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

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 III is organized in two parts - Part I: "Between Religions: Comparisons, Contestations, and Alternatives" and Part II: Gestalt und Gehalt: Religion, Representation, Literature, and Iconography." The seven chapters included in Part I deliberate over paradigms and frameworks of interreligious, intercultural understanding and harmony as well as cross-tradition influences. Part II comprises six chapters that look at the possibilities, limitations, and dilemmas of religious representations in various media and how some of the artists/literary figures (as well as philosophers and theologians) negotiated religion through the refractory medium of their art.

Contributors: Jibu Mathew George, Michael McGhee, Clare Sheldon Murray, D. Venkat Rao, S. N. Balagangadhara, Sarika Rao, Jakob De Roover, Marianne Keppens, Sarah Claerhout, Ashima Bhardwaj, Sheel Galada Parekh, Prakash Kona, Aravinda Bhat, Ibraheem N. A. Tagaddeen, and Rajan Joseph Barrett