Laura Duhan-Kaplan & Harry O. Maier 
Encountering the Other 
Christian and Multifaith Perspectives

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies, they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers, they explain, draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally, the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But, together, they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.

About the author

Harry O. Maier is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Vancouver School of Theology and Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. His most recent books include New Testament Christianity in the Roman World (2018) and Picturing Paul in Empire (2013).