"Religions in Focus" engages with the religious lives of members of some of the most significant religions today. It presents religions as contemporary ways of life that motivate and inspire people. Because religious people refer to sacred texts, honour the founders of their religions, learn from elders, or mould their lives according to authoritative teachings, "Religions in Focus" explains the relationship between tradition and contemporary practice. It offers an introduction to religions that is rooted in the best scholarship of the Study of Religions and provides a secure foundation for further study.A team of Religious Studies scholars from many countries, all skilled communicators about the contemporary religions with which they are thoroughly familiar, introduce what it means to live as a religious person today. They insist that however old or young these religions may be, what is most interesting is the ways in which people express them today. This is not a history of religions but an insightful introduction to living religions. A guide to further study and a companion website will point to ways of building on knowledge gained in studying this book, and applying skills developed in studying people's religious lives.

To live in a global society and make sense of world events requires more than a cursory understanding of world religions and the roles they play. This fascinating, in-depth, academic study of the five major religions focuses on each group's response to some of the most critical social issues of our time: ecology, peace, and women's rights. The author also highlights individual religious "heroes" and provides links to numerous digital sources for further research, making this a particularly timely and personalized approach to the study of world religions and their far-reaching impact at every level of society. Book jacket.

Religious ideas, practices, discourses, institutions, and social expressions are in constant flux. This volume addresses the internal and external dynamics, interactions between individuals, religious communities, and local as well as global society. The contributions concentrate on four areas: 1. Contemporary religion in the public sphere: The Tactics of (In)visibility among Religious Communities in Europe; Religion Intersecting De-nationalization and Re-nationalization in Post-Apartheid South Africa; 2. Religious transformations: Forms of Religious Communities in Global Society; Political Contributions of Ancestral Cosmologies and the Decolonization of Religious Beliefs; Esoteric Tradition as Poetic Invention; 3. Focus on the individual: Religion and Life Trajectories of Islamists; Angels, Animals and Religious Change in Antiquity and Today; Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar in Today’s Religion; Religion between Individuals and Collectives; 4. Narrating religion: Entangled Knowledge Cultures and the Creation of Religions in Mongolia and Europe; Global Intellectual History and the Dynamics of Religion; On Representing Judaism.

Retaining all the beloved qualities of Huston Smith's classic The World's Religions, this stunning pictorial presentation refines the text to its wonderful essentials. In detailed, absorbing, richly illustrated, and highly readable chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and primal religions, we find refreshing and fascinating presentations of both the differences and the similarities among the worldwide religious traditions. The approach is at once classic and contemporary, retaining all the empathy, eloquence, and erudition that millions of readers love about the earlier edition, while being edited and designed for a contemporary general readership. This delightful marriage of engaging text and remarkable pictures vividly brings to life the scope and vision of Huston Smith's expertise and insight.

Today, and historically, religions often seem to be intolerant, narrow-minded, and zealous. But the record is not so one-sided. In Religious Tolerance in World Religions, numerous scholars offer perspectives on the "what" and "why" traditions of tolerance in world religions, beginning with the pre-Christian West, Greco-Roman paganism, and ancient Israelite Monotheism and moving into modern religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. By tolerance the authors mean "the capacity to live with religious difference, and by toleration, the theory that permits a majority religion to accommodate the presence of a minority religion." The volume is introduced with a summary of a recent survey that sought to identify the capacity of religions to tolerate one another in theory and in practice. Eleven religious communities in seven nations were polled on questions that ranged from equality of religious practitioners to consequences of disobedience. The essays frame the provocative analysis of how a religious system in its political statement produces categories of tolerance that can be explained in that system’s logical context. Past and present beliefs, practices, and definitions of social order are examined in terms of how they support tolerance for other religious groups as a matter of public policy. Religious Tolerance in World Religions focuses attention on the attitude "that the ’infidel’ or non-believer may be accorded an honorable position within the social order defined by Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism, and so on." It is a timely reference for colleges and universities and for makers of public policy.

For sophomore/junior-level courses in World Religions and Anthropology of Religion in departments of Anthropology, Sociology, and Religion. Religion and Culture introduces students to the major World religions and aboriginal religious traditions. This edited volume presents all aspects of the anthropological perspective on religion. Contributing authors provide a unique assembly of various topics and traditions that are researched by contemporary anthropologists

Because religion is so central to the lives and experience of the vast majority of people throughout the world, it figures very prominently in a variety of ways in interhuman relations. Unfortunately, 'religion' often appears to be one of the potent sources of mistrust, discord and strife between and among individuals, groups and cultures. What frequently lies at the root of such suspicion and dissension is general ignorance concerning the religious other, a lack of knowledge about his or her beliefs, aspirations and views of the good and morally honorable life. And even if people have some factual knowledge about other religions, they regularly display little understanding of them and their adherents. Learning both to know and understand people of other faiths and their religions is absolutely requisite to the realization of paradigms of coherent and intelligent 'convivance, ' that is, living together in sensible, peaceable and cooperative harmony. An effective agency for fostering such knowledge and understanding is the discipline of theology of religions, which examines how religions have and ought to view other religions. And it is particularly the practice of comparative theology of religions which bears the most promise in this regard. The present symposium consists of precisely this kind of comparative exercise and may be viewed as an important contribution to the development of a new project which endeavors to enlarge the horizon and broaden the focus and reflection of theology of religions as that has been gradually developed during the last few decades, a new enterprise, in other words, which seeks to universalize and mutualize theology-of-religions discourse. One of the important things this volume shows is that the views religions have of other religions differ from one another in very substantial ways, which is explained by the fact that they derive from diverging paradigms of faith, belief and ritual and specific cultural and social contexts. This textbook demonstrates how strongly different Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto and Confucian views are from those of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, which latter in turn also exhibit considerable differences among themselves. These differences are greater than people immersed in their own cultures often realize or expect. It is becoming ever more clear that ignorance of or disinclination to acknowledge or refusal to accept these real differences constitute major root causes of serious conflicts in the world. The essays in this book, written by representatives of the major world religions, offer descriptive and/or prescriptive appraisals of other religions in general or one other religion in particular from the perspective of the religion of the author concerned. It is hoped that this unique exercise in intercultural theology of religions will generate insights and new forms of understanding which can be used by religious leaders and other educators to help correct the disposition toward religious haughtiness, insularity and communalism and the dangerous leanings toward interreligious suspicion, antipathy and animosity which are all too often evident in our contemporary societies.

The only book of its kind, this balanced and accessibly written text explores the geographical study of religion. Roger W. Stump presents a clear and meticulous examination of the intersection of religious belief and practice with the concepts of place and space. He begins by analyzing the factors that have shaped the spatial distributions of religious groups, including the seminal events that have fostered the organization of religions in diverse hearths and the subsequent processes of migration and conversion that have spread religious beliefs. The author then assesses how major religions have diversified as they have become established in disparate places, producing a variety of religious systems from a common tradition. Stump explores the efforts of religious groups to control secular space at various scales, relating their own uses of particular spaces and the meanings they attribute to space beyond the boundaries of their own communities. Examining sacred space as a diverse but recurring theme in religious belief, the book considers its role in religious forms of spatial behavior and as a source of conflict within and between religious groups. Refreshingly jargon-free and impartial, this text provides a broad, comparative view of religion as a focus of geographical inquiry.