Cows—certain types ofbovinae—can evoke strong emotions among peo-ple, different emotions rooted in different worldviews. One worldview,which is arguably a galaxy of worldviews emerging over centuries in India,has come to be called “Hindu.” Some people who identify themselvesas Hindus have strong feelings about cows—feelings that tie into theirsense of conviction that cows are not just…
What is spirituality? What is the relationship between spirituality and religion? Are they inseparable or just coincidentally connected? Does spirituality need a reference to God or is true spirituality perhaps only possible without religion? How do different forms of spirituality affect the lives of individuals and society? This book is dedicated to these questions and thus comprehensively exp…
Ramon Harvey revisits the Muslim theologian Ab? Man??r al-M?tur?d? (d. 333/944) from Samarqand and puts his system, and that of the M?tur?d? school, into lively dialogue with modern thought.Combining rigorous study of Arabic M?tur?d? texts with insights from Husserl’s phenomenology and analytic theology, Harvey explores themes from epistemology and metaphysics to the nature of God and specifi…
The Details of Thomas Becket’s life and of the first fifty years or so of his cult are so well-known that they hardly bear retelling.1 For the fifteenthcentury monks who acted as custodians of his shrine there was a handy mnemonic for the most significant events of his path to sainthood—the Seven Wonderful Tuesdays—which they duly copied into the instructions written fo…
‘TheWalking Dead’in the title of the current study is of courseanod to the fa-moustelevision series, but it also hasamore serious meaningalludingtothefact that from an ancient Egyptian perspective,the deceased and other spiritualbeingswereactuallypart of the life of the living and interacted with them.Aflowery description of this worldview has been provided by Thomas Mannin his famousJoseph…
The debate between faith and science is an ongoing and quickly evolving field of study, which touches many areas of investigation. This collection of essays informs readers about some of the discourses and themes that are currently driving the faith-science debate. The aim is not to provide a uniform or exhaustive meta-narrative on faith and science nor to focus on micro…
In an age where there was broad recognition of the Christian religion and respect for the church as an institution in European culture on the one hand and immense human suffering on the other, the young German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was deeply concerned about Christianity. His concern sprung from the fact that a person who professes to be a Christian and…
The seventeenth-century philosopher Anne Conway (1631–1679) has received renewed attention from scholars of various fields during the last three decades. Preeminently, the historian of philosophy Sarah Hutton has contributed import-ant work to this scholarly development by publishing a re-edited version of the Viscountess’ correspondence, published in 1992, …
During the evenings of 01 and 02 November 1561, a package containing a defensive plea [Dutch: verweerschrift] and an accompanying anonymous letter landed within the walls of the Castle of Doornik (Tournai). However, such a document never simply ‘falls from the sky’. The author, Guido de Brès, threw it over the wall within specific circumsta…
Let us retreat for a brief moment to the era that preceded the Late Middle Ages. In so doing, we might notice that some historians who have researched the Christianisation of Central and Eastern European societies as a continuous pro-cess, unfolding over centuries, estimate that pagan belief systems expired in the twelfth century, at the latest. The eminent Polish medievalist Henry…