Making Peace in and with the World: The Gã1/4len Movement and Eco-Justice (Hardback) | Released: 01 Feb 2012

Making Peace In and With the World: The Gulen Movement and Eco-Justice is a representative study and working analysis of contemporary Islamic thought on eco-justice. It cuts through problems facing humanity today, ranging from inequality and violence in the smaller globalized world to the end/death of nature as signaled by various environmental and ecological crises. Addressing these problems, this volume sheds light on two dimensions of peace in the earth community - making peace between differing human communities, and making peace between humanity and nature. The phrase Eco-Justice in this volume signifies this dual reality, thereby offering a unique and insightful view that justice in the world must go hand in hand with ecological justice if peace is to be made. With its dual foci of peace, this volume contributes to multi-disciplinary academic areas. It adds to a burgeoning field of religious ecology, by exploring the dynamics at play in the interaction between religion, human communities and nature, and by providing natural scientific works with considerable theoretical, philosophical and ethical implications. This volume also corresponds to studies in the interdisciplinary field of war and peace. Since it deals centrally with the question of religion and eco-justice, this volume challenges assumptions of exclusivist religion, religion-oriented violence and the religion-based Clash of Civilizations. The contributors of this volume from diverse academic backgrounds take Gulen and the Gulen movement as the case study. Muhammed Fethullah Gulen is one of the most significant Islamic theologians in the contemporary world, and his inspired Gulen movement is the fastest growing Islamic civic movement worldwide. This volume provides a key reference to studies in Gulen and his movement for new discussions and criticisms. And, by taking this figure and his movement as a case, it reveals a new dimension of peace among differing human communities and between humanity and nature.
About the Author: Dr Heon Kim is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has a cross-cultural academic career in Islamic studies and comparative religions in Korea, Egypt, Turkey and the USA in which he received his doctorate on Sufism in the thought of Fethullah Gulen. Dr Kim is the author of Din Degistirmenin Entellectual Arka Plani (Intellectual Background of Religious Conversion), and with a series of conference presentations and publications, his research focuses on Sufism, comparative religions and humanism. Dr John Raines taught in the Department of Religion at Temple University, Pennsylvania, USA for forty-five years. He is the author of many books and articles. In 2000, Dr Raines became one of the founders of The Center For Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a center where inter-religious dialogue and sophisticated social analysis flourish in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.