Author Description

This book, jointly authored by Johan Galtung and Graeme MacQueen, explores how religion, and specific religions, relate to spirituality--an inner sense of something beyond our selves--and peace, a pattern of nonviolence and equity. In Part I the reader is taken on a tour of religions around the world, the religio-scape, from Occident to Orient and abrahamism to buddhism, in search of peace-building spiritualities. Religions are then scrutinized for their hard and soft aspects. In Part II this search is taken much further into the theory and practice of peace, with a focus on five Asian peace spiritualities, and on ways in which religions have inspired concrete peace-making. The epilogue is written as a drama in five acts, a dialogical search for ways the religions could be a joint human property in a rapidly globalizing world.