In this book, Paul Babie and Michael Trainor compare our contemporary preoccupation with ownership and consumption with the role of property and possessions in the biblical world, contending that Christian theology provides a valuable entry point to discussing the issue of private property--a neoliberal tool with the capacity to shape the world in which we live by exercising control over the planet's resources. Babie and Trainor draw on the Gospel According to Luke, arguing that this first century CE document offers a radical, challenging view of wealth and possessions that in the...

Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization. The book focuses on the ways in which individual and social bodies manipulate and are manipulated by the politics and power encoded in language and formalized canonical knowledge. Scriptures, in this sense, function as complex phenomena that are instrumental to social conservatism as well as social critique and social change. The essays in this volume, written...

Innovative Catholicism and the Human Condition gives an anthropological account of a progressive religious movement in the Roman Catholic Church that is attempting to reconcile religious conviction and reason, and, ergo, modify the human condition. Investigation is given to a representative group of this movement, "Innovative Catholics," who are endeavouring to maintain the momentum for change which began in the 1960s and 1970s. They now find themselves caught between traditional notions of religion and a secularised society, while trying to reconcile these polarising forces to find a...

In 1967, Lynn White, Jr. s seminal article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" was published, essentially establishing the academic study of religion and nature. White argues that religions particularly Western Christianity are a major cause of worldwide ecological crises. He then asserts that if we are to halt, let alone revert, anthropogenic damages to the environment, we need to radically transform religious cosmologies. White s hugely influential thesis has been cited thousands of times in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies, environmental...

This book explores the idea of religious pluralism while defending the norms of secular cosmopolitanism, which include liberty, tolerance, civility, and hospitality. The secular cosmopolitan ideal requires us to be more tolerant and more hospitable toward religious believers and non-believers from diverse traditions in our religiously pluralistic world. Some have argued that the world s religions can be united around a common core. This book argues that it is both impossible and inadvisable either to reduce religion to one thing or to deny religion. Instead, the book affirms non reductive...

The transformations Buddhism has been undergoing in the modern age have inspired much research over the last decade. The main focus of attention has been the phenomenon known as Buddhist modernism, which is defined as a conscious attempt to adjust Buddhist teachings and practices in conformity with the modern norms of rationality, science, or gender equality. This book advances research on Buddhist modernism by attempting to clarify the highly diverse ways in which Buddhist faith, thought, and practice have developed in the modern age, both in Buddhist heartlands in Asia and in the West....

This book offers an original interpretation of the origin and early reception of the most fundamental claim of Christianity: Jesus resurrection. Richard Miller contends that the earliest Christians would not have considered the New Testament accounts of Jesus resurrection to be literal or historical, but instead would have recognized this narrative as an instance of the trope of divine translation, common within the Hellenistic and Roman mythic traditions. Given this framework, Miller argues, early Christians would have understood the resurrection story as fictitious rather than historical...