ABSTRACT
The pressures and opportunities of marketization and consumerism have inspired various new kinds of 'prosperity religion' which offer to enhance people's material, physical, psychological as well as spiritual wellbeing, which have also come to scholarly attention. In bringing together a diverse group of often younger scholars from around the world, it reflects the dynamic reality of religion in global societies today. Religion illustrates this as well as anything; globalization provides many trajectories for religion. Pluralization has turned out to be a more helpful meta-framework than secularization. In addition to this, historians have also drawn attention to the etymologies of the words ‘science’ and ‘religion,’ noting that the particular nuances and resonances which they bear today are largely modern constructs, influenced by the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment. The historical and geographical variation noted in the relationship of Christianity to the sciences may be discerned also in Jewish understandings of the relationship between science and faith.
