Crossing Religious Boundaries

A rich ethnography of lived religious experiences in Lagos, offering a unique look at religious pluralism in Nigeria's biggest city.

The essays in this volume illustrates the variety and power of predominantly pentecostal-charismatic movements between Western and African religious actors and groups that has developed across the past twenty years. In so doing, it also highlights the dramatic change in global "migration" patterns as a result of relatively inexpensive air travel.

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history. In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.

Arguably the single most important element in Abrahamic cross-confessional relations has been an ongoing mutual interest in perennial spiritual and ethical exemplars of one another’s communities. Ranging from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Crossing Confessional Boundaries explores the complex roles played by saints, sages, and Friends of God in the communal and intercommunal lives of Christians, Muslims, and Jews across the Mediterranean world, from Spain and North Africa to the Middle East to the Balkans. By examining these stories in their broad institutional, social, and cultural contexts, Crossing Confessional Boundaries reveals unique theological insights into the interlocking histories of the Abrahamic faiths.

Faith-based organisations (FBOs) have long been recognised as having an advantage in delivering programs and interventions amongst communities of the same faith. However, many FBOs today work across a variety of contexts, including with local partners and communities of different faiths. Likewise, secular NGOs and donors are increasingly partnering with faith-based organisations to work in highly-religious communities. Development Across Faith Boundaries explores the dynamics of activities by local or international FBOs that cross faith boundaries, whether with their partners, donors or recipient communities. The book investigates the dynamics of cross-faith partnerships in a range of development contexts, from India, Cambodia and Myanmar, to Melanesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. The book demonstrates how far FBOs extend their activities beyond their own faith communities and how far NGOs partner with religious actors. It also considers the impacts of these cross-faith partnerships, including their work on conflict and sectarian or ethnic tension in the relevant communities. This book is an invaluable guide for graduates, researchers and students with an interest in development and religious studies, as well as practitioners within the aid sector.

A deeply researched and vividly written study, this book depicts religion in place and in movement, dwelling and crossing. Drawing on insights from the natural and social sciences, Tweed's work is grounded in the gritty particulars of distinctive religious practices, even as it moves toward ideas about cross-cultural patterns. It offers a responsible way to think broadly about religion, a topic that is crucial for understanding the contemporary world.

Mission is the practice of cultivating relationships across boundaries for the sake of fostering conversations in word and deed about the nature of God's Good News. To understand the boundaries that need to be crossed, the book draws on the concept of context.

"The Romans' early establishment of the sanctity of their city and the desire to protect it -- from not only the ravages of military conflict beyond its confines but the dangers of authoritarian rule at home -- took a variety of forms, legal, political, and military. These were codified in social practices, and thus established behaviors and rituals that, as they set these practices in the public eye, served as a continuing self-justification of Rome's growing dominance in the Mediterranean world. Koortbojian examines the transformation of Rome from Caesar to Constantine from several different points of view to reveal the primordial distinction between matters civic and military, and how the 'crossing of the pomerium,' the evanescent boundary that divided them, provided the crux of a historical interpretation of distinctly Roman endeavors. Koortbojian sets the background and then expands upon the long-vexed problem of the presence of men at arms in the city of Rome; long-standing legal and political practices that were adapted in the face of new military engagements and the crisis of civil war; and how Roman commanders attended to established religious practices while on campaign, and how those practices mirrored traditional customs and inverted the manner of their performance so as to acknowledge a profound Roman distinction between civic and military acts. As a whole, the book demonstrates how certain fundamental principles of law, politics, and military life -- and the practices that followed from them -- were interwoven in a narrative of continuity and change across three centuries of Roman imperial rule"