Tolstoy, Universalism and the World Religions

World Englishes in world religions

In the beginning was the Word. Often quoted, these opening words from the Gospel according to John nonetheless show that the relationship between language and religion goes beyond intimacy to identity. Whether this is taken as a specific moment in the theorization of one religion, the culmination of a particular line of thinking, or a more general truth about how humans grasp the essence of the...

World Religions, the Earth Charter,

This article argues the global environmental crisis shows the need for a broad, inclusive definition of sustainability. It shows how religious traditions can help contribute to broader definitions, and describes how work from the field of Religion and Ecology has developed resources. It argues that the next step for the study of Religion and Ecology is to address sustainability, and then propos...

The Cult of Isis and Other Mystery Religions in Pompeii and the Roman World

The Origin of Religions

Sometime ago, I was listening to a radio program about people celebrating the winter's solstice. One of the people interviewed on the program talked about the celebrations of Druids in ancient England. Druids attached religious significance to many things, among them the shortest day of the year, evergreen trees, and mistletoe. As part of the solstice celebrations, Druids were believed to have ...

Perdurantism, Universalism, and Quantifiers

I argue that the conjunction of perdurantism (the view that objects are temporally extended) and universalism (the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion) gives rise to undesired complications when combined with certain plausible assumptions concerning the semantics of tensed statements.