Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations

Edited by University of Birmingham, UK, and WRWC program, University of Notre Dame, USA

4 Issues per year

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Print ISSN: 0959-6410

Online ISSN: 1469-9311

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations promotes the scholarly study of Islam as a religious and intellectual tradition, and its relations with Christianity and other religions. Islam as a religious and intellectual tradition includes:

• Islam as a historical tradition of faith and a current lived reality throughout the world;
• the development of religious teachings and debates about orthodox beliefs;
• major Muslim movements and thinkers;
• religious teachings and principles as motivation for individuals and societies;
• Islamic beliefs in new social contexts past and present; and,
• the future of Islam.

Islam in its relations with Christianity and other religions includes:

• Muslim attitudes towards other religions;
• Christian and other religious attitudes towards Islam;
• mutual influences between Islam and other religions;
• historical and contemporary interfaith collaborations and rivalries;
• religious factors in encounters and confrontations; and,
• Muslim minorities in non-Muslim societies and non-Muslims in Muslim-majority societies.

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations is edited by the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and the World Religions and World Church (WRWC) program, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations is abstracted and indexed in:

– American Theological Library Association
– Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts (ASSIA)
– ATLA Religion Database
– British Humanities Index
– European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH)
– IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews)
– IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature)
– SCOPUS
– Sociological Abstracts
– Theological and Religious Abstracts
-Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)

Source: tandfonline.com

Shein was also accused of cultural appropriation for using white models to sell sleepwear that imitated cultural clothing. The retailer has now apologized via a statement to its more than 11m Instagram followers, and removed the items from its site.

“As a global brand, we vow to do a much better job in educating ourselves on different cultures, religions and traditions to ensure our diverse community is respected and honored,” it said. “We offer our sincerest apology to all whom we have hurt and offended and hope we can earn your forgiveness.”

Reviews on the products showed that customers were using the mats for purposes other than prayer – one review showed a buyer using the mat for their pet cat.

Source: BBC

This interdisciplinary-oriented seminar was structured around five panel sessions. The first two sessions were set to discuss the status of women in Islamic exegesis and Catholic thought. The take away lesson out of these sessions was that contemporary challenges for gender equality stem from the misinterpretation of core Islamic principles and thus there is the need to refer back to the core foundations of religious principles. In the third session, which focused on the position of the woman in contemporary Jewish thought, the strong biblical figure of Esther was recalled in order to redirect the focus more on female characters in religious thought and leadership. Female religious leadership in various Jewish schools of thought has increased throughout the last century…

Finally, the seminar was wrapped with some policy recommendations to improve the status of women within the three monotheistic religions. The often-made mistake of confusing religion and culture needs to be overcome. In so doing, religious and cultural discourses must be contextualized, since socio-political contexts are crucial elements in producing patriarchal and authoritarian systems, which put constraints on the situation of women and on their rights. Further, there the need to foster religious education on a national and international scale and in an intercultural manner, so that women (and men) have access to the skills needed to read the holy scripts in a history-critical approach. As it was mentioned several times before, women and the youth must be the leading actors in this process.

Source: Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI)

Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions

Publisher: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (October 2018)

(This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Glocal Religions that was published in Religions)

The globalization of the world’s religions leads to a variety of fusions whereby local elements blend with global religions, leading to hybrid local-global or glocal religious forms. Glocal forms of religion provide a hitherto insufficiently explored research agenda with the potential of further growth in the future.

This volume introduces the basic tenets of this research agenda and offers examples from around the globe. In the volume’s individual chapters, authors explore a diverse tapestry of such forms that cover cases from the Caribbean, Japan, Finland, Eastern Europe, US, Korea, Southeast Asia and Central America. Glocal forms of religious expression exist across diverse religious traditions.

In this volume, religious traditions specifically explored include Buddhism, Hinduism, folk or traditional religions, Eastern Orthodox Christianity & Protestantism. The study of glocal religions involves a trans-disciplinary group of scholars and researchers. In this volume, contributions come from the fields of sociology, archaeology, anthropology, history and religious studies. This collection is an indispensable reader for scholars and students who wish to explore the dynamics of glocal religion in their part of the world.

 Read the book here.

Source: mdpi.com

Editors: Patrick Michel, Adam Possamai, Bryan Turner

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US (May 19, 2017)

This edited book explores the impact of globalization on the relationship between religion and politics, religion and nation, religion and nationalism, and the impact that transnationalism has on religious groups. In a post-Westphalian and transnational world, with increased international communication and transportation, a plethora of new religious recompositions religions now take part in a network society that cuts across borders. This collection, through its analysis of historical and contemporary case studies, explores the growth of both national and transnational religious movements and their dealings with the various versions of modernity that they encounter. It considers trends of religious revitalization and secularization, and processes of nationalism and transnationalism through the prism of the theory of multiple modernities, acknowledging both its pluralist world view but also the argument that its definition of modernity is often so inclusive as to lose coherence. Providing a cutting edge take on 21st century religion and globalization, this volume is a key read for all scholars of religion, secularization and transnationalism.

Table of Contents:

• Religions, Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities: An Introduction
• Contribution to a Socio-History of the Relations Between “Nation” and “Religion”: The Case of Catholicism
• “La Farina del Diavolo”: Transnational Migration and the Politics of Religious Liberty in Post-War Italy
• Persianate Islam and Its Regional Spread
• Charisma as a Transnational Enterprise
• Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Transnational “Faith Community” in Kyrgyzstan
• Multiple Modernities and Political Millenarianism: Dispensational Theology, Nationalism, and American Politics
• From Holy Sites to Web Sites: Hindu Nationalism, from Sacred Territory to Diasporic Ethnicity
• God Is Argentine and so Is the Pope! Catholicism, Popular Culture and the National Imagination
• Branding of Spiritual Authenticity and Nationalism in Transnational Sufism

Editors:

Patrick Michel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France and professor (directeur d’études) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France. In addition to his primary interest in Central Europe, his research focuses on the theoretical aspects of the relation between politics and religion.

Adam Possamai is Professor in Sociology and director of research in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the past President of the International Sociological Association’s Committee 22 on the Sociology of Religion.

Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Committee on Religion at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, US and Professor of the Sociology of Religion at the Australian Catholic University, Australia. He was the Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College.

Source: Palgrave Macmillan

The program is being run with the University of Bologna, whose course director said all religions that have not been officially recognized by the Italian state – including Islam – were welcome to join. Professor Giovanni Cimbalo told La Repubblica: “The aim is to foster a dialogue between religions and cultures, contributing to the construction of a peaceful and non-violent society.”

He said the course would respect the diverse denominations within Islam, as well as across Christianity and other religions. Attendees will be taught about the Italian constitution, including freedom of religion and speech, as well as the “rights and duties inherent in our democratic societies”.

More practical instruction will focus on the process of setting up new places of worship, following protests over the closure of makeshift mosques last year.

Despite having an estimated 1.6 million followers in Italy, Islam is not an officially recognized religion and the country has only a handful of registered mosques. With few official places of worship, many Muslims pray in houses and some 800 cultural centers and prayer rooms in the country, but right wing parties have claimed this makes religious sites hard to monitor and increases the risk of radicalization.

The new courses, to be taught at six universities including Pisa and Florence, are part of a €92,000 (£80,000) interior ministry program to improve integration and prevent extremism. It comes amid heightened security in Italy, which has come under the spotlight following revelations the Berlin Christmas market attacker was radicalized in its prisons.

Source: The Independent

“No-one has the right to employ violence or the threat of violence to advance a religion, religious beliefs, or religious laws,” say the authors of the text, American legal scholar Brian Lepard, theologian Amir Hussain of Loyola Marymount University, Vivian Lee-Nyitray of the University of California, and Daniel Cere and Arvind Sharma of the Faculty of Theology at Canada’s McGill University.

Ironically, only days after the declaration was released, alleged terrorist attacks in three communities in the United States inflamed anger and hostility at acts of violence perpetrated in the name of religion.

Work on a declaration of human rights in the name of the world’s religions began in 1998 at the suggestion of McGill University’s Faculty of Theology. The initiative coincided with celebrations to mark the 50^th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and was intended to create a declaration to complement the UN statement. Early drafts were discussed at academic conferences as well as at a UNESCO conference on inter-religious dialogue in Barcelona in 2002 and by the Parliament of the World’s Religions at its meeting in Durban, Australia in 2009.  Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi presented a revised version in 2006 at the first Global Conference of World’s Religions after September 11.

The final text released this month in Montreal states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. This right includes freedom to choose, retain or change one’s religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in a community with others and in public or private, to manifest one’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The 3^rd Global Conference on World’s Religions following September 11, held at McGill University and convened by Arvind Sharma, featured a list of high-profile religious academics, activists and writers including Gregory Baum, known for his role as theological advisor to the Ecumenical Secretariat during the Second Vatican Council, celebrated author Karen Armstrong, Indian spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and professor of Jewish studies Susannah Heschel.

The inaugural Global Conference on World Religions held in Montreal in 2006 was called in response to terrorist attacks on sites in the United States on September 11, 2001. The objective of the conferences has been to address the potential of the world’s religions to be agents of peace at a time when religion has, in Sharma’s words, become a “byword for evil, aggression and terror”. The Montreal event, held under the theme From Faith to Interfaith, was the final conference in the series. Co-sponsors included the Uberoi Foundation for Religious Studies and the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism.

Source: The World Council of Churches