You may find the posts here:
- How to Cook Up a Personal Jesus by Matt Stone
- How to be a Syncretist by Ellen Haroutunian
- Synching on Syncing by Phil Wyman
- Does interfaith dialogue lead to syncretism? by Liz Dyer
- The man in the moss by Steve Hayes
- Our uncomforatable God by Susan Barnes
And then there is this post The Deacon's Bench: Buying into the "Prosperity Gospel", which seems not unrelated.
5 comments:
Too theological for me, this one.
Interesting. I did a whole essay on this for my MA course, and identified four possible modes of practising more than one religion (naturally I cited your 2003 article about inculturation).
* Dvoeverie
* Syncretism
* Inculturation
* Coinherence
Coinherence is where two religions that both make sense to the practitioner are followed side-by-side. In the case of Corless and other Christo-Buddhists, this seems to be because of the similarity of the two faiths. Corless holds the two traditions in a creative tension, an internal dialogue. This may sound superficially similar to dvoeverie, but in dvoeverie there is said to be little or no interaction between the two faiths in the mind of the practitioner, whereas in coinherence practice, the two are held in dialogue.
Yvonne,
Good point, and a useful distinction -- thanks.
I have been thinking about this for the past week and was wondering if Christianity, at least at around 30 CE, can be classified as a Syncretic belief?
A community of Jews who started practising a divergent set of beliefs...
Meanie,
I don't think so. Both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism developed from Second-Temple Judaism, so they were two religions diverging from one, whereas syncretism is two different religions that were different to start with merging into one.
A better example of syncretism might be Afro-Caribbean religions, where people taken as slaves from differnt parts of Africa merged their own beliefs with each other and, in some cases, with Christianity.
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