though celebrating and worshiping together can enhance interreligious relations, cross-riting may also lead some believers to question whether it is appropriate to engage in the rituals of another faith community. Some believers may consider cross-ritual participation as inappropriate transgressive behaviour. Bringing together leading international contributors and voices from a number of religious traditions, Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue delves into the complexities and intricacies of the phenomenon. They ask: what are the promises and perils of celebrating and praying together? What are the limits of ritual participation? How can we make sense of feelings of discomfort when entering the sacred space of another faith community? The first book to focus on the lived dimensions of interreligious dialogue through ritual participation rather than textual or doctrinal issues, this innovative volume opens an entirely new perspective.

Der vorliegende Band der Reihe New German-American Studies eroertert anhand der Lebensgeschichte des geburtigen Westfalen August Rauschenbusch und unter Anwendung gangiger Methoden der deutsch-amerikanischen und transatlantischen Geschichtsschreibung das Schicksal eines deutschen Amerikaauswanderers im 19. Jahrhundert. August Rauschenbusch migrierte 1846 als protestantischer Missionar nach Missouri und hatte spater eine angesehene Stellung als Professor und Ausbilder von Predigern an einem deutschsprachigen theologischen Seminar im Staat New York inne. Der Verfasser ruckt durch seine Untersuchung der Biographie eines deutschen Theologen und Einzelauswanderers in den USA heute vergessene oder bisher weitgehend vernachlassigte Forschungsfelder deutsch-amerikanischer Geschichte wieder ins Bewusstsein.

Islam came into being around AD 600 as a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion revealed through the Prophet Muhammad. Awareness of Islam in the West has grown dramatically in the twenty-first century, but there remains much misunderstanding of the interrelationship between Islam and Christianity, both their commonalities and differences. Andrei Younis elucidates esoteric reasons behind the emergence of Islam from the perspective of Steiner's spiritual science. He draws on more than thirty years of studying Steiner's work, as well as on first-hand knowledge gained from living in various Islamic countries and cultures. His purpose is to reconcile the origins, beliefs, and meanings of Islam and Christianity. Comprehending this anthroposophic perspective on the emergence of Islam is key to understanding why Islam manifests as it does today. Whereas this book will be enlightening and even surprising to most open-minded Western readers, it is not meant to be a foundation for beliefs (or non-belief), but as a springboard for thought and new avenues of understanding and compassion in a dangerous time.

In this book, Scarfe Beckett is concerned with representations of the Islamic world prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England. Using a wide variety of literary, historical and archaeological evidence, she argues that the first perceptions of Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens which derived from Christian exegesis preconditioned wester expressions of hostility and superiority towards peoples of the Islamic world, and that these received ideas prevailed even as material contacts increased between England and Muslim territory. Medieval texts invariably represented Muslim Arabs as Saracens and Ismaelites (or Hagarenes), described by Jerome as biblical enemies of the Christian world three centuries before Muhammad's lifetime. Two early ideas in particular - that Saracens worshipped Venus and dissembled their own identity - continued into the early modern period. This finding has interesting implications for earlier theses by Edward Said and Norman Daniel concerning the history of English perceptions of Islam.

This is a revisionary study of Muslims living under Christian rule during the Spanish 'reconquest'. It looks beyond the obvious religious distinctions and delves into the subtleties of identity in the thirteenth-century Crown of Aragon, uncovering a social dynamic in which sectarian differences comprise only one of the many factors in the causal complex of political, economic and cultural reactions. Beginning with the final stage of independent Muslim rule in the Ebro valley region, the book traces the transformation of Islamic society into mudejar society under Christian domination. This was a case of social evolution in which Muslims, far from being passive victims of foreign colonisation, took an active part in shaping their institutions and experiences as subjects of the Infidel. Using a diverse range of methodological approaches, this book challenges widely held assumptions concerning Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, and minority-majority relations in general.

It is impossible to understand Palestine today without a careful reading of its distant and recent past. But until now there has been no single volume in English that tells the history of the events--from the Ottoman Empire to the mid-twentieth century--that shaped modern Palestine. The first book of its kind, "A History of Palestine" offers a richly detailed interpretation of this critical region's evolution.

Starting with the prebiblical and biblical roots of Palestine, noted historian Gudrun Kramer examines the meanings ascribed to the land in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Paying special attention to social and economic factors, she examines the gradual transformation of Palestine, following the history of the region through the Egyptian occupation of the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman reform era, and the British Mandate up to the founding of Israel in 1948. Focusing on the interactions of Arabs and Jews, "A History of Palestine" tells how these connections affected the cultural and political evolution of each community and Palestine as a whole."

In his latest book, William Egginton laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse--no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example--and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, Egginton argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, Egginton goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a "code of codes." In his view, being a religious fundamentalist does not require adhering to a particular religious creed. Fundamentalists--and stringent atheists--unconsciously believe that the methods we use to understand the world are all versions of an underlying master code. This code of codes represents an ultimate truth, explaining everything. Surprisingly, perhaps the most effective weapon against such thinking is religious moderation, a way of believing that questions the very possibility of a code of codes as the source of all human knowledge. The moderately religious, with their inherent skepticism toward a master code, are best suited to protect science, politics, and other diverse strains of knowledge from fundamentalist attack, and to promote a worldview based on the compatibility between religious faith and scientific method.

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America's Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a "demonic" and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world's Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today's evangelicals have deep roots in American history.

Tracing Islam's role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat--while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith--since the nation's founding. He shows how accounts of "Mahometan" despotism and lurid stories of European enslavement by Barbary pirates fueled early evangelicals' fears concerning Islam, and describes the growing conservatism of American missions to Muslim lands up through the post-World War II era. Kidd exposes American Christians' anxieties about an internal Islamic threat from groups like the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and America's immigrant Muslim population today, and he demonstrates why Islam has become central to evangelical "end-times" narratives. Pointing to many evangelicals' unwillingness to acknowledge Islam's theological commonalities with Christianity and their continued portrayal of Islam as an "evil" and false religion, Kidd explains why Christians themselves are ironically to blame for the failure of evangelism in the Muslim world.

"American Christians and Islam" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the causes of the mounting tensions between Christians and Muslims today.

Mary Eberstadt, "one of the most acute and creative social observers of our time," (Francis Fukuyama) shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing trend in American society: discrimination against traditional religious belief and believers, who are being aggressively pushed out of public life by the concerted efforts of militant secularists.In It's Dangerous to Believe, Mary Eberstadt documents how people of faith--especially Christians who adhere to traditional religious beliefs--face widespread discrimination in today's increasingly secular society. Eberstadt details how recent laws, court decisions, and intimidation on campuses and elsewhere threaten believers who fear losing their jobs, their communities, and their basic freedoms solely because of their convictions. They fear that their religious universities and colleges will capitulate to aggressive secularist demands. They fear that they and their families will be ostracized or will have to lose their religion because of mounting social and financial penalties for believing. They fear they won't be able to maintain charitable operations that help the sick and feed the hungry.Is this what we want for our country?Religious freedom is a fundamental right, enshrined in the First Amendment. With It's Dangerous to Believe Eberstadt calls attention to this growing bigotry and seeks to open the minds of secular liberals whose otherwise good intentions are transforming them into modern inquisitors. Not until these progressives live up to their own standards of tolerance and diversity, she reminds us, can we build the inclusive society America was meant to be.

Christians and Muslims together make up about 57% of the world's population today, and by the end of the century they will constitute about 66% of the world's population. More than any other single factor, the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren may depend on how well Christians learn to relate to Muslims - and Hindus, the next largest faith, not to mention Buddhists, Jews, people of indigenous faiths, and the nonreligious. We know how to have a strong Christian identity that is intolerant of or belligerent towards other faiths, and we know how to have a weak Christian identity that is tolerant and benevolent. But is there a third alternative? How do we discover, live, teach, and practise a Christian identity that is both strong and benevolent towards other faiths?In this provocative and inspiring book, author Brian McLaren tackles some of the hardest questions around the issue of interfaith relations, and shares a hopeful vision of the reconciliation that Jesus offers to our multi-faith world.

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.

In the early twentieth century, The Eastern Buddhist journal pioneered the presentation of Buddhism to the west and encouraged the west's engagement in interpretation. This interactive process increased dramatically in the post-war period, when dialogue between Buddhist and Christian thought began to take off in earnest. These debates and dialogues brought in voices with a Zen orientation, influenced in part by the philosophical Buddhism of the Kyoto School. Also to be heard however were contributions from the Pure Land and the Shin Buddhist traditions, which also have a strong tradition in the city. The book brings together a wide range of authors who have significantly influenced subsequent Buddhist-Christian dialogue and the interaction between east and west.

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.

Christians and Muslims comprise the world's two largest religious communities. This book looks at the history of their relationship - part peaceful co-existence and part violent confrontation - from their first encounters in the medieval period up to the present. It emphasises the theological, cultural and political context in which perceptions and attitudes have developed and gives a depth of historical insight to the complex current Christian-Muslim interactions across the globe.

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.

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.

Christian-Muslim interaction is a reality today in all corners of the globe, but while many celebrate the commonality of these traditions, significant differences remain. If these religions cannot be easily reconciled, can we perhaps view them through a single albeit refractive lens? This is the approach Paul Heck takes in "Common Ground" To undertake a study of religious pluralism as a theological and social reality, and to approach the two religions in tandem as part of a broader discussion on the nature of the good society.

Rather than compare Christianity and Islam as two species of faith, religious pluralism offers a prism through which a society as a whole -- secular and religious alike -- can consider its core beliefs and values. Christianity and Islam are not merely identities that designate particular communities, but reference points that all can comprehend and discuss knowledgeably. This analysis of how Islam and Christianity understand theology, ethics, and politics -- specifically democracy and human rights -- offers a way for that discussion to move forward.

Despite the present-day democratic government's commitment to human rights, socio-cultural and religious clashes still pose a threat to Nigeria. As a panacea a split according to ethnic and religious boundaries has been suggested; on the other hand upholding the different strands might spell greater benefits for the country's development. The basic assumption of both views is that ethnic and religious pluralism have led to conflicts, but that they are fuelled by politics, inequitable distribution of economic goods and the negative forces of globalization. In this project, examining these conflicts and the efforts made to resolve them, particular attention will be paid to dialogue and reconciliation. The key practice suggested is convivence: a symbiosis of interactive and interpenetrative approaches, based on intercultural and interreligious hermeneutical perspectives.

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.

Section one of this International Handbook attends to the philosophical and theoretical aspects of inter-religious education. The authors who contribute to this section critique current religious educational practice and offer skills, information and criteria for theory building in the area of inter-religious education. Among the contributors to this section of the International Handbook, one is from the United Kingdom, five are from the Untied Statures of America, two from Africa, and there is one contributor from each of Canada, Latvia and Norway. Two contributors are from the Jewish tradition, one from Islam, one from Orthodox Christianity and the others from a range of different Christian orientations. Their theories and philosophies of inter-religious education are informed by a range of perspectives including human rights, feminist theory and the perspective of Jewish-Christian and inter-religious dialogue.

Section two deals with religious education for inter-religious engagement. The body of scholarship contained in this section argues that religious education needs to provide an empathetic understanding of people, their histories and contexts, and the role of religion in their lives. Of the thirteen scholars who will contribute to this section, one is from the United States of America, two are from Ireland, two are from the United Kingdom, two from Canada and the remaining are from Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Israel, Australia and India. Much of this section draws on recent empirical research and it covers such diverse topics as fundamentalism and ecumenism, critical reflexivity, dialogue between Judaism and Islam, Islamic values and the role of Buddhism in promoting inter-religious education.

Section three analyses the connection between inter-religious education and the promotion of social justice and peace. Indeed a concern for justice and peace is common to all religions and can be the focus of inter-religious education. Among the scholars who will contribute to this section, four are Australian, two are German, and the remaining are from Norway, the United Kingdom, India, the Netherlands and Mumbai. Motifs in this section of the International Handbook cover suffering as a lens for understanding the history of religions, inter-religious tolerance, fundamentalism and fanaticism, peace education, theology and the role and critique of all of these in inter-religious education for social justice and peace.

Section four Inter-religious education for citizenship and human rights brings together a number of religious educators, expert theorists, empirical researchers and those working in international educational policy to examine the role of inter-religious education in promoting citizenship and human rights. Scholars will contribute to this section from Switzerland, England, Australia, France, Finland, Russia, Norway, the United States of America, Germany, Sweden and Japan. The chapters in this section will cover the specifically religious dimensions of policy and practice in human rights and citizenship and will draw on the policies and works of international bodies such as UNESCO as well as providing more local perspectives.

Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile examines the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the reconquest and the hundred years that followed the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). The study's focus on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, allows for a detailed investigation of the Jews' changing relations with the area's main power players-the monarchy, the church, and the towns. In a departure from previous assessments, Soifer Irish shows that the institutional and legal norms of toleration for the Jewish minority were forged not along the military frontier with Islam, but in the north of Castile. She argues that the Jews' relationship with the Castilian monarchy was by far the most significant factor that influenced their situation in the kingdom, but also demonstrates that this relationship was inherently problematic. Although during the early centuries of Christian expansion the Jewish communities benefited from a strong royal power, after about 1250 helping maintain it proved to be costly to the Jewish communities in economic and human terms. Soifer Irish demonstrates that while some Castilian clergymen were vehemently anti-Jewish, the Castilian Church as a whole never developed a coordinated strategy on the Jews, or even showed much interest in the issue. The opposite is true about the townsmen, whose relations with their Jewish neighbors vacillated between cooperation and conflict. In the late thirteenth century, the Crown's heavy-handed tactics in enforcing the collection of outstanding debts to Jewish moneylenders led to the breakdown in the negotiations between the Jewish and Christian communities, creating a fertile ground for the formation of an anti-Jewish discourse in Castilian towns. Soifer Irish also examines the Jews' attitudes toward the various powers in the Christian society and shows that they were active players in the kingdom's politics. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile breaks new ground in helping us understand more fully the tensions, and commonalities, between groups of different faiths in the late medieval period.