Interfaith dialogue: common threads
Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. New York: Random House, 2007.
From Karen Armstrong, the bestselling author of A History of God and The Spiral Staircase, comes this extraordinary investigation of a critical moment in the evolution of religious thought. In the ninth century BCE, events in four regions of the civilized world led to the rise of religious traditions that have endured to the present day–the development of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Armstrong, one of our most prominent religious scholars, examines how these traditions began in response to the violence of their time. Studying figures as diverse as the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah, Armstrong reveals how these still enduring philosophies can help address our contemporary problems.
Baring, Anne and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. New York: Arkana, Penguin Books, 1993.
This encyclopedic and easily comprehended work, whose range extends from the Paleolithic Age to the present-day Gaia Hypothesis, is a grand synthesis of art, mythology, literature, and psychology.
Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
The current return to spiritual values has spawned a surge of interest in the ancient goddess-based religions as a remedy to a long tradition of misogyny in the Western religions. But how accurate are these current representations of the goddess in polytheism? And did Judeo-Christian religion really turn its back on women? These are some of the questions that scholar and feminist Tivka Frymer-Kensky sets out to answer in this iconoclastic study of gender in religions past and present. Her argument, illustrated with fascinating accounts of myth and ritual dating back to the early days of Sumer, Assyria, and Greece, is that although polytheism did accord females an important role, the strict division between male and female actually served to keep women in a subordinate position. The goddesses were progressively “ghettoized”: their sphere was eventually relegated to home and hearth, while male gods took over as patrons of wisdom and learning. This dualism was displaced by the Bible, which embraced a surprisingly egalitarian view of human nature in which women were not considered to be inherently inferior. In a provocative work of biblical scholarship on gender and sexuality, Frymer-Kensky shows that the ideal of monotheism may offer far more to us today than a return to the gender-based worldview of the goddess religions.
Osborne, Martha Lee. Woman in Western Thought. New York: Random House, 1979.
Osmond, Rosalie. Imagining the Soul: A History. Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2003.
Is there a ghost in the machine? Are we born trailing clouds of glory? Is there a part of us that will survive death? Is the soul reborn in different bodily forms? These and similar questions have occupied humankind since the dawn of consciousness. Rosalie Osmond’s book explores the way the soul has been represented in different cultures and at different times, from ancient Egypt and Greece, through medieval Europe and into the 21st century. Basing her approach on historical sources, she reveals the many different ways in which the soul has been imagined and the range of human needs and aspirations these imaginings have addressed.
Phillips, John A. Eve: The History of an Idea. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Studies the prototype of Eve in history, literature, art, religion and mythology and discusses how this concept still influences the image and role of women today.
