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Globalization and high-speed communication put twenty-first century people in contact with adherents to a wide variety of world religions, but usually, valuable knowledge of these other traditions is limited at best. On the one hand, religious stereotypes abound, hampering a serious exploration of unfamiliar philosophies and practices. On the other hand, the popular idea that all religions lead to the same God or the same moral life fails to account for the distinctive origins and radically different teachings found across the world’s many religions. Understanding World Religions presents religion as a complex and intriguing matrix of history, philosophy, culture, beliefs, and practices. Hexham believes that a certain degree of objectivity and critique is inherent in the study of religion, and he guides readers in responsible ways of carrying this out. Of particular importance is Hexham’s decision to explore African religions, which have frequently been absent from major religion texts. He surveys these in addition to varieties of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
About the Author
Irving Hexham is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary and adjunct professor of World Christianity at Liverpool Hope University. He has published twenty-seven academic books, including The Concise Dictionary of Religion, Understanding Cults and New Religions, and Religion and Economic Thought, plus eighty major academic articles and chapters in books, numerous popular articles, and book reviews. Recently he completed a report for the United Nations’ refugee agency on religious conflict in Africa and another for the Canadian Government’s Department of Canadian Heritage on Religious Publications in Canada. He is listed in Who’s Who in Canada and various scholarly directories. In 2008, he was honored at the historic Humboldt University in Berlin with a Festschrift, Border Crossings: Explorations of an Interdisciplinary Historian (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag).
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General
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Chapter 1 - Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion
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Chapter 2 - A Biased Canon
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Chapter 3 - African Religious Traditions
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Chapter 4 - Witchcraft and Sorcery
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Chapter 5 - God in Zulu Religion
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Chapter 6 - The Case of Isaiah Shembe
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Chapter 7 - The Origins of Yogic Religions
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Chapter 8 - The Richness of the Hindu Tradition
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Chapter 9 - Rethinking the Hindu Tradition
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Chapter 10 - Gandhi the Great Contrarian
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Chapter 11 - Buddhism
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Chapter 12 - The Development of Buddhist Belief and Practice
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Chapter 13 - The Moral Quest of Edward Conze
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Chapter 14 - Other Yogic-Type Traditions
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Chapter 15 - Early Judaism
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Chapter 16 - Rabbinic and Other Judaisms
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Chapter 17 - Jewish Faith and Practice
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Chapter 18 - Martin Buber's Zionist Spirituality
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Chapter 19 - Christianity
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Chapter 20 - Christian History
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Chapter 21 - Christian Faith and Practice
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Chapter 22 - Christian Politics According to Abraham Kuyper
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Chapter 23 - The Challenge of Islam
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Chapter 24 - Muslim Beliefs and Practice
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Chapter 25 - Muslim Piety
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Chapter 26 - Sayyid Qutb and the Rebirth of Contemporary Islam
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Conclusion - Whither Religious Study?
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