Comparative religion Books

Book SynopsisRosemary Kellison is associate professor of religion at Florida State University and author of Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique (2019).Shannon Dunn is department chair and professor of religious studies at Gonzaga University and has most recently published essays in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book examines conversion stories as told by people who have actually undergone a conversion experience, including experiences of apostasy. The stories reveal that there is not just one ""conversion story."" Scot McKnight and Hauna Ondrey show that ""conversion theory"" helps explain why some people walk away from one religion, often to another, very different religion. The book confirms the usefulness--particularly for pastors, rabbis, and priests, and university and college teachers--of applying conversion theory to specific groups. However, the book's sensitive detailing of the stories themselves makes conversion more than a theoretical occurrence; it makes the immediacy, and often the difficulty, of conversion both real and moving.Trade ReviewThis book stirs deep reflection on the faith journeys of courageous people. -Lewis Rambo, San Francisco Theological SeminaryTable of Contents Conversion: What Really Happens? 1 Leaving Church, Finding Freedom Anatomy of Apostasy 2 Leaving the Synagogue, Finding the Church When Jews Become Messianic Jews 3 Leaving Rome, Finding Wheaton Catholics Behaving Protestantly 4 Leaving Wheaton, Finding Rome The Improbable Conversion of Evangelicals to Catholicism Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWilderness is one of the most abiding creations in the history of religions. It has a long and seminal history and is of contemporary relevance in wildlife preservation and climate discourses. Yet it has not previously been subject to scrutiny or theorising from a cross-cultural study of religions perspective. What are the specific relations between the world’s religions and imagined and real wilderness areas? The wilderness is often understood as a domain void of humans, opposed to civilization, but the analyses in this book complicate and question the dualism of previous theoretical grids and offer new perspectives on the interesting multiplicity of the wilderness and religion nexus. This book thus addresses the need for cross-cultural anthropological and history of religions analyses by offering in-depth case studies of the use and functions of wilderness spaces in a diverse range of contexts including, but not limited to, ancient Greece, early Christian asceticism, Old Norse religion, the shamanism-Buddhism encounter in Mongolia, contemporary paganism, and wilderness spirituality in the US. It advances research on religious spatialities, cosmologies, and ideas of wild nature and brings new understanding of the role of religion in human interaction with ‘the world’.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBased on the author’s cross-regional fieldwork, archival findings, and critical reading of memoirs and creative works of Tibetans and Chinese, this book recounts how the potency of Tibet manifests itself in modern material culture concerning Tibet, which is interwoven with state ideology, politics of identity, imagination, nostalgia, forgetting, remembering, and earth-inspired transcendence. The physical place of Tibet is the antecedent point of contact for subsequent spiritual imaginations, acts of destruction and reconstruction, collective nostalgia, and delayed aesthetic and environmental awareness shown in the eco-religious acts of native Tibetans, Communist radical utopianism, former military officers’ recollections, Tibetan and Chinese artwork, and touristic consumption of the Tibetan landscape. By drawing connections between differences, dichotomies, and oppositions, this book explores the interiors of the diverse agentive modes of imaginations from which Tibet is imagined in China. On the theoretical front, this book attempts to bring forth a set of fresh perspectives on how a culturally and religiously specific landscape is antecedent to simultaneous processes of place-making, identity-making, and the bonding between place and people.

Read more less