De Natura Fidei: Rethinking Religion across Disciplinary Boundaries: Volume I

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 I is divided into two parts - Part I: "Philosophizing Religion: Resetting the Terms of Inquiry" and Part II: "Cogito, ergo Credo/Nego: Religion, Cognition, and Evolution." Part I brings to the reader nine chapters that lay bare assumptions behind philosophical reasoning vis-à-vis religion and endeavour to reset the terms of investigation thereof. Part II consists of five elaborate chapters that examine the cognitive, psychoanalytic, and evolutionary dimensions of religion in a non-reductive fashion, with an eye on their implications for understanding the complexities of religious beliefs, practices, and narratives.

Contributors: Jibu Mathew George, Michael McGhee, Margit Wasmaier-Sailer, Govind Krishnan V., Santosh I. Raut, Bhaskarjit Neog, Syed Sayeed, Prakash Kona, Jose Nandhikkara, K. A. Jayaseelan, R. Amritavalli, Lee Irwin, Yoram Bilu, Debashis Bandyopadhyay, and Ken Baskin