Based on the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and Emanuel Swedenborg, Peter Rhodes presents a practical guide to spiritual progress. Stressing personal responsibility for overcoming negative traits, each chapter explains how we can realize our true spiritual potential by cultivating awareness of our baser reactions and by applying the tools of Gurdjieff's spiritual method, "The Work," to our everyday existence.
Rhodes joins "The Work" with the spiritual philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg to enhance our understanding of how the world of spirit intersects our lives on the earthly level. At the conclusion of each chapter, tools for measuring the reader's progress are provided in the form of weekly tasks and meditations. This book can be used in group workshops or by the individual.
Old Norse mythology is elusive: it is the label used to describe the religious stories of the pre-Christian North, featuring such well-known gods as Odin and Thor, yet most of the narratives have come down to us in manuscripts from the Middle Ages mainly written by Christians. Our view of the stories as they were transmitted in oral form in the pre-Christian era is obscured.
To overcome these limitations, this book assembles comparisons from a range of theoretical and analytical perspectives—across media, cultures, and disciplines. Fifteen scholars from a wide range of fields examine the similarities of and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures. The differences and similarities within the Old Norse corpus itself are examined to tease out the hidden clues to the original stories.
The sacred landscape of imperial China was dotted with Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples, shrines to local deities, and the altars of the mandarinate. Prominent among the official shrines were the temples in every capital throughout the empire devoted to the veneration of Confucius. Twice a year members of the educated elite and officials in each area gathered to offer sacrifices to Confucius, his disciples, and the major scholars of the Confucian tradition.
The worship of Confucius is one of the least understood aspects of Confucianism, even though the temple and the cult were highly visible signs of Confucianism's existence in imperial China. To many modern observers of traditional China, the temple cult is difficult to reconcile with the image of Confucianism as an ethical, humanistic, rational philosophy. The nine essays in this book are an attempt to recover the meaning and significance of the religious side of Confucianism. Among other subjects, the authors analyze the social, cultural, and political meaning attached to the cult; its history; the legends, images, and rituals associated with the worship of Confucius; the power of the descendants of Confucius, the main temple in the birthplace of Confucius; and the contemporary fate of temples to Confucius.
2004 – Harvey L. Johnson Award – Southwest Council of Latin American Studies
In the tumultuous decades following Mexico's independence from Spain, religion provided a unifying force among the Mexican people, who otherwise varied greatly in ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Accordingly, religion and the popular cultures surrounding it form the lens through which Terry Rugeley focuses this cultural history of southeast Mexico from independence (1821) to the rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1876.
Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Rugeley vividly reconstructs the folklore, beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices of the Maya and Hispanic peoples of the Yucatán. In engagingly written chapters, he explores folklore and folk wisdom, urban piety, iconography, and anticlericalism. Interspersed among the chapters are detailed portraits of individual people, places, and institutions, that, with the archival evidence, offer a full and fascinating history of the outlooks, entertainments, and daily lives of the inhabitants of southeast Mexico in the nineteenth century. Rugeley also links this rich local history with larger events to show how macro changes in Mexico affected ordinary people.
An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality
Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.
On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.
On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process.
In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.
Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church–state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church–state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church–state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
The intense piety of late T'ang essays on Buddhism by literati has helped earn the T'ang its title of the "golden age of Chinese Buddhism." In contrast, the Sung is often seen as an age in which the literati distanced themselves from Buddhism. This study of Sung devotional texts shows, however, that many literati participated in intra-Buddhist debates. Others were drawn to Buddhism because of its power, which found expression and reinforcement in its ties with the state. For some, monasteries were extravagant houses of worship that reflected the corruption of the age; for others, the sacrifice and industry demanded by such projects were exemplars worthy of emulation. Finally, Buddhist temples could evoke highly personal feelings of filial piety and nostalgia.
This book demonstrates that representations of Buddhism by lay people underwent a major change during the T'ang-Sung transition. These changes built on basic transformations within the Buddhist and classicist traditions and sometimes resulted in the use of Buddhism and Buddhist temples as frames of reference to evaluate aspects of lay society. Buddhism, far from being pushed to the margins of Chinese culture, became even more a part of everyday elite Chinese life.
Bringing together essential materials on the origins and development of Buddhist traditions from India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, and Japan, this anthology provides the broadest selection of primary source Buddhist literature available to date.
The volume is divided into two major parts: Theravada and Mahayana forms of Buddhism. The first section presents selections that explore major themes in Buddhist thought such as causality, Four Noble Truths, the doctrine of non-self, nibbana, meditation, and ethics, as well as literature about monastic life and regulations, women, and hagiography.
The second part includes selections from so-called wisdom literature and texts that represent the three major schools of Mahayana Buddhism: Pure Land, Madhyamika, and Yogacara. Selections also include sources from some of the major Chinese Buddhist schools such as Hua-yen, T'ien T'ai, Pure Land, and Ch'an. Readings by thinkers such as Tantric Buddhist reformer Tsong Khapa, Pure Land leaders Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren, as well as Zen Buddhists Dogen and Hakuin provide a perspective on regional and national traditions.
In addition to the general introduction, each major section is introduced by an essay that places the selections within the context of Buddhist history. This comprehensive reader stands on its own as an indispensable anthology of original textual sources for courses in Buddhism, while also serving as a companion volume to the text The Different Paths of Buddhism: A Narrative-Historical Introduction.
The Book of Pastoral Rule, or Liber regulae pastoralis, by Pope Gregory the Great—the pontiff responsible for the conversion of the English to Christianity beginning in 597—is a guide for aspiring bishops. Pope Gregory explains who ought and who ought not seek such a position and advises on what sort of spiritual guidance a bishop should provide to those under his direction.
The Old English Pastoral Care, a translation of Gregory’s treatise completed between 890 and 896, is described in a prefatory letter by King Alfred the Great as his own work, composed with the assistance of his bishops and chaplains. It appears to be the first of the Alfredian translations into Old English of Latin texts deemed necessary for the revitalization of the English Church, which had been ravaged by the depredations of Scandinavian invaders during the ninth century and by the decline of clerical competence in Latin.
This new edition and translation into modern English is the first to appear in a century and a half.
Maximos the Confessor (580–662) occupies a unique position in the history of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and spirituality. His profound spiritual experiences and penetrating theological vision found complex and often astonishing expression in his unparalleled command of Greek philosophy, making him one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. So thoroughly did his thought come to influence the Byzantine theological tradition that it is impossible to trace the subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity without knowledge of his work.
The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period.
This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically-based edition or English translation.
Maximos the Confessor (580–662) occupies a unique position in the history of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and spirituality. His profound spiritual experiences and penetrating theological vision found complex and often astonishing expression in his unparalleled command of Greek philosophy, making him one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. So thoroughly did his thought come to influence the Byzantine theological tradition that it is impossible to trace the subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity without knowledge of his work.
The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period.
This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically-based edition or English translation.
The roots of conservative Christian skepticism of international politics run deep. In this original work Markku Ruotsila artfully unearths the historical and theological origins of evangelical Christian thought on modern-day international organizations and U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the fierce debates over the first truly international body—the League of Nations.
After describing the rise of the Social Gospel movement that played a vital, foundational role in the movement toward a League of Nations, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism examines the arguments and tactics that the most influential confessional Christian congregations in the United States—dispensational millenialists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and, to a lesser extent, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Christian Restorationists—used to undermine domestic support for the proposed international body. Ruotsila recounts how these groups learned to co-opt less religious-minded politicians and organizations that were likewise opposed to the very concept of international multilateralism. In closely analyzing how the evangelical movement successfully harnessed political activism to sway U.S. foreign policy, he traces a direct path from the successful battle against the League to the fundamentalist-modernist clashes of the 1920s and the present-day debate over America's role in the world.
This exploration of why the United States ultimately rejected the League of Nations offers a lucid interpretation of the significant role that religion plays in U.S. policymaking both at home and abroad. Ruotsila's analysis will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of theology, religious studies, religion and politics, international relations, domestic policy, and U.S. and world history.
Reexamining religious culture in seventeenth-century New England, Janice Knight discovers a contest of rival factions within the Puritan orthodoxy. Arguing that two distinctive strains of Puritan piety emerged in England prior to the migration to America, Knight describes a split between rationalism and mysticism, between theologies based on God’s command and on God’s love. A strong countervoice, expressed by such American divines as John Cotton, John Davenport, and John Norton and the Englishmen Richard Sibbes and John Preston, articulated a theology rooted in Divine Benevolence rather than Almighty Power, substituting free testament for conditional covenant to describe God’s relationship to human beings.
Knight argues that the terms and content of orthodoxy itself were hotly contested in New England and that the dominance of rationalist preachers like Thomas Hooker and Peter Bulkeley has been overestimated by scholars. Establishing the English origins of the differences, Knight rereads the controversies of New England’s first decades as proof of a continuing conflict between the two religious ideologies. The Antinomian Controversy provides the focus for a new understanding of the volatile processes whereby orthodoxies are produced and contested. This book gives voice to this alternative piety within what is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England, and shows the political, social, and literary implications of those differences.
An engaging anthology that deals with both theory and practice
The emerging discipline of biblical spirituality considers how faith finds expression within the biblical texts and how modern expressions of faith interact with those texts. This volume represents Christo Lombaard’s reflective, analytical, and exegetical contributions to the field in order to explore how biblical texts mediate faith, both ancient and contemporary. It reflects on aspects of the interaction of faith and Scripture, critically approaching both dimensions.
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The book of Job is a complex, sophisticated treatment of the problem of undeserved suffering. It is also a sustained meditation on creation, on humanity’s place in creation, and on God’s ordering of creation. In this study, Kathryn Schifferdecker offers a close literary and theological reading of the book of Job—particularly of the speeches of God at the end of the book—in order to articulate its creation theology, which is particularly pertinent in our environmentally-conscious age.
After all of Job’s agonized questioning, God’s answer does not directly address Job’s questions about undeserved suffering or divine justice. Instead, the divine speeches take Job on a God’s-eye tour of creation in all its beauty and complexity. In extraordinarily detailed and beautiful poetry, the divine speeches show Job that the world is radically non-anthropocentric, that there exist wild places and animals whose value has nothing to do with their usefulness to humanity, and that God delights in the freedom of God’s creatures. This vision of the divine speeches enables Job to move out of despair into renewed participation in God’s often-dangerous but beautiful world.
This creation theology of Job, virtually unique in the Bible, has much to say to us today, as we struggle theologically and politically with the issues of environmental degradation and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or recited in private devotion by lay people. They were also translated into Old English, first in prose and later in verse. Sometime in the middle of the eleventh century, the prose and verse translations were brought together and organized in a complementary sequence in a manuscript now known as the Paris Psalter. The prose version, traditionally attributed to King Alfred (d. 899), combines literal translation with interpretative clarification. In contrast, the anonymous Old English verse translation composed during the tenth century approaches the psalms in a spirit of prayer and devotion. Despite their differences, both reflect earnest attempts to capture the literal meaning of the psalms.
The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time. With this translation readers encounter the beginnings and the continuation of a long tradition of psalm renderings in English.
A concise study of a large number of examples of pluses and minus providing insight into translation from Hebrew to Greek
Van der Vorm-Croughs focuses this translation study on the processes leading to pluses and minuses including linguistic and stylistic aspects (i.e., cases in which elements have been added or omitted for the sake of a proper use of the Greek language), literary aspects (additions and omissions meant to embellish the Greek text), translation technical aspects (e.g., the avoidance of redundancy), and contextual and intertextual exegesis and harmonization. This work also covers the relation between the Greek Isaiah and its possible Hebrew Vorlage to try to determine which pluses and minuses may have been the result of the translator’s use of a different Hebrew text.
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A history of research that changed scholarly perceptions of early Judaism
This collection of essays by some of the most important scholars in the fields of early Judaism and Christianity celebrates fifty years of the study of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at the Society of Biblical Literature and the pioneering scholars who introduced the Pseudepigrapha to the Society. Since its early days as a breakfast meeting in 1969, the Pseudepigrapha Section has provided a forum for a rigorous discussion of these understudied texts and their relevance for Judaism and Christianity. Contributors recount the history of the section's beginnings, critically examine the vivid debates that shaped the discipline, and challenge future generations to expand the field in new interdisciplinary directions.
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Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most important religious symbol of Mexico and one of the most powerful female icons of Mexican culture. In this study, based on research done among second-generation Mexican-American women, Rodriguez examines the role the symbol of Guadalupe has played in the development of these women. She goes beyond the thematic and religious implications of the symbol to delve into its relevance to their daily lives.
Rodriguez's study offers an important reinterpretation of one of the New World's most potent symbols. Her conclusions dispute the common perception that Guadalupe is a model of servility and suffering. Rather, she reinterprets the symbol of Guadalupe as a liberating and empowering catalyst for Mexican-American women.
Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.
This volume adapts the text of Jean Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.
Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.
This volume adapts the text of Jean Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.
“How I wept at your hymns and songs, keenly moved by the sweet-sounding voices of your church!” wrote the recently converted Augustine in his Confessions. Christians from the earliest period consecrated the hours of the day and the sacred calendar, liturgical seasons and festivals of saints. This volume collects one hundred of the most important and beloved Late Antique and Medieval Latin hymns from Western Europe.
These religious voices span a geographical range that stretches from Ireland through France to Spain and Italy. They meditate on the ineffable, from Passion to Paradise, in love and trembling and praise. The authors represented here range from Ambrose in the late fourth century ce down to Bonaventure in the thirteenth. The texts cover a broad gamut in their poetic forms and meters. Although often the music has not survived, most of them would have been sung. Some of them have continued to inspire composers, such as the great thirteenth-century hymns, the Stabat mater and Dies irae.
Why does a denomination prohibiting women clergy support parishes run by women? Why does a denomination opt to ordain women when there are few women seeking to join that clergy? And why have some denominations ordained women so much earlier than others? In a revealing examination of the complex relationship among religion, social forces, and organizational structure, Ordaining Women draws examples and data from over 100 Christian denominations to explore the meaning of institutional rules about women's ordination.
Combining historical and sociological perspectives, Mark Chaves deftly shows that formal institutional rules about ordination often diverge from the actual roles of women and are best understood as symbolic gestures in favor of--or in opposition to--gender equality. Ordaining Women concludes that external pressures from the women's movement and ecumenical pressure expressed through interdenominational organizations such as the National Council of Churches influence ordination practices. At the same time, internal factors such as having a source of religious authority that is considered superior to modern principles of equal rights also explain why some denominations ordain women much earlier than others.
Surprisingly, "the Bible forbids it" does not account for policies even among fundamentalists and other biblical inerrantists. Chaves' historical and comparative approach offers a revealing analysis of how the internal denominational debates have changed over time, becoming more frequent, more politicized, and more contentious. The skillful delineation of forces affecting debates and policies about women's ordination makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of religious organizations and of gender equality.
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.
James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams’s public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. For Williams, the enforcement of religious uniformity violated the basic values of Calvinist Christianity and presumed upon God’s authority to speak to the individual conscience. He argued that state coercion was rarely effective, often causing more harm to the church and strife to the social order than did religious pluralism.
This is the first collection of Williams’s writings in forty years reaching beyond his major work, The Bloody Tenent, to include other selections from his public and private writings. This carefully annotated book introduces Williams to a new generation of readers.
This spirited book is a study of the adjustments of three nineteenth-century missionaries to life in northeast China. Its subject is international relations of the person-to-person kind, based on the daily experiences of living in a foreign land.
The missionaries all worked in the same place in China, but had remarkably different personalities and careers. Tarleton Perry Crawford of the Southern Baptist Convention was an unfeeling, not always trustworthy missionary, whose depressing story contrasts sharply with those of the other two subjects. The famous Lottie Moon, also of the Southern Baptist Convention, has become a culture heroine as the founder of women's work in China (in her name the SBC has collected 250 million dollars). Calvin Wilson Mateer, a Presbyterian, is well known to students of modern Chinese history as a great educator.
In this account of how three individuals responded to the same problems and opportunities, Irwin Hyatt seeks to discover why only some Americans placed among Chinese will find friends and a new appreciation of life. It is a fascinating investigation into the crucial cultural problem of understanding other people. As Andre Malraux has written, “Europeans never understand anything of China that does not resemble themselves.”
While female religious have grown to possess a sense of personal authority in issues impacting the laity, and have come to engage in social-issue-oriented activities, religious institutions have traditionally viewed men as the decision-makers. One Faith, Two Authorities examines the tensions of policy and authority within the gendered nature of the Catholic Church.
Jeanine Kraybilllooks at the influence of Catholic elites—specifically within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—and their opinions on public policy and relevant gender dynamics with regard to healthcare, homosexuality, immigration, and other issues. She considers the female religious’ inclusive positions as well as their opposition to ACA for bills that would be rooted in institutional positions on procreation, contraception, or abortion. Kraybill also systematically examines the claims of the 2012 Doctrinal Assessment against the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
One Faith, Two Authorities considerswhether the sisters and the male clergy are in fact in disagreement about social justice and healthcare issues and/or if women religious have influence.
A contemporary edition and translation of one of the great monuments of Old English literary and religious culture.
The homilies of the monk Ælfric, written in the last decade of the tenth century, offer some of the most important prose writing in Old English. They convey mainstream Christian thought at the turn of the millennium, a distillation of the spiritual inheritance of the English Church before the Norman Conquest and during a time of monastic reform. The homilies cover a broad range of topics, from biblical exegesis to saints’ lives to general Christian history, with a strong focus on the Gospel reading at Mass, explained in language that laypeople could understand. Ælfric is famous for his lucid prose, which he later developed into a rhythmical and alliterative style that has often been likened to verse.
In his first series of Catholic Homilies, Ælfric drew on the works of Church Fathers such as Augustine, Gregory, and Bede to create forty sermons for use throughout the church year. This is the first complete translation of the Catholic Homilies since 1844, presented alongside the newly edited Old English text.
Debate rages within the Catholic Church about the ethics of war and peace, but the simple question of why wars begin is too often neglected. Catholics’ assumptions about the causes of conflict are almost always drawn uncritically from international relations theory—a field dominated by liberalism, realism, and Marxism—which is not always consistent with Catholic theology.
In The Origins of War, Matthew A. Shadle examines several sources to better understand why war happens. His retrieval of biblical literature and the teachings of figures from church tradition sets the course for the book. Shadle then explores the growing awareness of historical consciousness within the Catholic tradition—the way beliefs and actions are shaped by time, place, and culture. He examines the work of contemporary Catholic thinkers like Pope John Paul II, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, Dorothy Day, Brian Hehir, and George Weigel. In the constructive part of the book, Shadle analyzes the movement within international relations theory known as constructivism—which proposes that war is largely governed by a set of socially constructed and cultural influences. Constructivism, Shadle claims, presents a way of interpreting international politics that is highly amenable to a Catholic worldview and can provide a new direction for the Christian vocation of peacemaking.
Since Vatican Council II, convent walls have crumbled. and the structures that once separated nuns from the world are gone. Out of the Cloister is an organizational analysis of the structural and ideological changes that took place in Catholic religious orders of women in the United States. Many nuns today dress in street clothes, choose their own jobs, have a degree of financial independence from the larger order, and may not be recognized by their coworkers as nuns. What might once have been defined as a "total institution" has become, within the span of a few years, a type of voluntary organization where members join together loosely to achieve a common purpose.
Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh approaches religious orders as utopian communities and examines how contact with the larger society has affected the distinctiveness and solidarity that hold such groups together. She analyzes the patterns occurring within orders with particular focus on the relationship between organizational change and membership loss. Since changes have been introduced into religious orders at different rates, and since orders vary in such characteristics as size and educational level of members, it is possible to analyze relationships between exit rates and other organizational variables. The complex interplay of education and membership loss is one of the organizational dilemmas the author examines.
Although she is no longer a part of organized religious life, Ebaugh spent ten years as a nun and during that time collected much of the data presented in this book. As a nun she also helped conduct a number of self-studies and evaluations involved with the post-Vatican II reform and renewal efforts. She is therefore in the unique position of a researcher who collected data as an insider and analyzed it as an outsider.
This book is one of the first systematic, empirical studies of religious orders in the United States and one of the few sociological investigations of convents and the changes occurring within them.
Father Paul M. Washington rose to local and nation prominence as an unflagging supporter of civil and women's rights. One of a handful of black priests in a traditionally white church, he fought for understanding among all people, eventually serving twenty-five years as the Rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood. Though his ideas about equality often went against the views of the Episcopal church leadership, he rejected threats of withdrawn funding or retaliation to follow his heart and his theology.
Father Washington's story is a window of insight into the struggles for justice and dignity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the tumultuous 1960s he supported the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party, and many other groups working for peace and justice, providing meeting places and guidance. He often found himself in the midst of racial disturbances—the riots on Susquehanna Avenue in 1963 and on Columbia Avenue in 1964, in front of the Board of Education where high school students protested the Eurocentric curriculum, and outside the walls of Girard College where citizens and civic leaders demonstrated against the school's exclusion of black children. In the 1980s, he helped Philadelphia city officials negotiate with MOVE members and was a vocal supporter of Ramona Africa, fighting for her release from prison. It was in his church on the corner of 18th and Diamond Streets that women were first ordained a priests in the Episcopal church. And it was one of his congregation, Barbara Harris, who became the first female Episcopal bishop.
In his evocative voice, Father Washington describes the pivotal events of his life and how each impacted upon his evolving ideas of the relationship between religion and justice. Spanning seven decades, his account is at once an insightful and unique historical account of political action, of the reformation of the church, of the changing urban landscape, and of a life graced by leadership and spiritual enlightenment.
An exploration of the ways a particular religious tradition and a distinct social context have interacted over a 300-year period, including the unique story of the oldest and largest African American Calvinist community in America
The South Carolina low country has long been regarded—not only in popular imagination and paperback novels but also by respected scholars—as a region dominated by what earlier historians called “a cavalier spirit” and by what later historians have simply described as “a wholehearted devotion to amusement and the neglect of religion and intellectual pursuits.” Such images of the low country have been powerful interpreters of the region because they have had some foundation in social and cultural realities. It is a thesis of this study, however, that there has been a strong Calvinist community in the Carolina low country since its establishment as a British colony and that this community (including in its membership both whites and after the 1740s significant numbers of African Americans) contradicts many of the images of the "received version" of the region. Rather than a devotion to amusement and a neglect of religion and intellectual interests, this community has been marked throughout most of its history by its disciplined religious life, its intellectual pursuits, and its work ethic.
In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry’s naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens’ life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men’s ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of the state-building efforts that followed the weakening of the central government induced by the First World War.
In Onomastic Reforms, H. E. Chehabi explains the traditional naming practices of Iranians before the reform, describes the public debates surrounding their obsolescence, traces the legislative measures and decrees that constituted the reform, and explores the ways Iranians chose or invented surnames for themselves.
Effie Marquess Carmack (1885-1974) grew up in the tobacco-growing region of southern Kentucky known as the Black Patch. As an adult she moved to Utah, back to Kentucky, to Arizona, and finally to California. Economic necessity primarily motivated Effie and her husband's moves, but her conversion to the Mormon Church in youth also was a factor. Throughout her life, she was committed to preserving the rural, southern folkways she had experienced as a child. She and other members of her family were folk musicians, at times professionally, and she also became a folk poet and artist, teaching herself to paint. In the 1940s she began writing her autobiography and eventually also completed a verse adaptation of it and an unpublished novel about life in the Black Patch.
Jan Vansina’s 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina’s success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis.
Now, Vansina—with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research—has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission and potential uses of oral material.
“Those embarking on the challenging adventure of historical fieldwork with an oral community will find the book a valuable companion, filled with good practical advice. Those who already have collected bodies of oral material, or who strive to interpret and analyze that collected by others, will be forced to subject their own methodological approaches to a critical reexamination in the light of Vansina’s thoughtful and provocative insights. . . . For the second time in a quarter of a century, we are profoundly in the debt of Jan Vansina.”—Research in African Literatures
“Oral Traditions as History is an essential addition to the basic literature of African history.”—American Historical Review
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