Olin Library: Religion

This volume engages traditional and contemporary approaches to the Divine attributes in Christian-Muslim dialogue. A particular focus lies on the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience, justice and mercy, as well as simplicity and divine action. Engaging these attributes comparatively, two questions are posed: How can these attributes be conceived today, and to what extent is a mutual learning across religious traditions possible? Thereby, a special focus is placed on the role of analytic philosophy. How do the philosopical 'language games' used contribute to communicability across religions?

Leading scholars from diverse fields explore the importance of the Hebrew Bible for Jewish history, culture, and identity. The Hebrew Bible has been and continues to be at the heart of Judaism. As this volume explores its significance throughout the ages, it focuses both on the textual history and on its lived experience. The articles deal with aspects of textual criticism, translation, the history of reception, and modern references to the Hebrew Bible. They span a historical period from antiquity to the present day. Leading scholars from various disciplines use diverse approaches to highlight the Hebrew Bible's multifacetedness and its continuous importance for Jews around the world.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people's decisions and opportunities. Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction explores an emerging field with a religious studies approach, drawing on cultural and digital anthropological methods to demonstrate the entanglements of religion and AI, our imaginaries of these objects and our ideas about their utopian or dystopian futures. It addresses key topics, including the following: What AI is and is not. How religions are reacting to AI with examples of rejection, adoption, and adaptation. How established religions understand creation and place human-like AI within that. How overtly secular and even 'new atheist' groups understand AI as a tool for liberation from human evolution and religion. Religious visions of superintelligent AI. This engaging book is essential for anyone considering the relationship between religion, science and technology, and interested in the questions raised by transhumanism, posthumanism, and new religious movements.

Transdisciplinary insights at the intersection of religion, democracy, ecology, and economy What is the relationship of religion to economy, ecology, and democracy? In our fraught moment, what critical questions of religion may help to assembly democratic processes, ecosystems, and economic structures differently? What possible futures might emerge from transdisciplinary work across these traditionally siloed scholarly areas of interest? The essays in Assembling Futures reflect scholarly conversations among historians, political scientists, theologians, biblical studies scholars, and scholars of religion that transgress disciplinary boundaries to consider urgent matters expressive of the values, practices, and questions that shape human existence. Each essay recognizes urgent imbrications of the global economy, multinational politics, and the materiality of ecological entanglements in assembling still possible futures for the earth. Precisely in their diversity of disciplinary starting points and ethical styles, the essays that follow enact their intersectional forcefield even more vibrantly.

How has faith developed in the US and German societies across the last decades? In a three-wave longitudinal investigation of faith development, this study presents the changes of worldview and meaning-making that people associate with their religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist identifications. For almost two decades, research teams in Chattanooga (USA) and Bielefeld (Germany) have invited and re-invited hundreds of people to participate in a personal interview and to answer an extensive questionnaire in order to better understand the reasons and the consequences of their continuity or discontinuity in religious, spiritual, or non-theistic faith.