Great World Religions Research Articles

Great World Religions, Part IV:Confucius, the Tao, the Ancestors, and the Buddha: the Religions of China

(1997). Great World Religions, Part IV:Confucius, the Tao, the Ancestors, and the Buddha: the Religions of China. Journal of Chinese Religions: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 223-226.

Civilizations of the ancient Near East

Civilizations of the Ancient Near East brings together for the first time in one accessible resource scholarship that was previously scattered in hundreds of monographs and journal articles. One hundred and eighty-nine scholars from all over the world contributed their expertise to make this set the most appealing, original, and comprehensive reference on this fascinating area of study. All students, teachers, and scholars who seek to satisfy their curiosity about the ancient Near East's peoples and cultures will find within these volumes articles that intrigue and inform them.History begins in the ancient Near East. While earlier peoples left signs at Stonehenge, on the walls of caves in France it is in the Near East that we first find messages, evidence of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another, and the organization of nomadic tribes into societies with distinctive class structures, religions, and governments. Ancient Near Eastern civilizations took a great many forms, from the city-states of Mesopotamia to the centralized monarchy of Egypt, and they generated vital traditions in art, architecture, and literature. Through constant interchange with other parts of the world, these cultures influenced the emergence of three of the world's great religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the shape of human history into the Middle Ages and beyond. The vast expanses of desert in the region have preserved many ancient remains that scholars have recovered and analyzed. Spanning more than 4,000 years, from the Early Bronze Age to 325 BCE, this set explores all aspects of the emergence and development of the diverse cultures of the ancient NearEast.Civilizations of the Ancient Near East presents this enormously rich world from a variety of perspectives. It describes the physical world of the ancient Near East, evaluates the impact of ancient Near Eastern civilizations on succeeding cultures, and reconstructs its cultural contexts based on archaeological findings and the deciphering of documents. This two-volume edition contains the complete text of the original four-volume set, including 189 articles organized in eleven parts, enhanced by 46 maps and 612 photographs and line drawings.

Religion and Pluralism

The fact of a religiously plural world is one that is readily acknowledged by believers and non-believers alike. For religious believers, however, this fact poses a set of problems. Religions, at least most of the world's great religions, seem to present conflicting visions of the truth and competing accounts of the way to salvation. Faced with differing accounts of God in Judaism, Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism, what, for example can the Christian claim for the truth of Christian beliefs about God? John Hick, reflecting on the phenomenological similarity of worship in some of the great religious traditions, asks ‘whether people in church, synagogue, mosque, gurdwara and temple are worshipping different Gods or are worshipping the same God?’ (Hick and Hebblethwaite, 1980, p. 177). He rejects two possible answers to this question: that there exist many Gods, or that one religion, for example Christianity, worships the true God while all other religions worship false gods, which exist only in their imaginations.

A People That Shall Dwell alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy

MacDonald develops an evolutionary perspective on Judaism. Judaism is conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy characterized by a high degree of endogamy and resistance to genetic and cultural assimilation. Data are provided to support the author's theory that Judaism is characterized by a high level of within-group altruism and competition with outgroups. Finally, MacDonald argues that Judaism has been characterized by eugenic practices aimed at high intelligence and high investment parenting. After outlining a theory of evolutionary group strategies, MacDonald discusses the evidence from modern studies showing population genetic differences between Jews and Gentiles. He then shows that Jewish religious writing points to a pronounced tendency toward idealizing endogamy and condemning exogamy, and he points to the ways religious ideology and practice have facilitated the genetic and cultural separation of Jews and Gentiles. He then reviews evidence for resource and reproductive competition and the importance of kin-based cooperation and altruism as well as assortative mating for intelligence and resource aquisition ability among Jews. This study is a highly original attempt to develop an evolutionary understanding of one of the world's great religions. As such, it will be of concern to scholars and researchers in the fields of sociobiology and religion as well as the general reading public.

Differential Control of Cell Death in the Skin

THE RELATIONSHIP between life and death has challenged philosophers, writers and poets, and the theologians of all the world's great religions. It is now a subject of special interest to cell and molecular biologists as well. A major advance in biology has been the appreciation that life and death of individual cells are closely coordinated processes in the survival and adaption of multicellular organisms. Selective and controlled cell death is a dominant force in changing the cellular composition of complex organisms. Unwanted cells are eliminated during the normal course of differentiation of tissues, and also when cells are damaged by toxins, physical forces, infection, or exhaustion.¹The two major mechanisms of cell death are apoptosis and necrosis.²Apoptosis is an active process in which a central biochemical ''program'' is activated, causing nuclear fragmentation, formation of a rigid apoptotic envelope, and shrinkage of the cell into small fragments that

The Nightway Questions American Literature

In 1987 a graduate student came to me with what seemed to be an ingenious excuse for avoiding a reading assignment. She explained that she came from a rural background and was raised in a superstitious family. After reading John Bierhorst's introduction to Washington Matthews's translation of parts of the Dine or Navajo Nightway,1 she was afraid to read the text. She called my attention to Bierhorst's comment about Navajo who believed that Matthews's deafness and paralysis were related to the reversed healing powers of the ceremony that could have caused his illness (288-89). I tried to reassure her by indicating that my class and Bierhorst's greatly condensed version of Matthews's book The Night Chant (1902) certainly made no pretense of teaching the ceremonial (or chantway or sing) itself. That would take years, even if we all knew Navajo. Furthermore, such an endeavor would be blasphemous, since only a select group of highly trained Navajo chanters (hataaiii) could lead a Nightway. We would only be examining English translations of some of the songs and chants and would treat those parts of the ceremonial with the same degree of respect we would accord the ritual dramas and liturgies of other great world religions. The student left my office ready to read and satisfied with my explanation. I thought that I too was satisfied with my response until I walked into our next class meeting and overheard several other students admitting

The Taoist body

The ancient system of thought known as Taoism remains today the least well known of the world's great religions and one of the most inaccessible aspects of Chinese culture. This is in large part because Western thought clings to the notion of the separation of matter and spirit, body and soul. Taoism refuses this dualism and considers the body's perfection as essential as the soul's redemption is to Christianity. Kristofer Schipper's elegant and lucid introduction to the traditions of Taoism and the masters who transmit them will reward all those interested in China and in religions. The result of over twenty-five years of research, including eight years of fieldwork in China, Schipper's book retraces, step by step, the way that leads from Chinese shamanism and traditional village life to the physical Tending Life techniques, which in turn lead to the mysticism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Schipper shows the fundamental unity underlying all aspects of Taoism as Taoism considers itself to be. The social body - the community, the village, the land - corresponds in all aspects to the physical body in Taoism. In both of them the survival of humanity is decided here and now. 'My destiny is within me, not in Heaven!'

Professing the Creed Among the World’s Religions

PROFESSING THE CREED AMONG THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS For Hans-Georg Gadamer FRANS JOZEF VAN BEECK, 8.J. Loyola University Chicago, Illinois The Creed, the Created Order, and the Religions T:HE CHRISTIAN CREED is a particular profession of aith, yet it is not Hie creed of a sect; it is essentially niversalist. Both are dear not only from the Creed's oontent but aJ,so fr.om. the act by which it is professed. By means of the Creed, one particular, identifiable (" visible ") eommunity----the Christian Church-profosses, both to its own membership and to eviery pa,rt1cu1ar person or community 1that wants to listen, its faith :in God in the name of Jesus Christ. The part]cular profession is offered with a universa1ist intent, in the context of a communa:l missionary commitment to the whole world and, beyond that, in the perspectivie of the supernwbural, all-1 encompassing, escha:tologrcal "life of the world to come." It is not surprising, the1~efore, thait even those primitive trinitarian creeds that lack every trace of christoJogica.l narrative (and rthus also every ireferenoe rto Christ's coming to do justice to the living and the dead) still include a profession of at least a few eschatolog1erwl artides of belief at the end. The most nota.b1e among these features are il:he univiersaJ chm,ch (which represents and anticipates the finaJ gathering of the saints), rthe (definitive) forgivieness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, ,and rbhe life that fasts forever .1 But the Creed harbors another universraJism as well. It is 1 Cf. DS 1-6. 539 540 FRANS JOZEF VAN BEECK, S.J. natural, fuilldamentail, p:mtoilogiical. In !the text of the Creed, this univiersalism surfaces in the professwn of God ,as Creato!l' of aJil ,thait is, whether seen or unseen, and of Jesus Christ a:s God's 1agent in creation. In .addressing itself to humanity at ~arge, the Creed relies on this. It 'appeals to humanity's native eras-its native .attunement .to God am!d 1to the whole worLd, its limitless caipacity for ;authentic understanding, and its unquenchable thirsit for ioommunion. In the rhetoric of the Christian profiession of £aith, :the fO!l'IDer univiersalism enjoys pride of plare. The Creed's primary profession is positive: thematiicailly, the Creed is designed to formuilate the Christian £aiith in its mnc11ete, historic partioofarity , :in :i:ts commitment to the Christian mission to the whole worLd, and in its anticipation of :the eschaton. But if it is rtrue that the Creed primariily ·addresses itself to :ail:l of humanity with the es1chato1ogiterul message thrut is the horizon of the Christi ,an faith, this positivie profoss,ion is undergirded by a commitment to humanity allld the wol'lld in their natu1~ail integrity, by means of ra "suhsidiairy universwlism." If, in the actualiity of its hisrboric e:~istence, the Coorch ·aiddresses itself to all of humanity :and the wor1d with its partrowlar message of sru1vati .on, it is only by virtue of .a fundam.entail, natural universalism thrut it can so aiddress them. And it is on the strength of this 1aitber univiersailism that the Christian community it·self, itoo, acknowledges an whl-iillclusive natura.l order which it shares with all. of humanity. " All of humanity " is no:t an 1abs:tmntion; it comes in the form of ithe greiat variety of "rull nations" (Mt ~8: 19), along with their great religions. The theologircail. 'bask of interpreting the Creed in light of ilts .commitment to £UDJdamentail universalism , therefo11e, must .somehow raise the issue of Christianiity ';s relationship with the world's great religions. ln taking on this issrue, we must remind ourselv;es of an important ooail:ity-one heavy with consequence, as will be1come ·dear in the oomse of this es1 say. This 11eality was not unknown to the first Christian apologists: the Consrtantinian THE CREED AND THE RELIGIONS 541 and Theodosian settlements of the fourth century slowly but surely, and ever more fo11cefolly, eased it ~nto abeyance. But it began to J.~eturn with a vengeance in the early eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment, iinereasingJy fascinated by the variety of religions and cultures in...

The Harmonia Mundi Contemplative Congress

At the conclusion of the Harmonia Mundi Contemplative Congress, the hundreds of participants agreed they had truly been filled with a rich banquet of spiritual food offered to them by seven wisdom teachers of the various world's religions. The congress, held October 4-7, 1989 at Newport Beach, California, was hosted by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and was coordinated by the EastWest Foundation. The three-day congress had as its theme, Awakening the Compassionate Heart. A number of monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen joined the many presentors in attending a semiprivate audience with H.H. the Dalai Lama just prior to the opening of the congress. This interfaith gathering with accomplished teachers of meditation and contemplation from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism offered an in-depth contemplative experience with one teacher of the participant's choice. Meeting together in mentor groups helped these participants develop a heightened awareness of how compassionate action, rooted in contemplation, could transform one's life. During the congress, participants examined and discussed the interfaith and interdisciplinary relationships of contemplation and compassion. They explored the application of compassion to everyday affairs and reflected on how to integrate contemplative values into the mainstream of society. A meditation room was reserved in which symbols of each of the world's great religions were fittingly represented. Meditation leaders from each tradition were invited to lead a group for forty-five minutes either early in the morning or afternoon. Ken McLeod coordinated the meditation leaders, several of whom were members of North American Board for East-West Dialogue (NABEWD). Father Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic priest and Trappist monk, also chairman of the NABEWD, was the wisdom teacher invited to represent Christianity. Father Thomas offered the Centering Prayer form of contemplative prayer based on the Cloud of Unknowing but modified for contemporary users. He and others developed the method, which is based on the repetition of a short phrase in a way that develops the power of concentration and aids the meditator in the direct experience of God. Father Thomas was assisted by Mary

Weber on anomie

InGesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, Max Weber discussed the anomic potential of some non-Western religious doctrines. This paper provides an analysis of Weber's writings on anomie and attempts to show the relevance of Weber's work to contemporary anomie research. First, I locate Weber's treatment of anomie within his discussion of great world religions, highlighting its significance in a cross-cultural context. Second, I compare Weber's notion of anomie with current evaluations of anomie and discuss a typology of usages of the term. Finally, I explore the suggested usefulness of Weber's work on anomie for contemporary purposes.

South Asian Collections: Using Research Resources for a More General Public

South Asia is a complex and fascinating region. Comprised of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Bhutan, the subcontinent is home to all the world's great religions, to numerous languages and dialects, to ethnic diversity, and to a well‐developed publishing industry. Where formerly South Asia was in the news for gurus, Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, today it is before the public in terms of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan and India, ethnic/religious strife in Sri Lanka and India, and the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal. Through the Library of Congress' five South Asian programs, a number of academic libraries in the United States have developed superb collections, which include contemporary and historical topics, to support teaching and research on South Asia. It is the thesis of this article that these specialized resources should be more widely known and used by our colleagues and the general public.

Planned Ruination: Thatcher's Britain

Numerous thinkers and writers have long criticized the whole basis of the society of consumption, the society of "always more," the society which places the whole emphasis of human life on having rather than on being. Such criticisms indeed are an explicit element in most of the world's great religions and thus long antedate the modern "Age of Affluence," which rests obscenely on the (planned) deprivation and misery of three quarters of humankind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Toward Islamic Anthropology

I. IntroductionA. The Science of AnthropologyThis study is speculative and concerns a difficult and complex subject.Its task is made more difficult as it defends a metaphysical position, advancesan ideological argument, and serves a moral cause. It will therefore remainan incomplete part of an on-going process in the debate on key issues in contemporaryMuslim society.The major task of anthropology' -the study of man-is to enable us tounderstand ourselves through understanding other cultures. Anthropologymakes us aware of the essential oneness of man and therefore allows us toappreciate each other. It is only quite recently in history that it has come tobe widely accepted that human beings are fundamentally alike; that they sharebasic interests, and so have certain common obligations to one another. Thisbelief is either explicit or implicit in most of the great world religions, butit is by no means acceptable today to many people even in "advanced" societies,and it would make no sense at all in many of the less-developed cultures.Among some of the indigenous tribes of Australia, a stranger who cannotprove that he is a kinsman, far from being welcomed hospitably, is regardedas a dangerous outsider and may be speared without compunction. Membersof the Lugbara tribe of northwestern Uganda used to think that all foreignerswere witches, dangerous, and scarcely human creatures who walked aboutupside-down and killed people by magic. The ancient Greeks believed thatall non-Hellenic peoples were barbarians and uncivilized savages whom itwould be quite inappropriate to treat as real people. Many citizens of modemstates today think of people of other races, nations, or cultures in ways notvery different from these, especially if their skin is differently colored or if ...

Ranking Religions

Recently there has been considerable debate about the relationship between the religions of the world; in particular Christians have been anxious to formulate a theology of other religions which transcends the traditional Christian belief that God's revelation and salvation are offered exclusively in Jesus Christ. In this context a number of theologians have questioned the finality of Christ and Christianity. Professor John Hick for example - the leading proponent of this view - speaks of a Copernican revolution in theology which involves a radical transformation of the concept of the universe of faiths. It demands, he writes, ‘a paradigm shift from a Christianity–centred or Jesus–centred to a God–centred model of the universe of faiths. One then sees the great world religions as different human responses to the one divine Reality, embodying different perceptions which have been formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. Similarly, the Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikaar, endorses a new map of world religions. Advocating a revised form of ecumenism which strives for unity without harming religious diversity, Panikaar argues that the fundamental religious fact of the world's religions is the mystery known in every authentic religious experience. For Panikaar, this mystery within all religions is both more than and yet has its being within the diverse experiences and beliefs of the religions: ‘It is not simply that there are different ways of leading to the peak, but that the summit itself would collapse if all the paths disappeared. The peak is in a certain sense the result of the slopes leading to it.… It is not that this reality has many names as if there were a reality outside the name. This reality is the many names and each name is a new aspect.’ Such a vision of the universe of faiths implies that no religion can claim final or absolute authority.

Journey beyond Belief'

"Journey Beyond Belief' is an autobiographical account of the experiences and understandings that emerged from a personal exploration of a variety of growth disciplines. The author traces his trajectory from a hard-nosed neuroscientist with no faith in things subjective or emotional through the repeated shattering of his belief systems to a recognition of the vast reaches and varieties of inner experience. Beginning with psychotherapy and progressing through a number of humanistic, group, and meditative disciplines, he began to appreciate the limited and limiting nature of many of his own and the culture's beliefs, experiences, and behaviors. He was repeatedly shocked by the extent to which he had underestimated the vastness and richness of the inner universe, by the extent to which the untrained mind is out of control and continuously creates encompassing and entrapping illusory realities, by the amount of unnecessary suffering which this causes, by the fact that it is possible to train the mind to degrees considerably beyond those usually recognized by Western psychology, and by the fact that, at least at their usually unrecognized esoteric core, the world's great religions represent roadmaps for mental training designed to induce transcendent states.

Marxist Theory and Law: an Essay Review of Three Books

The complicated interplay between belief-systems and legal systems offers matter of great interest to students in at least three disciplines: comparative law, sociology of law, and legal history. An important contemporary example of this interrelationship is to be found in the complex connections between Marxism, one of the world's great religions, and those legal systems which, as socialist, claim prima facie to be based thereon. Exhibiting a diversity of viewpoints, three recent publications suggest reflection on this theme. Listed in the order of their consideration in this review, these publications include 1) an essay on the general theory of law and Marxism by an early Soviet writer; 2) a popular exposition of the Marxist conception of law, from the USSR Academy of Sciences; and 3) an empirical and historical study by a British scholar, specifically concentrated on Marxist ideology and Soviet criminal law.

Editorial: Religious Encounter in a Religiously Plural World

Although by no means a reality in most of the nations of the world, religious pluralism is often associated with today's world and is seen by many as the wave of the future. Indeed, it has become almost commonplace to speak of this religiously plural world as if this description were of a recent phenomenon; but for many centuries, long before the emergence of the great world religions, this has been a religiously plural world. Until fairly recent history, religion served as the bond of unity within the tribe, the nation, or the empire. The world at large was a religiously plural one in which, then as now, no single religious tradition could be said to dominate. With the possible exception of China, where three religions (Taoism, Confucian ism, and Buddhism) came to function in a complementary way as virtually one national faith (San Chiao), religious pluralism was not characteristic of society in general and therefore was not a matter of personal encounter. In the West, the religion of a nation was for centuries determined by the principle cuius regio, eius re/igio, which, in effect, denied religious pluralism to the nation. While this has always been a religiously plural world, only in relatively recent history has religious pluralism become a fact of human experience for persons living in a given society or nation.

Homogeneity and South African Hinduism

Hinduism is arguably the most diverse of the great world religions. In South Africa the clearest marker of this diversity is language. The South African Hindu community is concentrated in four linguistic groups, these being the Gujurat, Hindi, Tamil, and relugu. As in India, each has its favoured system of religious ritual, belief, and literature. The institutional structures of Hinduism are not entirely welladapted to the South African context. This has been documented in recent research' and the results in terms of the evolution of Hin-

Christians, Buddhists and Manichaeans in Medieval Central Asia

The oasis towns along the silk routes connecting China with Central Asia, India, Persia and the Near East, have been, since times immemorial, centers of contact between peoples from the most varied cultural and religious backgrounds. It was especially after the first centuries AD, after the spread of Buddhism through present day Afghanistan, Soviet Central Asia and China's Sinkiang and Kansu provinces, that an encounter took place between the two great world religions that shaped the intellectual history of Europe and Asia respectively. Just as Buddhism had expanded along the silk route, Christianity in its Nestorian garb also spread beyond Persia to the lowlands of Turan in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The history of its expansion beyond the Oxus and through the Tarim basin to the heart of China cannot be reconstructed in detail, but it is known that Bishop A-lo-pen was received with honours at the Chinese court in the 7th century. In the 8th century, a mission organized by the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I had considerable success among the peoples along the Syr Darya. In Kashgar, one of the main commercial centers along the southern silk route, a Christian king reigned in the beginning of the 8th century. Of the Iranian people in Central Asia, it was especially the Parthians and Sogdians who were open both to Christianity in its Nestorian form and to its Gnostic Manichaean offshoot. Though regarded as a heresy by Christians, it understood itself as a fulfillment of the Christian message. Its founder Mani (216-276) grew up in a Jewish-Christian baptist community in Mesopotamia and spread his message of the Kingdom of Light throughout the Persian empire of the Sasanians and sent missionaries to the Central Asian kingdom of the Kushans.

Christianity Confronts ModernityExistiert Gott?Hans Küng

Hans King's most recent major work, Existiert Gott?, follows his earlier On Being a Christian by only four years and is intended to complement it in such a way that the two fit together seamlessly and mutually illumine his whole theological project (pp. 19, 62). In both works Kung takes up the Christian theologian's distinctively apologetic task of answering the twofold question of the meaning and truth of the Christian message in the contemporary context. In On Being a Christian, Kung focuses on the broadly historical aspect of the hermeneutic demanded by this task. In Existiert Gott?, he turns his attention to the broadly philosophical hermeneutic of contemporary Christian systematic theology. In On Being a Christian, Kung explicitly identifies the horizon of contemporary theology as involving a double confrontation: with the great world religions on the one hand and with non-Christian 'secular' humanisms on the other (p. 25). Both the structure and content of his argument there, however, reveal that he is actually involved in a confrontation on three main fronts, not two. What gives Kung's approach to the apologetic task of Christian theology in both books its peculiar character is the way he understands and treats this third front. In addi-