The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion (No-Nonsense Guides)

The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion (No-Nonsense Guides)

Symon Hill

Language: English

Pages: 144

ISBN: 1906523290

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Religion is a term that is often used in the media and public life without any clarification. However, it is a word that encompasses hundreds of different beliefs. It is a loaded word that has a different meaning for every person; religion can be seen as a source of war and peace, love and hate, dialogue and narrow-mindedness.

Symon Hill’s No-Nonsense Guide to Religion tries to explain what religion means, how we relate to it, how it was created, and how it affects us culturally, politically, and spiritually today.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion does not just concentrate on the popular and well-established traditions, which normally over-emphasize powerful figures. The guide also focuses on the diversity within religions as well as the similarities between them.

The globalization of communications has made more people aware of religious conversion, with more people than ever before belonging to a different religious community from their parents. The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion considers how religion has shaped our culture as well as how our culture is shaping religion today.

Symon Hill is a tutor in practical theology, a writer, a trainer, and an activist. He has written comment pieces for newspapers ranging from the Sunday Herald to The Daily Mail and contributes regularly to the Guardian's website, The Friend, and Ekklesia.

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different experiences are to some extent responsible for our different understandings of truth. In turn, cultural and political factors play a major role in determining which experiences we are likely to have. It is therefore unsurprising that many approaches to truth, along with many religions, are more concerned with behavior than belief. For example, the Akhan people of Thailand practice a religion and tradition known as Zan. The researcher Deborah Tooker found a strong uniformity of religious

religion became a far more central topic of political and media discourse in western Europe. Of course, writers such as Dawkins and Hitchens have fueled these debates. A number of Christian writers have written books in response to them, arguing for the existence of God. Most of these writers, such as Keith Ward and Alistair McGrath, are moderately conservative Christians rather than 56 fundamentalists. However, they seem to accept many of the New Atheists’ premises. They argue for God on

associations. Gandhi created the word ‘satyagraha’, derived from words that mean ‘soul force’ or ‘truth force’. The Christian theologian Noel Moules coined the term ‘shalom activism’, based on the biblical word ‘shalom’, which is often translated as ‘peace’, but also includes justice, wholeness and the restoration of healthy and equal relationships. The phrase ‘active nonviolence’ is sometimes used as an umbrella term for these approaches. Walter Wink suggests that nonviolence is an approach that

to people’s willingness to kill one another; hence rejection of religion and rejection of violence are inseparable’.18 Nonetheless, Beale willingly works alongside many religious individuals in his peace activism. Some argue that it is this practical action that matters, rather than the motivations. While there is some validity to this point, it can lead us to say that nonviolent religious activists would have worked for peace anyway, with The rulers of the world? ‘To kill one man is to be

extraordinarily exciting discovery... It was precisely this very question of authority and source of power that constituted the offense of Jesus to the religious leaders of his time... So now it came to me with blinding clarity that claiming this power and letting it drive where it must, leads straight into trouble.23 The link between spiritual commitment and nonviolent activism has been drawn by many people, but they have usually been on the margins of religions. A key challenge for religious

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