Religious Polemics in Context: Papers Presented to the Second International Conference of the Leiden Institutefor the Study of Religions (LISOR) held at Leiden, 27–28 April, 2000, edited by T. L. Hettema and A. van der Kooij

At the international conference held in 2000 at the prestigious Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions (LISOR), the issue of religious diversity is explored from the point of view of the practice of religious controversy, as it is understood across polemical traditions and disciplines.Consequently, the papers collected in this hefty volume of almost 600 pages do, indeed, give a good image of what this growing interdisciplinary field of research is all about: the history and the particular articulations of religious traditions or paradigms are examined within oppositional contexts, thus adding a welcome dynamic as well as a much needed (transcultural) interfaith aspect.This relatively new disciplinary field is a field that preserves and presupposes the critical valorization of earlier achievements in the disciplines of religious history, comparative religion and theology, while allowing for a constructive and equally critical use of the newest methodologies in humanities: theory of argumentation, pragmatics, rhetorical studies, deconstructive techniques in philology, etc. Coming after the LISOR conference on the definitions of religion, published in 1999, the conference on religious polemic is-understandably-focussed by an interest in defining polemics in the context of religious discourses.The organizers of the meeting of 2000, a meeting that assembled controversy researchers from many parts of the world, define religious polemic according to the Webster Dictionary as "the art or practice of disputation or controversy".This broad definition is however sufficiently focussed to allow for both a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches and a well circumscribed series of case studies: while the area of Christianity is privileged, occupying roughly half of the volume, the religious traditions of controversy and debate in Judaism and Islam are also represented.The collection of some 30 studies is organized in 5 parts: general issues, history of religions, ancient Israel and early Christianity, history of Christianity and social sciences of religion.The first division of the collection, "general issues", groups together two interesting studies that have an introductory function, despite being quite dissimilar in their approach and depth of treatment: Marcelo Clascal's "On the Uses of Argumentative Reason in Religious Polemics" is a paper that articulates a simplified structural typology of religious polemics within the broader frame of strategic procedures of oppositional confrontations.Within the larger frame of general polemical exchanges-classified by Dascal after their intensity of argumentative disagreement into discussions, disputes and controversies, religious polemics are systematically sorted in three broad categories, according to the "scope of the belief base shared by the participants" (p.9): intra-faith, inter-faith and extra-faith polemical encounters.Needless to say, this abstract classification-aiming at a general methodology of descriptive evaluation-has

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