Browse results
Um diese Ziele zu erreichen, kommen in den Beiträgen zur Komparativen Theologie Theologen und Theologinnen bzw. Gelehrte verschiedener religiöser Traditionen miteinander und mit Vertreterinnen und Vertretern der Religions- und Kulturwissenschaften ins Gespräch, um so im interdisziplinären Gespräch die religionsbezogene Forschung zu vertiefen und im Methodenspektrum zu erweitern. Dabei werden gesellschaftlich brisante und für das interreligiöse Gespräch zentrale Fragestellungen ausgewählt und theologisch bearbeitet. Der Vergleich über Religionsgrenzen hinweg soll auf diese Weise Orientierungsleistungen für Menschen heute erbringen und das dialogische Profil der Theologien schärfen.
The book series, Contributions to Comparative Theology, stimulates the conversation of theologies of different religions and provides a forum for the newly developing research field of Comparative Theology. It advances ways to fathom and understand other religions, in which the diversity of another’s religious view of the world is adequately acknowledged without impermissibly relativizing the truth claims of one's own religion. At the same time, the series portrays real debates between Christian theologies and non-Christian worldviews, showing the ways in which a friendly pursuit of the one truth can be charted without compromising the integrity of one’s own religious commitments. Finally, by working hermeneutically, this series contributes to a better understanding of the differences that lie across religious boundaries. These efforts are underlined by the awareness that getting to know each other better is also helpful to arrive at a better understanding of one’s self and to deepen one's thinking about God – or ultimate reality.
To achieve these goals, theologians of various religious traditions come together in conversation with each other and also with representatives of religious and cultural studies. In the ensuing interdisciplinary dialogue, understandings of religion are deepened and expanded as socially and religiously challenging issues and topics, particularly those that feature prominently in interreligious conversation, are investigated theologically to reveal the unique contribution that Comparative Theology can make to advancing a civil dialogue and a civic culture. Theological investigations across disciplinary and religious boundaries thus provide resources for sharpening the dialogical profile of different theologies through the medium of Comparative Theology.
Abstract
Encounters with marginalised spiritualties and religions can assist in the creation of a post-2030 agenda that recognises the limitations of existing ideas of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘progress’, the necessity of which is evidenced by our worsening climate and ecological crisis.
The acknowledgement that religion plays an important role in the lives of the majority of the world’s population has led to increased partnerships between religious communities, humanitarian and development practitioners, and policy makers. At best, this has resulted in fruitful partnerships with those whose world views fit into predefined understandings of religion and development. At worst, it has led to the instrumentalisation of religious and spiritual leaders to implement western, individualistic, capitalist, anthropocentric ideas of development. Knowledge flows have remained unidirectional with the aforementioned partnerships yet to see the transformative potential of engaging with a greater diversity of religious and spiritual communities when imagining a post-2030 agenda.
This paper draws on ethnographic engagement and interviews with the Iglesia Filipina Independiente and Lumad Indigenous people in the Philippines to highlight how learned ignorance, encounters and horizontal relationships can expand individual and collective imagination – deconstructing imperial imaginations and prioritising people and planetary flourishing above profit. It highlights the potential way in which diverse subaltern, abyssal and decolonial movements can be engaged to support a burgeoning of ecologies of knowledge capable of challenging hegemonic understandings of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, essential to the post-2030 debate.
Abstract
Implicit in the Hebrew Bible is the proposition that Western philosophy’s world- rationalising resources are short a category. This is the category of ones – non-general individuals whose identity is secure apart from such wider wholes as they are/might be associated with. Since the Bible’s thinkers classify men and women as ones, their view would therefore be that Western philosophy cannot deal effectively with the human condition. This is the ultimate meaning of the injunction to each of us not to accept the other gods (who do not belong to the category) before God (who does). In these pages, I set out and defend the Bible’s implied critique of Western philosophy. By examining the positions of several leading philosophers of our time, I explain why philosophical analysis of the specific sort that traces back to God-less Greece is, as the Bible maintains, out of synchrony with human reality.
Abstract
According to the data provided in 2016 by the Polish Main Department of Statistics (Główny Urząd Statystyczny), the Buddhist Diamond Way Association of Karma Kagyu Lineage was one of ten most popular religions in Poland with more than 8200 adherents. Currently there are 19 officially registered Buddhist religious groups in Poland with ca. 14000 members, and what is noteworthy, this number increases in time, against the general declining trend, that can be observed in the majority of Polish religious groups. The article will show how Buddhism (which till the end of the 1960s. was practically unknown in Poland) became one of the most significant religious traditions in this country. It will present its constant development in the difficult times of anti-religious communist regime and in free Poland after 1989. It will also give an overview of various Buddhist traditions, that are active in Poland nowadays.
Abstract
This contribution aims to explore the historical predecessors of the Five Percenter model of self-realization, as popularized by Hip Hop artists such as Supreme Team, Rakim Allah, Brand Nubian, Wu-Tang Clan, or Sunz of Man. As compared to frequent considerations of the phenomenon as a creative mythological background for a socio-political struggle, Five Percenter teachings shall be discussed as contemporary interpretations of historical models of self-realization in various philosophical, religious, and esoteric systems. By putting the coded system of the tenfold Supreme Mathematics as one of its core teachings in context with the Pythagorean Tetractys, an arrangement of ten points in four lines, the commonalities between the sequence and concepts attributed to the respective numbers will be demonstrated.
Abstract
As a Vietnamese autochthonous religion, Cao Ðài was first meant to address Vietnamese people, who received the mission to spread out humanistic and salvationist messages all over the world. Cao Ðài expanded overseas, with few hundreds of them settled in France. Firstly, I will clarify the profile of few French sympathisers in colonial and postcolonial times. Secondly, I will examine ethnographic data collected in the two main Caodai temples of Vitry-sur-Seine and Alfortville from 1996 onwards. This extended fieldwork gave me the possibility to follow the membership logics, the different challenges and obstacles they face in terms of conversion and community life in the French context of religious freedom. The organization (or not) of spirit-medium séances, and the tactics of some Caodai missionaries will reveal some of the tensions between the pastoral and missionary dynamics of Cao Ðài in France.
Abstract
Support for strangers is deeply anchored in the social ethics of various religious traditions. Based on a qualitative content analysis of interviews with refugees and immigration executives. the article focuses on the role of religion and religious communities in refugee accommodation in Germany between 2011 and 2018. It sheds light on different schemes and measures of support offered by religious communities and explores the significance of religious and cultural differences for processes of accommodation and early integration. The empirical analysis is embedded in conceptual debates on the re-emergence of faith-based service providers in the crisis of the late modern welfare state. The findings suggest that the so called ‘refugee crisis’ has served as an opportunity structure for Christian refugee aid. At the same time, refugee accommodation centres in Germany have responded to an increase of non-Christian refugees (notably: Muslims) by a more restrictive handling of religious freedom.