Encounters in Faith
Christianity in Interreligious Dialogue
About This Book
Overview
Designed for College Students Taking Their First Course in Comparative Religion
What does it mean to be religious? Are there universal lessons that most religions point to? What does spiritual transformation look like? What is the soul?
Christian spirituality and comparative theology scholar Peter Feldmeier explores the relationship between Christianity and other religious traditions in an effort to rethink and shape the notion of faith.
In this text, Feldmeier explores Christianity and mysticism and investigates the role of spiritual masters and their mentoring of religiously serious people. He also examines Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and considers the notion of the soul. He discusses the Zen vision of life, as well as native traditions, particularly those of the Americas, and the New Age movement. In each chapter, Christianity acts as a dialogue partner as the text models for readers how one can re-imagine one’s own religious tradition.
By introducing the ethos of a range of religions, Feldmeier offers a rich and full exploration of the spiritual connection among religions, as well as reveals how religious understanding that employs both head and heart expands and challenges sometimes narrow doctrinal beliefs.
Details
| Weight | 0.85 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 5.375 × 1.5 × 8.25 in |
| Format | Softcover |
| Print ISBN | 978-1-59982-031-6 |
| Pages | 340 |
| Item # | 7032 |
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Customer Reviews
“In Encounters in Faith: Christianity in Interreligious Dialogue, Peter Feldmeier opens the discipline of comparative theology, often seen as the provenance of a few scholars with expertise in more than one religion, to a broad audience. Focusing on certain selective themes, he draws other religions into dialogue with Christianity, carefully explaining the meaning and place of a particular topic (mysticism, mediators, etc.) within a particular religion, and subsequently suggesting ways in which Christians might learn from the other. This book thus forms a welcome complement to the vast literature in both theology of religions and history of religions. It will be a useful handbook for undergraduate teaching as well as for disseminating the fruit of comparative theology and interreligious dialogue to the wider public.”
Boston College
“This engaging, informative textbook leads students quickly into interreligious inquiry and encounter. With its clear focus on religious practice, it will be a most helpful teaching tool.”
“There is something fresh and distinctive about Feldmeier’s approach to religions that serves as a timely corrective to so many textbooks on the same themes. Religions are too often presented as some exotic doctrinal system for conceptual analysis or some curious relic for historical investigation. Rather, for Feldmeier, religions are to be encountered and experienced. In his hands, religions no longer appear as so many isms but as living, evolving, and above all, mystical realities that expand and transform one’s spiritual perspective and way of life. Professors and students who are bored to tears by bone-dry religion textbooks that every year swamp college campuses will rejoice in having Feldmeier’s book at their disposal. They can now have a cor ad cor [heart to heart] conversation with the religious Other they encounter.”
Georgetown University
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction
- Christianity in a Multi-Religious World
- Mysticism
- Masters and Mediators
- The Jewish Vision
- Islam: The Surrendering Soul
- Hinduism’s Many Layers
- Buddha’s Revision
- Zen Mind, Ordinary Mind
- The Chinese Spirit
- Indigenous Traditions: The Primal Voice
- The New Age Message
- Interreligious Encounters: Backward and Forward
Glossary
Index
