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Examining a presentation made to the Pacific Coast Theological Society in 1939, this essay identifies some of the enduring issues for theological and religious education created by the reality of religious pluralism. Addressing religious pluralism is a dialectic process moving between the two poles of disorienting otherness and analogies based on the already familiar. Both moments are necessary, and neither is final. Education in a religiously plural world requires enabling students to live in a state of uncertainty.

This article outlines the contributions of the Krakow School to the field of science and religion. The Krakow School is a group of philosophers, scientists, and theologians who belong to the milieu of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. The members of the group are engaged in inquiries pertaining to the relationship between theology and various sciences, in particular cosmology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience. The article includes a presentation of the historical background of the School, as well as its main original contributions pertaining to the history of the interactions between science and religion, the rationality and mathematicity of the universe, theology of science, and the role of logic in theology.

Research into liberation theologies has rarely had an interreligious perspective. To that end, I shall carry out a comparative study of Christian and Islamic versions of liberation theology and I shall highlight the similarities and differences in their approaches. It will be a thematic study that is structured around three key mentalities which are shared by the approaches of both religious traditions. Firstly, the need to reinterpret their own religions from the perspective of the poor; secondly the interrelated emphases on action, orthopraxy and the agency of the oppressed; and thirdly a rejection of excessive other-worldliness. I conclude from my analyses with the following hypotheses: firstly, due to the lack of an authority akin to the Catholic Church, Islamic liberation theology is comparatively more likely to create the potential for social upheaval and is more likely to lead to an attenuation of metaphysical religious feeling; secondly, all liberation theologies contain latently the potential for creating millenarian outbursts; the best example to offer from modern history of this latent feature becoming manifest is in the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979.

While Jesus’ prophethood is an indisputable component of his identity in the Christian tradition, it has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior. In this article, I argue that an engagement with an understanding of Jesus’ prophethood in Islam, particularly as explicated by the Turkish thinker Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, can help Christians recover a more robust interpretation of Jesus as prophet that has a positive impact on a Christian articulation of the church and of discipleship today.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar's lament that coincidence of the theologian and the saint has not been the norm since the Middle Ages can be emblematic of a methodological issue impacting both academic theology and the Church wholly by separation of that which as a faith tenet should be unified—word and witness. Theologians’ intent today to speak from but not be confused with their location, the theological discipline's reach for respectability in an increasingly secular academy, market forces deliberately shrinking theology's influence except in such as interdisciplinary endeavors supporting other publics’ aims, the contemporary narrow specialization of the theologian, and the sometime view that narrow tasks serving theology are theology itself all result in conflations of theology and religion. So “theology” and “spirituality,” as Balthasar identified the breach, will be separate. Yet we hope that theologians, with all others, will be saints. Does this not, particularly to students, transmit the faith? Although Bernard Lonergan's method might seem to exacerbate the separation given its numerous theological specialties and conversion types, it also offers the way of reunification—without threat to academic integrity. The theological method, with its turn to the subject, can ground a theology (and method) of pedagogy.

The three short essays collected in this manuscript respond to Patricia O'Connell Killen and Eugene V. Gallagher's “Sketching the Contours in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion,” published in issue 16, no. 2 of this journal (2013). See additional responses by Charles R. Foster, Stephen Brookfield, and Pat Hutchings published in Teaching Theology and Religion

What is the relationship of religion in general, or of specific religions, to misogyny and the oppression of women? This article discusses Western feminism and religion, with a focus on North America, examining: 1) the relationship of religion to feminism as a political movement; 2) the role of feminism in religion, especially Western traditions; and 3) contributions of feminist criticism to the academic study of religion. The relationship between feminism and religion is multifaceted. Religion is important in feminist political activism, throughout first, second and third waves. Feminist activism is mutually influential to feminist theory, which approaches questions about gender not as optional, but as imperative to any rigorous analytic perspective. Feminist criticism of religion includes both feminist theology, which focuses on reforming religious traditions to be more egalitarian, and feminist scholarship in the academic study of religion, which challenges scholars to re-evaluate dominant models, such as the category of religion itself.

In this article I will reflect on interreligious dialogue and the tensive relation between openness and identity from a theological perspective. First, I consider the so-called theology of religions and the threefold soteriological typology of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. Second, I address one of the main criticisms of this approach, namely that the soteriological approach amounts to a perversion of the virtue of openness. This critique is articulated especially within particularism, a model which sets out to move beyond the soteriological fixation of the classical theology of religions. Because this relatively new model has not yet been analyzed systematically in the relevant literature, I will analyze some of its main tenets. I focus especially on the way this model sets out to alter the terms of the discussion on the dialogical tension between openness and commitment by claiming that hermeneutical openness should precede soteriological appreciation. Third, I turn to comparative theology as a fertile expression of particularism. Comparative theology presents itself as a genuinely adequate way to understand and appreciate the otherness of the religious other without losing sight of one's own identity. Moreover, comparative theology gives a new twist to the discussion on the dialogical tension between openness and commitment. Whereas the classical theology of religions seems to be actuated by the conviction that it is both possible and necessary to come to a final and definite soteriological appreciation of the religions, comparative theology sees interreligious encounter first and foremost as an ongoing conversational process, which can yield preliminary results only. It is my contention that this marks the nature of real and authentic dialogue.

This article uses a comparative theological model to explore the concept of pilgrimage—holy movement and holy place. It examines Christian pilgrimage exemplified by John Paul II's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000 and Islamic pilgrimage exemplified by the Hajj. It then re-visions Christian pilgrimage by suggesting how three features of the Hajj (danger and hardship, ritual nature, and gathering) can be used to deepen the Christian experience and understanding of pilgrimage.

This article begins with the absence of biblical stories about Jesus' youth. This lack means that typical boyhood characteristics, such as playfulness, are absent from a traditional Christian picture of the divine. Using the lens of stories told about Krishna's youth in the Bhagavata Purana, I suggest that Christians could learn from the Hindu idea of a “god at play,” as such a concept enhances a Christian understanding of who God has revealed Godself to be, and how Christians are called to be in relationship to God.

In this article I analyse some of the reasons for a recent, resurgent interest in religion and theology by political philosophers and relate this interest to an inherent instability in modernity itself. In the first part I describe the landscape of current political philosophy with a particular emphasis on radical philosophers. In the second part I describe how the liberal distinction between religion and politics generates a theological instability due to the effective disappearance of the social embodiment of religion within modernity. In the third part I draw some conclusions regarding the challenges the new post-secular condition presents to theology.

Although they take different approaches, both Taede A. Smedes and Kevin Sharpe have challenged the theology-and-science enterprise and raised important questions about theological and scientific assumptions behind this work. Smedes argues that theology should be taken more seriously, and Sharpe believes that theology should be more scientific. A proposed middle way involves engaging in the dialogue itself and exploring the questions and methodological implications that arise in the context of problem-focused interactions.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of work that has been carried out by scholars working in religion/theology and film over recent years. For a field that has only come to prominence in the last two decades, I outline a number of perspectives on the ways in which religion/theology and film may be seen to interact, including a discussion of some of the criticisms that have emerged both from within existing religious studies and theology scholarship and from film studies. The discussion focuses on whether or not research and teaching in this area is more than a fad and whether it offers creative new possibilities for interdisciplinary study.

Starting from the assertion that comparative theology is inherently dialogical in nature, this paper examines the use of non-confessional meta-terminology and its application in interfaith dialogue. In so doing, it examines potential meta-terms for describing revelation as related in the Bhagavad-Gita, the Qur’an, and the Gospel of John, and concludes that non-confessional terms aid in the dismissal of normative viewpoints, leading to greater appreciation of commonality and meaning in the truth claims of other faiths and dialogue partners.

To suppose the possibility of dialogue between theology and science is to suppose that theology is an intellectually worthy partner to engage in dialogue with science. The status of theology as a discipline, however, remains contested, one sign of which is the absence of theology from the university. I argue that a healthy theology-science dialogue would benefit from the presence of theology as an academic discipline in the university. Theology and theologians would benefit from the much closer contact with university disciplines, including the sciences. The university and the sciences would benefit from the presence of theology, providing a department of ultimate concern, where big questions may be asked and ideologies critiqued. A university theology would need to meet standards of academic integrity.

The article chronicles the different panels devoted tothe cognitive science of religion at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) in Tampa, Florida, in November 2007. The aim is to verify the state of this subdiscipline and to check how much this work-in-progress affects the present state of the dialogue between science and religion. Several signs point to a positive development in this scientific branch and favor a sound reception in theology, which should not ignore the new research.

Chinese philosophy of religion is a less discussed and less clearly formed area in the study of Chinese philosophy. It is true that there is virtually no discussion in Chinese philosophy about rationality or justification of religious beliefs comparable to the discussion of the same issues in Western philosophy of religion. The inquiry about rationality and justification of religious beliefs has shaped Western philosophy of religion. However, the scope of philosophy of religion in the Western context has been widened since Hume and Kant. When the West began to be exposed to non-Western religions, philosophical reflection on non-Western religions is also brought into the scope of philosophy of Religion. We can expect that the concept of religion will become much broader, the scope of philosophy of religion will expand and new issues, especially, issues concerning specific and non-Western religions, will be framed. When we look at philosophy of religion in a broad sense, the field of Chinese philosophy of religion begins to emerge. In this survey paper, I will focus on several issues which, in a broad sense of philosophy of religion, can be construed as the issues of Chinese philosophy of religion. One of the issues is about the religiosity of Confucianism. The second issue is about the concept of Tian. The third is the issue regarding the origin and nature of Chinese state religion and its characteristics which also have caught the attention of scholars, especially, in China. Is Confucianism a religion? How should we construe the religiosity of Confucianism if it does have a religious dimension? Is Tian a theological term? How does Tian differ from Western God? Is the sacrifice to Tian religious and a form of monotheism? What is the nature of state religion in traditional China? What is the relation between the state religion and Confucianism in traditional China? The debates on the issues addressing these questions will be introduced and discussed in this paper.

This article first identifies two reasons for the current marginality of the theological sub-discipline of “comparative theology.” The first is an awareness of the imperialistic character of the universalist (inclusivist and pluralist) theologies of the recent past. The second is the assumption that Christianity's relations with other religious are extrinsic to Christian identity. Drawing on Kathryn Tanner's critique of postliberalism, it argues that interreligious comparison is integral to a theology that recognizes the essentially relational nature of Christian identity. This recognition implies a continuous revision of Christian identity that checks the tendency to essentialize and thereby exclude religious “others.”

Bakhtin's dialogical (not dialectical) philosophy of the everyday, double-voiced prosaic and poetic discourse of asymmetrically interrelated, embodied selves, each answerable to others and the world, found liberating wisdom in modern novelizing texts, notably those of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, with the Chalcedonian Christ prototype as background. He suggests how language is used in Christian contexts by attending to different voices in confessional utterances that may include God's voice/an interlocutory infinite “third”—heard in and through others’ voices—without collapsing perspectival pluralism into relativism. Current work on comparative theology, contrasted with old-style comparative religion, echoes his insights.

The recovery of theological integrity effected by Karl Barth has very much to do with his polemic against natural theology. Theology has regained credibility, however, at the price of being made unnatural, severed from the world in its own ecclesiastical sphere. This actually represents an indirect endorsement of natural theology inasmuch as the naturalistic understanding of the world is taken for granted as the way the world is. One result of this is the virtual abandonment of nature for theology, reflected in an alienation from science and a disinterest in ecology. The more specific object of Barth's critique of natural theology, Nazism, may also exert a reverse influence on Barth's theology, helping to account for its Christological exclusivism. The implication of this is that the critique of natural theology requires a renewed appreciation of the naturalness of theology.

This article describes the transformation of Catholic theological education over the last fifty years from a highly defensive posture vis-a-vis other religions toward dialogical engagement with members of other religions and all persons of good will. Until Vatican II, most Catholic theologians and officials distrusted exploration of other religions as leading to a dilution of Catholic identity. Vatican II condemned anti-Semitism and called for dialogue among religions in pursuit of common values. Since the Council, there have been developments in interfaith education on three levels: religious studies, comparative theology, and inter-religious practice.

Today's theology, which in the United States is primarily Judeo-Christian, includes a variety of beliefs, rituals, social and moral imperatives that we commonly associate with our religious orientation. These organizational expressions of theology constitute a variety of descriptive characterizations of how we associate our self with religion. Nevertheless, in an increasingly technological culture based on empirical science, how do we reconcile this worldview with our theology? Some historians of religion claim that the roots of our organizational expressions of theology emanate from a common source of primary religious experience. In this essay, I argue that it is possible to engage in an experimental mysticism, which I refer to as “entheogenic keys to the doors of experimentation.”

Adapted from the introductory chapter of Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences (Peterson 2003), I here lay out a general approach for a dialogue between theology and cognitive science. Key to this task is an understanding of theology as the science or study of meaning and purpose. I give reasons why theology should be thought of in this sense and the potential fruitfulness of this approach.