An enlightening look at the surprising connections between spirituality and progressive thought in the United States.Religious liberalism in America is often associated with an ecumenical Protestant establishment. This book, however, draws attention to the broad diversity of liberal cultures that shapes America's religious movements.The essays gathered here push beyond familiar tropes and boundaries to interrogate religious liberalism's dense cultural leani...

This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment.Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a uni...

Cunningham's classic introduction to Wicca is about how to live life magically, spiritually, and wholly attuned with nature.

The Sikh religion has a following of over 20 million people worldwide. However,events such as the verbal and physical attacks on Sikhs just after September 11, where Sikhs were being mistaken for Muslims, suggest that the Sikh faith still remains mysterious to many. This Very Short Introduction introduces newcomers to the meaning of the Sikh religious tradition, its teachings, practices, rituals and festivals. Eleanor Nesbitt highlights and contextualizes the key threads in the hi...

For years, international apologist Josh McDowell has been alert to the challenge of Islam—and how Muslims’ objections to Christianity can raise deep doubts in believers’ minds. His recent on-the-ground research with Muslims in the Middle East has crystallized into this practical resource focusing on Jesus and the gospel. Aided by Islam expert Jim Walker, McDowell lays out the evidence on the crucial issues:What kind of prophet was Jesus? Was he the Messiah?“Son of G...

In recent years there has been an explosion of curiosity and debate about Islam and about the role of religion, both in the world and in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The numerous books published on these questions speak to issues of politics, history, or global security. None speaks to the heart and the spirit, and yet millions of people experience these issues not as political, economic, or intellectual questions but as questions of deep spiritual, emotional, and religious significance....

In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century “religious marketplace” in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reaso...

How Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have reimagined Abraham in their own imagesJews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. But in Inheriting Abraham, Jon Levenson reveals how the increasingly conventional notion of the three equally "Abrahamic" religions...

The story of Jesus is well-known worldwide. But have you ever wondered if it is the true and complete story of the Savior? Could there be more to the Son of God?Author Audrey Carr addresses those questions in The Greatest Story Never Told: An Advanced Understanding of Christianity. She not only presents thereal story of Jesus, in which he did not die on the cross, but also includeshis unitary gospel of oneness with God that traditional Christianity hasmissed. Quoting from ...

The notion of Interreligious Studies signals a new academic perspective on the study of religion, characterized by a relational approach. Interreligious Studies defines the essential features of interreligious studies compared with alternative conceptions of religious studies and theology. The book discusses pressing and salient challenges in interreligious relations, including interreligious dialogue in practice and theory, interfaith dialogue and secularity, confrontational iden...

This book examines how the racialization of religion facilitates the diasporic formation of ethnic Vietnamese in the U.S. and Cambodia, two communities that have been separated from one another for nearly 30 years. It compares devotion to female religious figures in two minority religions, the Virgin Mary among the Catholics and the Mother Goddess among the Caodaists. Visual culture and institutional structures are examined within both communities. Thien-Huong Ninh invites a critical re-th...

This timely work addresses sensitive issues and relations between Muslims and Christians around the world. The book uniquely captures the opportunity for Christians and Muslims to come together and discuss pertinent issues such as pluralism, governance, preaching, Christian missionary efforts, and general misperceptions of Muslim and Christian communities. Joint authorship and discussion within the book is used to offer dialogue and responses between different contributors. This dialogue r...