Multireligious Reflections on Friendship: Becoming Ourselves in Community
Ebook
Overview
Multireligious Reflections on Friendship: Becoming Ourselves in Community presents a multi-religious discussion of spiritual and ethical formation through friendship. Contributors discuss the positive effects of friendship and some of the culturally diverse ways that friendships develop. Friends help us co-exist in diverse societies, live sustainably in our ecosystems, heal from trauma, develop inner virtues, engage wisely in social action, and connect with the divine. While friendship is a core human value, cultural traditions have used different tools to build friendships. For example, Indigenous communities emphasize reciprocity on the land; Jewish traditions encourage respect for study partners; Buddhist teachers suggest discernment in befriending; Christian texts speak of bringing God’s love into community. The fifteen scholars contributing to this book draw on the teachings of six different global traditions: Indigenous, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian. Each scholar applies the tools of their tradition—reciprocity, respect, discernment, love, and more—to discuss how we might become our best selves in community.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Hussam S. Timani, and Anne-Marie Ellithorpe
Chapter One: Friendship, Treaty, and Family: Indigenous Insights
Raymond C. Aldred and Allen G. Jorgenson
Chapter Two: Friendships of Equality: Mitratva, Hindu Traditions, and Interfaith Possibilities
Jeffery D. Long
Chapter Three: Civic Friendship and Reciprocity: Ancient Biblical Exhortations, Contemporary Opportunities
Anne-Marie Ellithorpe
Chapter Four: Becoming a Friend to the World: Śāntideva on “Bodhisattva Friendship”
John M. Thompson
Chapter Five: Sacred Fellowship Among Learners: A Kabbalistic Pedagogy for Our Times
Laura Duhan-Kaplan
Chapter Six: God, Prophecy, and Friendship in Islam: A Theological Perspective
Hussam S. Timani
Chapter Seven: Ineffable Accompaniment: Towards a Theology of Friendship and The Human Animal
Dorothy Dean
Chapter Eight: “I have called you friends”: Friendship in the New Testament and Early Christianity
Liz Carmichael
Chapter Nine: Seeking God Together in Christ—Friendship in the Christian Life
Paul J. Wadell
Chapter Ten: Love, Friendship, and Solidarity: A Christian Theology of Friendship
Marcus Mescher
Chapter Eleven: A Path Through the Hell of War Trauma: Pavel Florensky's Theology of Friendship
Adam Tietje
Chapter Twelve: The Project of Friendship: Biblical, Butlerian, and Beer-Brewing Reflections
Brandy Daniels and Shelly Penton
Chapter Thirteen: Religion Has No Bo(u)nds?: Expanding the Dimensions of Religion to Account for the Attachment of Spiritual Friendship
Sarah Ann Bixler
About the Contributors
Multireligious Reflections on Friendship: Becoming Ourselves in Community is a unique collection of essays that deepens our understanding of friendship in the world's religions, while also offering friendship as a deep and authentic way of relating in communities of diversity. This book is a significant contribution to friendship and interfaith studies.
Multireligious Reflections on Friendship paints a rich and multifaceted portrait of friendship as essential to human, religious, and multireligious communities. Its thirteen essays, attentive to history, theology, and the dynamics of lived religion everywhere, show us how even in the most difficult of circumstances friendship has always helped people to faith to survive and flourish. In today’s broken world, friendships across religious borders remain a life-saving grace for us all, and this book helps us to appreciate this basic natural and supernatural truth.
Anne-Marie Ellithorpe is research associate at the Vancouver School of Theology.
Laura Duhan-Kaplan is Director of inter-religious studies and professor of Jewish Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, and Rabbi Emerita of Or Shalom Synagogue.
Hussam S. Timani is professor of philosophy and religion and Co-Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program at Christopher Newport University.