The Critical Analysis Of Religious Diversity

This book explores a selection of trans-contextual case studies within religious diversity scholarship to develop a series of theoretical and methodological considerations for scholars to utilize when they conduct their own studies of religious diversity.

In Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, editors Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt present thirteen essays that examine the complex religious culture of early modern England. Emphasizing particularly the marginalized discourses of Catholicism and Judaism in mainstream English Protestant culture, the authors highlight the instability of an official religious order that was troubled not only by religious heterodoxy but also by feminist and secular challenges. North American and Israeli scholars present essays on a wide range of subjects all assumed to be "marginal" but which in a real sense were central to the religious and cultural life of the Protestant English nation. Using critical methods ranging from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and intertextual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, contributors offer analyses in five sections: Minority Catholic Culture, Figuring the Jew, Hebraism and the Bible, Women and Religion, and Religion and Secularization. Essays reveal new aspects of familiar texts such as Shakespeare's King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, the psalm translations by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe's dramas, George Herbert's poetry, Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and John Milton's Samson Agonistes. They also call attention to works such as the mid-sixteenth-century play The Historie of Jacob and Esau, William Blundell's Catholic antiquarian writing, the series of paintings portraying the religious institute of Mary Ward, and funeral sermons for religiously active women. Contributors show that we cannot understand a culture without attending to its repressed, marginalized, and unacknowledged elements. Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.

This text presents a new critical theory addressing religious diversity, Christian religious privilege, and Christian hegemony in the United States. It meets a growing and urgent need in our society—the need to bring together religiously diverse ways of thinking and being in the world, and eventually to transform our society through intentional pluralism. The primary goal of Critical Religious Pluralism Theory (CRPT) is to acknowledge the central roles of religious privilege, oppression, hegemony, and marginalization in maintaining inequality between Christians and non-Christians (including the nonreligious) in the United States. Following analysis of current literature on religious, secular, and spiritual identities within higher education, and in-depth discussion of critical theories on other identity elements, the text presents seven tenets of CRPT alongside seven practical guidelines for utilizing the theory to combat the very inequalities it exposes. For the first time, a critical theory will address directly the social impacts of religious diversity and its inherent benefits and complications in the United States. Critical Religious Pluralism in Higher Education will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in higher education, as well as critical theorists from other disciplines.

This substantial volume of thirty-three original chapters covers the full range of issues in religious diversity. An indispensable guide for scholars and students, its essays make novel contributions and are crafted by recognized experts who represent a wide variety of religious and philosophical perspectives and backgrounds.

This open access book provides an analysis of contemporary societies and schools shaped by cultural diversity, globalization and migration. This diversity is necessarily reflected in education systems and requires the promotion of intercultural approaches able to improve learning processes and the quality of education. From an international and comparative perspective, this book first presents theoretical and conceptual foundations for seriously considering cultural diversity. The book also compares intercultural approaches and debates generated in countries as diverse as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Switzerland and France. For each national context, the book addresses both the historical roots of intercultural approaches and the concrete initiatives driven by educational policies for their implementation in schools and classrooms. Finally, the book presents discussions surrounding the treatment of linguistic or religious diversity in schools, the emergence of global citizenship education and the key role of teachers in intercultural approaches. This is an open access book.

This anthology explores religious diversity in Asia seen through the lenses of history, identity, state, ritual and geography. The chapters furthermore address theoretical and methodological reflections using Asia as a laboratory for broader comparative research of 'religious diversity'.

Religious Perspectives on Religious Diversity addresses fundamental and controversial questions raised by religious diversity. What are members of religious traditions to say about outsiders and about their religions? Discussion of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish perspectives is combined with methodological work.