The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1139 page)

 
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Jam
l al-D
n al-Afgh
n
(Muslim modernist reformer)
:

see
AL-AFGH
N
.

 
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James
.

The name of two or three early Christian figures. St James, the son of Zebedee, was brother of
John
, and one of Jesus' inner circle of disciples. He was martyred in 44 CE (Acts 12. 2). He was claimed in the Middle Ages to have been the apostle of Spain, and was supposed to have been buried at Santiago de Compostela (see
PILGRIMAGE
). St James, ‘the Lord's brother’ (Mark 6. 3), became the leader of the earliest Christian church at Jerusalem after the departure of
Peter
. Nothing is known of St James the Less (or ‘the younger’; Mark 15. 40) unless he is to be identified with James the son of Alphaeus (Mark 3. 18) or Jesus' brother.
The Letter of James is the first of the
Catholic
Epistles in the New Testament. It is almost entirely moral in content.

 
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(1842–1910).
American scholar whose contribution to the study of religion derives from his refusal to treat physiology, psychology, and philosophy as separate disciplines. What remains a major contribution to the psychology of religion, James's
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), also benefited from the fact that he was equipped with ‘religious musicality’. Always tending to be individualistic,
The Varieties
dwells on personal religious life rather than on institutional or social expressions. He introduced the phrase, ‘stream of consciousness’, and described the nature of the stream.
The Will To Believe
(1897) is a commitment to struggle against evil and moral deficiencies, not an exercise in empty metaphysical speculation.

 
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