"Readers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will readily see the similarities and the differences in what the three traditions have said, the ways they have arrived at their beliefs, and the ways they have solved analogous or different problems. Readers will become aware of several kinds of interactions among the three. They will hear not only the direct polemics but also the pointed silences in the texts when the one group knows but chooses not to say what the other is up to. All this makes for a fascinating read.... To read attentively through this whole collection will bring new depths and subtleties of understanding of our own cultural history and of those forces out of our past that, because so many of us have lost touch with them, seem alien and diabolical when they suddenly explode in our faces in the Middle East and elsewhere. ... Professor Peters' erudition is astounding.--Wayne A Meeks, Yale University
Invoking a concept as simple as it is brilliant, the author has taken the basic texts of the three related--and competitive--religious systems we call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and juxtaposed them in a topical and parallel arrangement according to the issues that most concerned all these "children of Abraham. " Through these extensive passages, and the author's skillful connective commentary, the three traditions are shown with their similarities sometimes startlingly underlined and their wellknown differences now more profoundly exposed. What emerges from this unique and ambitious work is a panorama of belief, practice, and sensibility that will broaden our understanding of our religious and political roots in a past that is, by these communities' definition, still the present.
The hardcover edition of the work is bound in one volume, and in the paperback version the identical material is broken down into three smaller but self- contained books. The first, "From Covenant to Community," includes texts and comments on the covenant and early history of the Chosen People and their post-Exilic reconstruction; the career and message of the Messiah Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad, the concept of holiness and of a "kingdom of priests>>; and, finally, the notions of church and state and the state as a church. The second paperback, "The Word and the Law and the People of God," discusses the scriptures of the three faiths in various contexts, exegetical and legal. The third paperback, "The Works of the Spirit," focuses on spirituality and worship and contains material on monasticism, theology, mysticism, and the "End Time." Throughout the work we hear an amazing variety of voices, some familiar, some not, all of them central to the primary and secondary canons of their oven tradition: alongside the scriptural voice of God are the words of theologians, priests, visionaries, lawyers, rulers, and the ruled. The work ends, as does the same author's now classic Children of Abraham, in what Peters calls the "classical period," that is, before the great movements of modernism and reform that were to transform Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
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