Protestantism and Non-Christian Religions

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Confucianism is the whole body of religious, ethical and political doctrine which Confucius gathered together from antiquity, personally taught by word, writing and example, and passed on to his successors. It is this same body of doctrine which Mencius in the […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Taoism Taoism, which literally means the religion of the “Way” (Tao), has had the most chequered career of the three main religious cultures of China. According to its own historians, it once commanded respect from the nation’s leaders, until Confucianism replaced […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Zoroastrianism Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest living faiths, and yet it has the smallest number of adherents. Although its ancestry is traceable to the sixth century before Christ, there are less than two hundred thousand professed Zoroastrians, only the Parsis […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University The origins of Shinto are lost in the dim past of Japanese history, and over the centuries its role has been to integrate with other systems, notably Confucianism from China and Buddhism from India, to give the people of Japan the […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Sikhism Sikhism is one of the least known living religions of the world, and yet one of the most interesting from the viewpoint of comparative history. Although practically confined to a single province of the Indian Republic, the Punjab region in […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Judaism is the oldest living religion of the Western world, and historically is the parent of Christianity and Islam, which together count one half the population of the human race. The pre-Christian phase of Judaism is not our concern, both because […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Early Christianity Christianity is unique in the history of world religions. Its ancestry derives from almost two millennia of Judaism, whose prophets for centuries had foretold the coming of a great religious leader who would establish a new spiritual kingdom on […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Not the least difficulty in writing about Catholicism is the problem of isolating the subject. The history of the Catholic Church is so closely woven into Christian civilization that the one cannot be told fairly without the other, and to do […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Islam To most Christians, Mohammedanism is only a vague religious movement that somehow gave rise to the Crusades and that presently affects the culture and political aspirations of certain people in North Africa, the Near East and Pakistan. Actually Mohammedanism is […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Eastern Orthodox writers justly complain that for over a thousand years Christianity has been identified with Europe. In the eyes of Asiatic and African people, Christendom is a West religion and its culture equated with the civilization of Western Europe. Yet […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University There is a legitimate sense in which Protestantism refers to all Christian movements, other than the Roman Catholic Church, that share the heritage of Western Christianity. Even the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy have been called “Protestant,” because they place the seat […]

Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Associate Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University Old Catholic Churches The origin of the Old Catholic movement goes back to Reformation times, and its theological principles derive from a Calvinist theory of grace. As a historical phenomenon the movement is sometimes described almost exclusively in terms of national […]