A fresh look at how Christians and Muslims speak of God
Naming God entails labeling the ineffable. And yet the Bible itself oscillates between denying that God can be named and describing how God shows Godself anyway.
In Naming God, the result of the 2021 Building Bridges Seminar—an international dialogue of Christian and Muslim scholars—the contributors examine the many ways Christians and Muslims refer to and describe God and the significance of naming God differently. This book provides guidance and materials that will benefit faith leaders as well as students and scholars of theology, dialogue theory, and conflict resolution. Nonspecialists will benefit from an entry-point into the theme of naming God, while specialists will be challenged to develop and deepen their thought on this important topic.
Reviews
"The nineteenth volume of the Building Bridges series continues its high-quality contribution to Scriptural and theological dialogues between Muslims and Christians by addressing a central theme: naming God. Even though this particular instance of the dialogue was organized online because of the coronavirus pandemic, the familiarity of the participants fostered by ongoing conversations in the previous years enabled them to add intense conversations to the long history of interreligious debates concerning the core matter of theology: how to properly name God."—Pim Valkenberg, professor of religion and culture, Catholic University of America
"Naming God does not only contain wonderful contributions from major Christian and Muslim scholars, but also rich material from Scripture and tradition to work on the topic. This makes the book at the same time theologically rich and very useful for the practical work of interreligious dialogue."—Klaus von Stosch, Schlegel-Professor of Systematic Theology, Bonn University
About the Author
Lucinda Mosher is director of the Master of Arts in Interreligious Studies and an affiliate of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. Concurrently, she is senior editor of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, founding president of Neighbor Faith Consultancy, and rapporteur of the Building Bridges Seminar. The author of six books, in addition to numerous chapters and journal articles, she is the editor or coeditor of nearly twenty titles—among them The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies (2022) and nine Building Bridges Seminar volumes.
