De Natura Fidei: Rethinking Religion across Disciplinary Boundaries: Volume II: 2

The three-volume edited collection entitled De Natura Fidei: Rethinking Religion across Disciplinary Boundaries is an international compendium of forty three chapters which together attempt to break new ground in understanding religion in its fundamentals and multidimensionality. These chapters feature original philosophical and historico-cultural research; offer cognitive, psychological, and evolutionary studies of religious beliefs, rites, and rituals; re-examine the structures and practices of religion; analyze limitations, possibilities, and dilemmas of religious representation; engage with the battle of world views in which religions were indispensable protagonists as also the difficult terrain of interreligious understanding. They contest, critique, and problematize received paradigms, as well as construct alternatives, all illuminating a ubiquitous but elusive phenomenon. They also foreground, sometimes in contradistinction to institutional discourses, the reality of lived faith. Volume II consists of two parts – Part I: “‘The Pastness of the Past’ and the Futurity of the Present: Religions in Their Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts” and Part II: “Illo Tempore: Myth, Folklore, and Popular Religion.” Part I features nine studies of selected religions, beliefs, institutions, and practices in their historical, political, and cultural contexts, also theoretically engaging with the question of what difference historicization, temporality, and politicization makes to understanding the nature and critique of religion. Part II brings to the reader seven chapters that examine myths and folklore as the basis of religious belief systems and practices with their local nuances as well as intertextual/intermedial variations in both echelons of ‘high religion’ and popular religious culture. Contributors: Jibu Mathew George, Michael McGhee, T. T. Sreekumar, Kiran Vinod Bhatia, Lakshmi Chandra, Syed Sayeed, Hatem Mohammed Al-Shamea, Monica Choudhary, Palmo R. Iya, Sangeetha Puthiyedath, Shun-hing Chan, Wing-leung Law, Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda, Ajay S. Sekher, Balasundaram Subramanian, Shilpaa Anand, Brigid Burke, Tommy Kuusela, Tulika Chandra, Sheel Galada Parekh, and Umesh Patra