Product Description: Religious Studies was first introduced as a new discipline in universities and colleges around the world in the 1960s. This discipline brought about a reorientation of the study of religion, created new perspectives and influenced all sectors of education...read more

Product Description: Spirit of Fire is a popular biography of one of this century's most fascinating religious figures. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a Jesuit theologian, mystic, and scientist renowned for his pioneering field work in geology, paleontology, and human origins...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This major new collection of readings demonstrates the range and vitality of feminist theology and its increasing influence on Christian women and men throughout the world. Here are thirty-eight key texts, representing the voices of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as those working among minorities in places such as Israel, the US, and the Pacific. The readings are grouped under five headings: -Doing Theology from Third World Women's Perspective -Women's Oppression and Cries of Pain -The Bible as a Source of Empowerment for Women -Challenging Traditional Theological Thinking -A Newly Emerging Spirituality All texts are placed in context by brief introductory comments, while the main introduction to the whole book provides a helpful overview of the major issues and developments in Christian-feminist thinking throughout the Third World and beyond. Among the contributors are Chung Hyun Kyung (Korea), Ivone Gebara (Brazil), Kwok Pui-lan (Hong Kong), Mercy Amba Oduyoye (Ghana), Delores S. Williams (USA).

Product Description: The Search for Spirituality offers a comprehensive overview of the incredibly rich and diverse spiritual landscapes of our world, and explores the global search for a spiritual life at an individual and social level, inside and outside religious traditions, and in the secular world...read more

Gender, Religion and Diversity provides an introduction to some of the most challenging perspectives in the contemporary study of gender and religion. In recent years, gender and women's studies have transformed the international study of religion through their use of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodologies, which have opened up new and highly controversial issues, challenging previous paradigms and creating fresh fields of study. As this book shows, gender studies in religion raises new and difficult questions about the gendered nature of religious phenomena, the relationship between power and knowledge, the authority of religious texts and institutions, and the involvement and responsibility of the researcher undertaking such studies as a gendered subject. This book is the outcome of an international collaboration between a wide range of researchers from different countries and fields of religious studies. The range and diversity of their contributions is the very strength of this book, for it shows how gendering works in studying different religious materials -- whether foundational texts from the Bible or Koran, philosophical ideas about truth, essentialism, history or symbolism, the impact of French feminist thinkers such as Irigaray or Kristeva, or critical perspectives dealing with the impact of race, gender, and class on religion.

Christian Mystics tells the story of sixty men and women whose mystical devotion to God transformed the times in which they lived and still affects our present-day search for spiritual meaning.

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Product Description: We live in a culture which has broadly rejected the possibility of absolute belief in one over-riding truth. And yet we are surrounded by people who do believe, who indeed are often intensely religious, but believe in different things...read more

Illustrated with the finest in religious artwork, an elegant volume explores the depths of Christian mystical heritage, from the birth of Christ to modern times, and examines mysticism's roots in the Hebrew Bible and Hellenic philosophy. 18,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Foreword by Desmond TutuThis collection of 28 essays provides a clear overview of the history of Religious Studies, the turning points it faces and the new directions it may take in the future.

Product Description: Over the past decade, gender studies have set an entirely new agenda for religious studies, and work in this area has expanded rapidly. In this book, an international group of scholars from Europe, North America and Australia provides an overview of these new theoretical and critical perspectives with special attention to new developments...read more

This book takes a genuinely new spiritual stance reflecting the emergence of a post-modern science and differing from the relativistic nihilism that calls itself postmodern but is really modernism extended to its limit. Based on a direct experience of reality as divine, this postmodern spirituality transcends modernity's individualism and patriarchy, its forced choices between dualism and materialism, anthropocentrism and relativism, supernaturalism and atheism, intolerance and nihilism. Bringing moral and ethical values back into rational discourse, this book provides a critique of various aspects of modern society--political, economic, social, agricultural, and technological aspects. This criticism, informed by the postmodern worldview, points toward a more satisfying form of personal existence and a sustainable form of global order.

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Product Description: This major collection of essays makes a new contribution to the role and image of women in the different world religions. Many new perceptions are revealed in this provocative collection, including insights into women in African traditional religions, in evangelical Christianity, and in new religious movements, which focus on some of today's fundamental questions: ò Are women hindered or encouraged to give full expression to their religious experience? ò How far do the different religious traditions draw on feminine symbols in speaking about ultimate reality? ò To what extent do women take part in ritual and religious practices or hold positions of authority? ò What is the actual religious experience of women, and how do women choose to follow a religious life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A detailed study of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, who attempted to reconcile the discoveries of modern science with Christian faith and Eastern mysticism