This open access book addresses the question of how God can providentially govern apparently ungovernable randomness. Medieval theologians confidently held that God is provident, that is, God is the ultimate cause of or is responsible for everything that happens. However, scientific advances since the 19th century pose serious challenges to traditional views of providence. From Darwinian evolut…
This international edited collection examines how racism trajectories and manifestations in different locations relate and influence each other. The book unmasks and foregrounds the ways in which notions of European Whiteness have found form in a variety of global contexts that continue to sustain racism as an operational norm resulting in exclusion, violence, human rights violations, isolation…
Religious scholarship can be offensive to believers, as conflicts from the time of Galileo and Spinoza to the recent critique of Danish religious scholars in the wake of the infamous Muhammad cartoons have shown. Studies of this type of scholarship have been appropriated by believers as a means of reinventing their own identities - as the training of twentieth-century Muslim clergy demonstrates…
This "Open Access" book investigates the legal reality of the church through a sociological lens and from the perspective of canon law studies, the discipline which researches the law and the legal structure of the Catholic Church. It introduces readers from various backgrounds to the sociology of canon law, which is both a legal and a theological field of study, and is the first step towards i…
The introduction to this volume describes the contribution that it makes to scholarship on ancient divinatory practices. It analyses previous and current research, arguing that while this predominantly functionalist work reveals important socio-political dimensions of divination, it also runs the risk of obscuring from view the very people, ideologies, and experiences that scholars seek to unde…
How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible in return? This volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to c…
Da die älteren Monographien zum Thema, die vor über vierzig Jahren erschienene Arbeit von Kurt Stalder und die unveröffentlichte Dissertation von Olav Hanssen, keinen Forschungsbericht enthalten1 und auch die neueren Beiträge zum Thema (mit Ausnahme von E. D. Schmidt)2 die Forschungsgeschichte nicht darstellen, sei diese hier in der gebotenen Kürze skizziert. Dabei ist eine thematis…
This open access book addresses, for the first time, Islamic social work as an emerging concept at the interface of Islamic thought and social sciences. Applying a multidisciplinary approach it explores, on the one hand, the discourse that provides religious legitimisation to social work activities and, on the other hand, case studies of practical fields of Islamic social work including educati…
The chapter proceeds from the sense of mutual dependence that existed between rudimentary warrior-elites and specialized supp-liers of prestige in archaic Greek and Indo-Iranian societies. While this tension was fraught with the danger of bankruptcy and disloy-alty, it also fostered new modes of antinomian religiosity. The Greek and Vedic comparanda revolve around the notion of sacrif…