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Over 7 billion people live on the earth, and 84 percent of them describe themselves as being religious. Few topics incite such passion as religion. What does that mean? Why are humans invested in ideas that may never be proved? Why has religion played such an important role in history? In Comparative Religion: Investigate the World through Religious Tradition, readers seek answers to these questions by comparing and contrasting the cultural, spiritual, and geographical underpinnings of five different religions. By developing a better understanding of the similarities and differences among religions of the world, readers gain a strong foothold in a dialogue that has continued for thousands of...
Comparison is at the heart of religious studies as a discipline and foundational to the field's methodology. In this book, Arvind Sharma introduces the term "reciprocal illumination" to describe the mutual enlightenment that can occur when a comparison is made between one tradition and another, one method and another, or between a tradition and a method. Developing the concept of reciprocal illumination through historical, phenomenological, and psychological methods, Sharma demonstrates how to use comparison, while avoiding the pitfall of treating it as merely raw material for higher order generalizations.
This book brings together two scholarly traditions: experts in Roman, Jewish and Islamic law, an area where scholars tend to be familiar with work in each area, and experts in the legal traditions of South and East Asia, which have tended to be less interdisciplinary. The resulting mix produces new ways of looking at comparative law and legal history from a global perspective, and these essays contribute both to our understanding of comparative religion as well as comparative law.
William A Graham, a leading international scholar in the field of Islamic Studies, gathers together his selected writings under three sections: 1.History and Interpretation of Islamic Religion; 2.The Qur'an as Scripture, and 3. Scripture in the History of Religion. Each section opens with a new introduction by Graham, and a bibliography of his works is included. Graham's work in Islamic studies focuses largely on the analysis and interpretation of the religious dimensions of ritual action, scriptural piety, textual authority/revelation, tradition, and major concepts, such as grace and transcendence. His work in the comparative history of religion has focused in particular on the 'problem' of scripture as a cross-cultural religious phenomenon that is more complex than simply 'sacred text'. This invaluable resource will be of primary interest to students of the Islamic tradition, especially as regards Qur'anic piety, Muslim 'ritual' practice, and fundamental structures of Islamic thought, and to students of the comparative history of religion, especially as regards the phenomenon of 'scripture' and its analogs.
Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
Ten noted religious studies scholars examine the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, & Mormonism to produce an authoritative, comprehensive survey of the writings that shape the world's major religions.
"Patrick Laude provides an invaluable collection of some of the greatest expressions of universal spirituality written in the past century and a half.... The essays are both intellectually and spiritually inspirational."---John Voll, Georgetown University, author of Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World --
How should we view religions that are different from our own? In a world where misunderstandings and disagreements between cultures and faiths are commonplace, this fascinating book, the first in a new series called Studies in Comparative Religion, helps us put other faiths in context and addresses the problem of encountering conflicting religious forms. Featuring 23 fascinating articles from religious scholars and the personal accounts of the remarkable individuals who have lived theses encounters first hand.
This book is now firmly established as the standard treatment of its subject. The history of comparative religion is traced in detail from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, in the work of scholars such as Max Muller and anthropologists - such as Tylor, Lang, Robertson-Smith and Frazer - through the American psychologists of religion - such as Starbuck, Leuba, William James - to the period after the First World War, when the evolutionary approach was seriously called into question. It also examines the relevance of religion to Freud and Jung; the 'phenomenology of religion'; the tensions between comparative religion and theology; and the work of such outstanding personalities as Nathan Söderblom and Rudolf Otto. The last two chapters review the main issues raised since the Second World War.