Almost every thoughtful person wonders at some time why morality says what it says and how, if at all, it speaks to us. David Wiggins surveys the answers most commonly proposed for such questions--and does so in a way that the thinking reader, increasingly perplexed by the everyday problem of moral philosophy, can follow. His work is thus an introduction to ethics that presupposes nothing more than the reader's willingness to read philosophical proposals closely and literally.

Gathering insights from Hume, Kant, the utilitarians, and a twentieth-century assortment of post-utilitarian thinkers, and drawing on sources as diverse as Aristotle, Simone Weil, and Philippa Foot, Wiggins points to the special role of the sentiments of solidarity and reciprocity that human beings will find within themselves. After examining the part such sentiments play in sustaining our ordinary ideas of agency and responsibility, he searches the political sphere for a neo-Aristotelian account of justice that will cohere with such an account of morality. Finally, Wiggins turns to the standing of morality and the question of the objectivity or reality of ethical demands. As the need arises at various points in the book, he pursues a variety of related issues and engages additional thinkers--Plato, C. S. Peirce, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, John Rawls, Montaigne and others--always emphasizing the words of the philosophers under discussion, and giving readers the resources to arrive at their own viewpoint of why and how ethics matters.

In the past few decades, scientists of human nature—including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioral economists—have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel? In Experiments in Ethics, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics.

Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of "experimental philosophy," provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.

Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.

Childhood faces humanity with its own deepest and most perplexing questions. An ethics that truly includes the world’s childhoods would transcend pre-modern traditional communities and modern rational autonomy with a postmodern aim of growing responsibility. It would understand human relations in a poetic rather than universalistic sense as openly and interdependently creative. As a consequence, it would produce new understandings of moral being, time, and otherness, as well as of religion, rights, narrative, families, obligation, and power.

Ethics in Light of Childhood fundamentally reimagines ethical thought and practice in light of the experiences of the third of humanity who are children. Much like humanism, feminism, womanism, and environmentalism, Wall argues, a new childism is required that transforms moral thinking, relations, and societies in fundamental ways. Wall explores childhood’s varied impacts on ethical thinking throughout history, advances the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, and reexamines basic assumptions in contemporary moral theory and practice.

In the process, he does not just apply ethics to childhood but applies childhood to ethics—in order to imagine a more expansive humanity.

From the earliest times, philosophers and others have thought deeply about ethical questions. But it was Aristotle who founded ethics as a discipline with clear principles and well-defined boundaries. Ethics After Aristotle focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, underscoring the thinker’s enduring influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE.

Beginning with Aristotle’s student and collaborator Theophrastus, Brad Inwood traces the development of Aristotelian ethics up to the third-century Athenian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias. He shows that there was no monolithic tradition in the school, but a rich variety of moral theory. The philosophers of the Peripatetic school produced surprisingly varied theories in dialogue with other philosophical traditions, generating rich insight into human virtue and happiness. What unifies the different strands of thought—what makes them distinctively Aristotelian—is a form of ethical naturalism: that our knowledge of the good and virtuous life depends first on understanding our place in the natural world, and second on the exercise of our natural dispositions in distinctively human activities. What is now referred to as “virtue ethics,” Inwood argues, is a less important part of Aristotle’s legacy than the naturalistic approach Aristotle articulated and his philosophical descendants developed further.

Offering a wide range of ways of thinking about ethics from an ancient perspective, Ethics After Aristotle is a penetrating study of how philosophy evolves in the wake of an unusually powerful and original thinker.

Sabina Lovibond invites her readers to see how the "practical reason view of ethics" can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason.

She elaborates and defends a modern practical-reason view of ethics by focusing on virtue or ideal states of character that involve sensitivity to the objective reasons circumstances bring into play. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; these ancient ideas can be made contemporary if one understands them in a naturalized way. She then explores the implications that arise from the naturalization of the classical view, weaving into her theory ideas of Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin. The book also discusses two modes of resistance to an existing ethical culture--one committed to the critical employment of shared norms of rationality, the other aspiring to a more radical attitude, grounded in hostility to the "universal." Lovibond tries to determine what may be correct in this second, admittedly paradoxical, tendency.

This is a timely and valuable effort to connect the most advanced forms of thinking in the analytic tradition and in the Continental tradition, and to extend our understanding of the intimacies and resistances between these two prominent strands of contemporary philosophy.

Bernard Williams is an eloquent member of that small but important group of distinguished thinkers who are trying to erase the borders between the experts and all of us who grapple with moral issues in our own lives. In this book he delivers a sustained indictment of systematic moral theory from Kant onward and offers a persuasive alternative.

Kant’s ideas involved a view of the self we can no longer accept. Modern theories such as utilitarianism and contractualism usually offer criteria that lie outside the self altogether, and this, together with an emphasis on system, has weakened ethical thought. Why should a set of ideas have any special authority over our sentiments just because it has the structure of a theory? How could abstract theory help the individual answer the Socratic question “How should I live?”

Williams’s goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He accuses modern moral philosophers of retreating to system and deserting individuals in their current social context. He believes that the ethical work of Plato and Aristotle is nearer to the truth of what ethical life is, but at the same time recognizes that the modern world makes unparalleled demands on ethical thought. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge. Williams has written an imaginative, ingenious book that calls for philosophers to transcend their self-imposed limits and to give full attention to the complexities of the ethical life.

In this book, William O'Neill, SJ, offers an interpretation of the nature and scope of practical reasoning in light of postmodern philosophical criticism. He charts a via media between the abstract formalism of neo-Kantian morality and relativist interpretations of neo-Aristotelian ethics.

The three parts of the book treat the eclipse of the classical Aristotelian conception of practical reason; the Kantian heritage in the modern moral theories of John Rawls and R.M. Hare; and the hermeneutical retrieval of a moral interpretation of the world. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern analytical philosophy, and the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas, O'Neill offers a critical reconstruction of practical reason which upholds the primacy of moral community while recognizing the ethical import of historical and cultural difference.

The final chapter applies the preceding hermeneutical critique to the question of the distinctiveness of Christian ethics in the writings of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Josef Fuchs, and Bruno Schüller. This original contribution will be of special interest to students and teachers of moral philosophy and theology.

What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.

    Hermann Cohen’s essay on Maimonides’ ethics is one of the most fundamental texts of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, correlating Platonic, prophetic, Maimonidean, and Kantian traditions. Almut Sh. Bruckstein provides the first English translation and her own extensive commentary on this landmark 1908 work, which inspired readings of medieval and rabbinic sources by Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.
    Cohen rejects the notion that we should try to understand texts of the past solely in the context of their own historical era. Subverting the historical order, he interprets the ethical meanings of texts in the light of a future yet to be realized. He commits the entire Jewish tradition to a universal socialism prophetically inspired by ideals of humanity, peace, and universal justice.
    Through her own probing commentary on Cohen’s text, like the margin notes of a medieval treatise, Bruckstein performs the hermeneutical act that lies at the core of Cohen’s argument: she reads Jewish sources from a perspective that recognizes the interpretive act of commentary itself.

In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he’s a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds. China Daily reports that he has acquired a popularity “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.” China Newsweek declared him the “most influential foreign figure” of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by the nation’s swift embrace of a market economy—a guide whose communitarian ideas resonate with aspects of China’s own rich and ancient philosophical traditions.

Chinese citizens often describe a sense that, in sprinting ahead, they have bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. The market economy has lifted millions from poverty but done little to define ultimate goals for individuals or the nation. Is the market all there is? In this context, Sandel’s charismatic, interactive lecturing style, which roots moral philosophy in real-world scenarios, has found an audience struggling with questions of their responsibility to one another.

Encountering China brings together leading experts in Confucian and Daoist thought to explore the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West. The result is a profound examination of diverse ideas about the self, justice, community, gender, and public good. With a foreword by Evan Osnos that considers Sandel’s fame and the state of moral dialogue in China, the book will itself be a major contribution to the debates that Sandel sparks in East and West alike.

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.

Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

In the twenty-first century the basic questions of ethics are no longer the abstract terms of ethical theory, but the concrete and burning issues related to the influence of life sciences, the impact of a globalized economy, and the consequences of present decisions for the future of humankind. Ethics: The Fundamental Questions of Our Lives analyzes twenty ethical issues that address education and culture, labor and economy, the environment and sustainability, democracy and cosmopolitanism, peace and war, and life and death. Each chapter describes a concrete example showing the relevance of the fundamental ethical question, then provides an explanation of how one can think through possible responses and reactions. Huber emphasizes the connections between personal, professional, and institutional ethics and demonstrates how human relationships lie at the center of our ethical lives. His aim is to articulate a theology of what he calls "responsible freedom" that transcends individualistic self-realization and includes communal obligations.

The essays in Ethics, Trust, and the Professions probe the nature of the fiduciary relationship that binds client to lawyer, believer to minister, and patient to doctor. Angles of approach include history, sociology, philosophy, and culture, and their very multiplicity reveals how difficult we find it to formulate a code of ethics which will insure a relationship of trust between the professional and the public.

Essays in Religion and Morality brings together a dozen papers of varying length to these two themes so crucial to the life and thought of William James. Reflections on the two subjects permeate, first, James's presentation of his father's Literary Remains; second, his writings on human immortality and the relation between reason and faith; third, his two memorial pieces, one on Robert Gould Shaw and the other on Emerson; fourth, his consideration of the energies and powers of human life; and last, his writings on the possibilities of peace, especially as found in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War."

These speeches and essays were written over a period of twenty-four years. The fact that James did not collect and publish them himself in a single volume does not reflect on their intrinsic worth or on their importance in James's philosophical work, since they include some of the best known and most influential of his writings. All the essays, throughout their varied subject matter, are consistently and characteristically Jamesian in the freshness of their attack on the problems and failings of humankind and in their steady faith in human powers.

Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world.

The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.

Towering over the Kanto Plain, the sacred mountain Ōyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed large over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.

By the Edo period (1600–1868), the revered peak had undergone a transformation from secluded spiritual retreat to popular pilgrimage destination. Its status as a regional landmark among its devotees was boosted by its proximity to the shogunal capital and the wide appeal of its amalgamation of Buddhism, Shinto, mountain asceticism, and folk beliefs. The influence of the Ōyama cult—the intersecting beliefs, practices, and infrastructure associated with the sacred site—was not lost on the ruling Tokugawa shogunate, which saw in the pilgrimage an opportunity to reinforce the communal ideals and social structures that the authorities espoused.

Barbara Ambros provides a detailed narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the Ōyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts. Richly illustrated and carefully researched, this study emphasizes the importance of “site” or “region” in considering the multifaceted nature and complex history of religious practice in Tokugawa Japan.

For over a hundred years, writers, artists, anthropologists and tourists have travelled to Bahia, Brazil, in search of the spirit possession cult called Candomblé. Thus, successive generations of cultists have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion. This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did cultists respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsiders’ imaginations.

An essential resource for scholars and students

Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.

Now in Paperback!

The Encyclopedia of Midrash provides readers with a deep, broad treatment of midrash unavailable in any other single source. Through the writings of top scholars in each of their fields, it sets out the current state of the question for the many topics discussed throughout the two-volume set. The encyclopedia treats interpretations of Scripture that came to closure prior to, or outside of, the framework of rabbinic midrash: Hellenistic Jewish midrash, Josephus, Pseudo-Philo, Jubilees, as well as to the New Testament, Karaite and Samaritan writings, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Features:

• Paperback format of an essential Brill hardcover reference set
• A general introduction to rabbinic midrash and its traits
• Discussion of rabbinic midrashic documents focused on specific books of Scripture, the theology expressed by rabbinic midrashic compilations, and the historical context in which rabbinic Midrash took shape

Exegesis--interpretation and explanation of sacred texts--is the quintessence of rabbinic thought. Through such means and methods, the written words of Hebrew Scripture have been extended since antiquity, and given new voices for new times. In this lucid and often poetic book, Michael Fishbane delineates the connections between biblical interpretation and Jewish religious thought.

How can a canon be open to new meanings, given that it is believed to be immutable? Fishbane discusses the nature and rationale of this interpretative process in a series of studies on ancient Jewish speculative theology. Focusing on questions often pondered in Midrash, he shows how religious ideas are generated or justified by exegesis. He also explores the role exegesis plays in liturgy and ritual. A striking example is the transfer of speculative interpretations into meditation in prayer. Cultivation of the ability to perceive many implicit meanings in a text or religious practice can become a way of living--as Fishbane shows in explaining how such notions as joy or spiritual meditations on death can be idealized and the ideal transmitted through theological interpretation. The Exegetical Imagination is a collection of interrelated essays that together offer new and profound understanding of scriptural interpretation and its central role in Judaism.

As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Everyday Jihad plunges us into the sprawling, heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which in the early 1990s became a site for militant Sunni Islamists. A place of refuge for Arabs hunted down in their countries of origin and a recruitment ground for young disenfranchised Palestinians, the camp--where sheikhs began actively recruiting for jihad--situated itself in the global geography of radical Islam.

With pioneering fieldwork, Bernard Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, combining a literal interpretation of sacred texts with a militant interpretation of jihad, took root in this Palestinian milieu. By staying very close to the religious actors, their discourse, perceptions, and means of persuasion, Rougier helps us to understand how radical religious allegiances overcome traditional nationalist sentiment and how jihadist networks grab hold in communities marked by unemployment, poverty, and despair.

With the emergence of Hezbollah, the Shiite political party and guerrilla army, at the forefront of Lebanese and regional politics, relations with the Palestinians will be decisive. The Palestinian camps of Lebanon, whose disarmament is called for by the international community, constitute a contentious arena for a multitude of players: Syria and Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority, and Bin Laden and the late Zarqawi. Witnessing everyday jihad in their midst offers readers a rare glimpse into a microcosm of the religious, sectarian, and secular struggles for the political identity of the Middle East today.

Empire of the Dharma explores the dynamic relationship between Korean and Japanese Buddhists in the years leading up to the Japanese annexation of Korea. Conventional narratives cast this relationship in politicized terms, with Korean Buddhists portrayed as complicit in the “religious annexation” of the peninsula. However, this view fails to account for the diverse visions, interests, and strategies that drove both sides.

Hwansoo Ilmee Kim complicates this politicized account of religious interchange by reexamining the “alliance” forged in 1910 between the Japanese Soto sect and the Korean Wonjong order. The author argues that their ties involved not so much political ideology as mutual benefit. Both wished to strengthen Buddhism’s precarious position within Korean society and curb Christianity’s growing influence. Korean Buddhist monastics sought to leverage Japanese resources as a way of advancing themselves and their temples, and missionaries of Japanese Buddhist sects competed with one another to dominate Buddhism on the peninsula. This strategic alliance pushed both sides to confront new ideas about the place of religion in modern society and framed the way that many Korean and Japanese Buddhists came to think about the future of their shared religion.

A new English translation for scholars and students of church history

Evagrius exerted a striking impact on the development of spirituality, of Origenism, and of the spiritual interpretation of the Bible in Greek, Syriac, and Latin Christianity. This English translation of the most complete Syriac version of Kephalaia Gnostika makes Evagrius Ponticus's thoughts concerning reality, God, protology, eschatology, anthropology, and allegorical exegesis of Scripture widely available.

Features:

• English translation of the longer Syriac version discovered by Antoine Guillaumont
• Commentary provides an integrated analysis of Evagrius's ascetic and philosophical writings
• Extensive introduction on the importance of Evagrius and the context of his writings

A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity.

American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success?

According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century.

Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.

This small book, the last work of a world-renowned scholar, has established itself as a classic. It provides a superb overview of the vast historical process by which Christianity was Hellenized and Hellenic civilization became Christianized.

Werner Jaeger shows that without the large postclassical expansion of Greek culture the rise of a Christian world religion would have been impossible. He explains why the Hellenization of Christianity was necessary in apostolic and postapostalic times; points out similarities between Greek philosophy and Christian belief; discuss such key figures as Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa; and touches on the controversies that led to the ultimate complex synthesis of Greek and Christian thought.

Who is a true prophet? Who has real access to divine realms of knowledge? Early Christian communities accused each other’s prophets of madness and of making false claims to divine knowledge. This book argues that early Christians did not seek to answer questions about true prophecy or to define madness and rationality, but rather used this discourse in order to control knowledge, to establish their own authority, and to define Christian identity. Christians launched these arguments in the context of the Greco-Roman world, where prophecy, visions, ecstasy, and dreams—all considered part of the same phenomenon—were the subject of cutting-edge philosophical, medical, and even political debates.

Early Christian prophecy has usually been interpreted according to a model which explains that at its origins, Christianity was characterized by vibrant spiritual gifts which declined as church order and institutions developed. Arguing that a model of struggle informed by feminist theory and postcolonial criticism provides a better framework for understanding early Christian texts, this work clarifies how early Christian arguments about rationality, madness, and the role of spiritual gifts in history are attempts to negotiate authority and to define religious identity in the midst of many competing forms of Christianity. Laura Nasrallah uses New Testament and early third-century texts to trace the rhetoric of this debate—rhetoric that is still alive today as communities across the globe struggle to define religious identity.

Contemporary ecumenism is a revival of a Reformation ideal. The Colloquy of Poissy was the last great expression expression of that ideal. At the colloquy, held in 1561 on the eve of the French religious wars, revived Catholicism and emergent international Protestantism met in an attempt to establish peace, unity, and reconciliation of differing viewpoints. A history of this great conference reveals how unfinished was the Reformation and how tragic a turn it had taken.

This work on the colloquy presents the dialectical complexities of the sixteenth-century theology—a theology that had emerged with binding strands of religious idealism and political interest. Theology was, indeed, the medium of discourse, but it was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means to a higher goal: religious reconciliation.

The present analysis, therefore, is not so much a study in the abstractions of theology as it is a study in ecumenism. Poissy is placed in a larger historical background and the author carefully and critically weighs all factors which affected the chances for religious unity. Within this larger context, he argues that the colloquy placed the participants at the final crossroads of the Reformation. When it was over the Reformation was sealed and the Counter-Reformation signaled.

Donald Nugent’s approach is revisionist; his theological orientation is Erasmian, ecumenical, and speculative. He shows that ecumenism has been effectively and banefully excised from historiography and argues that it must be reintegrated into the story of the Reformation. Because we live in a new age of ecumenism, the author’s insights and conclusions are especially appropriate. We have now that keen and historical dimension which cannot but help illuminate contemporary life.

The pandemic presented religion as a paradox: faith is often crucial for helping people weather life’s troubles and make difficult decisions, but how can religion continue to deliver these benefits and provide societal structure without social contact?  The topical volume, An Epidemic among My People explains how the COVID-19 pandemic stress tested American religious communities and created a new politics of religion centered on public health.

The editors and contributorsconsider how the virus and government policy affected religion in America. Chapters examine the link between the prosperity gospel and conspiracy theories, the increased purchase of firearms by evangelicals, the politics of challenging public health orders as religious freedom claims, and the reactions of Christian nationalists, racial groups, and female clergy to the pandemic (and pandemic politics). As sharp lines were drawn between people and their governments during this uncertain time, An Epidemic among My People provides a comprehensive portrait of religion in American public life.  

Cutting edge reflections on biblical text formation

Empirical models based on ancient Near Eastern literature and variations between different textual traditions have been used to lend credibility to the identification of the sources behind biblical literature and the different editorial layers. In this volume, empirical models are used to critique the exaggerated results of identifying sources and editorial layers by demonstrating that, even though much of ancient literature had such complex literary histories, our methods are often inadequate for the task of precisely identifying sources and editorial layers. The contributors are Maxine L. Grossman, Bénédicte Lemmelijn, Alan Lenzi, Sara J. Milstein, Raymond F. Person Jr., Robert Rezetko, Stefan Schorch, Julio Trebolle Barrera, Ian Young, and Joseph A. Weaks.

Features:

• Evidence that many ancient texts are composite texts with complex literary histories
• Ten essays and an introduction cover texts from Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

New from the Bible and Women Series

This collection of essays deals with aspects of women and gender relations in early Judaism (during the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires). Some essays focus on specific writings: the Greek (Septuagint) version of Esther, Judith, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Letter of Jeremiah. Others explore how certain biblical texts are reinterpreted: Eve in the Life of Adam and Eve, the mixing of the sons of God with the daughters of men from Genesis 6:1–4, the Egyptian princess at the birth of Moses, and how Josephus retells biblical stories. The third group of essays explore specific social contexts: Philo's views of women in the Roman empire, the Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, and women philosophers of the Therapeutae in Egyptian Alexandria.

Features

• An International team of contributors from Europe and North America
• A breadth of materials covered, including many lesser-known early Jewish writings
• Focus is on a gendered perspective and gender specific questions

Examine the creative, profound dialogue between medieval women and biblical traditions

The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible’s reception during the early Middle Ages (500–1100 CE) in both the Greek East and the Latin West. Essays focus on interactions between women and the Bible through biblical precepts on women and for women, biblical women as the subjects of action or objects of discussion, and writings by women that refer to the Bible as a moral authority. The women discussed in the volume range from the well-known—including the nuns Kassia in Byzantium and Hrosvita in the West; the aristocrat Dhuoda, author of a moral guide for her son; Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne and abbess of Chelles; and her niece Rotrude—to those who remain anonymous. Contributions also explore how the Old and New Testaments exercised influence on emerging Islam.

Features:

• Analysis of images of the Virgin Mary as a means of tracing the spread of her cult and feast days from East to West
• Exploration of the significance of classical culture for medieval women who composed poems for a Christian audience
• Evaluation of art as a means of establishing devotional relationships not necessarily mediated by the voices of preachers or the reading of texts
.

An interdisciplinary study of a familiar patriarchal narrative

Encounters in the Dark: Identity Formation in the Jacob Story traces the many moments of darkness in the life of Jacob. From the darkness of his mother's womb, to the darkness Jacob uses to deceive his father and his brother, to the night he sleeps on the ground with just a stone for a pillow at Bethel, and to the triumphant scene of wrestling God by the Jabbok River, the biblical story frequently situates Jacob in the darkness. Through an exploration of key moments in Jacob's story, Noel Forlini Burt follows Jacob's journey from home to exile and back home again. His story symbolizes the larger story of Israel's own wrestling with God in the darkness of exile and return.

Features

• An exploration of the poetics and rhetoric of the Jacob story
• An examination of characterization in its ancient and modern contexts
• An analysis of individual and collective identity

Editorial Techniques in the Hebrew Bible: Toward a Refined Literary Criticism presents and applies a model for understanding and reconstructing the diachronic development of the Hebrew Bible through historical criticism (or the historical-critical method). Reinhard Müller and Juha Pakkala refine the methodologies of literary and redaction criticism through a systematic investigation of the evidence of additions, omissions, replacements, and transpositions that are documented by divergent ancient textual traditions. At stake is not only historical criticism but also the Hebrew Bible as a historical source, for historical criticism has been and continues to be the only method to unwind those scribal changes that left no traces in textual variants.

A new perspective on editorial activity in the Hebrew Bible for research and teaching

Evidence of Editing lays out the case for substantial and frequent editorial activity within the Hebrew Bible. The authors show how editors omitted, expanded, rewrote, and compiled both smaller and larger phrases and passages to address religious and political change. The book refines the exegetical method of literary and redaction criticism, and its results have important consequences for the future use of the Hebrew Bible in historical and theological studies.

Features:

• Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic examples of editorial activity
• Clear explanations of the distinctions between textual, literary, and redaction criticism
• Fifteen chapters attesting to continual editorial activity in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings

Paradise haunts the Biblical West. At once the place of origin and exile, utopia and final destination, it has shaped our poetic and religious imagination and informed literary and theological accounts of man’s relation with his creator, with language and history. For Kant, Paradise was the inaugural moment for the rise and progress of reason as the agency of human history, slowly but certainly driving humanity away from error and superstition. Nietzsche described it more somberly as the very embodiment of the conflict between humanity and its beliefs.

In Earthly Paradise, Milad Doueihi contemplates key moments in the philosophical reception and uses of Paradise, marked by the rise of critical and historical methods in the Early Modern period. How do modern debates around the nature of evil, free will, and the origin of language grow out of the philosophical interpretations of Paradise as the site of human history? How do the reflections of Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, and their contemporaries inform our current ideas about the Biblical narrative of the Fall? Is Paradise the source of human error or an utopian vision of humanity itself?

A new perspective on essential aspects of Esther’s plot and characters for students and scholars

Empire and Gender in LXX Esther foregrounds and highlights empire as the central lens in this provocative new reading of Esther. This book provides a unique synchronic reading of LXX Esther with the Additions, allowing the presence and negotiation of imperial power to be further illuminated throughout the story’s plot. Stone explores and demonstrates how performances of gender are inextricably intertwined with the exertion and negotiation of imperial power portrayed in LXX Esther and offers examples of connections to the range of imperial power experienced by Jewish people during the late Second Temple period.

Features:

• An exploration of the tenets and methodology of imperial-critical approaches
• Focused attention to the final form of LXX Esther
• Construction of early audiences for LXX Esther in first-century BCE Ptolemaic Alexandria and Hasmonean Judea