Toward Our Mutual Flourishing: The Episcopal Church, Interreligious Relations, and Theologies of Religious Manyness(3 Studies in Episcopal and Anglican Theology)

In Toward Our Mutual Flourishing: The Episcopal Church, Interreligious Relations, and Theologies of Religious Manyness, the author tells the story of The Episcopal Church's development of an official rationale for its ongoing engagement with religious diversity. At once a work of historical, moral, and practical theology, this volume contextualizes and explains what one church teaches about how religious difference may be interpreted in Christian terms. Through guided reading of noteworthy documents, this book explores such themes as this church's preference for ecumenical interfaith work, its particular attention to Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim concerns, the relationship between missiology and theological understanding of religious diversity, and the intersection of interreligious relations with other ecclesial concerns - peace and justice activism, liturgical reform efforts, and what it means to be the Body of Christ in the twenty-first century. The author thus positions this multinational, multicultural, multilingual denomination within the Interfaith Movement, the Anglican theological tradition, and the various schemes for analyzing Christian theologies of religions. About The Episcopal Church (but not just for Episcopalians), about Christianity (but not just for Christians), this book is an excellent resource for courses in interreligious dialogue, Christian ethics, and American religious history.

About the Author :
Lucinda Allen Mosher, an educator and consultant on interreligious matters, received her ThD from General Theological Seminary. She is Faculty Associate in Interfaith Studies at Hartford Seminary. Concurrently, she is Assistant Academic Director of the Building Bridges seminars and founding instructor for the University of Michigan-Dearborn's annual Worldviews Seminar. Her clients have included Auburn Seminary's Center for Multifaith Education, Trinity Institute, The Episcopal Church's Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations, and the Anglican Communion Network of Inter Faith Concerns. The author of the Faith in the Neighborhood book series on America's religious diversity, Mosher has written many articles on multifaith issues generally and Christian-Muslim concerns specifically. She lectures and offers workshops regularly across the country and abroad.

Review :
Lucinda Allen Mosher has masterfully outlined how one Christian communion in the United States - in this case, The Episcopal Church - has faced the opportunities and challenges of religious diversity in relation to its vocation. Religious diversity is not new, although many have come to recognize that reality only recently. Each Christian communion and indeed each religious community needs to ask the questions that The Episcopal Church has asked, and grapple with the challenges posed by that reality to its own self-understanding. (Shanta Premawardhana, President, Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education, SCUPE) Drawing on her experience as a lifelong educator, a committed Episcopalian, and a scholar of both ecumenical and interreligious relations, Lucinda Allen Mosher has provided us with a comprehensive overview of how one Christian communion has sought to engage the 'manyness' of religious expression in today's world. Far from a dry academic exercise, Mosher helps us to see that this is yet another way to 'love one's neighbor as oneself. (C. Christopher Epting, Assisting Bishop, Diocese of Chicago)