The Human Condition: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project (Comparative Rel Ideas

by Robert Cummings Neville (editor), Peter L. Berger (Foreword)

This multi-authored collaborative work on the idea of the human condition as a comparative category cuts across major religious traditions and cultures. Extensive essays by distinguished specialists examine Chinese religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together the essays provide a multi-cultural approach to the human condition, discussing both broad sensibilities of religious traditions as well as specific texts. In addition the volume contains an introduction to a sophisticated theory of comparison for religious ideas, including explicit comparisons based on the specialized essays. Contributors include Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Malcolm David Eckel, Paul Fredriksen, S. Nomanul Haq, Joseph Kanofsky, Livia Kohn, Robert Cummings Neville, Hugh Nicholson, Anthony J. Saldarini, Tina Shepardson, John Thatamanil, and Wesley J. Wildman.

365 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Robert Cummings Neville (born May 1, 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) is an American systematic philosopher and theologian, author of numerous books and papers, and ex-Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry, editors of a festchrift—a collection of critical essays written in Neville's honor—entitled Interpreting Neville, consider him to be "one of the most significant philosophers and theologians of our time". Neville was Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has taught at Yale, Fordham, and the State University of New York Purchase. He is now a professor at Boston University He was granted a Doctorate honoris causa by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Far Eastern Studies in 1996.