Gives an account of the emergence of progressive religious thinkers and organisations on the 'religious left'. This book offers an analysis of the cultural roots, key ideas and organisational structures of this faith, assessing its significance in the changing moral and religious landscape of contemporary western society.

Today's religious violence challenges our understanding of religion. Do we need special notions such as 'cult' and 'fundamentalism' to come to terms with it? Does monotheism, with its claim to exclusivity, necessarily generate intolerance? Kippenberg rejects the idea that violence and religion are inherently connected and instead considers the actions, motives, and self-perceptions of real people. He shows that the violent outcomes of the American tragedies of Jonestown and Waco were not inev...

Keeping Faith in Practice is an addition to SCM's growing Practical and Pastoral Theology list. Most books in this field are written by authors from various Protestant backgrounds. Catholic teachers in this field are frequently asked by colleagues for suggestions of Catholic resources, and find themselves at a loss.

The central subject of this book is an exploration of how theology engages with the dimension of practice in the life of the Church and contemporary society and culture. The book ...

Happiness comes from within. Can these 'truths' hold the key to a happier, more fulfilled life?In The Happiness Hypothesis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines ten Great Ideas which have been championed across centuries and civilisations and asks: how can we apply these ideas to our twenty-first century lives?

Sociology of Religion is an increasingly popular component of courses in religious studies at undergraduate level. While most textbooks on the Sociology of Religion are written from a sociological background, this new student-friendly textbook aims to introduce the field and the subjects studied by sociologists of religion to students with a background in theology and religious studies.

With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of ...

David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Dialogues ask if belief in God can be inferred ...

This book is aimed at those training for ministry, those in ministry and lay people wishing to reflect upon their work. It seeks to enable those in pastoral ministry to reflect upon their institutional encounters and to enable lay people who work in institutions as professionals or managers to reflect upon their pastoral encounters. By generating shared encounters of theological reflection between these two groups the authors identify points of solidarity and tension between them.The book see...

Why do human beings believe in divinities? Why do some seek eternal life, while others seek escape from recurring lives? Why do the beliefs and behaviors we typically call "religious" so deeply affect the human personality and so subtly weave their way through human society?Ideal as a supplementary text in introductory religion courses or as the main text in theory and method in religious studies or in sociology of religion courses, Ten Theories of Religion, Fourth Edition, offers an illumina...

Discover the historical and social context of one of the most influential works ever written with this authoritative new resource The newly revised second edition of The Hebrew Bible: A Contemporary Introduction to the Christian Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh delivers a brief and up-to-date introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in the broader context of world history. Its treatment of the formation of the Bible amidst different historical periods allows readers to understand the bib...