What is the nature of world Anglicanism in a postcolonial, global age? This book provides the key to understanding both the character of this Christian tradition and the essential nature of current disputes. It describes the foundations of the tradition and outlines its central beliefs and practices, focusing on mission, liturgy, engagement with others, and power, knowledge and authority in the church. It includes chapters on women s ordination and on homosexuality in the public life of the church, and the final chapter looks to the challenges of the future."

Feng Shui has been known in the West for the last 150 years but has mostly been regarded as a primitive superstition. During the modern period successive regimes in China have suppressed its practice. However, in the last few decades Feng Shui has become a global spiritual movement with professional associations, thousands of titles published on the subject, countless websites devoted to it and millions of users. In this book Ole Bruun explains Feng Shui's Chinese origins and meanings as well as its more recent Western interpretations and global appeal. Unlike the abundance of popular...

The Vatican. The Inquisition. Contraception. Celibacy. Apparitions and miracles. Plots and scandals. The Catholic Church is seldom out of the news. But what do its one billion adherents really believe, and how do they put their beliefs into practice in worship, the family, and society? This down-to-earth account goes back to the early Christian creeds to uncover the roots of modern Catholic thinking. It avoids getting bogged down in theological technicalities, and throws light on aspects of the Church's institutional structure and liturgical practice that even Catholics can find baffling: why...

Shamans are an integral part of communal religious traditions, professionals who make use of personal supernatural experiences, especially trance, as a resource for the wider community's physical and spiritual well-being. This Introduction surveys research on the topic of shamanism around the world, detailing the archaeology and earliest development of shamanic traditions as well as their scientific 'discovery' in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonization in Siberia, the Americas, and Asia. It explores the beliefs and rituals typical of shamanic traditions, as well as the...

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...

In this book contemporary Judaism is presented in all its rich diversity, including both traditional and modern theologies as well as secular forms of Jewish identity. While the focus of the book is on developments that have taken place in the past two hundred years, they are set against a historical background, going back to the Bible. Beginning with a description of the Jewish people as it exists in today's world, it studies the unique concept of Jewish peoplehood and its survival over the centuries in the face of many challenges. An account of the key texts is followed by studies of the...

Coinciding with the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Baptist movement, this book explores and assesses the cultural sources of Baptist beliefs and practices. Although the movement has been embraced, enriched, and revised by numerous cultural heritages, the Baptist movement has focused on a small group of Anglo exiles in Amersterdam in constructing its history and identity. Robert E. Johnson seeks to recapture the varied cultural and theological sources of Baptist tradition and to give voice to the diverse global elements of the movement that have previously been excluded or...

Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of writing on the Trinity, indicating a renewal of ideas and debate concerning this key element of Christian theology. This introduction challenges the standard account of a decline and revival in Trinitarian theology, taking into account recent, alternative readings of the theological tradition by Lewis Ayres and Michel Barnes amongst other scholars. By clearly analysing the scope of these new approaches, the authors establish the importance of a sapiential understanding of the Trinity, resisting the notion of separating faith and reason and...

How is a free faith expressed, organised and governed? How are diverse spiritualities and theologies made compatible? What might a religion based in reason and democracy offer today's world? This book will help the reader to understand the contemporary liberal religion of Unitarian Universalism in a historical and global context. Andrea Greenwood and Mark W. Harris challenge the view that the Unitarianism of New England is indigenous and the point from which the religion spread. Relationships between Polish radicals and the English Dissenters existed, and the English radicals profoundly...

Pentecostalism has become the fastest growing Christian movement, particularly outside Europe, and Allan Heaton Anderson is one of the foremost scholars of this phenomenon. His innovative interpretation of Pentecostalism focuses on the serious contribution made by both western and Majority World participants in its development. In this second edition of his leading introductory course book, Anderson presents an updated global history of the movement, which addresses significant events and changes in recent years, and surveys important theoretical issues such as gender and society, as well as...