Discover new and recent publications on interfaith relations and related topics. The selection of books and articles features work written and/or edited by researchers from the University of Cambridge, including authors based in the Faculty of Divinity and other members of the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum.
Featured publication: The Harvest of Time
A debut novel from Dr Ankur Barua, The Harvest of Time (Austin Macauley, November 2023) follows the footsteps of a fictional Cambridge Divinity student. Barua engages creatively with the contemporary cultural landscape of India and inter-religious relations. Colleagues and students marked the book’s arrival with a celebratory launch, reported by Dr Alexandra Ilieva.
In 2023, CIP also celebrated new books from Dr Daniel Weiss and Professor Esra Özyürek. Details of these and other publications are available below.
2023
Haustein, Jörg (2023) Islam in German East Africa, 1885–1918: A Genealogy of Colonial Religion. Palgrave Macmillan.
An in-depth analysis of German colonial Islam politics, Haustein’s monograph offers a new approach to a post-colonial historiography of Islam in Africa, enabling new insights into religion, ethnicity, language, law, and education in colonial Tanzania.
Özyürek, Esra (2023) Subcontractors of Guilt Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany. Stanford University Press.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. View related media coverage, or watch video from the Cambridge book launch.
Weiss, Daniel (2023) Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence. Cambridge University Press.
Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? Weiss provides new readings of Jewish philosophers Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin in light of rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. The book demonstrates classical rabbinic literature’s relevance to contemporary political & philosophical debates. Watch video from Weiss’s September 2023 book launch (via YouTube.com).
2020–2022
Barua, Ankur (2022) The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes. Lexington Books.
Barua sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal: various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last 600 years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The book incorporates a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904–2002).
Demiri, L., M. Zaman, Tim Winter, C. Schwöbel, & A. Bodrov, eds. (2022) Theological Anthropology in Interreligious Perspective. Sapientia Islamica 5, Mohr Siebeck.
What defines 'humanity' is a seemingly innocuous question and yet one which continues to attract controversy. Directed by this inquiry and bringing together theological insight in conversation with academic interreligious discourse, this edited volume offers a unique contribution towards articulating the complex and myriad ways in which human life has been conceived and related to the greater vista of reality. Framed around Muslim-Christian theological dialogue, the volume results from a meeting of prominent international scholars, whose contributions investigate the origins of life through to death and beyond.
Posegay, Nick (2021) Points of Contact The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. Open Book.
In Points of Contact, Nick Posegay investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.
Snyder, Julia and Daniel H. Weiss (eds) (2020) Scripture and Violence. London: Routledge.
Scripture and Violence explores the complex relationship between scriptural texts and real-world acts of violence. The book illustrates prevalent modern tendencies to express more concern about other people’s texts and violence than one’s own, to treat interpretation and application of scriptural passages as self-evident, and to assume that the actions of religious people are directly motivated by what they read in scriptures. The volume includes essays by scholars of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. View related resources (via ScriptureAndViolence.org).
Pre-2020
Andrejč, Gorazd and Daniel H. Weiss (eds) (2019) Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies. Boston: Brill.
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and his thought in general continue to be highly relevant for present and future research on interreligious relations. Spanning several (sub)disciplines – from philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, comparative philosophy, comparative theology, to religious studies – the contributions engage with recent developments in interpretation of Wittgenstein and those in the philosophy and theology of interreligious encounter.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet and Marija Grujić (eds) (2019) Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement. Special Issue. EthnoScripts 21(1). Hamburg: University of Hamburg.
What is home after home? In its aftermath, does a dwelling continue to dwell? Can forms of belonging be replanted, or replaced with new ones? And, what kinds of claims are articulated in the belonging inclusive of absence? Contributors tackle such questions within specific timespaces of movement, travel and forced migration, through gendered and bodily transformations, in religious ritual and the promise of the eternal, through the dire straits of developmental projects, the loss and disintegration of social relations, and through resurrected colonial and nationalist tropes.
Jackson Ravenscroft, Ruth (2019) The Veiled God: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Theology of Finitude. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Schleiermacher was a 19th-century German theologian, philosopher, translator, philologist, and civil servant. The Veiled God offers an appraisal of his early work, and explores the cultural and academic impact of his theory of religion, at the interface of a number of academic disciplines. The book also critically examines Schleiermacher's definition of religion, as well as his understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in contemporary Berlin.
Lockhart, Alastair (2019) Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Lockhart examines the global spread of a system of religious healing developed by a small Christian group in the UK from the 1920s and through the 20th century. More than 100,000 people in 100+ countries applied for the healing. The book examines how people adopted and adapted the healing system within social, cultural, and historical contexts, drawing out distinctive and common aspects of religious creativity from the UK, the USA, Jamaica and Finland.
Bar-Asher Siegal, Michal, Daniel H. Weiss, and Holger Michael Zellentin (eds) (2018) Talmud and Christianity: Rabbinic Judaism after Constantine. Special double issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly 25.3 and 25.4. [Part 1 and Part 2]
Synergising important developments in the study of rabbinic Judaism and scholarship on Late Antiquity in relation to the Talmud and Christianity: (1) a better understanding of how closely the Palestianian and Babylonian Talmuds, respectively reflect the early Byzantine and Sasanian culture in which they evolved, and (2) a growing sense of the editorial role of the rabbis; and (3) increased attention to cultural context and literary interactions.
This JSQ double-issue works towards a new understanding of how to read rabbinic Judaism in light of the Christian elements of the rabbis’ context, illuminating important new elements of Jewish/Christian relations, and of classical rabbinic Judaism.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2018) Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape. Oxford: Berghahn. Also available in paperback (2021).
An intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time.
Meggitt, Justin J (2013) Early Quakers and Islam: Slavery, Apocalyptic and Christian-Muslim Encounters in the Seventeenth Century. Studies on Inter-Religious Relations 59. Uppsala: Swedish Science Press.
A study of the relations between early Quaker slaves and their North African owners in the 17th century, an interreligious encounter that generated some of the most striking and constructive exegesis of the Qur’an in early modern England.
Winter, Tim, Richard Harries and Norman Solomon (eds) (2006) Abraham’s Children: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Conversation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark/Continuum.
An edited volume, which includes four chapters by Winter, recording some proceedings of the Oxford Abrahamic Group.
2022–2023
Snyder, Julia. 2023 Prooftexting from Other People’s Scriptures? ‘Prophets and Patriarchs’ in Acts of Philip 5–7. Harvard Theological Review, 116:1, pp. 66—90. doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000044
What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.”
Badder, Anastasia. 2022. ‘I Just Want You to Get into the Flow of Reading’: Reframing Hebrew Proficiency as an Enactment of Liberal Jewishness. Language & Communication 87, pp. 221—30, doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2022.08.003.
Families enroll their children in Luxembourg's Liberal Talmud Torah because they are committed to continuing Jewish tradition and teaching their children how to be Jewish. These families are also deeply attached to liberal modernity and its ideals of free choice and autonomy... [Read a longer introduction to this study.]
Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2022 Jewish Music in Northern Morocco and the Building of Sonic Identity Boundaries. Journal of North African Studies, 27:5 (Sept 2022) pp. 1027—1059. doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2021.1884855.
Drawn from field work done in Morocco between 2007–2019 of the Judeo-Spanish repertoires of Northern Morocco and their internal societal functions: Communal use is strictly inner-facing and specific to their life in Morocco and not a representation of a long nostalgia for life in pre-Expulsion Spain.
Hawkes, Jason D., et al. 2022 Grounding Texts and Theories of Societal Change. Antiquity, 96:387 (June 2022), pp. 611—627. doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.28.
During the mid-first millennium CE, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal transformations. Neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven had been studied archaeologically. Hawke & his co-authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context.
Dekel, I., & Esra G. Özyürek. 2022. The Logic of the Fight against Antisemitism in Germany in Three Cultural Shifts. Patterns of Prejudice, 56: 2-3 (May 2022), pp. 157—187. doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2023.2192029.
In Germany, public accusations of antisemitism are increasingly directed at two groups: (1) designated Others (Muslims and other racialized minorities who seldom engage in anti-Jewish hate crimes) and (2) public intellectuals who are for the most part white ethnic Germans (including Jews and Christians) who demonstrate solidarity with these minorities. Dekel and Özyürek describe the logic that drives this growth in accusations.
Posegay, Nick. 2022 “Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 54:3 (Aug. 2022), pp. 423–441. Cambridge University Press, doi.org/10.1017/S0020743822000356.
The Cairo Genizah is known as a repository for manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Less known is the fact that 100s of Genizah fragments were produced in the late 19th century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history, and raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2021) Locating Pandemic Grief in Sarajevo: Georgic Notes Against Self-Isolating Regimes. Forum Bosnae 91-92: 308-26.
Chiefly focusing on the political developments in Sarajevo at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the article suggests that the biopolitical regime of power in Bosnia – wholly conceivable through the deployed concept of “self-isolation” – might be irreconcilable with St George's Day traditions.
2020 and earlier
Barua, Ankur (2020) The Hindu Cosmopolitanism of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble): An Irish Self in Imperial Currents, Harvard Theological Review 113(1): 1–23.
The Irishwoman, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), a well-known disciple of the charismatic Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, creatively reconfigured some traditional Vedāntic vocabularies to present the “cosmo-national” (what we would today call the “cosmopolitan”) individual as one who is not antithetical to but is deeply immersed in the densities of one’s own national locations.
Lockhart, Alastair (2020) New Religious Movements and Quasi-religion: Cognitive Science of Religion at the Margins. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 42(1): 101-122.
The article examines the ways in which new and quasi-religious movements have been analysed in the cognitive science of religion and uncovers something of the underlying theoretical material in cognitive science of religion in its interaction with religious thinking.
Lockhart, Alastair (2019) A Bud from the Tree of Life: William McDougall’s Response to Freud. History and Philosophy of Psychology 20(1): 28-33.
Focused on the interaction between the ideas of the prominent interwar British psychologist William McDougall (Professor of Psychology at Harvard 1920-27 and Duke University 1927-1938) and the founder of psychoanalysis. McDougall emerged from an idealistically inflected anthropological tradition in the Britain hospitable to religious ideas presenting a sharp contrast to Freud's reductive and anti-religious views.
Meggitt, Justin J. (2019) A Turke Turn’d Quaker: Conversion from Islam to Radical Dissent in Early Modern England. The Seventeenth Century 34(3): 353–80.
Whilst accounts of early modern English ‘renegades’ who ‘turn’d Turke’ and converted to Islam, attracted considerable anxiety in Protestant England, and have been subject of considerable scholarship in recent years, this micro-historical study sheds light on the less well known phenomenon of movement in the other direction.
Soars, Daniel J. (2019) The Virtues of Comparative Theology. Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 32, Article 8.
This article reflects on the practice of comparative theology and the sorts of virtues—personal as well as academic—which such interfaith experiments require of the practitioner. By exploring notions like doctrinal humility and rootedness in a particular tradition, we are forced to reflect upon the ‘virtues’ of the discipline in both senses of the word—not only those attributes required to engage in it, but the merits of doing it at all.
Waller, Giles (2019) Complicity, Recognition, and Conversion in the Christus Patiens Drama. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49(1): 33–55.
Waller traces the dynamic of tragic recognition and conversion through one of the most explicit attempts to consider the central narrative of the Gospels in a tragic mode, Hugo Grotius’s 1608 Christus Patiens (translated into English by George Sandys in 1640). Converting the Passion narrative into neoclassical drama, Christus Patiens raises troubling dramaturgical, ethical, and theological questions about the nature of Christian tragedy and its relation to atonement and conversion.
Davison, Andrew (2018) Christian Systematic Theology and Life Elsewhere in the Universe: A Study in Suitability. Theology and Science 16(4): 447-461.
A three-way interaction between theology, natural science, and philosophy. The philosophical distinction between necessity and possibility, augmented by the scholastic category of fittingness, or suitability, is applied to the discussion of whether Christians ought to entertain, or even expect, that sentient life elsewhere in the universe would have received its own incarnation.
Davison, Andrew (2018) “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change”, but “who knows how?”: Evolution and Divine Exemplarity. Nova et Vetera 16(4): 1067-1102
What connections can be drawn between scientific discussion of how evolution explores possible biological forms and mediaeval discussions of creatures as imitating ideas in the divine mind? Responding to the tendency in theology of the past century or so to play down previous ideas of divine exemplarity – the sense that imitation of God stands as the wellspring of creaturely form – Davison suggests that this paradigm can find renewed use, with evolutionary thought not sweeping it away.
Barua, Ankur (2017) The Absolute of Advaita and the Spirit of Hegel: Situating Vedanta on the Horizons of British Idealisms. Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34(1): 1-17.
What happens in a triangular “fusion of horizons” across the conceptual landscapes of Hegelian Idealism; British reconfigurations of Hegelian Idealism; and modernised restructurings of Advaita Vedānta, in British India and postcolonial India, through the lenses of Hegelian worldviews? – this article explores the philosophical significance of Hegel-influenced systems as an intellectual conduit for some Indo-British and Indo-European intellectual encounters.
Davison, Andrew (2017) “Not to Escape the World but to Join It”: Responding to Climate Change with Imagination not Fantasy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences 375:20160365.
The prospect of catastrophic climate change is well established, and yet human behaviour has not sufficiently changed so as to mitigate it. Turning to philosophical and literary discussions of the role of the imagination, as a capacity that opens us up to the reality before us, in comparison to what has been called ‘fantasy’, which instead projects our aspirations or desires upon the world, Davison argues that those who reach too readily for futuristic technological solutions, rather than changes in behaviour, are following a ‘fantastic’ path here, and not only those who deny climate change outright.
Winter, Tim (2017) Some Islamic reflections on Gavin D’Costa’s Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims. Louvain Studies 40(3): 286-302.
A look at the genesis and theology of Vatican II’s declarations on Muslims, in the form of a review essay of this book by a Catholic theologian.
Barua, Ankur (2016) Christian Visions of Vedanta: The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux. Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51(4): 524-551.
At first sight, nothing could seem to be further removed from the personalist theism of Christianity than the austere non-dualism of Advaita Vedānta which claims that there is no ontological distinction between devotee and deity – this article explores how two European Roman Catholic monks (one British and the other French) have nevertheless argued that precisely an Advaita-informed spirituality can revitalise Christian forms of contemplative life.
Barua, Ankur (2014) Interreligious Dialogue, Comparative Theology, and the Alterity of Hindu Thought. Studies in World Christianity 20(3): 215–237.
If non-Christian religious worldviews are to be conceptualised as radically other to Christianity, what might be the shape of a Christian style of engagement with them? – this article studies the work of two Scotsmen in British India, J. N. Farquhar (1861–1929) and A. G. Hogg (1875–1954), who struggled around a hundred years ago with this question vis-à-vis the religious universes of Vedāntic Hinduism.
Barua, Ankur and Hina Khalid. 2023 The Songs of Nazrul’s Nightingale: Planting the Islamic Rose in Bengali Soil. Maydan, 24 Jan 2023. theMaydan.com
Weiss, Daniel H. 2023. “Predators Are Prohibited, Why Are Ducks Kosher?” TheTorah.Com
Barua, Ankur. “Bhakti Beyond Borders: Sufi Serenades in Love’s Laboratory.” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (jhiblog.org), 7 December 2022.
2022–2023
Barua, Ankur. 2023. “Spectres of Violence and Landscapes of Peace: Imagining the Religious Other in Patterns of Hindu Modernity.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts: Interreligious Perspectives, ed. M. Power & H. Paynter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 29—51.
Özyürek, Esra G. 2023, “Situating Empathy: Holocaust Education for the Middle East/Muslim Minority in Germany.” In Conversations on Empathy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering, ed. F. Mezzenzana & D. Peluso, Routledge, 2023, pp. 174—190, doi.org/10.4324/9781003189978
Posegay, Nick. 2023. “Hebrew Printing and Printers’ Colophons in the Cairo Genizah: Networking Book Trade in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.” In Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time, ed. G.A. Kiraz & S. Schmidtke, Giorgias Press, 2023, pp. 79—105.
Moulin-Stożek, Daniel. 2022. “‘Religion’, ‘Worldviews’ and the Reappearing Problems of Pedagogy.” In Religion and Worldviews: The Triumph of the Secular in Religious Education, ed. L.P. Barnes, Routledge, pp. 136—151, doi.org/10.4324/9781003264439-8
Moulin-Stożek, Daniel, & M.W. James. 2022. “Religion and Social Development in Childhood.” In The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development, ed. P.K. Smith & C.H. Hart, 3rd edn, Wiley, pp. 405—421. doi.org/10.1002/9781119679028.ch22
Weiss, Daniel H. 2022. “Iconic Theology in Classical Rabbinic Literature and Orthodox Christianity.” In Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, ed. N. De Lange et al., Fortress Academic, pp. 88—98.
Weiss, Daniel H. 2022. “Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: Jewish Philosophy in an Anti-Jewish Guise?” In The Marrano Way: Between Betrayal and Innovation, ed. A. Bielik-Robson, De Gruyter, pp. 133—154. www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110768275-006/html.
2021–2020
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2021) My Grandmother Drank the Qur'an: Liquid Readings and Permeable Bodies in Bosnia. In L. McCormick Kilbride, S. Kotva and R. Jackson Ravenscroft (eds) Theologies of Reading: Positions and Responses. Special issue of CounterText 7.1: 73-89.
This article considers the practices of imbibing – or otherwise transforming and internalising – sacred texts as modes of reading in their own right.
Snyder, Julia A. (2020) Apostles and Politics in the Roman Empire. In JA. Snyder and K. Zamfir (eds) Reading the Political in Jewish and Christian Texts. Biblical Tools and Studies 38. Leuven: Peeters: 227–256
This essay discusses political perspectives in several early Christian texts that are set against the backdrop of the Roman empire.
Pre-2020
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet and Marija Grujić (2019) Thinking Post-Home: An Introduction. In Safet HadžiMuhamedović and Marija Grujić (eds) Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement. Special issue of EthnoScripts 21(1): 1-29.
This introduction considers some of the ways in which the meanings and expressions of ‘home’ might change after persons, communities and things ‘move’ – by will, force, rituals, dreams, or otherwise – towards new spaces, times and bodies, as well as through new political and affective capacities.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2019) Flow and Constraint: Syncretism and Nationalism Along a Bosnian Sinking River. In R Povall (ed.) Liquidscapes: Tales and Tellings of Watery Worlds and Fluid States. Dartington: Art.Earth Imprint: 223-9.
This essay focuses on a Bosnian river, one of the longest underground watercourses in the world, known by various names and of central importance to Bosnian shared and syncretic rituals.
Haecker, Ryan (2019) A Plastic Possibility for Ralph Cudworth’s Libertarianism. In A Fürst (ed.) Origen’s Philosophy of Freedom in Early Modern Times: Debates about Free Will and Apokatastasis in 17th-Century England and Europe. Adamantiana Series 13. Münster: Achendorff Verlag: 75-85.
In spite of the many merits of Cudworth’s libertarianism, there appears to remain an as yet unanswered logical problem of free will, which could only be answered by extending the principle of plasticity from plastic nature to plastic logic; the plastical logic of dialectic; and, supremely, of the divine dialectic of the Trinity.
Snyder, Julia A. (2019) Simon, Agrippa, and Other Antagonists in the Vercelli Acts of Peter. In U Mell and M Tilly (eds) Gegenspieler: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Gegner in frühjüdischer und urchristlicher Literatur. WUNT 428. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 311–31.
This essay analyzes the portrayal of literary antagonists in an early Christian story about the apostle Peter. Peter faces opposition not only from a "Jewish magician" who challenges his teaching about Jesus, but also from members of the "pagan" Roman elite, who object to his ethical teachings.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2018) Syncretic Debris: From Shared Bosnian Saints to the ICTY Courtroom. In A Wand (ed.) Tradition, Performance and Identity Politics in European Festivals. EthnoScripts 20(1): 32-63.
An anthropological postscript to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), brought to a conclusion in 2017. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia, I trace in the Tribunal’s archives the strange afterlives of two shared and syncretic saints, George and Elijah.
Meggitt, Justin J. (2018) Early Unitarians and Islam: Revisiting a “Primary Document”. In D Steers and S Lingwood (eds) Unitarian Theology II. Oxford: Faith and Freedom: 48–59.
The address of English Unitarians to the Moroccan ambassador in 1682 was foundational in the formation of a new and increasingly influential denomination, and is evidence of the complex perception of Islam amongst early modern Christians in the English-speaking world.
Winter, Tim (2018) ‘The Inception of A Common Word’. In L. Demiri and Y. Said (eds) The Future of Interfaith Dialogue: Muslim-Christian Encounters through A Common Word. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 13-30.
A history of the origins of the Common Word, the best-known Muslim joint statement on Islam’s relationship to Christianity.
Davison, Andrew (2017) Looking Back toward the Origin: Scientific Cosmology as Creation ex nihilo Considered “from the Inside”. In G. Anderson and M. Bockmuehl (eds) Creatio ex nihilo: Origins and Contemporary Significance. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 367-390.
Retrieving metaphysical thinking from the high Middle Ages to provide resources for discussions about the theological implications of various theories in contemporary science about the earliest moments of the universe and the notion of ’t=0’ or a beginning to time.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2014) The Tree of Gernika: Political Poetics of Rootedness and Belonging. In P. Dransart (ed.) Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements [ASA Monographs]. Oxford: Bloomsbury: 53-72.
On 26 April 1937 Nazi aeroplanes razed Gernika to the ground. However, one oak tree survived.... The trunk of the ‘old tree’ was later housed in a nearby shrine, and its acorns continued to be used to plant new oaks in Gernika and across the Basque diasporas. Building on recent anthropological theory on nonhuman agency, the article dwells on Basque inter-species engagements and the agentive qualities of this extraordinary arboreal being.
HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2013) Bosnian Sacral Geography: Ethnographic Approaches to Landscape Protection. In J-M Mallarach (ed.) Spiritual Values of Protected Areas of Europe. German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation: 56-62.
What happens when the states’ attempts to protect sacred spaces run counter to their traditional religious use? Who gets to protect and from whom? This article starts with the image of fenced up walls of Djevojačka Pećina, the ‘Maiden’s Cave’ in central Bosnia, one of the largest Muslim pilgrimage sites in Europe. The material interactions of the pilgrims with the cave are inseparable from the (protected) value of the site.
Winter, Tim (2013) Realism and the Real: Paradoxes of Islamic Pluralist Soteriology. In Mohammad Hassan Khalil (ed.) Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 122-150.
An assessment of the viability of a pluralist Muslim theology of religions.