A comparative historical analysis of the social changes that have affected the Islamic world in modern times & of the failure to achieve consensus on important social issues such as the form of government, the status of women, national identity & rule making.

With resurgent interest in the Muslim world and in particular political Islam, this collection of translated essays by major Muslim thinkers from the Middle East and South Asia demonstrates the ongoing and contentious debate between modernizers seeking to adapt Western ways and fundamentalists who rejected them. From Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the nineteenth-century to Ayatollah Khomeini in the twentieth, the selections provide an opportunity to examine a diversity of Muslim thinkers thoughts on important topics like jurisprudence, politics, relations with the west, and women in their own words.

The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism provides a state of the art reference tool written by leading scholars in the fields of religious studies and history.

For Christians, the first encounter with the New Age Movement may prove confusing. On the one hand, there is an attraction in New Age ideology and ritual practice, but on the other, this very attraction raises theological and pastoral questions for the Churces, whose responses have been ambiguous and conflicting. The author analyses the real challenge the New Age offers the Churches today, and gives and overview of the way in which Christian groups have responded to it.

A remarkable development occurred in the Islamic world during the second half of the 19th century. A group of prominent Muslim theologians began to critically examine classical conceptions and methods of jurisprudence and devised a new approach to Islamic theology. This new approach was nothing short of an outright rebellion against Islamic orthodoxy, displaying an astonishing compatibility with 19th century Enlightenment era thought. In the 20th century, this modernist movement declined, to be replaced by another cultural episode, characterized by the growing power of Islamic fundamentalism. This volume looks at these two very different approaches to Islam, illustrating how Islamic modernism and fundamentalism were discourses each being an organized set of signs consisting of a conceptual framework, symbolic order, and ritualistic behaviour. The editors have selected the most prominent Islamic thinkers of modernist and fundamentalist viewpoints, diverse nationalities, and from both the late decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century.

This book clarifies differences between the intellectual positions of the so-called two-party system of liberals and conservatives in American Protestant Christianity. Nancey Murphy advances the thesis that the philosophy of the modern period is largely responsible for the polarity of Protestant Christian thought. A second thesis is that the modern philosophical positions driving the division between liberals and conservatives have themselves been called into question. This, then, presents the opportunity to ask how theology ought to be done in a postmodern era and to envision a rapprochement between theologians of the left and right. The book concludes by speculating on the future and the likelihood that the compulsion to separate into two distinct camps will be precluded by the coexistence of a wide range of theological positions from left to right.

Much of the Middle East and North Africa still appears to be in a transitional period set in motion by the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the political trajectory of the region remains difficult to grasp. In The Clash of Values, Mansoor Moaddel provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the region’s present and will determine its future. Analyzing data from over 60,000 face-to-face interviews of nationally representative samples of people in seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey—Moaddel reveals the depth and breadth of the conflict of values. He develops measures of expressive individualism, gender equality, secularism, and religious fundamentalism and shows that the factors that strengthen liberal values also weaken fundamentalism. Moaddel highlights longitudinal data showing changes in orientations toward secular politics, Western-type government, religious tolerance, national identity, and to a limited extent gender equality, as well as a significant decline in support for political Islam, over the past decade. Focusing on these trends, he contends that the Arab Spring represents a new phase of collective action rooted in the spread of the belief in individual liberty. Offering a rigorous and deeply researched perspective on social change, The Clash of Values disentangles the Middle East and North Africa’s political complexity and pinpoints a crucial trend toward liberal nationalism.

David Currie was raised in a devout Christian family whose father was a fundamentalist preacher and both parents teachers at Moody Bible Institute. Currie's whole upbringing was immersed in the life of fundamentalist Protestantism - theology professors, seminary presidents and founders of evangelical mission agencies were frequent guests at his family dinner table. Currie received a degree from Trinity International University and studied in the Masters of Divinity program. This book was written as an explanation to his fundamentalist and evangelical friends and family about why he became a Roman Catholic. Currie presents a very lucid, systematic and intelligible account of the reasons for his conversion to the ancient Church that Christ founded. He gives a detailed discussion of the important theological and doctrinal beliefs Catholic and evangelicals hold in common, as well as the key doctrines that separate us, particularly the Eucharist, the Pope, and Mary.