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  3. New Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought

New Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought combines philosophical clarity, historical scholarship, and ethical inquiry into the study of religion, considering such questions as: what does a properly critical approach to 'religion' or to particular religious traditions, practices, and ideas involve? What concepts might such an approach employ and how should these be understood? What are the political implications of taking such an approach – for religious studies and for the people studied therein? How should attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, capital, empire, and domination inform our assessment of religious traditions, institutions, and practices? The answers offered, while diverse in their methodologies, topics, and conclusions, are intended alike to be clear, precise, and historically attuned investigations of important subjects or figures in the study of religion and critical thought.

  • General Editors: Molly Farneth, Haverford College, Keri Day, Princeton Theological Seminary, Stephen Bush, Brown University

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5 results in New Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought

The Politics of Islamic Ethics
  • Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition
  • Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. Rooting her investigation in the two central passages in the Qur'an and Hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierachies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

Political Theology and the Conflicts of Democracy
  • Nicholas Norman-Krause
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Nicholas Norman-Krause argues, in this authoritative and sophisticated new treatment of conflict, that contestation is a basic - potentially regenerative - aspect of any flourishing democratic politics. In developing a distinctive 'agonistic theology,' and relating the political theory of agonism to social and democratic life, the author demonstrates that the conflicts of democracy may have a beneficial significance and depend at least in part on faith traditions and communities for their successful negotiation. In making his case, he deftly examines a rich range of religious and secular literatures, whether from the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Stanley Cavell or from less familiar voices such as early modern jurist and political thinker Johannes Althusius and twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Liberationists including Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr. are similarly recruited for a theological account of conflict read not just as concomitant to, but also as constitutive of, democratic living.

Beyond Civility in Social Conflict
  • Dialogue, Critique, and Religious Ethics
  • Russell P. Johnson
  • Published online:
    08 November 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • How can one speak and act in ways that overcome entrenched social conflicts? In polarized societies, some insist that the survival of democracy depends on people abiding by rules of civility and mutual respect. Others argue that the political situation is so dire that one's values need to be fought for by any means necessary. Across the political spectrum, people feel like they need to choose between the morality of dialogue and the effectiveness of protest. Beyond Civility in Social Conflict makes an important intervention in this debate. Taking insights from nonviolent direct action, it provides a model for advocacy that is both compassionate and critical. Successful communicators can help their opponents by dismantling the illusions and unjust systems that impede human flourishing and pit people against one another. The final chapter turns specifically to Christian ethics, and what it means to 'love your enemies' by disagreeing with them.

On Helping One's Neighbor
  • Severe Poverty and the Religious Ethics of Obligation
  • Bharat Ranganathan
  • Published online:
    04 April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Exploring what he calls 'the moral horror that is severe poverty,' Bharat Ranganathan develops a demanding account of the obligations that affluent people have to assist severely impoverished people. He argues that this is an immediate ethical as much as a social or structural imperative. Noting that developmental economists and moral and political philosophers have focused on wealth inequalities in increasingly sophisticated ways, Ranganathan observes that – within religious ethics – normative issues around severe poverty have nevertheless received insufficient attention. Bringing together general moral, religious, and philosophical principles with particular economic, social, and political realities, and engaging constructively with the writings of John Rawls and Peter Singer, this passionately argued book boldly challenges deleterious trends within ethics by unpacking, in a much more systematic way than hitherto, the pressing dilemmas around acute impoverishment. It will find an eager readership among scholars of religion, ethics, developmental studies, and theology.

Thoreau's Religion
  • Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism
  • Alda Balthrop-Lewis
  • Published online:
    14 January 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • Thoreau's Religion presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau's ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispecies community. The book makes an important contribution to scholarship in religious studies, political theory, English, environmental studies, and critical theory by offering the first sustained reading of Thoreau's religiously motivated politics. In Balthrop-Lewis's vision, practices of renunciation like Thoreau's can contribute to the reformation of social and political life. In this, the book transforms Thoreau's image, making him a vital source for a world beset by inequality and climate change. Balthrop-Lewis argues for an environmental politics in which ecological flourishing is impossible without economic and social justice.