Encountering the Other: Christian and Multifaith Perspectives - Paperback

by Laura Duhan-Kaplan (Editor), Harry O. Maier (Editor)

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies, they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers, they explain, draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally, the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But, together, they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.

Author Biography

Laura Duhan-Kaplan is Director of Inter-Religious Studies and Professor of Jewish Studies at Vancouver School of Theology, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Rabbi Emerita of Or Shalom Synagogue. She is author of Family Pictures: A Philosopher Explores the Familiar (1998) and The Infinity Inside: Jewish Spiritual Practice through a Multi-faith Lens (2019).



Harry O. Maier is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Vancouver School of Theology and Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. His most recent books include New Testament Christianity in the Roman World (2018) and Picturing Paul in Empire (2013).