A Snarl Theology calls God a merciful creator, a big-picture divinity, bigger than anything imaginable. Scripture confirms that in the restoration of the world and all its environs, there will be a settlement between God and his creatures. A covenant to set animals and us back as we were meant to be. “I will make a covenant for them on that day, with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the air, and with the things that crawl on the ground.” (Hosea 2:20) Redemption is the divine act of follow-through regarding covenant—washing away our faults, defects, and foibles and taking us into the arms of the divine. Are animals rewarded with redemption, like us—with a full restoration? To imagine that God will not reward these martyred creatures, who play a significant role in human redemption, weakens the concept and promise of paradise. Animals are sentient beyond our understanding, residents in a universe where God communicates with everyone. This animal kingdom theology implies that animals, too, hear God’s voice. A Snarl Theology’s hope for animals to be our redemptive allies shouldn’t cancel doctrine, upset dogma, or countermand Christianity. It should increase our love of God.

A Snarl Theology calls God a merciful creator, a big-picture divinity, bigger than anything imaginable. Scripture confirms that in the restoration of the world and all its environs, there will be a settlement between God and his creatures. A covenant to set animals and us back as we were meant to be. "I will make a covenant for them on that day, with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the air, and with the things that crawl on the ground." (Hosea 2:20) Redemption is the divine act of follow-through regarding covenant--washing away our faults, defects, and foibles and taking us into the arms of the divine. Are animals rewarded with redemption, like us--with a full restoration? To imagine that God will not reward these martyred creatures, who play a significant role in human redemption, weakens the concept and promise of paradise. Animals are sentient beyond our understanding, residents in a universe where God communicates with everyone. This animal kingdom theology implies that animals, too, hear God's voice. A Snarl Theology's hope for animals to be our redemptive allies shouldn't cancel doctrine, upset dogma, or countermand Christianity. It should increase our love of God.

The present publication is an up-to-date, authentic and comprehensive dictionary of religion, which recognises that religion is a field in its own right and with its own language. It aims to provide clear, concise, and correct definitions and descriptions of the terms used in all world religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Shintoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Animism and so on. This work is designed to be a comprehensive reference tool for researchers, students, religious practitioners and all who are interested in religions and religious practices. It is earnestly hoped that it will be an authoritative source to which one can turn with confidence for meaning and knowledge of the common and specialised terms used in world religions.

In this volume Ann Lee Bressler offers the first cultural history of American Universalism and its central teaching -- the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Although Universalists have commonly been lumped together with Unitarians as "liberal religionists," in its origins their movement was, in fact, quite different from that of the better-known religious liberals. Unlike Unitarians such as the renowned William Ellery Channing, who stressed the obligation of the individual under divine moral sanctions, most early American Universalists looked to the omnipotent will of God to redeem all of creation. While Channing was socially and intellectually descended from the opponents of Jonathan Edwards, Hosea Ballou, the foremost theologian of the Universalist movement, appropriated Edwards's legacy by emphasizing the power of God's love in the face of human sinfulness and apparent intransigence. Espousing what they saw as a fervent but reasonable piety, many early Universalists saw their movement as a form of improved Calvinism. The story of Universalism from the mid-nineteenth century on, however, was largely one of unsuccessful efforts to maintain this early synthesis of Calvinist and Enlightenment ideals. Eventually, Bressler argues, Universalists were swept up in the tide of American religious individualism and moralism; in the late nineteenth century they increasingly extolled moral responsibility and the cultivation of the self. By the time of the first Universalist centennial celebration in 1870, the ideals of the early movement were all but moribund. Bressler's study illuminates such issues as the relationship between faith and reason in a young, fast-growing, and deeply uncertain country, and the fate of the Calvinist heritage in American religious history.

This book is based on my doctoral dissertation from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1996) of the same title. As a master's student, working on an entirely different project, I was well aware that many of Newton's theological manuscripts were located in our own Jewish National and University Library, but I was under the mistaken assumption that scores of highly qualified scholars must be assiduously scouring them and publishing their results. It never occurred to me to look at them at all until, having fmished my master's, I spoke to Professor David Katz at Tel-Aviv University about an idea I had for doctoral research. Professor Katz informed me that the project I had suggested was one which he himself had just fmished, but that I might be interested in working on the famous Newton manuscripts in the context of a project being organized by him, Richard Popkin, James Force, and the late Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, to study and publish Newton's theological material. I asked him whether he was not sending me into the shark-infested waters of highly competitive scholarship, and learned that in fact there were only a handful of scholars in the world who actively studied and published on Newton's theology. At the time the group consisted mainly of Popkin, Force, Dobbs, Frank Manuel, Kenneth Knoespel, and David Castillejo.