Contemporary Practices of World Religion (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781988557052)

Religion is not a relic. Despite predictions that modernity would render it obsolete, the twenty-first century has witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of religious vitality across every inhabited continent.

This textbook offers the most comprehensive and theoretically rigorous survey of contemporary world religion currently available for advanced instruction. Spanning seventeen chapters - from foundational methods and globalization theory through every major tradition to cross-cutting themes of gender, violence, and the digital future - it brings the same analytical depth to traditions of the Global South as to the Abrahamic traditions that have dominated Western religious studies.

Three commitments set this book apart: it takes contemporary seriously - focusing on religion as it is lived and contested today; it takes practices seriously - attending to the embodied, material, and communal dimensions of religious life; and it takes the world seriously - giving traditions from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific the same rigorous treatment as Western traditions.