Jordan lectures in comparative religion

"This book explores African religious practice and its relation to African identity. It takes the problem of faith as its central theme, emphasizing the particular existential tensions dividing yet uniting the Christian and the African. Drawing on Heidegger and Sartre, it analyses these tensions underlying and creating the dialogues of hybridity or metissage."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"This book takes a fresh look at the earliest Buddhist texts and offers various suggestions how the teachings in them had developed. Two themes predominate. Firstly, it argues that we cannot understand the Buddha unless we understand that he was debating with other religious teachers, notably brahmins."--BOOK JACKET. "The other main theme concerns metaphor, allegory and literalism. By taking the words of the texts literally - despite the Buddha's warning not to - successive generations of his disciples created distinctions and developed doctrines far beyond his original intention. Perhaps most important of all, a combination of literalism with ignorance of the Buddha's allusions to brahminism led Buddhists to forget that the Buddha had preached that love, like Christian charity, could itself be directly salvific."--BOOK JACKET.

This analysis of contrasting faiths places the religions of Canaan (later Phoenicia) and Israel in their historical settings, treating them as distinct, yet interacting, beliefs. As a prelude to the description of the two religions, the author traces the evolution of poetic style from the Patriarchal Age to the United Monarchy, showing the value of orally transmitted verse for the validation of early Biblical historical tradition. He then demonstrates the Mesopotamian origin of the Patriarchal clans with the aid of new cuneiform date, and shows a close connection between the movement of the Hebrews from the Euphrates Valley through Palestine into Egypt and the work of Moses. Special attention is paid to the early Hebrew family law, the case law of Israel, and the hygienic rules (which are older than commonly thought by scholars). The nature of the Canaanite-Phoenician religion is much clearer than it was a few years ago; its influence on Israel was both greater and less than is usually thought. But the relation was reciprocal, and both gained much in the exchange which set in about the tenth century and continued until the fifth century B.C.