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.

This book reflects on one of the most pressing challenges of our time: the current and historical relationships that exist between the faith-traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It begins with discussion on the state of Jewish-Christian relations, examining antisemitism and the Holocaust, the impact of Israel and theological controversies such as covenant and mission. Kessler also traces different biblical stories and figures, from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, demonstrating Jewish-Christian contact and controversy. Jews and Christians share a sacred text, but more surprisingly, a common exegetical tradition. They also need to deal with some of the more problematic and violent biblical texts. Jews, Christians and Muslims includes reflection on the encounter with Islam, including topics associated with a divergent history and memory as well contemporary relations between the three Abrahamic faiths. Kessler's writings shed light on common purpose as well as how to manage difference, both vital in forming a positive identity and sustaining a flourishing community.

Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters: Developments, Diversity and Dialogues addresses the key issues in the present day global encounter between Christians and Muslims. Divided into two parts, the first examines theoretical issues and concerns which affect dialogue between the two traditions. The second part highlights case studies from around the world. Chapters come from established scholars including Reuven Firestone, Douglas Pratt and Clinton Bennett, emerging scholars, as well as practitioner perspectives. Highlighting the diversity within the field of "Christian-Muslim" encounter, case studies cover examples from the US and globally, and include dialogue in the US post 9/11, Nigerian Muslims and Christians, and Christian responses to Islamophobia in the UK. Covering unique areas and those not explored in detail elsewhere, Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters: Developments, Diversity and Dialogues will be of interest to advanced students, researchers, and interfaith professionals.

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.

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.

The concept of "vocation" or "calling" is a distinctively Christian concern, grounded in the long-held belief that we find our meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in God. But what about religions other than Christianity? What does it mean for someone from another faith tradition to understand calling or vocation? In this book contributors with expertise in Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, and secular humanism explore the idea of calling in these various faith traditions. The contributors each search their respective tradition's sacred texts, key figures, practices, and concepts for wisdom on the meaning of vocation. By seeking comparative insights from diverse faith traditions, say Kathleen Cahalan and Douglas Schuurman, we can all increase and improve our efforts to build a better, more humane world.

These are some of the urgent questions posed by this stimulating and wide-ranging new colloquy. Bringing together a wealth of wisdom and experience in medical science and in Buddhist thought and ethics, the discussants together address issues of vital current concern. They ask, for example, to what degree science and religion, as well as other fields of learning, may find common ground. They examine the pitfalls, as well as the opportunities, posed by genetic engineering. They examine the need for science to develop a proper ethical dimension, particularly in relation to weapons of war, if it is to realize its true potential. Exhibiting everywhere a sensitive humanity, as well as a deep respect for their different backgrounds, the participants exemplify in these civilized exchanges a mutual passion for developing dialogue as a profound and practical way of cultivating both toleration and peace.

Faith and Sword gives a concise history of what has arguably been the longest conflict in human history - a conflict that continues, in a new form, to this day. The overtly religious Christian-Muslim struggle lasted for nearly thirteen centuries, and for most of that period the Muslims were in the ascendant. The Christians eventually halted the tide of Arab conquest, but their counterstroke in the Crusades ended in failure and the Muslim threat was renewed by the Ottoman Turks. Only after 1600 did the Christians finally begin to gain the upper hand, with the fall of the Ottoman empire after the First World War seeming to mark the final victory of the Christians. Between 1918 and 1979, however, the Christian-Muslim conflict continued, but in a less obviously religious form. Christendom became the largely secularised West, and Muslim success in throwing off European colonialism owed more to secular nationalists than religious leaders. After the Iranian revolution of 1979 the picture changed again: religious fundamentalism revived on the Muslim side and the USA became its principal target.Today the USA has never been more militarily dominant, yet it is rendered insecure by a tiny minority of religious militants whose outlook is said to have been superseded by the march of history. Alan G. Jamieson provides a wide-ranging and detailed survey of this conflict through all its stages, and shows how the present situation has emerged. He ranges widely in time, from the original Arab conquests in the seventh century to the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. All areas of conflict are included, from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Russia to Somalia. This authoritative and readable study will appeal equally to scholars, students and the general reader, giving an accessible introduction to one of the most important conflicts of our time.

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.

Despite the fact that "Nones"-people who do not identify with or belong to any religious tradition-are, by definition, impervious to generalization, there is a tendency for others to draw to mind a certain prototype when imagining them. It is often an unflattering or overly simplified portrait of a person whose spiritual life might be characterized by words like "individualist," "narcissistic," "uncommitted," "unbelieving," "consumeristic," "superficial," and otherwise less serious and meaningful than that of a person whose spiritual identity is anchored in formal membership in an institutional religious organization. As Elizabeth Drescher points out in Choosing Our Religion, Nones are described by negatives; they do not identify as belonging to a specific group, and are not affiliated with an institutional religion. However, there are now more self-identified Nones in this country than Mainline Protestants or Non-Denominational and Born Again Christians, a result of what is clearly a significant religious and spiritual shift in American culture. Breaking away from both the derisive accounts of this trend, as well as myriad studies focusing on data analysis of its social, cultural, and political impact, Drescher invites members of the fastest growing religious demographic in the US to speak for themselves. She asks them about how they came to their present spiritual outlook, how they understand the divine, what role spiritual sages and sacred texts play in their spiritual lives, what the meaning and purpose of the spiritual life might be, how community functions in spirituality, what practices enrich the spiritual life, what happens when we die, and other basic theological and spiritual questions. As she discovers, most Nones report having been raised in religious households, nearly two-thirds of them Christian; in fact, the majority of Nones are not atheists or agnostics, but believers and seekers most of whom adhere to nominally Christian beliefs and practices mixed liberally with resources from non-Christian traditions. Research for the book began with on an online survey about the beliefs, practices, and outlooks of religious Nones. Drescher then used the survey results as a guide for a series of focus groups and one-on-one interviews. In Choosing Our Religion, Nones will emerge as real people drawing on the resources available to them-diverse religious traditions, spiritual exploration, personal and communal experience-to shape a spiritual outlook and practice that they find meaningful and life-giving.

A Dialogue of Life Towards the encounter of Jews and Christians will motivate Jews and Christians to begin "the way of dialogue." These pages provide accessible tools for anyone taking part in the encounter between people of different cultures or religions. It offers useful tools for those who work in the areas of education (teachers, professors, and catechists), as well as for families.

Common to both Judaism and Christianity is a heightened engagement with time within liturgical practice, in which collective religious memory and anticipation come together to create a unique sense of time. Exploring the nebulous realms of religious experience and the sense of time, Remembering the Future charts the ways that the experience of time is shaped by the traditions of Judaism and Christianity and experienced within their ritual practices. Through comparative explorations of traditional Jewish and Christian understandings of time, contemporary oral testimonies, and discussions of the work of select twentieth-century Jewish and Christian thinkers, this book maps the temporal landscapes of the religious imagination. Maintaining that the sense of time is integral to Jewish and Christian religious experience, Remembering the Future makes a notable contribution to interreligious studies and liturgical studies. It sheds light on essential aspects of religious experience and finds that the intimacy of the experience of time grants it the capacity to communicate across religious boundaries, subtly transgressing obstacles to interreligious understanding.