Editorial. Religious diversity. Looking Eastward: (Asia) beyond the West

Lionel Obadia, University of Lyon 2 PhD, Professor in Anthropology at the University of Lyon 2, France, specializing in religious studies, anthropology and the sociology of religion. After gaining a PhD on Buddhism in France and in the West, he has studied Buddhism, shamanism and witchcraft in Asia, mainly Nepal. He has recently conducted research on Jewish Messianic movements in Europe, the US and Israel, and football (soccer) in a religious perspective in France. He is the author of ten books, among them La marchandisation de Dieu (2013), Anthropologie des religions (2007), Religion (2004), Sorcellerie (2004), Le bouddhisme en Occident (2007), and The Economics of Religion with Donald Wood (Emerald 2011) and more than one hundred chapters and articles in French, English, Spanish, Chinese and German. Ruth Illman, Donner Institute Docent of comparative religion at Åbo Akademi University, director of the Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History in Turku, Finland. Her main research interests include interreligious dialogue, religion and art, and contemporary Judaism. Among her recent publications are the books Art and Belief: Artists Engaged in Interreligious Dialogue (Routledge 2012) and Theology and the Arts: Engaging Faith, co-authored with W. Alan Smith (Routledge 2013, paperback edn 2016). She is the editor of Approaching Religion and Scripta Instituti Donneriani, published by the Donner Institute, and, together with Karin Hedner Zetterholm, of the peer-reviewed journal Nordisk judaistik – Scandinavian Jewish Studies.The subject matter of this special issue is anything but new: religious diversity has already been widely discussed in theology, philosophy, history and sociology. (Too) many times, however, diversity has been measured against the yardstick of the changing face of monotheistic models of religion (mainly Christianity). Asian religions have stood at the opposite end of a spectrum of analytical models in religious studies ever since Max Weber’s classic analysis of Asian religions as mixed systems of beliefs per se. This distinction is, nevertheless, rather problematic, and calls for a closer examination of the conceptual status of diversity, and of the forms it assumes in Asian contexts