Religion

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.

This book offers an examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive occult iconoclasts. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a study in contradictions. He was born into a Fundamentalist Christian family, and then he was educated at Cambridge where he experienced both an intellectual liberation from his religious upbringing and a psychic awakening that led him into the study of magic. He was a stock figure in the tabloid press of his day, vilified during his life as a traitor, drug addict and debaucher; yet he became known as perhaps the most influential thinker in contemporary esotericism. The practice of the occult arts was understood in the light of contemporary developments in psychology, and its advocates, such as William Butler Yeats, were among the intellectual avant-garde of the modernist project. Crowley took a more drastic step and declared himself the revelator of a new age of individualism. Crowley's occult bricolage, Magick, was a thoroughly eclectic combination of spiritual exercises drawing from Western European ceremonial magical traditions as practiced in the nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley also pioneered in his inclusion of Indic sources for the parallel disciplines of meditation and yoga. The summa of this journey of self-liberation was harnessing the power of sexuality as a magical discipline, an instance of the “sacrilization of the self” as practiced in his co-masonic magical group, the Ordo Templi Orientis. The religion Crowley created, Thelema, legitimated his role as a charismatic revelator and herald of a new age of freedom under the law of “Do what thou wilt.” The influence of Aleister Crowley is not only to be found in contemporary esotericismȔhe was, for instance, a major influence on Gerald Gardner and the modern witchcraft movement—but can also be seen in the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in many forms of alternative spirituality and popular culture. This book provides insight into Crowley's critical role in the study of western esotericism, new religious movements, and sexuality.

This book offers a compelling and provocative argument against the application of postmodern thought to religious studies, showing how such radically skeptical thinking undermines, subverts, and distorts the study of religion. It shows that religious studies is an ongoing experiment with various types of methodological approaches to the study of religion, which is itself a human construct with limited cross-cultural application. Without a commonly agreed-upon method for the study of its subject, religious studies is characterized by the use of multiple methods, which tend to be adopted based on the latest trends in the field. Most recently, these trends have been dominated by postmodern thought. Because the discipline of religious studies is a product of the European Enlightenment with its values and representational mode of thinking, it is challenged and even threatened by postmodern thought, which calls into question many of its values, basic presuppositions, and convictions. The author examines various postmodern positions related to the study of religion, including those of Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault and Edward W. Said. He contrasts the thought of traditional history of religions scholars Mircea Eliade and Wendy Doniger with selected postmodern thinkers on the topics of hermeneutics, comparison, and difference. The book concludes by exploring the postmodern challenges to such accepted concepts of religion and considers the long-term implications of a scholar's adoption of postmodern methods. Regardless of whether they are transformed by postmodern thought, it suggests all methods and concepts should be subject to pragmatic review.

Ellen Muehlberger explores the diverse and inventive ideas Christians held about angels in late antiquity, focusing especially on the fourth and fifth centuries. At that time, Christians were experimenting with new modes of piety, adopting long-standing forms of public authority to Christian leadership and advancing novel ways of cultivating both body and mind to further the progress of individual Christians. She argues that in practicing these new modes of piety, Christians developed new ways of thinking about angels. The first half of the book is a detailed exploration of the two most popular discourses about angels that developed in late antiquity: in one, developed by Christians cultivating certain kinds of ascetic practices, angels were one type of being among many in a shifting universe, and their primary purpose was to guard and to guide Christians; in the other, voiced by urban Christian leaders contesting with one another, angels were morally stable characters described in the emerging canon of Scripture, available to enable readers to render Scripture coherent with emerging theological positions. In the second half, Muehlberger shows how these two discourses influenced wider Christian culture. In detailed studies of popular biographies written in late antiquity, of the community standards of emerging monastic communities, and of the training programs developed to prepare Christians to participate in ritual, new ideas about angels shaped and directed the formation of those institutions that we think of as defining late antiquity.

Falling outside of the usual categories of Patristic Christological discourse, Augustine’s Christology remains a relatively neglected area of his thought. This study focuses on his understanding of the humanity of Christ as it emerged in dialogue with his anti-Pelagian conception of human freedom and Original Sin. By reinterpreting the Pelagian controversy as a Western continuation of the Origenist controversy before it, it argues that Augustine’s reading of Origen lay at the heart of his Christological response to Pelagianism. Augustine is, therefore, situated within the network of fourth- and fifth-century Western theologians concerned to defend Origen’s orthodoxy—and the orthodoxy of a broader Christian Platonism—against their opponents. Opening with a survey of scholarship in the areas of both Augustinian Christology and Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism, it proceeds by detailing Augustine’s engagement with the issues and personalities involved in both the Origenist and Pelagian controversies. Chapter 3 examines the importance of Augustine’s understanding of Christ ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom 8.3) within his anti-Pelagian works; Chapter 4 traces the dependence of this motif on Origen’s exegesis. The fifth chapter considers Augustine’s treatment of Christ’s soul in relation to his understanding of Apollinarianism. The study concludes by exploring Augustine’s handling of the origin of the soul, suggesting that the inconsistencies in his Christology can be explained by recourse to an Origenian framework, in which the soul of Christ remains sinless in the Incarnation because of its relationship to the eternal Word after the Fall of souls to embodiment

In this groundbreaking volume, eminent and up-and-coming scholars, representing a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, address the question of non-Muslim salvation: according to the Islamic ethos (however understood), what can be said about the status and fate of non-Muslims? Each of the volume’s contributors responds to this often asked “salvation question”—a question with profound theological and practical implications—from different angles: while some limit themselves to its historical dimensions, others approach it as theologians and philosophers, yet others focus on the relationship between this-worldly relations with Others and next-worldly conceptions of salvation. Individually and collectively, the essays comprising this volume advance the discourse on religious diversity and our understanding of Islamic thought and Muslim societies. Between Heaven and Hell is possibly the first ever multi-authored volume on salvation in Islamic thought, at least in English. It does not conclude with neat resolutions; instead, it offers fascinating expositions, debates, and points of departure for further contemplation. Aside from the editor of the volume, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, and the author of the foreword, Tariq Ramadan, the contributors include William C. Chittick, Farid Esack, Mohammad Fadel, David M. Freidenreich, Marcia Hermansen, Jerusha Lamptey, Bruce B. Lawrence, Muhammad Legenhausen, Yasir Qadhi, A. Kevin Reinhart, Sajjad Rizvi, Reza Shah-Kazemi, and Tim Winter.

Empathy is a way of re-membering oneself with the religious other that buttresses an interreligious unity-in-diversity. This book therefore proposes a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism is through a more detailed consideration of the phenomenological category of empathy vis-à-vis Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) and Edith Stein (1891–1942). The book's methodology is phenomenological and narrative in approach, and is therefore necessarily contextual in so far as it takes seriously the post-Shoah situation. Heschel's call for a prophetic return to God, a call that is “ecumenically” expansive and supportive of humanity's need to receive otherness, is a call to live life in the form of response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic response through Edith Stein's interreligiously attuned scholarship and witness of empathy, as narratively “drawn” from within the chiarascuro horizon of the Shoah. Stein's portrait rises in the typology of “mandorla” figure—as one capable of dialectically bridging sameness with otherness—conveying an em-pathos in word and deed that is less narrow and more interreligious in kind, precisely because her “way” of martyrdom is as a re-memberer with the religious other(s) who is same: she neither distances herself nor denies her consanguinity with the Jewish people. Stein's Jewish and Christian fidelity, while being an archetype for interreligious relations, also challenges Catholicism to do the teshuva work of remembering its Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with otherness.

This volume seeks to show how Jews, Catholics, and Protestants can and do read the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament simultaneously from a critical and religious perspective. It points out the similarities and differences in how biblical texts are read, interpreted, and applied in each tradition. In particular, it explores how biblical criticism, especially the historical-critical method, can provide a sound basis for a religious reading. While the authors were trained academically in biblical criticism and teach it in their classes, they continue to read the Bible as a meaningful religious document central to their lives. The heart of the book is three essays on reading the Bible critically and religiously from a Jewish (Brettler), Catholic (Harrington), and Protestant (Enns) perspective; each author also offers a response to each of his colleague’s essays. Also included are an introduction to the history of biblical interpretation, a brief conclusion, and a glossary of technical terms.

This book investigates the meaning of happiness in light of biblical scholarship and developments in the study of happiness, especially via positive psychology. Nine chapters that focus on the Bible (five on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, four on the New Testament) are accompanied by three that evaluate the theme and the biblical chapters via the disciplines of systematic theology, practical theology, and counselling psychology. An introduction frames the project in terms of the meaning (often vaguely or ill-defined) of happiness, and a conclusion offers a first attempt at writing a biblical theology of happiness.

The fourth-century writer Evagrius of Pontus likens the experience of contemplation to dwelling in a kind of place. “When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace,” says Evagrius, “then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire of the color of heaven. This state is called by scripture, the place of God.” This book believes that the ancient tradition of Christian contemplative thought and practice represented by Evagrius has a genuine contribution to make to the world of ecological thought and practice. At the same time, he says, the sense of “the whole” emerging from contemporary ecological discourse has the potential to deepen and expand the classic understanding of contemplative life and practice. One of the striking features of the present historical moment is a deep and pervasive hunger for a less fragmented way of apprehending the world. Attending to these two traditions of thought and practice together, this book argues, can help us recover such an integrated vision of the world. Additionally, there is a growing recognition in the culture at large, and in faith communities in particular, of the need for a response to the ecological crisis that expresses our deepest moral and spiritual values. Drawing on the insights of the early Christian monastics as well as the ecological writings of such figures as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and many others, this book forges a distinctively contemplative vision of ecological spirituality that could, the book contends, serve to ground the work of ecological restoration.