logo for Georgetown University Press
The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies
Lucinda Mosher
Georgetown University Press, 2022

A comprehensive collection provides guidance and deep insight from a variety of experts in this emerging field

The rapidly developing field of interreligious studies fosters scholarship engaging two or more religious traditions at a time. Inherently multidisciplinary, the field brings the academic consideration of religions into conversation with the humanities and social sciences, employing relational, intersectional, experiential, and dialogical methodologies as it examines the interrelationship of individuals and groups with differing alignments toward religion.

Edited by Lucinda Mosher, The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies features an international roster of practitioners of or experts on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Ruism, Humanism, and African, North American, and South American Indigenous lifeways. Each author offers a unique perspective on the nature of this emerging discipline.

This companion provides fifty thought-provoking chapters on the history, priorities, challenges, distinguishing pedagogies, and practical applications of interreligious studies. Anyone who seeks a deeper appreciation of this relatively new academic field will find it useful as a textbook or research resource.

[more]

front cover of Global Perspectives on Science and Religion
Global Perspectives on Science and Religion
Pranab Das
Templeton Press, 2009

Gathering thinkers from ten countries and various scientific and spiritual backgrounds, Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality leads readers on a fascinating tour of distinctly non-Western approaches to topics in these two fields. These voices add fresh and invigorating input to a dialogue that has thus far been predominantly guided by scholars from the United States or Western Europe.

The award-winning researchers in this volume were selected from a pool of over one hundred and fifty applications. They offer the very best scholarship from underrepresented regions around the globe. The essays cover a broad spectrum of scientific fields, spanning mathematical physics, robotics, biosemiotics and other new schools of theoretical biology, embryonic stem cells, cognitive science, and the concept of opening the human mind to broader ideas of reality. Hailing from some of the top research institutions in India, Japan, Russia, Korea, China, and a variety of Eastern European nations, contributors offer unique insights into their cultures' spiritual and philosophical traditions. At the same time, they deftly engage concepts from the ongoing Western dialogue in its terms, delving deeply, at times, into schools of thought like phenomenology or process thought.

Scholars, students, researchers, and anyone seeking new ways of understanding the interplay of spirituality and science will discover a multitude of windows into previously underexplored research areas in these truly interdisciplinary essays. Indeed, any of these pieces could serve as the basis for entirely new long-term study programs.

[more]

front cover of God Gave Us The Right
God Gave Us The Right
Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism
Manning, Christel
Rutgers University Press, 1999
What does it mean to be a religious conservative, particularly for women, in America today? While it appears that people are returning to conservative religion because they are fed up with the excesses of liberalism, including feminism, a closer look at the lives of religious conservatives reveals a more complex reality. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant communities, Christel Manning explores the diversity among women who have returned to tradition. Arguing that America has undergone profound cultural and economic changes in the last thirty years, which create tension between women's lives and traditional gender roles, she demonstrates that conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Evangelical Protestants negotiate those tensions in different ways. Manning also shows that women in conservative religious communities share many of the same concerns as secular women.
Manning looks at how the religious communities profiled have been influenced by feminist values and describes the ways in which these women negotiate gender roles at work, religious services, and at home. She explains how they deal with the inconsistencies created by their attempts to integrate feminist and traditionalist norms. In highly accessible prose, Manning examines their attitudes towards the feminist movement, its impact on American culture, and the extent to which the women seek to resist it. God Gave Us the Right explains how these different views of feminism reflect the diverse theologies and historical experiences of the three communities.
[more]

front cover of Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars
Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars
Critical Explorations in the History of Religions
Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude.

The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian.
 
Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
God's Creativity and Human Action
Christian and Muslim Perspectives
Lucinda Mosher
Georgetown University Press, 2019

A record of the 2015 Building Bridges Seminar for leading Christian and Muslim scholars, this collection of essays explores the nature of divine and human agency through themes of creation’s goal, humankind’s dignity and task, and notions of sovereignty. Part I sets the context for the book with “Human Action within Divine Creation: A Muslim Perspective” by Mohsen Kadivar of Duke University and “On the Possibility of Holy Living: A Christian Perspective” by Lucy Gardner of Oxford University. The rest of the book includes paired essays—one from a Muslim perspective, one from a Christian perspective—that introduce scriptural material with commentary to aid readers in conducting dialogical study. In her conclusion, coeditor Lucinda Mosher digests the illuminating small-group conversations that lie at the heart of the Building Bridges initiative, conversations that convey a vivid sense of the lively, penetrating but respectful dialogue for which the project is known. This unique volume will be a valuable resource to scholars, students, and professors of Christianity and Islam.

[more]

front cover of Grieving Pregnancy
Grieving Pregnancy
Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism
Maureen L. Walsh
Rutgers University Press, 2024
In Grieving Pregnancy: Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism, Maureen L. Walsh compares how the two religious traditions respond ritually and discursively to miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion experiences marked by grief for the women involved. The experience of pregnancy loss has always been a part of women’s lives, yet only recently has it garnered attention from religious leaders and scholars commensurate with its prevalence. This book examines pregnancy loss as a theological problem for both Buddhism and Catholicism and analyzes the rites and memorials that have developed to address it, such as Japanese Buddhist mizuko kuyō (water children rites) and emergent American Catholic memorial practices focused on pregnancy loss. These parallel practices have emerged within distinct religious landscapes—a fact reflected in their forms and purposes—and when considered together, they raise questions of keen interest to theological and religious studies about the goals of religious practice and the imagination of human life at its earliest stages.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter