This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice, and world religion during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This second volume focuses on the diverse interfaith afterlives of Jesus. Moving beyond the explicitly Christian afterlives traced in volume one, this set of essays explores how Jesus has significant afterlives in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Ruism and Mormonism, as well as selected secular afterlives in progressive Christianity. The contributors include religion scholars from the respective traditions, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own religious context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice, and world religion during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This second volume focuses on the diverse interfaith afterlives of Jesus. Moving beyond the explicitly Christian afterlives traced in volume one, this set of essays explores how Jesus has significant afterlives in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Ruism and Mormonism, as well as selected secular afterlives in progressive Christianity. The contributors include religion scholars from the respective traditions, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own religious context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

St. Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, has bequeathed guidelines for both personal and political behavior to individual citizens and to states that have retained their relevance to humanity to this day. However, his statement in Romans 13 that “the powers-that-be are ordained of God” has been interpreted in conflicting ways, especially since the time of Martin Luther in sixteenth-century Germany. Luther’s occasional insistence that the ruler had to be obeyed unquestionably led to a political culture in Prusso-Germany that was systematized by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). His teachings gave rise to the disastrous ultra-authoritarian regimes of both Marxist-Leninism (left-wing Hegelianism) and National Socialism (right-wing Hegelianism). The author of this book, being equipped with a long training in Prusso-German history, has explained how this happened and why both Imperial Germany and the Nazi Third Reich unleashed expansionist wars and justified them with ideologies that were both hostile to Western European and transatlantic democratic, parliamentary values. The author’s familiarity with the contemporary history of both the liberal-parliamentary West Germany and the authoritarian communist East Germany has enabled him to portray the internecine German debate that was largely influenced by the remarkable ministry of the martyred Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The legacy of the late André LaCocque is brought to life in this book, each chapter having been written by his beloved friends and former students. His work has so inspired them that each of the contributor chapters moves LaCocque’s work forward in directions of which he surely would have joyfully approved. His great love of Jewish-Christian relations, matters of social justice, feminist biblical scholarship, and interdisciplinary dialogue are carried forward in the enthusiasm and careful work presented here. These offerings in his memory are sure to serve as a jumping-off point for further scholarship in each of these areas of interest and blossom in the years ahead.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social just and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This third volume focuses on the diverse afterlives of Jesus within contemporary culture and the arts. Moving beyond the explicitly religious afterlives traced in the first two volumes, this set of essay traces selected afterlives of Jesus within Indigenous cultures around the Pacific, as well as in the arts and in the contested fields of gender and sexuality. The contributors include religion scholars from diverse cultural contexts, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own particular context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

In recent decades there has been a seismic shift in world Christianity. Whereas formerly Christianity existed as a Caucasian Euro-American phenomenon, the majority of Christians today reside in the Southern Hemisphere, or the Global South. And what is true for the demographics of Christianity has followed lockstep for its theological developments. The era of German theologians setting the tone for global church are gone. Today, some of the loudest and most creative voices in theology speak from the emerging contingencies of the Global South, for example, promoting Latinx, Black, Caribbean, and Asian theologies and their influence often influences the conversation in the United States and Europe. In addition, just as the center of Christianity has moved geographically from north to south, so with theological seminaries in the west, which have declined as training centers for clergy. These events coincide with new theological centers are opening in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. The bottom line is—contemporary Christianity today looks significantly different than it did a century ago, and publications have been slow to acknowledge, let alone describe and elaborate upon, this major shift to the largest religion in the world. These shifts guide our intentions in this book. Such a reference book, which could also be used as a textbook, therefore is very much needed. In fact, there is nothing like the contents of this single-volume book in the publishing market which allows for high-quality, interdisciplinary, and international dialogue.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This first volume focuses on selected historical afterlives of Jesus, including the Pantokrator of Byzantium and the Aryan Jesus of Nazi Germany. This collection is not an exercise in Christian apologetics, nor is it an interfaith project—except in the sense that many of the contributors are from a Christian context of some kind, while others are from other contexts. The contributors include scholars in relevant fields, as well as religious practitioners reflecting on Jesus in their own cultural and religious settings. While the essays are original work that is grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language so the information is accessible to intelligent nonspecialists.

“Reading this book requires an open and questioning mind, not a mind that has already accepted just one answer. I, for one, have benefited greatly by reading his words and listening to his lectures.” — From the foreword by Sir Jason Winters, KGSJ Licauco, in this book, boldly discourses topics that might be unconventional for most people, but very thought-provoking. Such topics might be disturbing, but they will satiate the intellectually curious and those who don’t settle only in a single point of view.