Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Comparative Religion

For those who are trying to grasp the complexities of the strife in the Middle East, this book addresses the religious, political, social, and economic problems there, as well as throughout the Arab world. Among the topics covered are the personality of Mohammed, movements within Islam, and current trends such as socialism and fundamentalism.

Liberator, ancestor, cosmic Christ, and Black Messiah: these are just some of the ways that Jesus is viewed in the world. This rare book provides a global tour of the Christologies emerging in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and those of North American feminist and African American theologies.

In this book, Duncan Ferguson and contributors describe the range of thought and practice within the New Age and offer balanced judgments regarding its value for societies and individuals undergoing unprecedented change. Assessing its weakness and strengths, the authors and editor say the New Age is not all good or all bad and that some of its holistic and ecological tenets may be useful in formulating a spirituality in our confusing time.

In this important and timely book, philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar deals with the crucial issues of our time--war, religion, and ecology--as he redefines true peace and offers a way to achieve it in the world. Peace, he argues, requires more than nuclear, military, or economic disarmament. Peace can be obtained only by a cultural disarmament, which will require that absolution be abandoned for true reconciliation through ongoing intercultural dialogues.

Renowned theologian and philosopher of religion John Hick takes a hard look at an important intellectual problem facing Christians today: where exactly does Christianity fit into the scheme of the world in light of other world religions? And is it possible to remain Christian while accepting the truth of other beliefs? Offering good reasons for why the traditional stance that Christianity is the only true religion is no longer workable, Hick puts forth a cogent defense of Christianity in the global context of other religions.

Relating to People of Other Religions:

- provides autobiiographical, anecdotal, biblical, and practical reflections

- avoides academic jargon

- challenges the reader to reflection

- gives readers confidence in relating to people of other faiths

- offers readers an opportunity...

Written reputedly by an Egyptian magus, Horapollo Niliacus, in the fourth century C.E., The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo is an anthology of nearly two hundred "hieroglyphics," or allegorical emblems, said to have been used by the Pharaonic scribes in describing natural and moral aspects of the world. Translated into Greek in 1505, it informed much of Western iconography from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This work not only tells how various types of natural phenomena, emotions, virtues, philosophical concepts, and human character-types were symbolized, but also...

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating contemporary inquiry, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha.

Rank's monograph remains the classic...

The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and a rebirth into transcendent life. This book traces the images of spiritual initiation in religious rituals and myths of resurrection, poems and epics, cycles of nature, and art and dreaming. It dramatizes the metamorphosis from a common experience of death's inevitability into a transcendent freedom beyond individual limitations.

"This is a classic work in analytical psychology that offers crucial insights on the meaning of death symbolism (and its inevitably accompanying...

Addressing problems of objectivity and authenticity, Sabine MacCormack reconstructs how Andean religion was understood by the Spanish in light of seventeenth-century European theological and philosophical movements, and by Andean writers trying to find in it antecedents to their new Christian faith.

The inaugural volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of thirty scholars of the religions of India in a new anthology designed to reshape the ways in which the religious traditions of India are understood. The book contains translations of forty-five works, most of which have never before been available in a Western language. Many of these highlight types of discourse (especially ritual manuals, folktales, and oral narratives) and voices (vernacular, esoteric, domestic, and female) that have not been sufficiently represented in previous anthologies and standard...

Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a...

The acclaimed volumes of Princeton Readings in Religions present the remarkable range of all that is encompassed in the practice of religions, across the centuries and across the world.

Religions of Asia in Practice: An Anthology brings together into a single volume the most important and fascinating selections from the volumes on Buddhism, India, China, Tibet, and Japan to give an overview of how religions have been lived by both ordinary and extraordinary people throughout the continent of Asia. These materials--many of which had never before been translated...

In this beautifully realized study, Peter Schafer investigates the origins of a female manifestation of God in Jewish mysticism. The search itself is a fascinating exploration of the idea of a feminine divinity. And Schafer's surprising but persuasive conclusions yield deeper understanding of the complex but frequently intimate relationship between Christianity and Judaism--and of the development of religious concepts more generally.

Toward the end of the twelfth century, a small book titled the Bahir (Light) appeared in Provence. The first document of Judaism's emerging...

The world's three great monotheistic religions have spent most of their historical careers in conflict or competition with each other. And yet in fact they sprung from the same spiritual roots and have been nurtured in the same historical soil. This book--an extraordinarily comprehensive and approachable comparative introduction to these religions--seeks not so much to demonstrate the truth of this thesis as to illustrate it. Frank Peters, one of the world's foremost experts on the monotheistic faiths, takes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and after briefly tracing the roots of...