Print

Foreword xvii Alongside the still relatively modest amount of literature available on reli- gions and poverty, the editors of and contributors to this text offer its content to stimulate more cross-religious and interdisciplinary thinking. This is intended to help formulate and implement practical strategies to make the world a place in which all have food to eat, meaningful employment, equal rights, and opportunities to flourish as individuals and as members of inter- dependent communities. This may be rejected by some as an inappropriate aim for what many will see as an academic text. However, in an increasingly interconnected world, the cross-fertilization of ideas may be essential for securing a more just, peaceful, and equitable world for humans to occupy should they succeed in sustaining the planet itself. Disciplinary boundaries between so-called objective, religiously neutral religious studies, faith-based or confessional theology, and interfaith activism are blurred as people switch between all three by teaching at a university serving a church, temple, syna- gogue, or mosque and taking part in interfaith initiatives. This writer wishes to thank his former departmental chair, William Brackney, and Rupen Das, whose doctoral thesis he had the honor of exam- ining, for the invitation to write this foreword. —Dr. Clinton Bennett SUNY New Paltz Notes 1. Guidelines on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1979), accessed March 16 2018, https://www .oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/interreligious-dialogue -and-cooperation/interreligious-trust-and-respect/guidelines-on-dialogue-with -people-of-living-faiths-and-ideologies. 2. Tom Bamat, Nell Bolton, Myla Legulo, and Atralia Omer, eds., Interreligious Action for Peace: Studies in Muslim Christian Cooperation (Baltimore, MD: Catholic Relief Services, 2017), accessed March 10, 2018, https://www.crs.org/sites/default /files/tools-research/interreligious_action_for_peace_march_2017.pdf. 3. Kofi Annan, “Foreword,” in Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understand- ing Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies, edited by Frances Stewart (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xv–xvi. 4. Nobelprize.org, “Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank—Press Release,” Nobel Media AB 2014, accessed March 17, 2018, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/press.html. 5. On Grameen, see Clinton Bennett, “Microfinance,” in The Oxford Encyclo- pedia of Islam and Women, vol. 1, edited by Natana J. Delong-Bas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 658–660. 6. Earle E. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 51.