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The question of religious pluralism is the most significant yet thorniest of issues in theology today, and John Hick (1922-2012) has long been recognized as its most important scholar. However, while much has been written analyzing the philosophical basis of Hick's pluralism, very little attention has been devoted to the theological foundations of his argument. Filling this gap, this book examines Hick's theological attempts to systematically deconstruct the church's traditional incarnational Christology. Special attention is given to evaluating Hick's foundational theses «that Jesus himself did not teach what was to become the orthodox Christian understanding of him» and «that the dogma of Jesus' two natures . . . has proved to be incapable of being explicated in any satisfactory way.» By elucidating the ways in which Hick's arguments fail, David Nah demonstrates that Hick was unwarranted in breaking away from the church's incarnational Christology that has been at the core of Christianity for almost two thousand years.

Our contemporary world is fast becoming religiously diverse in a variety of ways. Thanks to globalization and migration, to mention only two current worldwide trends, people of diverse and sometimes mutually hostile faiths are now sharing neighborhoods and encountering one another's religious traditions on a daily basis. For scholars in religious studies and theology the issue to be examined is whether religious diversity is merely the result of historical development and social interaction, or whether it is inherent in the object of belief–part of the very structure of faith and our attempts to understand and express it.
The essays in this volume range from explorations of the impact of religious diversity on religious studies to examples of interfaith encounter and dialogue, and current debates on Christian theology of religion. These essays examine not only the theoretical issues posed by religious pluralism to the study of religion and Christian theology but also concrete cases in which religious pluralism has been a bone of contention. Together, they open up new vistas for further conversation on the nature and development of religious pluralism.

The Religious Origins of Democratic Pluralism focuses on explaining one of the riddles that fascinated historians and political scientists through much of the twentieth century, namely, the origin and development of Swedish social democracy. While other countries in Europe experienced dramatic swings between radical and conservative political parties, which resulted in tragic experiments with totalitarian regimes, Sweden by contrast miraculously seemed to avoid these extremes, and maintain space for democratic discussion and dissent. This peaceful transformation was facilitated by political actors who crafted the discourse of their debates in such a way that pluralism came to be valued as an ethical good and then vigorously defended. This study turns back the clock to examine the critical decades leading up to the emergence of social democracy, and in particular, the career of one prominent politician, Paul Peter Waldenstrom (1838-1917). In addition to a career in politics, Waldenstrom was a clergyman, revival preacher, educator, author, and newspaper editor, whose political career began in 1868 with his participation in the Church Assembly of the Church of Sweden, and expanded during his years of service in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, from 1884 to 1905. This study places Waldenstrom in dialog with his contemporaries and opponents as a means of identifying how the theological values and priorities of the religious awakening were articulated in the public square and contributed to the development of a new political order.

This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule. The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.