Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Religion

Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts explores the phenomenon of spirit possession, focusing on the religious and cultural functions it serves as a means of communication.

This work focuses on processes of articulating identity. The notions of "shared idioms" and "sacred symbols" shaping this volume suggest both a search for common ground and boundary-drawing processes. Individual chapters locate "sites" of these modes and the conditions that engender them, problematizing the truth-claims of unitary markers of identity.

Theology and the Science of Moral Action explores a new approach to ethical thinking that promotes dialogue and integration between recent research in the scientific study of moral cognition and behaviour¿including neuroscience, moral psychology, and behavioural economics¿and virtue theoretic approaches to ethics in both philosophy and theology. The book evaluates the concept of moral exemplarity and its significance in philosophical and theological ethics as well as for ongoing research programs in the cognitive sciences.

This book examines various attempts in the `West¿ to manage cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity ¿ focusing on Muslim minorities in predominantly non-Muslim societies. An international panel of contributors provide insight.

This book adds a new and innovative perspective to this line of thought by being the first to link prenatal and perinatal experiences to the origins of these unconscious underpinnings of our shared images of God.

Using an approach that is both comparative and historical, and relying upon case studies ranging from China and Iran to India, Britain, America and Kurdistan, the authors of this volume treat religions as discourses that are the products of a particular moment in history.

New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam contributes to the ongoing dialogue about the nature and influence of the Nation of Islam, bringing together contributions that explore the formation, practices, and influence of the NOI.

Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"¿understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language¿as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis.

Translating Religion advances thinking about translation as a critical category in religious studies, combining theoretical reflection about processes of translation in religion with focused case studies that are international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious.

This book considers the theological background and meaning of Smith¿s work. Adam Smith as Theologian gathers a group of eminent economists, historians, philosophers, and theologians to reflect on these questions, examining the extent to which even contemporary economics may contain residues of Smith¿s theological mores.

This collection considers how religious identity interplays with other forms and contexts of identity, specifically those related to sexual identity. It asks how these intersections are formed, negotiated and resisted across time and places, including the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and the Global South. Questions around ''queer'' engagements in same-sex marriages, civil partnerships and other practices (e.g. adoption) have created a number of provoking stances and policy provisions - but what remains unanswered is how people experience and situate themselves within sometimes competing, or ''contradictory'', moments as ''religious queers'' who may be tasked with ''queering religion''. Additionally, the presumed paradoxes of ''marriage'', queer sexuality, religion and youth combine to generate a noteworthy generational absence. This leads to questions about where ''religious queers'' reside, resist and relate experiences of intersecting religious and sexual lives. In looking at interconnectedness, this collection offers international contributions which bridge the ''contradictions'' in queering religion and in making visible ''religious queers.'' It provides insight into older and younger people''s understandings of religiosity, queer cultures, and religious groups. A small but active religious minority in the US has received much attention for its anti-gay political activity; much less attention has been paid to the more positive, supportive role that religious-based groups play in e.g. providing housing, education and political advocacy for queer youth. Queer methodologies and intersectional approaches offer a lens both theoretically and methodologically to uncover the salience of related social divisions and identities. This collection is both innovative and sensitive to ''blended'' identities and their various enactments.

The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere moves gender from the periphery to the centre of contemporary debates about the role of religion in public and political life. It offers a timely, multidisciplinary collection of gender-focused essays that address an array of challenges arising from the changing role and influence of religious organisations, identities, actors and values in the public sphere in contemporary multicultural and democratic societies.

This volume brings together for the first time some of the world¿s leading authorities on the German mystic Jacob Boehme, to illuminate his thought and its reception over four centuries for the benefit of students and advanced scholars alike. Boehme¿s theosophical works have influenced Western culture in profound ways since their dissemination in the early 17th Century, and these interdisciplinary essays trace the social and cultural networks as well as the intellectual pathways involved in Boehme¿s enduring impact. The chapters range from situating Boehme in the 16th Century Radical Reformation, to discussions of his significance in modern theology. They explore the major contexts for Boehme¿s reception including the Pietist movement, Russian religious thought and Western esotericism, as well as focusing more closely on important readers: the religious radicals of the English Civil Wars and the later English Behmenists; literary figures such as Goethe and Blake, and great philosophers of the modern age, among them Schelling and Hegel. Together, the chapters illustrate the depth and variety of Boehme¿s influence and a concluding chapter addresses directly an underlying theme of the volume ¿ asking why Boehme matters today, and how readers in the present might be enriched by a fresh engagement with his apparently opaque and complex writings.

This book offers an academically rigorous examination of the biological, psychological, social and ecclesiastical processes that allowed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to happen and then be covered up.

This book highlights the diverse ways in which religions first and foremost make use of the traditional power and communication channels available to them, like strategies of conversion, the preservation of traditional value systems, and the intertwining of religious and political power. Nevertheless, challenged by a more culturally and religiously diversified societies and by the growth of new religious sects, contemporary religions are also forced to let go of these well known strategies of preservation and formulate new ways of establishing their position in local contexts. This collection of essays by established and emerging scholars brings together theory-driven and empirically-based research and case-studies about the global and bottom-up strategies of religions and religious traditions in Europe and beyond to rethink their positions in their local communities and in the world.

This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the two sometimes overlap, and at other times spirituality distances itself from religion while reproducing some of its underlying interpretative frameworks. This book does not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted, yet recognizes the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the reciprocal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology. The ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality included in this volume span a wide range of countries, from Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel.

This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today - its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism - and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China''s encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.

Teaching the Historical Jesus in his Jewish context to students of varied religious backgrounds presents instructors with not only challenges, but also opportunities to sustain interfaith dialogue and foster mutual understanding and respect. This new collection explores these challenges and opportunities, gathering together experiential lessons drawn from teaching Jesus in a wide variety of secular and religious settings. A diverse group of Jewish and Christian scholars reflect on their own classroom experiences and explicates crucial issues for teaching Jesus, providing practical case studies for scholars working on Jewish-Christian relations.

Examines a series of common features in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be one of the most influential figures in Islamic thought.

This interesting and provocative work develops a new theological approach to language in the light of contemporary critical theory.