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Books > Religion & Spirituality
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 the religious 'other.'
Today, this debate assumes great importance because of the
pervasive experience of religious plurality, which prompts inquiry
into convergences and divergences in belief and practice as well as
controversy over appropriate forms of interreligious interaction.
The persistence of religious violence and oppression give 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 to models that depict religions as
isolated entities or by 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 it to re-evaluate, re-interpret,
and re-envision the Qur'anic discourse on religious difference.
Through a close and detailed 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 articulates a new, integrated
model of religious pluralism.
Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's
peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern,
non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of
the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human
world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both,
continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In
this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work
with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her
argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such
traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other
words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other
beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual
intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and
communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating,
creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind
the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use.
Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are
appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in
the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate
objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the
final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging
and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic
perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and
poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the
''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of
development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other
social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of
common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes
with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its
shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the
development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle
community between humans as well as between humans and the
other-than-human world.
Throughout church history, the book of Psalms has enjoyed wider use
and acclaim than almost any other book of the Bible. Early
Christians extolled it for its fullness of Christian doctrine,
monks memorized and recited it daily, lay people have prayed its
words as their own, and churches have sung from it as their premier
hymn book. While the past half century has seen an extraordinary
resurgence of interest in the thought of American theologian
Jonathan Edwards, including his writings on the Bible, no scholar
has yet explored his meditations on the Psalms. David P. Barshinger
addresses this gap by providing a close study of his engagement
with one of the Bibles most revered books. From his youth to the
final days of his presidency at the College of New Jersey, Edwards
was a devout student of Scriptureas more than 1,200 extant sermons,
theological treatises, and thousands of personal manuscript pages
devoted to biblical reflection bear witness. Using some of his
writings that have previously received little to no attention,
Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms offers insights on his theological
engagement with the Psalms in the context of interpretation,
worship, and preaching. Barshinger shows that he appropriated the
history of redemption as an organizing theological framework within
which to engage the Psalms specifically, and the Bible as a whole.
This original study greatly advances Edwards scholarship, shedding
new and welcome light on the theologians relationship to Scripture.
By exploring how Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and John Calvin
interpreted a set of eight messianic psalms (Psalms 2, 8, 16, 22,
45, 72, 110, 188), Sujin Pak elucidates key debates about
Christological exegesis during the era of the Protestant
reformation. More particularly, Pak examines the exegeses of
Luther, Bucer, and Calvin in order to (a) reveal their particular
theological emphases and reading strategies, (b) identify their
debates over the use of Jewish exegesis and the factors leading to
charges of 'judaizing' leveled against Calvin, and (c) demonstrate
how Psalms reading and the accusation of judaizing serve
distinctive purposes of confessional identity formation. In this
way, she portrays the beginnings of those distinctive trends that
separated Lutheran and Reformed exegetical principles.
For some eighty-five years--between, roughly, 1725 and 1810--the
American colonies were agitated by what can only be described as a
revolutionary movement. This was not the well-known political
revolution that culminated in the War of Independence, but a
revolution in religious and ethical thought. Its proponents called
their radical viewpoint "deism." They challenged Christian
orthodoxy and instead endorsed a belief system that celebrated the
power of human reason and saw nature as God's handiwork and the
only revelation of divine will. This illuminating discussion of
American deism presents an overview of the main tenets of deism,
showing how its influence rose swiftly and for a time became a
highly controversial subject of debate in the colonies. The deists
were students of the Enlightenment and took a keen interest in the
scientific study of nature. They were thus critical of orthodox
Christianity for its superstitious belief in miracles, persecution
of dissent, and suppression of independent thought and expression.
At the heart of his book are profiles of six "rational infidels,"
most of whom are quite familiar to Americans as founding fathers or
colonial patriots: Benjamin Franklin (the ambivalent deist), Thomas
Jefferson (a critic of Christian supernaturalism but an admirer of
its ethics), Ethan Allen (the rough-edged "frontier deist"), Thomas
Paine (the arch iconoclast and author of The Age of Reason), Elihu
Palmer (the tireless crusader for deism and perhaps its most
influential proponent), and Philip Freneau (a poet whose popular
verses combined deism with early romanticism). This is a
fascinating study of America's first culture war, one that in many
ways has continued to this day.
Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary
Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a
population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and
"Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are
popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the
majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews
from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa,
and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and
continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as
France, Latin America, and the United States.
Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews offers a collection of new
scholarship on the issues of self-definition and identity facing
Sephardic Jewry. The essays draw on a variety of
disciplines--demography, history, political science, sociology,
religious and gender studies, anthropology, and literature.
Contributors explore the issues surrounding the emergence and
increasingly wide usage of "Mizrahi" in place of "Sephardic," as
well as the invigoration of Sephardic Judaism. They look at the
evolution of Sephardic politics in Israel through the dramatic rise
and continuing influence of the Shas political party and its
spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Other contributors examine
the variegated nature of Mizrahi immigration to Israel, fictional
portraits of female Mizrahi immigrants to Israel in the 1940s and
1950s, contemporary Mizrahi Israel feminism, modern Arab
historiography's portrayal of Jews of Muslim lands, and the
changing Sephardic halakhic tradition.
Though much has been written about particular forms of violence
related to religion, such as sacrificial rites and militant
martyrdom, there have been few efforts to survey the phenomena in
all of the world's major religious traditions, historically and in
the present, viewing the subject in personal as well as social
dimensions, and covering both literary themes and political
conflicts. This compact collection of essays provides such an
overview. Each of the essays explores the ways in which violence is
justified within the literary and theological foundation of the
tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and
how social acts of vengeance and warfare have been justified by
religious ideas. The nature of the connection between violence and
faith has always been a topic of heated debate, especially as acts
of violence performed in the name of religion have erupted onto the
global stage. Some scholars argue that these acts of violence are
not really religious at all, but symptomatic of other elements of
society or human nature. Others however point to the fact that
often the perpetrators of these acts cite the faith's own
foundational texts as their inspiration-and that the occurrence of
violence in the name of religion exists across all faith
traditions. Is violence, then, the rare exception in religious
traditions or is it one of the rules? The contributors to this
volume explore many possible approaches to this question and myriad
others. How is religion defined? Must a religion be centered on
supernatural beings? Does the term refer to social behavior or
private? Is dogma or practice the key to its essence? Is it a
philosophical system or a poetic structure? And how should violence
be defined? From whose perspective and at what point is an act to
be deemed violent? What act cannot be construed as violent in some
way? For instance, are we talking only about war and genocide, or
psychological coercion, social restrictions and binding
categorizations? Collectively, the essays in this volume reflect
the complex and contested meanings of both religion and violence,
providing overviews of engagements with violence in Hindu,
Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, African, and
Pacific Island religious traditions. By shedding light on the
intersection of violence with faith, this volume does much to
expand the understanding of the nature of religion itself, and the
diverse forms it may take.
Tantric traditions in both Buddhism and Hinduism are thriving
throughout Asia and in Asian diasporic communities around the
world, yet they have been largely ignored by Western scholars until
now. This collection of original essays fills this gap by examining
the ways in which Tantric Buddhist traditions have changed over
time and distance as they have spread across cultural boundaries in
Asia. The book is divided into three sections dedicated to South
Asia, Central Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. The essays cover
such topics as the changing ideal of masculinity in Buddhist
literature, the controversy triggered by the transmission of the
Indian Buddhist deity Heruka to Tibet in the 10th century, and the
evolution of a Chinese Buddhist Tantric tradition in the form of
the True Buddha School. The book as a whole addresses complex and
contested categories in the field of religious studies, including
the concept of syncretism and the various ways that the change and
transformation of religious traditions can be described and
articulated. The authors, leading scholars in Tantric studies, draw
on a wide array of methodologies from the fields of history,
anthropology, art history, and sociology. Tantric Traditions in
Transmission and Translation is groundbreaking in its attempt to
look past religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume
offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this
longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth
of interest over the past half century. Under the guidance of a
distinguished editorial board, it publishes exemplary papers in any
area of philosophy of religion.
Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) is popularly
celebrated for his fascinating spiritual life. How could one man,
one deeply spiritual man, serve as both a traditional Oglala Lakota
medicine man and a Roman Catholic catechist and mystic? How did
these two spiritual and cultural identities enrich his prayer life?
How did his commitment to God, understood through his Lakota and
Catholic communities, shape his understanding of how to be in the
world? To fully understand the depth of Black Elk's life-long
spiritual quest requires a deep appreciation of his life story. He
witnessed devastation on the battlefields of Little Bighorn and the
Massacre at Wounded Knee, but also extravagance while performing
for Queen Victoria as a member of "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West
Show. Widowed by his first wife, he remarried and raised eight
children. Black Elk's spiritual visions granted him wisdom and
healing insight beginning in his childhood, but he grew
progressively physically blind in his adult years. These stories,
and countless more, offer insight into this extraordinary man whose
cause for canonization is now underway at the Vatican.
In the last few decades, all major presidential candidates have
openly discussed the role of faith in their lives, sharing their
religious beliefs and church commitments with the media and their
constituencies. And yet, to the surprise of many Americans, God
played almost no role in the 2012 presidential campaign. During the
campaign, incumbent Barack Obama minimized the role of religion in
his administration and in his life. This was in stark contrast to
his emphasis, in 2008, on how his Chicago church had nurtured him
as a person, community organizer, and politician, which ultimately
backfired when incendiary messages preached by his liberationist
pastor Jeremiah Wright went viral. The Republican Party faced a
different kind of problem in 2012, with the increasing irrelevance
or absence of founders of the Religious Right such as Pat Robertson
or Jerry Falwell. Furthermore, with Mormon Mitt Romney running as
the GOP candidate, party operatives avoided shining a spotlight on
religion, recognizing that vast numbers of Americans remain
suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The
absence of God during the 2012 election reveals that the United
States is at a crossroads with regards to faith, even while
religion continues to play a central role in almost every facet of
American culture and political life. The separation of church and
state and the disestablishment of religion have fostered a rich
religious marketplace characterized by innovation and
entrepreneurship. As the generation that launched the culture wars
fades into history and a new, substantially more diverse population
matures, the question of how faith is functioning in the new
millennium has become more important than ever. In Faith in the New
Millennium historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars
tackle contemporary issues, controversies, and policies ranging
from drone wars to presidential campaigns to the exposing of
religious secrets in order to make sense of American life in the
new millennium. This melding of past and present offers readers a
rare opportunity to assess Americans' current wrestling with
matters of faith, and provides valuable insight into the many ways
that faith has shaped and transformed the age of Obama and how the
age of Obama has shaped American religious faith.
The idea of the pre-existence of the soul has been extremely
important, widespread, and persistent throughout Western
history--from even before the philosophy of Plato to the poetry of
Robert Frost. When Souls Had Wings offers the first systematic
history of this little explored feature of Western culture.
Terryl Givens describes the tradition of pre-existence as
"pre-heaven"--the place where unborn souls wait until they descend
to earth to be born. And typically it is seen as a descent--a
falling away from a happier and untroubled state into the turbulent
and sinful world we know. The title of the book refers to the idea
put forward in antiquity that our souls begin with wings, and that
only after shedding those wings do we fall to earth. The book not
only traces the history of the idea of pre-existence, but also
captures its meaning for those who have embraced it. Givens
describes how pre-existence has been invoked to explain "the better
angels of our nature," including the human yearning for
transcendence and the sublime. Pre-existence has been said to
account for why we know what we should not know, whether in the
form of a Greek slave's grasp of mathematics, the moral sense
common to humanity, or the human ability to recognize universals.
The belief has explained human bonds that seem to have their own
mysterious prehistory, salved the wounded sensibility of a host of
thinkers who could not otherwise account for the unevenly
distributed pain and suffering that are humanity's common lot, and
has been posited by philosophers and theologians alike to salvage
the principle of human freedom and accountability.
When Souls had Wings underscores how durable (and controversial)
this idea has been throughout the history of Western thought, the
theological dangers it has represented, and how prominently it has
featured in poetry, literature, and art.
This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of
all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed
attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural
difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical
ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day,
the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger
develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a
counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God.
The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty
in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of
midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource
for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for
creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for
integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores
how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the
homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a
selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can
use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of
God.
A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to
whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from
those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a
vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more
faithfully in the world.
Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from
Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the
Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows
that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material
religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in
Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries.
Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the
transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of
saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared
religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal
to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection.
Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word
"faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of
Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to
missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer"
indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring
Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America,
self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical
writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions
of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct
their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial
sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is
thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti,
and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing,
contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story
of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood,
Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional
history of religious modernities.
Cardinal Francis E. George, O.M.I., was a model pastor and a heroic disciple of Christ. A native Chicagoan, he was told as a young man that he would never be a priest in Chicago because of a physical disability resulting from polio. He went on to be ordained a priest with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1963. He was appointed as Archbishop of Chicago in 1997, created a cardinal in 1998, and served in Chicago until 2014, just months before his death at the age of 78.
Cardinal George's many gifts — including his superior intellect — made him a pivotal player in Church affairs nationally and internationally. He governed during difficult and challenging times, yet he always attempted to lead with the heart of Christ, living out his episcopal motto, "To Christ be glory in the Church."
A man of pastoral availability, Cardinal George poured out his life in service to Christ and the Church, always attentive to the poor and those on the margins. Universally admired for his pursuit and proclamation of the truth, and his personal witness to the Gospel, Cardinal George remains a model for discipleship and leadership. By the time of his death in 2015, Cardinal George was regarded as one of the most respected bishops in American Catholic history. His fascinating and inspiring story reminds us that God's ways are always better than our own.
In a long-overlooked diary entry, Franz Kafka admitted to suffering
from ''bouts of clairvoyance.'' These bouts of clairvoyance can be
seen in his writing, in moments when the solid basis of human
cognition totters, the dissolution of matter seems imminent, and
objects are jarringly severed from physical referents. June O.
Leavitt offers a fascinating examination of the mystical in Kafka's
life and writings, showing that Kafka's understanding of the occult
was not only a product of his own clairvoyant experiences but of
the age in which he lived.
Kafka lived during the modern Spiritual Revival, a powerful
movement which resisted materialism, rejected the adulation of
science and Darwin, and idealized clairvoyant modes of
consciousness. Kafka's contemporaries - such theosophical
ideologues as Madame H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Dr. Rudolph
Steiner - encouraged the counterculture to seek the true, spiritual
essence of reality by inducing out-of-body experiences and
producing visions of higher disembodied beings through meditative
techniques. Leaders of the Spiritual Revival also called for the
adoption of certain lifestyles, such as vegetarianism, in order to
help transform consciousness and return humanity to its divine
nature.
Interweaving the occult discourse on clairvoyance, the divine
nature of animal life, vegetarianism, the spiritual sources of
dreams, and the eternal nature of the soul with Kafka's
dream-chronicles, animal narratives, diaries, letters, and stories,
Leavitt takes the reader on a journey through the texts of a great
psychic writer and the fascinating epoch of the Spiritual Revival.
Cultural conflicts about the family-including those surrounding
women's social roles, the debate over abortion, and in more recent
years, debates about stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and
contraception-have intensified over the last few decades among
Catholics, as well as among American citizens generally. In fact,
these conflicts comprise much of the substance of the moral
polarization that currently characterizes our public politics.
Scholars have demonstrated the importance of the media in the
endurance of these conflicts, as well as the important role played
by elites, particularly religious elites. But less is known about
how individuals in local settings and cultures-especially religious
settings-experience and participate in them. Why are these
conflicts so resonant among ordinary Americans, and Catholics in
particular? By exploring how religion and family life are
intertwined in local parish settings, this book strives to
understand how and why Catholics are divided around these cultural
conflicts about the family. It presents a close and detailed
comparative ethnographic analysis of the families and local
religious cultures in two Catholic parishes: religiously
conservative Our Lady of the Assumption Church and theologically
progressive St. Brigitta Church. Through an examination of the
activities of parish life, together with the faith stories of
parishioners, this book reveals how two congregational social
processes-the practice of central ecclesial metaphors, and the
construction of Catholic identities-matter for the ways in which
parishioners work out the routines of marriage, childrearing, and
work-family balance, as well as to the ways they connect these
everyday challenges to the public politics of the family. The
analysis further demonstrates that these institutional processes
promote polarization among Catholics through practices that
unintentionally fragment the Catholic tradition in local religious
settings.
The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary
obstacles--poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation--to become
one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples
and schools, and attracting crowds of students and disciples
wherever he went. Now, in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, James
Carter draws on untapped archival materials to provide a book that
is part travelogue, part history, and part biography of this
remarkable man.
This revealing biography shows a Chinese man, neither an
intellectual nor a peasant, trying to reconcile his desire for a
bold and activist Chinese nationalism with his own belief in
China's cultural and social traditions, especially Buddhism. As it
follows Tanxu's extraordinary life, the book also illuminates the
pivotal events in China's modern history, showing how one
individual experienced the fall of China's last empire, its descent
into occupation and civil war, and its eventual birth as modern
nation. Indeed, Tanxu lived in a time of almost constant
warfare--from the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, to the Boxer Uprising,
the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation, and World War II.
He and his followers were robbed by river pirates, and waylaid by
bandits on the road. Caught in the struggle between nationalist and
communist forces, Tanxu finally sought refuge in the British colony
of Hong Kong. At the time of his death, at the age of 89, he was
revered as "Master Tanxu," one of Hong Kong's leading religious
figures.
Capturing all this in a magnificent portrait, Carter gives
first-person immediacy to one of the most turbulent periods in
Chinese history.
W. E. B. Du Bois is an improbable candidate for a project in
religion. His skepticism of and, even, hostility toward religion is
readily established and canonically accepted. Indeed, he spent his
career rejecting normative religious commitments to institutions
and supernatural beliefs. In this book, Jonathon Kahn offers a
fresh and controversial reading of Du Bois that seeks to overturn
this view. Kahn contends that the standard treatment of Du Bois
turns a deaf ear to his writings. For if we're open to their
religious timbre, those writings-from his epoch-making The Souls of
Black Folk to his unstudied series of parables that depict the
lynching of an African American Christ-reveal a virtual obsession
with religion. Du Bois's moral, literary, and political imagination
is inhabited by religious rhetoric, concepts and stories. Divine
Discontent recovers and introduces readers to the remarkably
complex and varied religious world in Du Bois's writings. It's a
world of sermons, of religious virtues such as sacrifice and piety,
of jeremiads that fight for a black American nation within the
larger nation. Unlike other African American religious voices at
the time, however, Du Bois's religious orientation is distinctly
heterodox--it exists outside the bounds of institutional
Christianity. Kahn shows how Du Bois self-consciously marshals
religious rhetoric, concepts, typologies, narratives, virtues, and
moods in order to challenge traditional Christian worldview in
which events function to confirm a divine order. Du Bois's
antimetaphysical religious voice, he argues, places him firmly in
the American tradition of pragmatic religious naturalism typified
by William James. This innovative reading of Du Bois should appeal
to scholars of American religion, intellectual history, African
American Studies, and philosophy of religion.
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