Love, Sex and Gender in the World Religions
Love, Sex and Gender in the World Religions
Edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy Martin
Introduction
Two forces which gathered strength in the last half of the twentieth century now dominate the world religions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first is the globalization of religions and their resulting encounter with each other, and the second is the need to redefine attitudes toward gender as women have stepped forward to insist that their full humanity be acknowledged in the religious as well as the social realm.
In a process begun in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth, the great religions of the world became truly global in the geographic distribution of their adherents and so began to impact and influence each other's adherents in new ways. From Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism began seriously to influence the West for the first time in the twentieth century, in part spurred by the first meeting of the Parliament of the World Religions in Chicago in 1893. And while the proselytizing traditions of Christianity and Islam had already become prominent as they spread globally from their inception, after the 1940s the Holocaust and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state brought new worldwide attention and increased global acceptance of Judaism. Many of these great religions had come in contact before this time and even grown up side by side, but a truly global presence of each and the accompanying growth of understanding leading to a deeper appreciation of alternate traditions is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Among the official decrees of Vatican II, the watershed Roman Catholic Council of 196365, was Nostra Aetate, the Dogmatic Constitution on "The Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions." In Nostre Aetate the world's largest organized religious tradition, which has one billion adherents today and represents fully half of world Christendom, declared that "all peoples comprise a single
Edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy Martin
Introduction
Two forces which gathered strength in the last half of the twentieth century now dominate the world religions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first is the globalization of religions and their resulting encounter with each other, and the second is the need to redefine attitudes toward gender as women have stepped forward to insist that their full humanity be acknowledged in the religious as well as the social realm.
In a process begun in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth, the great religions of the world became truly global in the geographic distribution of their adherents and so began to impact and influence each other's adherents in new ways. From Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism began seriously to influence the West for the first time in the twentieth century, in part spurred by the first meeting of the Parliament of the World Religions in Chicago in 1893. And while the proselytizing traditions of Christianity and Islam had already become prominent as they spread globally from their inception, after the 1940s the Holocaust and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state brought new worldwide attention and increased global acceptance of Judaism. Many of these great religions had come in contact before this time and even grown up side by side, but a truly global presence of each and the accompanying growth of understanding leading to a deeper appreciation of alternate traditions is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Among the official decrees of Vatican II, the watershed Roman Catholic Council of 196365, was Nostra Aetate, the Dogmatic Constitution on "The Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions." In Nostre Aetate the world's largest organized religious tradition, which has one billion adherents today and represents fully half of world Christendom, declared that "all peoples comprise a single