The Norton Anthology Of World Religions

This magisterial Norton Anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world 's major religions. To help readers encounter strikingly unfamiliar texts with pleasure; accessible introductions, headnotes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps, illustrations and chronologies are provided. For readers of any religion or none, The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles writes, invite us "to see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will..." Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Judaism brings together over 300 texts from pre-Israelite Mesopotamia to post-Holocaust Israel and America. The volume features Jack Miles 's illuminating General Introduction - “How the West Learned to Compare Religions” - as well as David Biale 's “Israel among the Nations,” a lively primer on Jewish history and the core teachings of Judaism.

This magisterial Norton Anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world 's major religions. To help readers encounter strikingly unfamiliar texts with pleasure; accessible introductions, headnotes, annotations, pronouncing glossaries, maps, illustrations and chronologies are provided. For readers of any religion or none, The Norton Anthology of World Religions opens new worlds that, as Miles writes, invite us "to see others with a measure of openness, empathy, and good will..." Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Islam brings together over 100 texts from the Qur 'an in the seventh century to feminist and pluralist readings of the Qur 'an in the twenty-first century. The volume features Jack Miles 's illuminating General Introduction - “How the West Learned to Compare Religions” - as well as Jane Dammen McAuliffe 's “Submission to God as the Wellspring of a Civilization,” a lively primer on the history and core tenets of Islam.

“A major landmark of religious publishing and one to be widely welcomed.”—William Dalrymple, New York Times The Norton Anthology of World Religions offers a beautifully designed library of more than 1,000 primary texts, accompanied by headnotes, annotations, glossaries, maps, illustrations, chronologies, and a dazzling general introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles. This collection “will unsettle some current certainties about the nature of faith and, in so doing, may help its readers arrive at a nuanced and accurate perception of our predicament in this dangerously polarized world” (Karen Armstrong, New York Times). Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Daoism brings together over 150 texts from Daoism’s origins in the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.) to its vital, international present. The volume features Jack Miles’ illuminating General Introduction—“Art, Play, and the Comparative Study of Religion”—as well as James Robson’s “Daoism Lost and Found,” a lively primer on the history and guiding values and practices of Daoism.

This anthoogy, edited by world-renowned scholars under the direction of Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles, offers a portable library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world's major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism (Volume 1); Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Volume 2). The anthology brings together foundational works--the Bhagavad Gita, the Daodejing, the Bible, the Quʹran--with the writings of scholars, seekers, believers, and skeptics whose voices over centuries have kept these religions vital.

“A major landmark of religious publishing and one to be widely welcomed.”—William Dalrymple, New York Times The Norton Anthology of World Religions offers a beautifully designed library of more than 1,000 primary texts, accompanied by headnotes, annotations, glossaries, maps, illustrations, chronologies, and a dazzling general introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles. This collection “will unsettle some current certainties about the nature of faith and, in so doing, may help its readers arrive at a nuanced and accurate perception of our predicament in this dangerously polarized world” (Karen Armstrong, New York Times). Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Islam brings together over 100 texts from the Qur’an in the seventh century to feminist and pluralist readings of the Qur’an in the twenty-first century. The volume features Jack Miles’s illuminating General Introduction—“How the West Learned to Compare Religions”—as well as Jane Dammen McAuliffe’s “Submission to God as the Wellspring of a Civilization,” a lively primer on the history and core tenets of Islam.

This anthology, edited by world-renowned scholars under the direction of Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles, offers a portable library of primary texts from the world's major religions. Volume 1 covers Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism. The anthology brings together foundational works--the Bhagavad Gita, the Daodejing --with the writings of scholars, seekers, believers, and skeptics whose voices over centuries have kept these religions vital.

The World Religions Paradigm has been the subject of critique and controversy in Religious Studies for many years. After World Religions provides a rationale for overhauling the World Religions curriculum, as well as a roadmap for doing so. The volume offers concise and practical introductions to cutting-edge Religious Studies method and theory, introducing a wide range of pedagogical situations and innovative solutions. An international team of scholars addresses the challenges presented in their different departmental, institutional, and geographical contexts. Instructors developing syllabi will find supplementary reading lists and specific suggestions to help guide their teaching. Students at all levels will find the book an invaluable entry point into an area of ongoing scholarly debate.

Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned. In Modern Religion, Modern Race Theodore Vial argues that because the categories of religion and race are rooted in the post-Enlightenment project of reimagining what it means to be human, we cannot simply will ourselves to stop using them. Only by acknowledging that religion is already racialized can we begin to understand how the two concepts are intertwined and how they operate in our modern world. It has become common to argue that the category religion is not universal, or even very old, but is a product of Europe's Enlightenment modernization. Equally common is the argument that religion is not an innocent category of analysis, but is implicated in colonial regimes of control and as such plays a role in Europe's process of identity construction of itself and of non-European "others." Current debates about race follow an eerily similar trajectory: race is not an ancient but a modern construction. It is part of the project of colonialism, and race discourse forms one of the cornerstones of modern European identity-making. Why can't we stop using them, or re-construct them in less toxic ways? By examining the theories of Kant, Herder, and Schleiermacher, among others, Vial uncovers co-constitutive nature of race and religion, describes how they became building blocks of the modern world, and shows how the two concepts continue to be used today to form identity and to make sense of the world. He shows that while we disdain the racist language of some of the founders of religious studies, the continued influence of the modern worldview they helped create leads us, often unwittingly, to reiterate many of the same distinctions and hierarchies. Although it may not be time to abandon the very category of religion, with all its attendant baggage, Modern Religion, Modern Race calls for us to examine that baggage critically, and to be fully conscious of the ways in which religion always carries with it dangerous ideas of race.

“Beautifully written, expertly researched and masterfully presented, this tour of how heaven has been understood throughout history is absolutely fascinating.” —James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage A smart and thought-provoking cultural history of heaven. What do we think of when we think about heaven? What might it look like? Who or what might be there? Since humans began to huddle together for protection thousands of years ago, these questions have been part of how civilizations and cultures define heaven, the good place beyond this one. From Christianity to Islam to Hinduism and beyond, from the brush of Michelangelo to the pen of Dante, people across millennia have tried to explain and describe heaven in ways that are distinctive and analogous, unique and universal. In this engrossing cultural history of heaven, Catherine Wolff delves into how people and cultures have defined heaven over the centuries. She describes how different faiths and religions have framed it, how the sense of heaven has evolved, and how nonreligious influences have affected it, from the Enlightenment to the increasingly nonreligious views of heaven today. Wolff looks deep into the accounts of heaven to discover what’s common among them and what makes each conception distinct and memorable. The result is Beyond, an engaging, thoughtful exploration of an idea that is central to our humanity and our desire to define an existence beyond death.

Critically examining the notion of 'world religions', Charles D. Orzech compares five purpose-built museums of world religions and their online extensions. Inspired by the 19th and 20th century discipline of comparative religion, these museums seek to promote religious tolerance by representing religious diversity and by arguing for underlying kinship among religions. From locations in Europe (Marburg, Glasgow and St Petersburg), to North America (Quebec) to Asia (Taipei), each museum advances a particular cultural history. This book shows how the curation of the objects they contain shapes public perceptions of religion, giving material form to the discourses about religion and world religions. Raising important questions about religion and secularity, museum displays and religious piety, Museums of World Religions questions the ideology that informs these museums. Building on recent anthropological work on the agency of religious objects, the author critiques these museums and suggests new approaches to displaying the matter of religion.

In Architecture of the World’s Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities, Thomas Barrie presents religious architecture as an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements, which are often materialized in different ways in the world’s principal religions.

A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner. How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity—a religion inextricably bound to Western thought—Jack Miles reveals how the West’s “common sense” understanding of religion emerged and then changed as insular Europe discovered the rest of the world. In a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.

An Introduction to Religious and Theological Studies walks students through topical issues to be encountered in the study of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as these religions encounter other religions in the context of the wider ecumenism. The text is written from a Christian point of view and aims at helping students understand that to be Christian is to be ecumenical. African Traditional Religions (ATRs) has been included in this survey to provide background for the religious traditions and cultures of peoples of Africa as Christianity moves inexorably southward. The book has been written with undergraduate general education students in mind--including meeting the needs of those in seminaries and theological institutes.

Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures/scripturalization/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) "work" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"—understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language—as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.

Buddhism is often the religion that teachers have the least confidence in teaching despite being the sixth largest religion in the UK and being commonly regarded as one of the six major religions to be taught in schools throughout the country. This book explores the beliefs and practices of Buddhism as a lived religion in the UK. This book engages with Buddhist beliefs and practices and provides students and teachers with the confidence to address misconceptions and recognise the importance of beliefs in the lives of believers, in a way that will enable readers to go forward with confidence. Aspects of Buddhism explored include the concepts that form the central beliefs of Buddhism, and then the expression of these beliefs in worship, daily life, and the ethics of Buddhists in the modern day. Each chapter includes authentic voices of believers today and provides opportunities for the reader to consider the concepts and how they can be respected and taught and in the classroom. The book forms part of the Teaching Religions and Worldviews series of guides, each one designed to build teachers' confidence and expertise in teaching a different religion or worldview in the classroom..

In a time of plague, fundamental questions become immediate and personal. The pandemic, droughts, floods, fire, political violence: the world has been grimly reminded of the proximity and inevitability of death. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor—acclaimed public intellectuals and scholars of religion, one a Christian and the other an atheist, close friends for fifty years—have spent their lives grappling with questions of ultimate concern. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, Miles and Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world. A Friendship in Twilight is their plague journal. In raw and searching letters, written daily from the first lockdowns through the Capitol riot, Miles and Taylor reflect on life during overlapping crises. Amid the menace of the pandemic and the unceasing political turmoil, they debate the lessons that a catastrophic present can teach about the future and how to read, think, live, and face up to death. Confronting the vulnerability of their aging bodies and the frailty of American democracy, the two friends discuss why and how philosophical reflection matters for a wounded world. Their conversations are imbued with an ever-present sense of urgency about the worth of a life, the fragility of existence, and the uncertainty of endings. Seamlessly moving from heartfelt emotion to philosophical speculation, current events to great art and literature, this book is a powerful and moving testament to the precarity of life and to enduring friendship.

Seven Testaments is volume one of a trilogy, introducing and supplementing the already popular academic texts, Three Testaments: Torah Gospel and Quran (2012) and Four Testaments: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita (2016). Organized in three parts, Seven Testaments will cover the foundations of how these testaments were formed, the essence of each one of the testaments and a section of primary source documents that frames the testaments in a modern setting.