Religious Literacy Resource Guide: Lived Religion

A new and expanded edition of a highly successful textbook on world religions with a comparative approach which explores how six major religions are lived and expressed through their customs, rituals and everyday practices. A new edition of this major textbook, exploring the world's great religions through their customs, rituals and everyday practices by focusing on the 'lived experience'  This comparative study is enriched and broadened with the inclusion of a sixth religion, Daoism Takes a thematic, comparative and practical approach; each chapter explores a series of key themes including birth, death, ethics, and worship across all six religions at each time Broadens students' understanding by offering an impartial discussion of the similarities and differences between each religion Includes an increased range of student-friendly features, designed to allow students to engage with each religion and extend their understanding

The Anthology of Living Religions,3/e combines classic texts with contemporary issues in order to provide an anthology that is meaningful and captivating to students.     Written by Mary Pat Fisher and Lee Worth Bailey, the Anthology of Living Religions includes samples of scriptures and classical historical texts - while also include many articles on the study of world religions, including descriptions of how believers are living their faiths today.

Social scientists sometimes seem not to know what to do with religion. In the first century of sociology's history as a discipline, the reigning concern was explaining the emergence of the modern world, and that brought with it an expectation that religion would simply fade from the scene associeties became diverse, complex, and enlightened. As the century approached its end, however, a variety of global phenomena remained dramatically unexplained by these theories. Among the leading contenders for explanatory power to emerge at this time were rational choice theories of religiousbehavior. Researchers who have spent time in the field observing religious groups and interviewing practitioners, however, have questioned the sufficiency of these market models. Studies abound that describe thriving religious phenomena that fit neither the old secularization paradigm nor theequations predicting vitality only among organizational entrepreneurs with strict orthodoxies. In this collection of previously unpublished essays, scholars who have been immersed in field research in a wide variety of settings draw on those observations from the field to begin to develop morehelpful ways to study religion in modern lives. The authors examine how religion functions on the ground in a pluralistic society, how it is experienced by individuals, and how it is expressed in social institutions. Taken as a whole, these essays point to a new approach to the study of religion,one that emphasizes individual experience and social context over strict categorization and data collection.

Religions in Practice provides a comprehensive and primarily theme-based overview for students who are being introduced to the anthropology of religion. While covering traditional topics like magic, witchcraft, and spiritual healing, the book also addresses key contemporary subjects such as migration, nationalism, transnationalism, law, and secularism.  It offers an issues-oriented perspective on everyday religious behaviors and examines small-scale societies as well as major, established religions. Bowen successfully balances the presentation of theory and concepts with rich case study examples, integrating theoretical discussion with a wide range of cross-cultural ethnographic material. This seventh edition has been updated throughout and the opening chapters have been reworked to focus more clearly on the question of what is religion and on approaches to studying religion. There is also a new final chapter on violence and religion. The book now contains a greater number of illustrations and each chapter ends with questions for discussion.

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

In this book Meredith McGuire points the way forward toward a new way of understanding and studying religious behavior. Rather than try to fit people into prearranged packages, she argues, scholars must begin to study religion as it is actually lived and experienced in peoples' everyday lives. Drawing on her own extensive fieldwork, as well as recent work by other scholars, McGuire explores the many ways that people express themselves spiritually and shows that they rarely fit neatly into the categories we've developed. Challenging those who see declining church attendance as the death of religion in the Western world, McGuire demonstrates that religion is as widespread, potent, and vital as ever, if you know where to look.

Living Religions: A Brief Introduction presents a highly readable and stimulating concise survey of the modern religious world though an emphasis on the personal consciousness of believers and their own accounts of their religion and relevance in contemporary life. Along with a team of specialist consultants in each faith, and drawing on a wealth of scholarly research and firsthand source material, Mary Pat Fisher provides a fresh and challenging insight into the historical development and teachings of traditional faiths, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. She considers how the contemporary beliefs and practices of each of these traditions has evolved, and explores the changing nature of each religion; particularly the role of women, and the issues and controversies such as fundamentalism, violence, globalization, and interfaith initiatives.