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This book's provocative analysis of the roots of peacemaking in the Western world elucidates struggles for peace that took place in the high and late Middle Ages. The author traces the ways that eleventh-century peace movements, seeking to end violence among Christians, shaped not only power structures within Christendom but also the relationship of the Western Christian world to the world outside. The unification of Christian society under the banner of “holy peace” precipitated a fundamental division between the Christian and non-Christian worlds, and the postulated peace among Christians led to holy war against non-Christians.

For the past century, initiatives inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy have contributed to the evolution of environmental activism. Steiner’s 1924 course of lectures on agriculture initiated biodynamics, which became the first organized form of organic agriculture. Farmers and activists inspired by Steiner helped prepare the way for Rachel Carson’s campaign against pesticides, anticipated the major themes of Gaian spirituality, invented community-supported agriculture, and founded many of the world’s largest green banks. Waldorf schools and Camphill intentional communities, also inspired by Steiner, integrate concern for the environment into their practices of education and care for persons with special needs. Eco-Alchemy tells all these stories, with special attention to the ways anthroposophical initiatives have interacted with impulses rooted in other spiritual traditions. By placing anthroposophy within the broader history of environmentalism, Dan McKanan demonstrates that the environmental movement itself has a complex ecology and would not be as diverse or transformative without the contributions of anthroposophy. Anthroposophy’s greatest contribution has been its emphasis on the balancing of polarities, drawn from alchemy. By refusing the dichotomies of matter and spirit, nature and humanity, and science and spirituality, students of Rudolf Steiner help environmentalism evolve in new and creative ways.

Drawing on analyses of activist art, music, and writings, as well as interviews and participant-observation in activist communities and at protests, For the Wild explores the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights activists’ commitments develop through powerful experiences with the other-than-human world during childhood and young adulthood. The book addresses the question of how and why activists come to value nonhuman animals and the natural world as worthy of protection. For the Wild is about two kinds of ritual: conversion as a rite of passage or initiation into activism and protests as ritualized actions. In the context of conversion to activism, the book explores the ways in which the emotions of love, wonder, rage and grief that motivate radical activists develop through powerful, embodied relationships with nonhuman beings. These emotions, their ritualized expressions, and spirituality shape activists’ protest practices and help us understand their deep-rooted commitments to the planet and its creatures.

This book explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize “us” and “them” through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. The book analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the “other.” It illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and it demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, contributes to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.

In light of the widespread public perception of incompatibility between Islam and Christianity, this book provides a much-needed straightforward comparison of these two great faith traditions from a broad theological perspective. The book illuminates the similarities as well as the differences between Islam and Christianity through a clear exploration of four major dimensions—historical, creedal, institutional, and ethical and spiritual. Throughout, the book features comparisons between concrete elements such as creedal statements, prayer texts, and writings from major theologians and mystics. It also includes a glossary of technical theological terms. For western readers, in particular, this balanced, authoritative work overturns some common stereotypes about Islam, especially those that have emerged in the decade since September 11, 2001.

Iconic images of medieval pilgrims, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims making their laborious way to Canterbury, conjure a distant time when faith was the only refuge of the ill and infirm, and thousands traveled great distances to pray for healing. Why, then, in an age of advanced biotechnology and medicine, do millions still go on pilgrimages? Why do journeys to important religious shrines—such as Lourdes, Compostela, Fátima, and Medjugorje—constitute a major industry? This book explores these provocative questions and finds that pilgrimage continues to offer answers for many. Its benefits can range from a demonstrable improvement in health to complete recovery. Using research in biomedical and behavioral science, the book examines accounts of miracle cures at medieval, early modern, and contemporary shrines. It enquires into the power of relics, apparitions, and the transformative nature of sacred journeying and shines new light on the roles belief, hope, and emotion can play in healing.

This book is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa's political journey and religious diversity, the author explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. The book analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South Africa's Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South Africa's President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, the author develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. The book uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.