The History Of Religions

A History of the World's Religions bridges the interval between the founding of religions and their present state, and gives students an accurate look at the religions of the world by including descriptive and interpretive details from the original source materials. Refined by over forty years of dialogue and correspondence with religious experts and practitioners around the world, A History of the World's Religions is widely regarded as the hallmark of scholarship, fairness, and accuracy in its field. It is also the most thorough yet manageable history of world religion available in a single volume, treating many subjects largely neglected in other texts.

This book is part of an initiative in cooperation with renowned Chinese publishers to make fundamental, formative, and influential Chinese thinkers available to a western readership, providing absorbing insights into Chinese reflections of late, and offering a chance to grasp today’s China. In their influential book Handbook of the History of Religions in China, Zhongjian Mou and Jian Zhang present a panorama of the religions existing in China through time. In their fascinating History, they delineate the emergence and development of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity and explore the roles they played in Chinese society and the interrelations between them. In China, also due to the encompassing Confucian idea of “living together harmoniously while maintaining differences,” religions—including newly arrived ones—came closer together than anywhere else in the world and reached a unique level of peaceful societal coexistence. Despite many frictions and conflicts, communication and reconciliation were indisputably predominant in China throughout history. Buddhism was peacefully introduced into China and, later on, a harmonious, symbiotic syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism developed—an exemplary process of how a diverse set of different religions can complement each other and contribute to a better life.

Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism was 'invented', this work focuses on the following stage in which it was “essentialised” into a sui generis, universal category of religion. At the same time, it shows how Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier, with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today, drawing on the same discourses. This book provides a history of this problematic category, and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century. It uses a critical-historical method to show how and why Gnosis, Gnostic and Gnosticism were taken up by specific groups and individuals – practitioners and scholars – at different times. It shows how ideas about Gnosticism developed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, drawing from continental phenomenology, Jungian psychology and post-Holocaust theology, to be constructed as a perennial religious current based on special knowledge of the divine in a corrupt world. David G. Robertson challenges how scholars interact with the category Gnosticism, and contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between primary sources, academics and practitioners in category formation.

Preliminary Material /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Preface /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Formation of Monotheism /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Truth of Myth /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Myths of Beginnings and Creation-Myths /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- IO and Rangi /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Confession of Sins: An Attempted General Interpretation /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Confession of Sins and the Classics /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Introduction to the History of Greek Religion /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Religion of Ancient Thrace /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Wheel in the Ritual Symbolism of Some Indo-European Peoples /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Carmenta /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Gaulish Three-Faced God on Planetary Vases /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Regnator Omnivm Devs /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- West Slav Paganism /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Sarapis and His “Kerberos” /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Aion--(Kronos)Chronos in Egypt /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- The Monstrous Figure of Time in Mithraism /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- East and West /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- State Religion and Individual Religion in the Religious History of Italy /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- History and Phenomenology in the Science of Religion /Raffaele Pettazzoni -- Index /Raffaele Pettazzoni.

In this seminal work, pioneering theologian Ernst Troeltsch raises the question, how can we pass beyond the diversity with which history presents us to norms for our faith and for our judgments about life? He trenchantly probes the issue of how one religion--when viewed historically in the context of other world religions--can be universally and absolutely true. Though many others since have explored the issue of historical relativism and religious truth, few have done so with Troeltsch's determination and incisiveness, and for this he has made a lasting contribution to Christian theology and the philosophy of religion. The questions Troeltsch poses in this book remain utterly significant for the thoughtful Christian today. This reissue of a well-known classic includes a foreword by theological titan James Luther Adams.

In Monks in Motion, Jack Meng-Tat Chia explores why Buddhist monks migrated from China to Southeast Asia, and how they participated in transregional Buddhist networks across the South China Sea. This book tells the story of three prominent monks--Chuk Mor (1913-2002), Yen Pei (1917-1996), and Ashin Jinarakkhita (1923-2002)--and examines the connected history of Buddhist communities in China and maritime Southeast Asia in the twentieth century.

Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.