Amos Wilder’s study of early Christian rhetoric, first published in this country and in England in 1964, was hailed as the basic work on the literary art of the New Testament, important for its analysis of oral forms and for its insight into the novelty of New Testament speech.
The Tale Review commented, “Wilder brings to this study of New Testament language not only the ability of a recognized scholar in that field, but also a long-standing and well-informed interest in the broader literary picture. Working both these interests simultaneously, he argues that form and content in the language of the New Testament are integrally related… Here is nontechnical writing on the New Testament at its best, a book which should be of general interest to a large circle of readers, and it is a pleasure to note that for words the author’s hand is as keen as his eye.”
In his introduction to this reissue, Mr. Wilder explains more particularly the aim and method of the work, discusses the significance of his approach in current biblical interpretation, and considers some recent developments in the specifically “literary” and rhetorical aspects of New Testament study.
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.
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 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.
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:
This monograph is a study of the Rgyal ba'i dben gnas rwa sgreng gi bshad pa nyi ma'i 'od zer (Rays of the Sun: A Statement about Rwa sgreng Monastery, Hermitage of the Victor), which is a newly discovered hand-written manuscript from the Fifth Dalai Lama’s private library at 'Bras spungs monastery, Lhasa. It is the first known work devoted solely to Rwa sgreng monastery, the mother monastery of the Bka' gdams school founded by 'Brom ston Rgyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1005–1064) in 1057 after the death of his master Atiśa (982–1054).
The Bka' gdams school no longer exists, but it has greatly influenced major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, such as Dge lugs, Bka' brgyud, and Sa skya school. Rwa sgreng monastery itself has shifted to the Dge lugs school, but it still has a strong presence as a monastery related to Bka' gdams school. Since this work was written at approximately the end of the thirteenth century, it is a relatively early text in the history of the Bka' gdams school, and it provides valuable historical, political, and sociological data on Rwa sgreng monastery.
This study aids understanding of the history of Rwa sgreng monastery and the early Bka' gdams school—and more broadly illuminates important aspects of Tibetan history.
This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet. It affords a glimpse of one Tibetan scholar's efforts to classify more than two thousand titles of Buddhist literature in the decades before the canonical collections known as the Bka' 'gyur and the Bstan 'gyur achieved a relatively stable form. Tibetan historiography traces the origin of the Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur to Bcom ldan ral gri's efforts, though the unique structure of the Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od, which differs greatly from available Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur catalogs, shows that the situation is more complex.
Known to contemporary scholars of Tibetan literature for some time through mention in other works, Bcom ldan ral gri's survey has recently become available for the first time in two manuscripts. The present work contains a detailed historical introduction, an annotated edition of the two manuscripts, as well as concordances and appendices intended to aid the comparative study of early Tibetan collections of Indic Buddhist literature.
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?
Christianity has been spread in Africa by Africans. It is the story of peoples seizing control of their own spiritual destinies—rather than the commonplace notion that the continent’s Christian churches represent colonial and capitalist powers that helped subdue Africans to European domination. In short, once introduced, Christianity took on a powerful life of its own and spun out of the control of those who would retain ownership of doctrine and practice. East African Expressions of Christianity examines the experiences of African Christians as they explored the new faith, interpreted it in the context of their own values, appropriated it for themselves, and forged their own distinctive churches. Prominent Tanzanian and American historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and church people examine the translation of religious meanings across cultural boundaries; the religious and social appeal of the new faith; and the vital roles played by African evangelists, teachers, and translators in the spread of Christianity and the development of an African church.
Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, Kent L. Brintnall also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men’s bodies and open them up to eroticization. Locating the roots of our cultural fascination with male pain in the crucifixion, he analyzes the way narratives of Christ’s death and resurrection both support and subvert cultural fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Through stimulating readings of works by Georges Bataille, Kaja Silverman, and more, Brintnall delineates the redemptive power of representations of male suffering and violence.
Abbatial annals of medieval England.
Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in AD 672 or 673 in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.
Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes.
The first comprehensive history of early Christianity.
Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. AD 260–340), born in Palestine, was a student of the presbyter Pamphilus, whom he loyally supported during Diocletian’s persecution. He was himself imprisoned in Egypt, but became Bishop of Caesarea around 314. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he sat by the emperor, led a party of moderates, and made the first draft of the famous creed.
Of Eusebius’ many learned publications we have the Martyrs of Palestine and the Life of Constantine; several apologetic and polemic works; parts of his commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah; and the Chronographia, known chiefly in Armenian and Syriac versions of the original Greek. But Eusebius’ chief fame rests on the History of the Christian Church in ten books, published in 324–325, the most important ecclesiastical history of ancient times, a great treasury of knowledge about the early Church.
Abbatial annals of medieval England.
Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in AD 672 or 673 in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.
Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes.
The first comprehensive history of early Christianity.
Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. AD 260–340), born in Palestine, was a student of the presbyter Pamphilus, whom he loyally supported during Diocletian’s persecution. He was himself imprisoned in Egypt, but became Bishop of Caesarea around 314. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he sat by the emperor, led a party of moderates, and made the first draft of the famous creed.
Of Eusebius’ many learned publications we have the Martyrs of Palestine and the Life of Constantine; several apologetic and polemic works; parts of his commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah; and the Chronographia, known chiefly in Armenian and Syriac versions of the original Greek. But Eusebius’ chief fame rests on the History of the Christian Church in ten books, published in 324–325, the most important ecclesiastical history of ancient times, a great treasury of knowledge about the early Church.
In this volume, prominent Buddhist scholar Donald Swearer posits that the future requires a radical shift toward living in recognition of the interdependence of all life forms and the consequent ethic of communality and a life style of moderation or “enoughness” that flows from that recognition, which he calls “an ecology of human flourishing.” Swearer has assembled world-class thinkers to explore and imagine several dimensions of an ecology of human flourishing: economic, sociological, religious, ethical, environmental, historical, literary; how notions of human flourishing, quality of life, and common good have been constructed; and, in the contemporary world, how they are illuminated or are challenged by issues of distributive justice, poverty and economic inequality, global health, and environmental sustainability.
With contributors ranging from ecoactivist Bill McKibben and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, to transformative theologian Sallie McFague and Malaysian critic of global injustice Chandra Muzzafar, this book expresses ethical and religious aspirations to remake the world in the midst of the contradictions, injustices, and problems of our daily lives and today's global economic and climate crises.
The scientific, political, and economic policy debates about the global environmental crisis have tended to ignore its historical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic dimensions. This book redresses that omission by highlighting these humanistic components that are integral to the fabric of our ecological understanding and, consequentially, essential to a broad, multidisciplinary approach to environmental studies and public policy initiatives.
In this slim volume, seven world-class scholars discuss the wide range of perspectives that the fields of literature, history, religion, philosophy, environmental ethics, and anthropology bring to the natural environment and our place in it. The preface summarizes the development of the religion and ecology movement; the editor’s critical introduction highlights the essays’ major themes. Bringing insights from the humanities to bear on ecological concerns, this volume will appeal to a wide audience in the humanities and environmental studies, policy makers, and the general public. The book represents a continuation of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ highly regarded Religions of the World and Ecology series.
Ecology and the Environment: The Mechanisms, Marring, and Maintenance of Nature is the ninth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, R. J. Berry, a well-known leader in the field of ecology, describes the basic concepts of ecology and seeks to put them into a general context for a reader who lacks any scientific background.
Religion has not been a popular target for economic analysis. Yet the tools of economics can offer deep insights into how religious groups compete, deliver social services, and reach out to potential converts—how, in daily life, religions nurture and deploy market power. Sriya Iyer puts these tools to use in an expansive, creative study of India, one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world.
Iyer explores how growth, inequality, education, technology, and social trends both affect and are affected by religious groups. Her exceptionally rich data—drawn from ten years of research, including a survey of almost 600 religious organizations in seven states—reveal the many ways religions interact with social welfare and political conflict. After India’s economy was liberalized in 1991, she shows, religious organizations substantially increased their provision of services, compensating for the retreat of the state. Iyer’s data also indicate that religious violence is more common where economic growth is higher, apparently because growth increases inequality, which sectarian politicians might exploit to encourage hostility toward other religions. As inequality leads to social polarization, religious doctrines become more extreme. But there are hopeful patterns in Iyer’s data, too. Religious organizations, on balance, play a positive role in India’s socioeconomic development, and women’s participation in religious life is on the rise.
The Economics of Religion in India has much to teach us about India and other pluralistic societies the world over, and about the power of economics to illuminate some of societies’ deepest beliefs and dynamics.
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.
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.
One hundred and sixty invited scholars and specialists—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—and 2000 other clergy and lay people took part in the historic colloquium sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School in 1963 as a Protestant response to the Second Vatican Council. This volume includes the Stillman Lectures on the Unity of Christians given by Augustin Cardinal Bea, President of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity as well as all the other major addresses and proceedings of the colloquium.
In the words of Richard Cardinal Cushing, “The spirit of Christian love which could be felt in every session, along with the distinguished company of scholars which the University had assembled from far and near, guaranteed that these days would be so memorable as to demand an accessible and enduring record. We now have just such a record in these pages.” Encompassing a wide range of religious convictions, this topical and exciting book provides an illuminating perspective on the problems involved in the ecumenical dialogue and helps to define the vital issues that continue to divide Christians today.
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 Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. The Edge of Islam advances understanding of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession, local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of “Islam” across cultures.
The twentieth anniversary of the beatification of Edith Stein (1891–1942), the accomplished Jewish philosopher who made a spiritual journey from atheism to agnosticism before eventually converting to Catholicism, will be celebrated in 2007. In Edith Stein: Philosopher and Mystic, Josephine Koeppel chronicles the life of this influential saint from her secular youth and entrance into a German monastery to her tragic death at Auschwitz. This accessible work will reward readers of all faiths interested in the life of a remarkable woman who changed the modern conception of sainthood.
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 comprehensive history of a state on Judah’s border
Edom at the Edge of Empire combines biblical, epigraphic, archaeological, and comparative evidence to reconstruct the history of Judah's neighbor to the southeast. Crowell traces the material and linguistic evidence, from early Egyptian sources that recall conflicts with nomadic tribes to later Assyrian texts that reference compliant Edomite tribal kings, to offer alternative scenarios regarding Edom's transformation from a collection of nomadic tribes and workers in the Wadi Faynan as it relates to the later polity centered around the city of Busayra in the mountains of southern Jordan. This is the first book to incorporate the important evidence from the Wadi Faynan copper mines into a thorough account of Edom's history, providing a key resource for students and scholars of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible.
What is the relationship between religious belief and the study of nature, between theology and science? This is the fundamental preoccupation of the three different studies in Einstein, Polanyi, and the Laws of Nature.
By exploring the highly original yet little-known thought of Michael Polanyi, Jaeger highlights the inherent personal investment in any quest for knowledge, including the scientific enterprise, thus raising the question of the objectivity of human knowledge. Considered to be the most incredible mind of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein saw scientific research as the fruit of the “cosmic religion.” His response to the question of the relationship between faith and science also receives the close analysis it deserves. Finally, Jaeger is interested in science’s propensity to use the concept of laws of nature, an idea also found in the Bible. She paves the way for interdisciplinary dialogue by examining the similarities and differences.
The synthesis of these three complementary studies brings out the collaboration between belief and knowledge, thus establishing a bridge between two noble human activities: faith and scientific research. It will interest all serious followers of the ongoing science and religion dialogue.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified." In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress, Linda M. Lewis studies Browning's religion as poetry, her poetry as religion. The book interprets Browning's literary life as an arduous spiritual quest—the successive stages being a rejection of Promethean pride for Christ-like humility, affirmation of the gospels of suffering and of work, internalization of the doctrine of Apocalypse, and ascent to divine love and truth.
Lewis follows this religious crusade from the poet's childhood to her posthumous Last Poems--including such topics as her Bible reading, her introduction to the Greek church fathers and the English Protestant reformers, the theological debates in which she participated, her quarrel with the theology of Paradise Lost, and her scandalous involvement in mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. Using insights from contemporary feminist thought, Lewis argues that Browning's religious assumptions and insights range from the conventional to the iconoclastic and that women's spirituality is, for Browning as well as for other Victorian women writers, separate from orthodox patriarchy. Lewis demonstrates that Browning's political and social ideology--often labeled inconsistent and illogical—really makes sense in light of this spiritual quest, which leads her to confront her God "face to face."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress examines not only Browning's most admired works, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but also her large body of political works and her important early poems—The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile. This intertextual book compares Browning's ideology to that of feminists such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale; influential conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle; and those most esteemed of Victorian poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.
Concluding with an examination of religion as a central focus of Victorian women poets, Lewis clarifies the ways in which Browning differs from Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow, and Mary Howitt. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress maintains that Browning's peculiar face-to-face struggle with the patristic and poetic tradition—as well as with God—sets her work apart.
“Solomon’s fascinating and sweeping history of the legal fight over mandatory school prayers is compelling, judicious, and elegantly written. Fabulous!”
—David Rudenstine, Dean, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
“Stephen Solomon’s Ellery’s Protest provides a brilliant analysis of a major Supreme Court decision that redefined the relationship between church and state almost a half century ago. This study goes well beyond simply offering a gripping account of the course of litigation that brought before the Justices the contentious issue of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, though the thoroughness of that account would merit careful reading by itself. Especially impressive is the author’s deep probing of hitherto neglected sources, and invaluable primary material including extensive direct contact with the plaintiff, the ‘Ellery’ of the book’s title. Finally, and perhaps most impressive, is Solomon’s careful placement of the issue and the case in a far broader context that is as critical to national life and policy today as it was four and a half decades ago when the high Court first tackled these questions.”
—Robert O’Neil, Professor of Law, University of Virginia
Great legal decisions often result from the heroic actions of average citizens. Ellery’s Protest is the story of how one student’s objection to mandatory school prayer and Bible reading led to one of the most controversial court cases of the twentieth century—and a decision that still reverberates in the battle over the role of religion in public life.
Abington School District v. Schempp began its journey through the nation’s courts in 1956, when sixteen-year-old Ellery Schempp protested his public school’s compulsory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. Ejected from class for his actions, Schempp sued the school district. The Supreme Court’s decision in his favor was one of the most important rulings on religious freedom in our nation’s history. It prompted a conservative backlash that continues to this day, in the skirmishes over school prayer, the teaching of creationism and intelligent design, and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “under God.”
Author Stephen D. Solomon tells the fascinating personal and legal drama of the Schempp case: the family’s struggle against the ugly reactions of neighbors, and the impassioned courtroom clashes as brilliant lawyers on both sides argued about the meaning of religious freedom. But Schempp was not the only case challenging religious exercises in the schools at the time, and Ellery’s Protest describes the race to the Supreme Court among the attorneys for four such cases, including one involving the colorful atheist Madalyn Murray.
Solomon also explores the political, cultural, and religious roots of the controversy. Contrary to popular belief, liberal justices did not kick God out of the public schools. Bitter conflict over school Bible reading had long divided Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Eventually, it was the American people themselves who removed most religious exercises from public education as a more religiously diverse nation chose tolerance over sectarianism. Ellery’s Protest offers a vivid account of the case that embodied this change, and a reminder that conservative justices of the 1950s and 60s not only signed on to the Schempp decision, but strongly endorsed the separation of church and state.
In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades.
Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers. Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher. Emerson in His Sermons is the first major study of the sermons since the publication of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.
Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought. Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.
Roberson focuses on Emerson's reaction to what was perhaps the most signifcant event in his personal life: the death of his young wife, Ellen, of tuberculosis in 1831, after only sixteen months of marriage. Roberson's correlation of the sermons written during that time with the complexity of Emerson's emotional and intellectual response to the tragedy of Ellen's illness and death is the most detailed and sophisticated treatment of that material to date.
Roberson understands Emerson's emergence from the ministry as his rejection of ready-made institutions and sytems of thought. Through her careful readings of the sermons, Roberson finds that Emerson's objective was less the translation of his life into writing than the translation of his life through writing. By considering the sermons in this way, Roberson is able to enrich our understanding of the private and passionte impulses of this seminal thinker.
Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship. Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.
Kathleen Flake, associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University examines the logic of those women who thrived, rather than suffered, in early Mormon polygamy, and finds that the marriage covenant granted them priestly rights and independence through the powers of heaven.
China was the most advanced country in the world when Huizong ascended the throne in 1100 CE. In his eventful twenty-six year reign, the artistically-gifted emperor guided the Song Dynasty toward cultural greatness. Yet Huizong would be known to posterity as a political failure who lost the throne to Jurchen invaders and died their prisoner. The first comprehensive English-language biography of this important monarch, Emperor Huizong is a nuanced portrait that corrects the prevailing view of Huizong as decadent and negligent. Patricia Ebrey recasts him as a ruler genuinely ambitious—if too much so—in pursuing glory for his flourishing realm.
After a rocky start trying to overcome political animosities at court, Huizong turned his attention to the good he could do. He greatly expanded the court’s charitable ventures, founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, and paupers’ cemeteries. An accomplished artist, he surrounded himself with outstanding poets, painters, and musicians and built palaces, temples, and gardens of unsurpassed splendor. What is often overlooked, Ebrey points out, is the importance of religious Daoism in Huizong’s understanding of his role. He treated Daoist spiritual masters with great deference, wrote scriptural commentaries, and urged his subjects to adopt his beliefs and practices. This devotion to the Daoist vision of sacred kingship eventually alienated the Confucian mainstream and compromised his ability to govern.
Readers will welcome this lively biography, which adds new dimensions to our understanding of a passionate and paradoxical ruler who, so many centuries later, continues to inspire both admiration and disapproval.
The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history.
Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.
Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.
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:
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.
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:
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.
In Enchanted Ground, Sharon Hatfield brings to life the true story of a nineteenth-century farmer-turned-medium, Jonathan Koons, one of thousands of mediums throughout the antebellum United States. In the hills outside Athens, Ohio, Koons built a house where it was said the dead spoke to the living, and where ancient spirits communicated the wisdom of the ages. Curious believers, in homespun and in city attire, traveled from as far as New Orleans to a remote Appalachian cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions.
Yet Koons’s story is much more than showmanship and sleight of hand. His enterprise, not written about in full until now, embodied the excitement and optimism of citizens breaking free from societal norms. Reform-minded dreamers were drawn to Koons’s seances as his progressive brand of religion displaced the gloomy Calvinism of previous generations. As heirs to the Second Great Awakening, which stretched from New York State to the far reaches of the Northwest Territory, the curious, the faithful, and Koons himself were part of a larger, uniquely American moment that still marks the cultural landscape today.
“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy…McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.”
—The Observer
At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct.
Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls.
“A majestic achievement…It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.”
—Commonweal
“More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion…will stun even skeptical readers.”
—Christian Century
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.
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
One of the classics of modern spirituality, Encounters with Silence is one of Karl Rahner’s most lucid and powerful books. A book of meditations about man’s relation with God, it is not a work of dry theology, but rather a book of prayerful reflections on love, knowledge, and faith, obedience, everyday routines, life with our friends and neighbors, our work and vocation, and human goodness. The immense success of this moving work is a tribute to its practicality and the ability of the great theologian to speak simply and yet profoundly to ordinary men and women seeking an inspiring guide to the inner life, one that never forsakes the world of reality. The book is cast in the form of a dialogue with God that moves from humble but concerned inquiry to joyful contemplation.
“You will come again because the fact that you have already come must continue to be revealed ever more clearly. It must become progressively manifest to the world that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart. . . . The false appearance of our world, the shabby pretense that it has not been liberated . . . must be more and more thoroughly rooted out and destroyed. . . . And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of your advent.” (from the book)
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:
The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West’s greatest thinkers. But, according to Guy Stroumsa, the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco-Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East.
The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, scriptural study, rituals like praying and fasting, and the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco-Roman religions and, Stroumsa argues, transform religion itself.
A concise and original approach to a much-studied moment in religious history, The End of Sacrifice will be heralded by all scholars of late antiquity.
In Engaged Spirituality, Gregory C. Stanczak challenges this assumption, arguing that spirituality plays an important social role as well. Based on more than one hundred interviews with individuals of diverse faith traditions, the book shows how prayer, meditation, and ritual provide foundations for activism. Among the stories, a Buddhist monk in Los Angeles intimately describes the physical sensations of strength and compassion that sweep her body when she recites the Buddha’s name in times of selfless service, and a Protestant reverend explains how the calm serenity that she feels during retreats allows her to direct her multi-service agency in San Francisco to creative successes that were previously unimaginable.
In an age when Madonna studies Kabbalah and the internet is bringing Buddhism to the white middle-class, it is clear that formal religious affiliations are no longer enough. Stanczak’s critical examination of spirituality provides us with a way of discussing the factors that impel individuals into social activism and forces us to rethink the question of how “religion” and “spirituality” might be defined.
Catholic colleges and universities have achieved a prestigious place in American higher education, but at the risk of losing their religious identity. This book confronts challenges facing all members of the college community, from presidents and trustees through the faculty and deans to student-life professionals, in making a renewed commitment to that mission.
Developing the vision of Catholic higher education expressed in the Vatican statement Ex Corde Ecclesiae, these essays provide a framework for enhancing Catholic identity across the campus and in the curriculum. The contributors address significant aspects of the culture of Catholic higher education in order to prescribe the best practices that can help colleges and universities maintain their distinctive religious character and ethical vision.
The Enigmatic Academy is a provocative look at the purpose and practice of education in America. Authors Christian Churchill and Gerald Levy use three case studies—a liberal arts college, a boarding school, and a Job Corps center—to illustrate how class, bureaucratic, and secular-religious dimensions of education prepare youth for participation in American foreign and domestic policy at all levels.
The authors describe how schools contribute to the formation of a bureaucratic character; how middle and upper class students are trained for leadership positions in corporations, government, and the military; and how the education of lower class students often serves more powerful classes and institutions.
Exploring how youth and their educators encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in school, The Enigmatic Academy deepens our understanding of the flawed redemptive relationship between education and society in the United States. Paradoxically, these three studied schools all prepare students to participate in a society whose values they oppose.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press