Interfaith relations – The Bell Bookshop

The Long Game

Emma — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Given the turbulence in the international order in recent years, one of the central concerns among observers of world politics is the question of China’s ultimate goals. As China emerges as a superpower that rivals the United States, American policymakers grappling with this century’s greatest geopolitical challenge are looking for answers to a series of critical questions. Does China have expansive ambitions? Does it have a grand strategy to achieve them? If so,what is it and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, and memoirs by party leaders, to demonstrate that China is in fact playing a long, methodical game to replace America as a regional and global hegemon. He traces the basic evolution of Chinese strategy, showing how it evolved in response to changes in US policy and its position in the world order. After charting these shifts over time, Doshioffers a comprehensive yet “asymmetric” plan for an effective US response to this challenge: one that undermines China’s ambitions without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan. Ironically, the approach mirrors China’s own current strategy of subtly weakening Chinese leverage in the regionand elsewhere while expanding US leverage over China.A bold assessment of what the Chinese government’s true foreign policy objectives are, The Long Game offers valuable insight to the most important rivalry in world politics.

Not In Gods Name

Emma — Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Despite predictions of continuing secularisation, the twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of religious extremism and violence in the name of God.

In this powerful and timely book, Jonathan Sacks explores the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, focusing on the historic tensions between the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Drawing on arguments from evolutionary psychology, game theory, history, philosophy, ethics and theology, Sacks shows how a tendency to violence can subvert even the most compassionate of religions. Through a close reading of key biblical texts at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths, Sacks then challenges those who claim that religion is intrinsically a cause of violence, and argues that theology must become part of the solution if it is not to remain at the heart of the problem.

This book is a rebuke to all those who kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love, and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.

For the sake of humanity and the free world, the time has come for people of all faiths and none to stand together and declare: Not In God’s Name.

Pagans & Christians

Emma — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

From the second century AD to the conversion of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World gives a fascinating new perspective on an extraordinary era.

The transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient Mediterranean world was a process whose effects we still live with today. How did this monumental conversion come about? How did Christianity compare and compete with the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This scholarly work, from award-winning historian Robin Lane Fox, places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civic life and contrasts their religious experiences, visions, cults and oracles.

Leading up to the time of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, the book aims to enlarge and confirm the value of contemporary evidence, some of which has only recently been discovered.

‘This brilliant book is a wholly unexpected and central contribution to its subject. What is more it is readable and rereadable, even gripping’
Peter Levi, Spectator

‘Important and learned’
Financial Times

‘A massive and humane study…On my shelf it will rest with pride between Edward Gibbon and Peter Brown’
Telegraph

‘On the one hand a magisterial analysis and reconstruction of an apparently remote and alien society, on the other a detailed study of the single most significant process in our history’
The Times

Robin Lane Fox (b. 1946) is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a University Reader in Ancient History. His other books include The Classical World, Alexander the Great, Pagans and Christians and The Unauthorized Version. He was historical advisor to Oliver Stone on the making of Stone’s film Alexander, for which he waived all his fees on condition that he could take part in the cavalry charge against elephants which Stone staged in the Moroccan desert.