Reid B. Locklin - Böcker

Using a new model focused on four core capacities-intellectual complexity, social location, empathetic accountability, and motivated action--Teaching Civic Engagement explores the significance of religious studies in fostering a vibrant, just, and democratic civic order.In the first section of the book, contributors detail this theoretical model and offer an initial application to the sources and methods that already define much teaching in the disciplines of religious studies and theology. A second section offers chapters focused on specific strategies for teaching civic engagement in religion classrooms, including traditional textual studies, reflective writing, community-based learning, field trips, media analysis, ethnographic methods, direct community engagement and a reflective practice of "ascetic withdrawal." The final section of the volume explores theoretical issues, including the delimitation of the "civic" as a category, connections between local and global in the civic project, the question of political advocacy in the classroom, and the role of normative commitments.Collectively these chapters illustrate the real possibility of connecting the scholarly study of religion with the societies in which we, our students, and our institutions exist. The contributing authors model new ways of engaging questions of civic belonging and social activism in the religion classroom, belying the stereotype of the ivory tower intellectual.

Using a new model focused on four core capacities-intellectual complexity, social location, empathetic accountability, and motivated action--Teaching Civic Engagement explores the significance of religious studies in fostering a vibrant, just, and democratic civic order.In the first section of the book, contributors detail this theoretical model and offer an initial application to the sources and methods that already define much teaching in the disciplines of religious studies and theology. A second section offers chapters focused on specific strategies for teaching civic engagement in religion classrooms, including traditional textual studies, reflective writing, community-based learning, field trips, media analysis, ethnographic methods, direct community engagement and a reflective practice of "ascetic withdrawal." The final section of the volume explores theoretical issues, including the delimitation of the "civic" as a category, connections between local and global in the civic project, the question of political advocacy in the classroom, and the role of normative commitments.Collectively these chapters illustrate the real possibility of connecting the scholarly study of religion with the societies in which we, our students, and our institutions exist. The contributing authors model new ways of engaging questions of civic belonging and social activism in the religion classroom, belying the stereotype of the ivory tower intellectual.

This volume explores the twenty-first century classroom as a uniquely intergenerational space of religious disaffiliation, and questions about how our work in the classroom can be, and is being, re-imagined for the new generation. The culturally hybrid identity of Millennials shapes their engagement with religious "others" on campus and in the classroom, pushing educators of comparative theology to develop new pedagogical strategies that leverage ways of seeing and interacting with their teachers and classmates. Reflecting on religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, African Traditional Religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and agnosticism/atheism, this volume theorizes the theological outcomes of current pedagogies and the shifting contours of comparative theological discourse.

This volume explores the twenty-first century classroom as a uniquely intergenerational space of religious disaffiliation, and questions about how our work in the classroom can be, and is being, re-imagined for the new generation. The culturally hybrid identity of Millennials shapes their engagement with religious "others" on campus and in the classroom, pushing educators of comparative theology to develop new pedagogical strategies that leverage ways of seeing and interacting with their teachers and classmates. Reflecting on religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, African Traditional Religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and agnosticism/atheism, this volume theorizes the theological outcomes of current pedagogies and the shifting contours of comparative theological discourse.

A collection of Raj's groundbreaking ethnographic studies of "vernacular" Catholic traditions in Tamil Nadu, India.Finalist for the 2018 Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies presented by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies At the turn of the twenty-first century, Selva J. Raj (1952–2008) was one of the most important scholars of popular Indian Christianity and South Asian religion in North America. Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints gathers together, for the first time in a single volume, a series of his groundbreaking studies on the distinctively "vernacular" Catholic traditions of Tamil Nadu in southeast India. This collection, which focuses on four rural shrines, highlights ritual variety and ritual transgression in Tamil Catholic practice and offers clues to the ritual exchange, religious hybridity, and dialogue occurring at the grassroots level between Tamil Catholics and their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. Raj also advances a new and alternative paradigm for interreligious dialogue that radically differs from models advocated by theologians, clergy, and other religious elite. In addition, essays by other leading scholars of Indian Christianity and South Asian religions-Michael Amaladoss, Purushottama Bilimoria, Corinne G. Dempsey, Eliza F. Kent, and Vasudha Narayanan-are included that amplify and creatively extend Raj's work.

Offers a new, interreligious approach to questions of mission and conversion, grounded in a close study of the Chinmaya Mission, Ramakrishna Mission and other movements associated with the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta.For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond.