Making World Religions

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-230
Author(s):  
Alexander Rocklin
Keyword(s):  
Print Media ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Other World

This chapter explores the short-lived Trinidad Hindu Mahasabha, which endeavored to articulate a Hindu identity that transcended local politics and concerns of "orthodox" and "reform," in order to unify all Hindus in Trinidad and allow them to take their place, on an equal footing, along with Christianity, Islam, and the other "world religions," on the international stage. This chapter shows the ways in which world religion operated as a lived category for particular communities: how local groups imagined and performed transnational Hindu identities through the consumption and distribution of print media and the promotion and performance of physical culture.

World Christianity, ‘World Religions’ and the Challenge of Insider Movements

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Christian J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Historical Series ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
World Christianity ◽  
Other World ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The One ◽  
Insider Movements

While studies in World Christianity have frequently referred to Christianity as a ‘world religion’, this article argues that such a category is problematic. Insider movements directly challenge the category, since they are movements of faith in Jesus that fall within another ‘world religion’ altogether – usually Islam or Hinduism. Rather than being an oddity of the mission frontier, insider movements expose ambiguities already present in World Christianity studies concerning the concept of ‘religion’ and how we understand the unity of the World Christian movement. The article first examines distortions that occur when religion is referred to on the one hand as localised practices which can be reoriented and taken up into World Christianity and, on the other hand, as ‘world religion’, where Christianity is sharply discontinuous with other world systems. Second, the article draws from the field of religious studies, where several writers have argued that the scholarly ‘world religion’ category originates from a European Enlightenment project whose modernist assumptions are now questionable. Third, the particular challenge of insider movements is expanded on – their use of non-Christian cultural-religious systems as spaces for Christ worship, and their redrawing of assumed Christian boundaries. Finally, the article sketches out two principles for understanding Christianity's unity in a way that takes into account the religious (1) as a historical series of cultural-religious transmissions and receptions of the Christian message, which emanates from margins like those being crossed by insider movements, and (2) as a religiously syncretic process of change that occurs with Christ as the prime authority.

scholarly journals Ritual & Practices to Attain Spirituality in the light of Religious Scriptures of the World Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-43
Author(s):  
Tayyaba Razzaq
Keyword(s):  
Research Study ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Ritual Systems

Humans are spiritual beings and preferred to be an element (one way or the other) of this potent mighty power that fascinated him. Men have been urged to look or visualize the Mighty Lord. Different kind of tools and means were designed in various religious communities to offer a few beautified methods to meet this fundamental intuition. To attain spirituality, many ancient religions had their own rituals and ceremonial systems that mostly consist of external rites and practices. The purpose of the study is to examine and determine the importance of rituals that are being practice in the world religions? What the methods religious scriptures has mentioned for their followers to adopt to attain spirituality? The study is to find out similarities and differences in rituals & practices to attain spirituality as mentioned in their religious scriptures? Research methodology for this study adapted is descriptive. This research study has fined out that some ritual systems are concerned with inwards purification rather than outwards. The major purpose of all such practices; fasting, sacrifices, charity etc are all to free men from the entire evil deeds, make him pure as the will of the Lord and closer to it.

Self and Suffering: Deconstruction and Reflexive Definition in Buddhism and Christianity

1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Other World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Hostile Attitude

In a study of the religious significance of food to medieval woman, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that the ascetic practices embraced by these women are signs of a commitment to explore the religious potentialities of the body rather than being indications of a hostile attitude to the flesh. She comments that belief in the ‘salvific potential of suffering flesh (both our's and God's)’ differentiates Christianity from other world religions, since it is a ‘characteristically Christian idea that the bodily suffering of one person can be substituted for the suffering of another through prayer, purgatory, vicarious communion etc….’ In the discussion which follows I shall attempt to draw out this differentiating characteristic in a comparative study of Christian and Buddhist concepts of, and attitudes to, suffering. I shall suggest that the divergent orientations which structure the religious treatment of this issue are related not only to radically opposing conceptions of the religious ‘path’, but also to different understandings of ‘self’. Although the categories ‘self’ and ‘suffering’ are intimately related in each context, it is my contention that in the Christian context the religious meaning of life becomes apparent to the individual in so far as the content of self is defined progressively in the reflexive encounter with the ‘Other’ (God), an encounter which can be facilitated through suffering. In a Buddhist context, on the other hand, it is precisely such a reflexivity (between self and ‘others’ if not the ‘Other’) which is understood to create and reproduce both self and suffering, and from which the Buddhist desires liberation.

‘EVERY NAME HAS ITS PATH’: IMAGINING AND ACHIEVING FULBE ENTANGLEMENT IN A MOOSE COMMUNITY

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-478
Author(s):  
Mark Breusers
Keyword(s):  
Central Region ◽  
The Other ◽  
North Central Region ◽  
North Central ◽  
Social Controversy ◽  
Community Boundaries ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Other World ◽  
Societal Relations

ABSTRACTGiven the observed agro-pastoralization of livelihoods of both Moose ‘farmers’ and Fulbe ‘herdsmen’, interactions between both groups living in Burkina Faso's north-central region are usually interpreted in terms of vanishing symbiosis and increasing tension along ethnic lines. There is, however, a remainder to this equation, namely the cattle Moose entrust to Fulbe. This article looks into Fulbe involvement in solving Moose fecundity problems to elucidate the nature of the relationships in which cattle entrustment is embedded. It is argued that Moose ideas about the other world and its intervention in procreation and constituting personhood allow imagining an extension of Moose societal relations beyond conventional community boundaries, that is, including Fulbe. This extension can be subsequently – but not necessarily – effectuated through the establishment and performance of spiritual kinship in which cattle owned by Moose can be embedded. The divergent extent to which sustained Moose–Fulbe relations result is explained in terms of social controversy regarding agro-pastoralization of livelihoods accompanied by differential cattle accumulation.

Teaching World Religions Through Their Scriptures

Horizons ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
Leonard J. Biallas
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Factual Information ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Literary Forms

AbstractTextbooks on world religions offer a vast amount of factual information that often overwhelms undergraduate students. Because they get lost in detail, the students find it difficult to appropriate the religious traditions into their own experience. Is there a different approach to the religions—one that does not get too bogged down in historical dates or various philosophical movements, yet still remains academically respectable—that might better help them to appreciate the religious traditions? I want to suggest that one possible method might be to study selected key passages from the scriptures of the various religions, in particular their stories (rather than other literary forms). Such stories, whether narratives or parables, exist in the scriptures of all the major world religions. Carefully selected for their transformative and paradigmatic power, these stories easily lead into discussions of doctrines, rituals, ethics, and the other phenomenological dimensions of religion. More importantly, certain basic themes in these stories—desire for the direct experience of God, forgiveness, martyrdom, duty, balance of self-nature-society, and self-forgetfulness, for example—transcend their formulation in any one specific world religion. Student awareness of these and other archetypal themes is a healthy step in appropriating the cultural and spiritual life of their own religious traditions.

Integrating Feminist Perspectives with the Religious Studies Curriculum: Setting the Question

Horizons ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-301
Author(s):  
Denise Lardner Carmody
Keyword(s):  
General Education ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Feminist Perspectives

My assignment is to set the question for our teaching workshop on integrating feminist perspectives into the religious studies curriculum. In reflecting on this assignment in light of the full program sketched in the brochure for the workshop, I found three journalistic questions coming to mind. The six specialized sub-workshops seemed to deal quite comprehensively with the question of how to effect the integration of feminist perspectives into the religious studies curriculum. Mary Jo Weaver's plenary address promised to treat from the perspective of American religious history where American women now are and may hope to arrive tomorrow. That left the matter of why we should be assembled here this evening, and though I'm sure that many of the other presenters will address it substantially, I have taken it as the proper focus for this kick-off presentation. Inevitably, speaking about why it is important to represent women's voices will imply how we may best accomplish this, but let us begin by reminding ourselves of the telos of our workshop—the prospective good that brings us together. My ruminations on this topic will have three sub-topics; students' needs, intellectual justice, and fidelity to God.This past semester I taught two typical courses: “Women and World Religions” and “The New Testament and Literature.” Both courses are part of the Tulsa Curriculum, our general education sequence. Each course had about thirty students, but only two of those in “Women and World Religion” were men, while “The New Testament and Literature” had about fifteen men. It is hard to say, though, which sex was more in need of feminist perspectives.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Other World

The Introduction presents the issue of the importance of Hegel’s account of the world religions and the neglect of this material in the secondary literature. An account is given of the quite limited secondary literature on this topic. The main theses of the work are stated: Hegel’s interpretation and defense of Christianity cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of his assessment of the other world religions. A key claim in his argument is that the different religions develop historically parallel to the development of human culture and spirit. Thus, the story of the development of the different conceptions of the gods is at the same time the story of the development of human freedom.

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