Building a Better Bridge

‘‘In Broken Images’’: Faith in the Public Sphere

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pp. 7-26

Christians and Muslims are faced with a similar challenge when they confront the reality of contemporary Europe: How can the sincere believer also participate fully in the public life of his or her nation as a citizen? In this essay I examine more closely the private and public identity of citizens in secular liberal democracies. ...

Christian Faith and National Belonging

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pp. 27-34

The origins of Christian attitudes to the state are found in the Bible. Already in ancient Israel, the emergence of the monarchy was reluctantly recognized as necessary (maybe even as a necessary evil), and the rights and duties of kingship were prescribed (1 Sam. 8–10). ...

Faith and National Identity of Catholicsin Bosnia-Herzegovina

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pp. 35-39

I would like to draw attention to some delicate problems of religious identity and national loyalty from the point of view of religious and ethnic communities in my own country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Religious identity surpasses the boundaries of an ethnic group or country...

The Identity of Christians in Church and in State

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pp. 41-47

To ‘‘be’’ (einai) means to find, or to keep trying to find, a human answer to the mystery of being. To be a Christian means that this answer is found, or ever re-appropriated, with Christ in God.⁴¹ For a Christian, then, living in Christ is truly being a human being—humanity being meaningfully transformed on its way to God (ho ōn).⁴² ...

Faith and National Identity in Britain

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pp. 49-58

The subject of citizenship is a recent addition to the United Kingdom national school curriculum, introduced as a way of instructing young people in the rights and responsibilities of participation in British society. Recent too has been the devising of ‘‘citizenship ceremonies’’ at which those wishing to become British citizens...

Notes

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pp. 59-68

Islamic Views of the Collective

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pp. 73-79

This essay is arranged in three parts.¹ First is an introduction about the upstream conditions for the Islamic message and how we deal with governance and justice from an Islamic perspective—not merely of one Muslim but of the whole Islamic community. ...

The Common Good: Catholicism, Pluralism, and Secular Society

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pp. 81-91

Concern for the common good is one of the characteristic features of Catholic social thought; the notion has roots in the classical world and in Augustine and Aquinas, but it achieved a special prominence in Catholic social teaching over the last century. ...

Bosnian Muslim Scholarson Governance and Justice

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pp. 93-96

In modern Islamic thought in Bosnia and Herzegovina, developed in post-Ottoman times, there was no systematic treatment of issues such as governance and justice. Bosnian scholars of the Habsburg era, 1878–1918, initiated debates about the permissibility of Muslims staying in a non-Muslim polity, about Muslims serving in a non-Muslim army...

Muslim and Christian Perspectives on Different Models of Governance and Justice

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pp. 97-101

In most of the analyses to be found nowadays, Christianity is defined as a strict part ofWestern civilization and Islam as a strict part of Eastern civilization. Whether intentionally or not, these analyses always forget the fact that there are Christians—Eastern ones—who live and develop in the same civilizations and historical circumstances as Muslims do. ...

Government and Religion in Malaysia

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pp. 103-113

Malaysia is a majority Muslim country wherein Islam is the official religion but where non-Muslims also enjoy freedom of religion and worship. Ethnicity and religion are probably two of the most challenging aspects of government in Malaysia, and there is always room for improvement, due partly to changing perceptions of inter faith relations...

Different Models of Governance and Justice: A West African Christian Perspective

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pp. 115-125

Africans have a much talked about interreligious, inter faith environment that is unique in many ways. We have multifaith families, clans, ethnic groups, and nations. At each of these levels, there are many elements that bind African Muslims and Christians together, from kinship ties to shared languages and citizenship. ...

Notes

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pp. 126-128

Christianity, Islam, and the Challenge of Poverty

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pp. 133-140

It is likely that religious believers of all traditions would begin by warning that poverty is not a word with a single definition. We may think first of apparently straightforward material deprivation—a low income, no public welfare or emergency provision, poor health care, and inability to afford basics such as food. ...

Poverty and the Charism of Ishmael

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pp. 141-152

Bosnian folklore, that treasury of cross-grained wisdom, seems to favor two themes above all others: saints and plum brandy. The very best kind of story is often one that combines the two. An example is the tale of the seventeenth century Qadiri dervish, Hasan Kaimije. Kaimije was a figure known for his austerity...

Speaking to the Heart

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pp. 153-160

I begin this essay by stating the assumption that justifies its place in our program, namely that the ecological crisis is in the first instance not a technological crisis but a theological one. It is a crisis that concerns us precisely as creatures before their creator—the only creature, as far as we know, who is sensible of being obligated to a creator. ...

Āyatology and Rahmatology: Islam and the Environment

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pp. 161-167

It is difficult to know where to begin in discussing ‘‘Islam and the environment’’; writing and reflection on this theme have, to date, been very scarce.⁷⁴ This seems to me to demonstrate something of a crisis in contemporary Muslim theology; in light of this, I propose to examine the preconditions of a Muslim theology of the environment...

Notes

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pp. 168-173