“The most significant contribution to rethinking the origins and course of the First Crusade for a generation.”
—Mark Whittow, Times Literary Supplement
“Filled with Byzantine intrigue, in every sense this book is important, compellingly revisionist and impressive. It refocuses the familiar western story through the eyes of the emperor of the east and fills in the missing piece of the puzzle of the Crusades.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography
“Highly readable…its presentation of political machinations, compromises, and betrayals seems utterly convincing.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“A dazzling book, perfectly combining deep scholarship and easy readability. The most important addition to Crusading literature since Steven Runciman.”
—John Julius Norwich, author of Byzantium
“Fluent and dramatic…Frankopan rightly places the Emperor Alexios at the heart of the First Crusade, skillfully adding a dimension frequently missing from our understanding of this seminal event.”
—Jonathan Phillips, author of Holy Warriors
In 1096, an expedition of extraordinary scale and ambition set off from western Europe on a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Three years later, after a journey that saw acute hardship, the most severe dangers, and thousands of casualties, the knights of the First Crusade found themselves storming the fortifications and capturing the Holy City. Against all odds, the expedition had returned Jerusalem to Christian hands.
In this groundbreaking book, Peter Frankopan paints a vivid picture of this infamous confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Basing his account on long-ignored eastern sources, he gives a provocative and highly original explanation of the world-changing events that followed. The Vatican’s victory cemented papal power, while Constantinople, the heart of the still-vital Byzantine Empire, never recovered. Frankopan’s revolutionary work shows how the taking of Jerusalem set the stage for western Europe’s dominance and shaped the modern world.
At a time when the concept of religion-based politics has taken on new and sometimes ominous tones—even within the United States—it is not only right, but also urgently necessary that William Lee Miller revisit his profound exploration of the place of religious liberty and church and state in America. For this revised edition of The First Liberty, Miller has written a pointed new introduction, discussing how religious liberty has taken on deeper dimensions in a post-9/11 world. With new material on recent Supreme Court cases involving church-state relations and a new concluding chapter on America's religious and political landscape, this volume is an eloquent and thorough interpretation of how religious faith and political freedom have blended and fused to form part of our collective history-and most importantly, how each concept must respect the boundaries of the other.
Though many claim the United States to be a "Christian Nation," Miller provides a fascinatingly vivid account of the philosophical skirmishes and political machinations that led to the "wall of separation" between church and state. That famous phrase is Jefferson's, though it does not appear in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution. But Miller follows this seminal idea from three great standard-bearers of religious liberty: Jefferson, Madison, and Roger Williams. Jefferson, who wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the precursor of the First Amendment of the Constitution; James Madison, who was politically responsible for Virginia's acceptance of religious liberty and who, a few years later, helped draft the Bill of Rights; and the even earlier figure, the radical dissenter Roger Williams, who propounded the idea of religious freedom not as a rational secularist but out of a deeply held spiritual faith.
Miller re-creates the fierce and vibrant debate among the founding fathers over the means of establishing public virtue in the absence of established religion—a debate that still reverberates in today's passionate arguments about civil rights, school prayer, abortion, Christmas crèches, conscientious objection during warfare—and demonstrates how the right to hold any religious belief has dynamically shaped American political life.
Encountering Edward Said on Yom Kippur: Reflections on the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is a fascinating and controversial collection of journals and meditations on the plight and possibility of the prophetic witness in the modern world. In these pages, the Jewish theologian, Marc H. Ellis, explores the prophetic through his encounters with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, as a way of thinking through the stakes of contemporary Jewish history. His unexpected encounter with Said on Yom Kippur provides a fascinating window to explore the dangers and possibilities of present-day Jewish life and its future. Ellis applies Said’s idea of late-style to the Jewish prophetic – what Ellis names the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic – to mean the reappearance and coming home of the Jewish prophetic as it undergoes its own deconstruction and re-emergence. At turns deeply personal and creatively theoretical, Ellis doesn’t shy away from the forbidden terrains of self questioning and progressive posturing, even with people and movements he identifies with. The result is a sensitive and provocative exploration filled with questions and responses rather than definitive answers.
A fresh look at early urban churches
This collection of essays examines the urban context of early Christian churches in the first-century Roman world. A city-by-city investigation of the early churches in the New Testament clarifies the challenges, threats, and opportunities that urban living provided for early Christians. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how scholars assemble an accurate picture of the cities in which the first Christians flourished.
Features:
Investigate the challenges, threats, and opportunities experienced by the early church
Volume two of The First Urban Churches focuses on the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Corinth. An investigation of the material evidence of Corinth helps readers today understand properly the challenges, threats, and opportunities that the early Corinthian believers faced in the city. The essays demonstrate decisively the difference that such an approach makes in grappling with the meaning and context of the Corinthian epistles in the New Testament.
Features:
Investigate the challenges, threats, and opportunities experienced by the early church in Ephesus
The third installment of The First Urban Churches focuses on the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Ephesus. As with previous volumes, contributors illustrate how an investigation of the material evidence will help readers understand properly the challenges, threats, and opportunities that the early Ephesian believers faced in that city. Brad Bitner, James R. Harrison, Michael Haxby, Fredrick J. Long, Guy M. Rogers, Michael Theophilos, Paul Trebilco, and Stephan Witetschek demonstrate decisively the difference that such an approach makes in grappling with the meaning and context of the New Testament writings, particularly Ephesians, Acts, and Revelation.
Features
Investigate the challenges and opportunities experienced by the early church
This fourth installment of The First Urban Churches, edited by James R. Harrison and L. L. Welborn, focuses on the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Philippi. The international team of New Testament and classical scholars contributing to the volume present essays that use inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography to examine the rivalries, imperial context, and ecclesial setting of the Philippian church.
Features:
A fresh examination of early Christianity by an international team of New Testament and classical scholars
Volume 5 of The First Urban Churches investigates the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea. Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, and Philippi (vols. 2-4), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine preconceived understandings of the early church and to grapple with the meaning and context of Christianity in its first-century Roman colonial context.
Features:
An examination of early Roman Christianity by New Testament and classical scholars
Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume of The First Urban Churches and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea (vols. 2–5), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine what we know about the early church within Rome and the port city of Ostia. In the introductory section of the book, James R. Harrison discusses the material and documentary evidence of both cities, which sets the stage for the essays that follow. In the second section, Mary Jane Cuyler, James R. Harrison, Richard Last, Annelies Moeser, Thomas A. Robinson, Michael P. Theophilos, and L. L. Welborn examine a range of topics, including the Ostian Synagogue, Romans 1:2–4 against the backdrop of Julio-Claudian adoption and apotheosis traditions, and the epistle of 1 Clement. In the final section of this volume, Jutta Dresken-Welland and Mark Reasoner engage Peter Lampe’s magnum opus From Paul to Valentinus; Lampe wraps up the section and the volume with a response. Throughout, readers are provided with a rich demonstration of how the material evidence of the city of Rome illuminates the emergence of Roman Christianity, especially in the first century CE.
The First Urban Churches 7 includes essays focused on the development of early Christianity from the mid-first century through the sixth century CE in the ancient Macedonian city of Thessalonica. An international group of contributors traces the emergence of Thessalonica’s house churches through a close study of the archaeological remains, inscriptions, coins, iconography, and Paul’s two letters to the Thessalonians. After a detailed introduction to the city, including the first comprehensive epigraphic profile of Thessalonica from the Hellenistic age to the Roman Empire, topics discussed include the Roman emperor’s divine honors, coins and inscriptions as sources of imperial propaganda, Thessalonian family bonds, Paul’s apostolic self-image, the role of music at Thessalonica and in early Christianity, and Paul’s response to the Thessalonian Jewish community. Contributors include D. Clint Burnett, Alan H. Cadwallader, Rosemary Canavan, James R. Harrison, Julien M. Ogereau, Isaac T. Soon, Angela Standhartinger, Michael P. Theophilos, and Joel R. White.
The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them.
Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion and patriotism to express their policies for governance at the onset of the Cold War and to explain them to the American public.
Professor Tietge details our cultural attitudes about science in the early years of the Cold War, when on the heels of a great technological victory Americans were faced with the possibility of destruction by the very weapons that had saved them.
In Flash Effect we learn how, by symbolizing the scientist as both a father figure and a savior—and by celebrating the technological objects of his labor—the campaign to promote science took hold in the American consciousness. The products of that attitude are with us today more than ever.
In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful—the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints. Willing to die gruesome deaths or endure constant suffering, saints conveyed a powerful message: God was still present in the world. He continues to manifest His powers and communicate His messages through His special friends—the saints. What kind of Christianity do we find in these stories? In this original and provocative work, Aviad Kleinberg argues that the saints’ stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment; they retain an alternative theology, often quite different from the formal theology of the Church. By telling and retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were shaping and reshaping Christianity itself.
In this study of stories from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries, we meet the tender Perpetua bidding farewell to her infant son, Simeon Stylites turning himself into a rotting corpse, Francis of Assisi finding joy in suffering, and Fra Ginepro playing the fool, for Christ. We meet holy anchorites, headstrong virgins, fearless dragon slayers, and scheming politicians. Kleinberg unveils the inner contradictions, the subversive ideas, and the deadly power games that lay behind the making of the Western imagination. People, ideas, and passions—often relegated to the back pews—take center stage in this daring book. This is a story of how stories change lives.
O’Hara focuses on interactions between church authorities and parishioners from the late-colonial era into the early-national period, first in Mexico City and later in the surrounding countryside. Paying particular attention to disputes regarding caste status, the category of “Indian,” and the ownership of property, he demonstrates that religious collectivities from neighborhood parishes to informal devotions served as complex but effective means of political organization for plebeians and peasants. At the same time, longstanding religious practices and ideas made colonial social identities linger into the decades following independence, well after republican leaders formally abolished the caste system that classified individuals according to racial and ethnic criteria. These institutional and cultural legacies would be profound, since they raised fundamental questions about political inclusion and exclusion precisely when Mexico was trying to envision and realize new forms of political community. The modes of belonging and organizing created by colonialism provided openings for popular mobilization, but they were always stalked by their origins as tools of hierarchy and marginalization.
The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds. During the last thirty years, archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, Indigenous scholars, and linguists have emphasized the antiquity and geographical extent of similar Flower World beliefs among ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World.
Flower Worlds are not simply ethereal, otherworldly domains, but rather they are embodied in lived experience, activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the use of material objects and ritual spaces. This comprehensive book illuminates the origins of Flower Worlds as a key aspect of religions and histories among societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. It also explores the role of Flower Worlds in shaping ritual economies, politics, and cross-cultural interaction among Indigenous peoples.
Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.
Contributors: Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, James M. Córdova, Davide Domenici, Ángel González López, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael D. Mathiowetz, Cameron L. McNeil, Felipe S. Molina, Johannes Neurath, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, David Delgado Shorter, Karl A. Taube, Andrew D. Turner, Lorena Vázquez Vallín, Dorothy Washburn
Josef van Ess is the world's most distinguished scholar of classical kalam, the Muslim theology that was the precursor to, and foundation for, modern Islam. This book makes available, for the first time in English, the fruit of van Ess's thirty-five years of work in the field. A lucid and authoritative introduction to classical Islam, it opens a window on the intellectual world that gave rise to Muslim theology.
A sustained look at important issues in early kalam, The Flowering of Muslim Theology discusses the emergence of theology in the classical period and offers acute and illuminating comparisons with the Christian (and Jewish) traditions. Van Ess looks at the issue of heresy, at early ideas about straying from true belief. In a substantial and original instance of Koranic exegesis, he considers a problem much debated among classical theologians: whether it is possible to see God. He examines the different ways in which early Muslim thinkers appropriated atomism, a natural philosophy that was originally materialistic and atheistic, for their own theological purposes. He explores the explosive mix of theology and political thought, in an analysis of the development of ideas about the role and authority of a ruler. And he considers the relationship, or contradiction, between faith and knowledge: the enduring question of how one can know whether something is right or true.
A work of intellectual history enlivened by vivid examples, The Flowering of Muslim Theology gives a wider audience rare insight into Islam's rich classical past.
Although Richard Hooker (1554–1600) is now known principally as the author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in his lifetime the Tractates and Sermons brought him greater notoriety. Hooker’s views on justification, the perseverance of faith, and the relationship of the Church of Rome to the reformed Church of England were widely reported, and texts of the tracts were extensively circulated in manuscript.
Thanks to the meticulous editing of Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the contemporary impact of these debates can now be appreciated for the first time. These tracts provide a unique perspective on the turbulent world of late Elizabethan theology. In addition, they lay the doctrinal foundations of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity itself and—with the excellent commentary of Egil Grislis, Professor of Theology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, enable us to trace the intellectual formation of sixteenth-century England’s most innovative and provocative theologian.
The volume includes a newly discovered letter; three newly attributed sermon fragments; and analysis by P. F. Forte of Hooker’s distinctive preaching style.
The writings of Richard Hooker are of central interest to those studying English Renaissance thought and literature. In this, the third volume of a much-needed critical edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, are the posthumous books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker planned the Laws in eight books, but he died shortly after publication of Book Five. Books Six, Seven, and Eight, which contain his analysis of jurisdiction, episcopacy, and the royal supremacy, are here transcribed from versions that have the most authority. The volume also includes Hooker’s autograph notes toward those texts (brought to light by P. G. Stanwood in the course of his research) and the contemporary notes by George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys on a lost draft of Book Six. Mr. Stanwood’s introduction lays to rest all doubts about the authenticity of the last three books as we have them, doubts current since publication of Walton’s Life of Hooker in 1662.
This edition, sponsored by the Folger Library, is providing authoritative texts to serve as a basis for the scholarly reappraisal of Richard Hooker’s writings that is presently underway.
Richard Hooker is the first major voice of Anglican theology, and his defense of the Elizabethan Church against the attacks of the Puritans set the prevailing tone of Anglicanism for centuries to follow. Through his eloquent treatise on ecclesiastical law the medieval political thought of Thomas Aquinas became a part of the English political heritage, to be used by such writers as Locke, Burke, and Coleridge. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is also a primary statement in English of a theory of natural law. Finally, we must turn to Hooker if we are to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance, for he luminously sets forth the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age.
The Folger Library has answered a long-felt need in sponsoring this critical, old-spelling edition of Hooker’s Works, prepared with all the expertise modern scholarship can bring to bear. Six scholars share the editorial responsibility, consulting their eighteen-member Board of Advisers as necessary. The texts for the edition are based on fresh transcriptions of the earliest and most authoritative documents, in many cases manuscripts written or corrected by Hooker himself or contemporary transcripts of these. The critical apparatus for each text records substantive variants among the authoritative documents as well as departures in accidentals from the copy text. The aim of the apparatus is to enable the interested reader to reconstruct the authority underlying the text.
The Preface and Books I–V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Volumes I and II of this edition, represent all of Hooker’s work published in his lifetime. These volumes were prepared by Georges Edelen, Professor of English at Indiana University, and W. Speed Hill, Associate Professor of English, Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York.
We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.
Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—namely, A Christian Letter, 1599—with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws, and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.
John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.
An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives.
Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—called kev cai tshiab, “the new way”—as a means of navigating their complex spiritual landscapes.
Melissa May Borja explores how this religious change happened and what it has meant for Hmong culture. American resettlement policies unintentionally deprived Hmong of the resources necessary for their time-honored rituals, in part because these practices, blending animism, ancestor worship, and shamanism, challenged many Christian-centric definitions of religion. At the same time, because the government delegated much of the resettlement work to Christian organizations, refugees developed close and dependent relationships with Christian groups. Ultimately the Hmong embraced Christianity on their own terms, adjusting to American spiritual life while finding opportunities to preserve their customs.
Follow the New Way illustrates America’s wavering commitments to pluralism and secularism, offering a much-needed investigation into the public work done by religious institutions with the blessing of the state. But in the creation of a Christian-inflected Hmong American animism we see the resilience of tradition—how it deepens under transformative conditions.
Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2016
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the attention of the Catholic and Protestant religious communities around the world focused on a few small settlements of French Canadian immigrants in northeastern Illinois. Soon after arriving in their new home, a large number of these immigrants, led by Father Charles Chiniquy, the charismatic Catholic priest who had brought them there, converted to Protestantism. In this anthropological history, Caroline B. Brettell explores how Father Chiniquy took on both the sacred and the secular authority of the Catholic Church to engineer the religious schism and how the legacy of this rift affected the lives of the immigrants and their descendants for generations. This intriguing study of a nineteenth-century migration of French Canadians to the American Midwest offers an innovative perspective on the immigrant experience in America.
Brettell chronicles how Chiniquy came to lead approximately one thousand French Canadian families to St. Anne, Illinois, in the early 1850s and how his conflict with the Catholic hierarchy over the ownership and administration of church property, delivery of the mass in French instead of Latin, and access to the Bible by laymen led to his excommunication. Drawing on the concept of social drama—a situation of intensely lived conflict that emerges within social groups—Brettell explains the religious schism in terms of larger ethnic and religious disagreements that were happening elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. Brettell also explores legal disputes, analyzes the reemergence of Catholicism in St. Anne in the first decade of the twentieth century, addresses the legacy of Chiniquy in both the United States and Quebec, and closely examines the French Canadian immigrant communities, focusing on the differences between the people who converted to Protestantism and those who remained Catholic.
Occurring when nativism was pervasive and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party was at its height, Chiniquy’s religious schism offers an opportunity to examine a range of important historical and anthropological issues, including immigration, ethnicity, and religion; changes in household and family structure; the ways social identities are constructed and reconstructed through time; and the significance of charismatic leadership in processes of social and religious change. Through its multidisciplinary approach, Brettell’s enlightening study provides a pioneering assessment of larger national tensions and social processes, some of which are still evident in modern immigration to the United States.
New research that transforms how to understand food and eating in literature
Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms hierophagy, a specific type of transformational eating where otherworldly things are consumed. Multiple ancient Mediterranean, Jewish, and Christian texts represent the ramifications of consuming otherworldly food, ramifications that were understood across religious boundaries. Reading ancient texts through the lens of hierophagy helps scholars and students interpret difficult passages in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, Revelation 10, and the Persephone myths, among others.
Features:
In this new century, born in hope but soon thereafter cloaked in terror, many see religion and politics as a volatile, if not deadly, mixture. For All Peoples and All Nations uncovers a remarkable time when that was not so; when together, those two entities gave rise to a new ideal: universal human rights.
John Nurser has given life to a history almost sadly forgotten, and introduces the reader to the brilliant and heroic people of many faiths who, out of the aftermath of World War II and in the face of cynicism, dismissive animosity, and even ridicule, forged one of the world's most important secular documents, the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These courageous, persistent, visionary individuals—notable among them an American Lutheran Seminary professor from Philadelphia, O. Frederick Nolde—created the Commission on Human Rights. Eventually headed by one of the world's greatest humanitarians, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration has become the touchstone for political legitimacy.
As David Little says in the foreword to this remarkable chronicle, "Both because of the large gap it fills in the story of the founding of the United Nations and the events surrounding the adoption of human rights, and because of the wider message it conveys about religion and peacebuilding, For All Peoples and All Nations is an immensely important contribution. We are all mightily in John Nurser's debt." If religion and politics could once find common ground in the interest of our shared humanity, there is hope that it may yet be found again.
A fascinating memoir about a Holocaust survivor's loss of and journey back to faith. In 1939, Baruch Goldstein was a religiously observant adolescent resident of the Jewish community in Mlawa, a town that was then in East Prussia. After war broke out, the Jewish community there was relatively sheltered, as that region was incorporated into the German Reich rather than into the General Government (the German run-fragment of pre-war Poland, where conditions were harsh for everyone). However in 1942, Goldstein was sent to Auschwitz, where he stayed two-and-a-half years. His family was scattered all to their deaths, but he survived the war--barely. For Decades I Was Silent is an account of life in a small Polish-German town and provides information on the religious life of the Jewish citizens. This book creates a direct sense of the random, mystifying personal violence individuals felt at the hands of Germans--not the anonymous industrial death machine, but immediate, face-to-face violence.
After the war, Goldstein drifted as a refugee to UNRR camps in Italy. Over time, young Goldstein had to face the fact that all of his extended family was lost and he had only the possibilities of Palestine or help from distant relatives in the United States as a future. His American relatives urged him to enter the United States as a yeshiva student, and eventually he became a rabbi and started a family. As a young rabbinical student, and then as a rabbi, Goldstein was forced to confront the events of the Holocaust and the damage done to his faith.
Russia occupies a unique position in the Muslim world. Unlike any other non-Islamic state, it has ruled Muslim populations for over five hundred years. Though Russia today is plagued by its unrelenting war in Chechnya, Russia’s approach toward Islam once yielded stability. In stark contrast to the popular “clash of civilizations” theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support.
In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great inaugurated a policy of religious toleration that made Islam an essential pillar of Orthodox Russia. For ensuing generations, tsars and their police forces supported official Muslim authorities willing to submit to imperial directions in exchange for defense against brands of Islam they deemed heretical and destabilizing. As a result, Russian officials assumed the powerful but often awkward role of arbitrator in disputes between Muslims. And just as the state became a presence in the local mosque, Muslims became inextricably integrated into the empire and shaped tsarist will in Muslim communities stretching from the Volga River to Central Asia.
For Prophet and Tsar draws on police and court records, and Muslim petitions, denunciations, and clerical writings—not accessible prior to 1991—to unearth the fascinating relationship between an empire and its subjects. As America and Western Europe debate how best to secure the allegiances of their Muslim populations, Crews offers a unique and critical historical vantage point.
Why teach about religion in public schools? What educational value can such courses potentially have for students?
In For the Civic Good, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton offer an argument for the contribution of Bible and world religion electives. The authors argue that such courses can, if taught properly, promote an essential aim of public education: the construction of a civic public, where strangers engage with one another in building a common future. The humanities serve to awaken students to the significance of interpretive and analytic skills, and religion and Bible courses have the potential to add a reflective element to these skills. In so doing, students awaken to the fact of their own interpretive framework and how it influences their understanding of texts and practices. The argument of the book is developed by reports on the authors’ field research, a two-year period in which they observed religion courses taught in various public high schools throughout the country, from the “Bible Belt” to the suburban parkway. They document the problems in teaching religion courses in an educationally appropriate way, but also illustrate the argument for a humanities-based approach to religion by providing real classroom models of religion courses that advance the skills critical to the development of a civic public.
Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its proscriptions. The Forbidden Image traces the dual strains of “iconophilia” and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.
Alain Besançon’s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from the medieval through the early modern periods. Besançon completes The Forbidden Image with an examination of how iconophilia and iconoclasm have been debated in the modern period.
“Even the reader who has heard something of the Byzantine quarrels about images and their theological background will be surprised by a learned and convincing interpretation of the works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich in terms of religiously inspired iconoclasm. . . . This is an immensely rich and powerful masterpiece.”—Leszek Kolakowski, Times Literary Supplement
Moral theologians, defense analysts, conflict scholars, and nuclear experts imagine a world free from nuclear weapons
At a 2017 Vatican conference, Pope Francis condemned nuclear weapons. This volume, issued after the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, presents essays from moral theologians, defense analysts, conflict transformation scholars, and nuclear arms control experts, with testimonies from witnesses. It is a companion volume to A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament (Georgetown University Press, 2020).
Chapters from the perspectives of missile personnel and the military chain of command, industrialists and legislators, and citizen activists show how we might achieve a nuclear-free world. Key to this transition is the important role of public education and the mobilization of lay movements to raise awareness and effect change. This essential collection prepares military professionals, policymakers, everyday citizens, and the pastoral workers who guide them, to make decisions that will lead us to disarmament.
This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history.
This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways. Missions provided many Americans with their first significant exposure to non-Western cultures and religions. They helped to establish a variety of new academic disciplines in home universities—linguistics, anthropology, and comparative religion among them. Missionary women helped redefine gender roles in North America, and missions have vitalized tiny local churches as well as entire denominations, causing them to rethink their roles and priorities, both here and abroad. In fact, missionaries have helped define our own national identity by influencing our foreign, trade, military, and immigration policies over the last two centuries.
Topics in the collection range from John Saillant's essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker's essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long’s essay on the “Auca martyrs” offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment's power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico’s secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups—black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—sought to convert one another, stead-
fastly envisioning “others” as every bit as “heathen” as those in far-off lands.
The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home is an insightful, provocative collection that will stimulate much discussion and debate. It is valuable for academic libraries and seminaries, scholars of religious history and American studies, missionary groups, cultural historians and ethnographers, and political scientists.
Peruvian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints face the dilemma of embracing their faith while finding space to nourish their Peruvianness. Jason Palmer draws on eight years of fieldwork to provide an on-the-ground look at the relationship between Peruvian Saints and the racial and gender complexities of the contemporary Church.
Peruvian Saints discovered that the foundational ideas of kinship and religion ceased being distinct categories in their faith. At the same time, they came to see that LDS rituals and reenactments placed coloniality in opposition to the Peruvians’ indigenous roots and family against the more expansive Peruvian idea of familia. In part one, Palmer explores how Peruvian Saints resolved the first clash by creating the idea of a new pioneer indigeneity that rejected victimhood in favor of subtle engagements with power. Part two illuminates the work performed by Peruvian Saints as they stretched the Anglo Church’s model of the nuclear family to encompass familia.
This book brings together a unique combination of experts in conflict resolution and focuses on the role forgiveness can play in the process. It deals with theology, public policy, psychological and social theory, and social policy implementation of forgiveness. This book is essential for libraries, scholars, conflict negotiators, and all people who hope to understand the role of forgiveness in the peace process.
The book's first section explores how ideas like "forgiveness" and "reconciliation" are moving out from the seminary and academy into the world of public policy and how these terms have been used and defined in the past. The second section looks at forgiveness and public policy. One of the chapters, by Donald W. Shriver Jr., addresses forgiveness in a secular political forum.
The third section of the book draws us to a more thorough analysis of the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation from voices in the academic and theological community, and the final section highlights the work of practitioners currently working with religion, public policy, and conflict transformation, particularly in areas such as Ireland and Africa.
Contributors include Desmond M. Tutu, Rodney L. Petersen, Miroslav Volf, Stanley S. Harakas, Raymond G. Helmick, SJ, Joseph V. Montville, Douglas M. Johnston, Donna Hicks, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Everett L. Worthington, Jr., John Paul Lederach, Ervin Staub, Laurie Anne Pearlman, John Dawson, Audrey R. Chapman, Olga Botcharova, Anthony da Silva, SJ, Geraldine Smythe, OP, Andrea Bartoli, Ofelia Ortega, and George F. R. Ellis.
A new understanding of the history of the northern kingdom from 1350 B.C.E. to 720 B.C.E.
Beginning with the Canaanite city-states, through the Saulide dynasty, to the fall of Israel, Finkelstein presents the first comprehensive history of Israel integrating the analysis of more than thirty years of archaeological work with interpretation of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Though Judah dominates the pages of the Hebrew Bible and contemporary studies, Israel dominates here as Finkelstein reveals the glory of the Omride dynasty, outlines how the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah developed parallel to one another, and highlights Israel’s transformation from kingdom to foundational idea.
Features:
In 1894, on the eve of the French conquest of Morocco, a young Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī decided to abandon his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, al-Kattānī mobilized a socially diverse coalition of Moroccans who called for resistance against French colonization.
In 1909, he met a violent death at the hands of the same Moroccan anti-colonialists he had empowered through his activism. Today, the government of Morocco regards al-Kattānī’s story as subversive, and he has virtually disappeared from the narratives of the early Moroccan anti-colonialism and nationalism. Despite this silencing, al-Kattānī’s remarkable personal transformation and sacrifice is at the heart of the events that, although ultimately failing to prevent French rule, gave birth to Moroccan nationalism and to modern concepts of Moroccan political power and authority.
Forgotten Saints draws on a diverse collection of previously unknown primary sources to narrate the vivid story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.
An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities
Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.
Formations of Ritual was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Yaktovil is an elaborate healing ceremony employed by Sinhalas in Sri Lanka to dispel the effects of the eyesight of a pantheon of malevolent supernatural figures known as yakku. Anthropology, traditionally, has articulated this ceremony with the concept metaphor of "demonism." Yet, as David Scott demonstrates in this provocative book, this use of "demonism" reveals more about the discourse of anthropology than it does about the ritual itself. His investigation of yaktovil and yakku within the Sinhala cosmology is also an inquiry into the ways in which anthropology, by ignoring the discursive history of the rituals, religions, and relationships it seeks to describe, tends to reproduce ideological-often, specifically colonial-objects.
To do this, Scott describes the discursive apparatus through which yakku are positioned in the moral universe of Sinhala, traces the appearance of yakku and yaktovil in Western discourse, evaluates the contribution of these figures and this ceremony in anthropology, and attempts to show how the larger anthropology of Buddhism, in which the anthropology of yaktovil is embedded, might be reconfigured. Finally, he offers a rereading of the ritual in terms of the historically selfconscious approach he proposes.The result points to a major rethinking of the historical nature not only of the objects, but also of the concepts through which they are constructed in anthropological discourse.David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Contributors. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
In May 1855 twenty-seven men set out from the young Mormon settlements in Utah to establish the northernmost colony of the Kingdom of God, "the Northern Mission to the Remnants of the House of Jacob"-American Indians. More colonists, including families, would join them later. Building a fort in the Limhi Valley, four hundred miles to the north and at the foot of the pass by which Lewis and Clark had crossed the Continental Divide, they began to proselyte among Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives as well as members of the Bannock, Nez Percé, and other tribes. Three years later, some of their expected and actual Indian converts violently drove the colonists out and destroyed Fort Limhi.
In Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858, David Bigler shows that the colony, known as the Salmon River Mission, played a pivotal role in the Utah War of 1857-1858 and that the catastrophic end of the mission was critical in keeping that conflict from becoming an all out war between Mormon Utah and the United States. In the process, he uses a multitude of primary sources, many newly uncovered or previously overlooked, to reconstruct a dramatic and compelling story involving stalwart Mormon frontiersmen, Brigham Young, a variety of Native American individuals and groups, the U. S. Army, and "mountaineers," as the surviving fur trade veterans now commonly known as "mountain men" called themselves.
The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV’s Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall, part of the chronicles of the famous Swiss abbey, is a treasure trove of medieval monastic life. Saint Gall’s records span its humble beginnings in the early seventh century to the late Middle Ages, with Ekkehard’s contribution covering the 880s to 972, near the end of the monastery’s two-century-long golden age. Its unforgettable tales, sometimes at odds with the historical record, contain sharp flashes of Ekkehard’s signature humor—when, for instance, a spying abbot from a neighboring monastery is caught hiding in the latrine. Ekkehard also shows how the abbey’s role as a spiritual haven could be compromised by worldly ties, including close associations with the powerful Carolingian and Ottonian courts. He bears witness to the struggles of the tenth-century church reform movement, when Emperor Otto I dispatched investigators to uncover Saint Gall’s deviations from the Rule of Saint Benedict.
This volume publishes the Latin text alongside its first complete English translation.
Engaging resources for understanding the importance of bodies and spaces in producing and interpreting persuasive language
This volume collects essays that represent intellectual milestones that are informing sociorhetorical interpretation during the twenty-first century. The essays are arranged into five parts: (1) Topos; (2) Cultural Geography and Critical Spatiality; (3) Rhetorolects and Conceptual Blending; (4) Rhetography; and (5) Rhetorical Force.
Features:
The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.
The cultures considered here originated in the ancient world, took on Christian forms, and manifest themselves today in more secular ways. These are, as John W. O'Malley identifies them: the prophetic culture that proclaims the need for radical change in the structures of society (represented by, for example, Jeremiah, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.); the academic culture that seeks instead to understand those structures (Aristotle, Aquinas, the modern university); the humanistic culture that addresses fundamental human issues and works for the common good of society (Cicero, Erasmus, and Eleanor Roosevelt); and the culture of art and performance that celebrates the mystery of the human condition (Phidias, Michelangelo, Balanchine).
By showing how these cultures, as modes of activity and discourse in which Western intelligence has manifested itself through the centuries and continues to do so, O'Malley produces an essay that especially through the history of Christianity brilliantly illuminates the larger history of the West.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
In Fragments of Bone, thirteen essayists discuss African religions as forms of resistance and survival in the face of Western cultural hegemony and imperialism. The collection presents scholars working outside of the Western tradition with backgrounds in a variety of disciplines, genders, and nationalities. These experts draw on research, fieldwork, personal interviews, and spiritual introspection to support a provocative thesis: that fragments of ancestral traditions are fluidly interwoven into New World African religions as creolized rituals, symbolic systems, and cultural identities.
Contributors: Osei-Mensah Aborampah, Niyi Afolabi, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Randy P. Conner, T. J. Desch-Obi, Ina Johanna Fandrich, Kean Gibson, Marilyn Houlberg, Nancy B. Mikelsons, Roberto Nodal, Rafael Ocasio, Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and Denise Ferreira da Silva
Dr. Ehrhardt considers that New Testament teaching could benefit by being more closely related to its context and background than is often the case. He suggests that the method of the presentation of the Gospel is important, as well as the intention behind it.
In an examination of the background, Dr. Ehrhardt deals principally with two aspects. The first is the fact that the New Testament and the form Christianity took in the first few centuries after the death of Christ were subject to several influences. One of the most important was Greek and Dr. Ehrhardt traces Hellenistic influence in St. Paul's treatment of Christ, in Greek modes of thought in the preaching of the Gospel and the historical tradition in the Book of Acts. He then turns to Jewish and Roman practices and ideas which played a part in forming Church doctrine and ritual, such as ordination and baptism. Secondly, he discusses the daily life of the newly-converted Christians, the problems they met with and the changes that took place.
It is hoped that these essays, many of which aim at giving a fresh, rather than a final view, may prove stimulating by asking unfamiliar questions and offering new solutions.
Is there really a hell? Should we be good simply to avoid punishment in the life hereafter? Just asking these questions theoretically doesn't get us far, George F. Dole suggests, but examining the works of someone who has been there may help. Dole refers to Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and statesman who over the last twenty-seven years of his life had the privileged status of an observer of non-physical worlds, including hell. Swedenborg wrote that we are unconscious residents of the spiritual world as well as the material world, and the hells he encountered have mirrors in our everyday lives.
Within this framework, Dole examines questions about evil and hell that have plagued thinkers for centuries: Do we have freedom of choice? Do our spirits exist after death? Does an all-loving God condemn us to hell? If not, can we ourselves become irredeemably evil? What distinguishes Dole's approach to these questions is his open-mindedness and his hopefulness. Freedom and Evil brings us face to face with a God of mercy, and it is easy to believe, with Dole, that the gates of hell are not to keep people in but to keep people out.
A unique interreligious dialogue provides needed context for deeper understanding of interfaith relations, from ancient to modern times
Freedom is far from straightforward as a topic of comparative theology. While it is often identified with modernity and even postmodernity, freedom has long been an important topic for reflection by both Christians and Muslims, discussed in both the Bible and the Quran. Each faith has a different way of engaging with the idea of freedom shaped by the political context of their beginnings. The New Testament emerged in a region under occupation by the Roman Empire, whereas the Quran was first received in tribal Arabia, a stateless environment with political freedom.
Freedom: Christian and Muslim Perspectives, edited by Lucinda Mosher, considers how Christian and Muslim faith communities have historically addressed many facets of freedom. The book presents essays, historical and scriptural texts, and reflections. Topics include God's freedom, human freedom to obey God, autonomy versus heteronomy, autonomy versus self-governance, freedom from incapacitating addiction and desire, hermeneutic or discursive freedom vis-à-vis scripture and tradition, religious and political freedom, and the relationship between personal conviction and public order.
The rich insights expressed in this unique interfaith discussion will benefit readers—from students and scholars, to clerics and community leaders, to politicians and policymakers—who will gain a deeper understanding of how these two communities define freedom, how it is treated in both religious and secular texts, and how to make sense of it in the context of our contemporary lives.
The writings of Pope Pius VI, head of the Catholic Church during the most destructive period of the French Revolution, were compiled in two volumes by M.N.S. Guillon and published in 1798 and 1800. But during the Revolution, the reign of Napoleon, and the various revolutionary movements of the 19th century, there were extraordinary efforts to destroy writings that critiqued the revolutionary ideology. Many books and treatises, if they survived the revolution or the sacking from Napoleon’s armies. To this day, no public copy of Guillon’s work exists in Paris.
Now, for the first time in English, these works comprising the letters, briefs, and other writings of Pius VI on the French Revolution are available. Volume I treats the first shock of the Revolution and the efforts of the Pope in 1790 and 1791 to oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which famous revolutionary and shrewd diplomat Talleyrand referred to as “the greatest fault of the National Assembly”). Volume II will be published later, and deals with the aftermath of the Civil Constitution through Pius’s death in exile). Editor and translator Jeffrey Langan presents the materials leading up to and directly connected with these decrees, in which the National Assembly attempted to set up a Catholic Church that would be completely submissive to the demands of the Assembly. Volume I also covers Pius’s efforts to deal with the immediate aftermath of the Constitution after the National Assembly implemented it, including his encyclical, Quod Aliquantum.
The letters will show how Pius chose to oppose the Civil Constitution. He did so not by a public campaign, for he had no real temporal power to oppose the violence, but by attempting to work personally with Louis XVI and various archbishops in France to articulate what were the points on which he could concede (matters dealing with the political structures of France) and what were the essential points in which he could not concede (matters dealing with the organization of dioceses and appointment of bishops).
Since the 1980s, with the writings and school that developed around François Furet, as well as Simon Schama’s Citizens, a new debate over the French Revolution has ensued, bringing forth a more objective account of the Revolution, one that avoids an excessively Marxist lens and that brings to light some of its defects and more gruesome parts – the destruction and theft of Church property, and the sadistic methods of torture and killing of priests, nuns, aristocrats, and fellow-revolutionaries.
An examination of the writings of Pius VI will not only help set the historical record straight for English-speaking students of the Revolution, it will also aid them to better understand the principles that the Catholic Church employs when confronted with chaotic political change. They will see that the Church has a principled approach to distinguishing, while not separating, the power of the Church and the power of the state. They will also see, as Talleyrand himself also saw, that one of the essential elements that makes the Church the Church is the right to appoint bishops and to discipline its own bishops. The Church herself recognizes that she cannot long survive without this principle that guarantees her unity.
Pius VI’s efforts were able to keep the Catholic Church intact (though badly bruised) so that she could reconstitute herself and build up a vibrant life in 19th-century France. (He did this in the face of the Church’s prestige having sunk to historic lows; some elites in Europe thought there would be no successor to Pius and jokingly referred to him as “Pius the Last.”) He began a process that led to the restoration of the prestige of the Papacy throughout the world, and he initiated a two-century process that led to the Church finally being able to select bishops without any interference from secular authorities. This had been at least a 1,000-year problem in the history of the Church. By 1990, only two countries of the world, China and Vietnam, were interfering in any significant way in the process that the Church used to select bishops.
Pius VI’s papacy, especially during the years of the French Revolution, was a pivotal point for the French Revolution and for the interaction between Church and state in Western history. All freedom-loving people will be happy to read his distinc-tions between the secular power and the spiritual power. His papacy also was important for the internal developments that the Church would make over the next 200 years with respect to its self-understanding of the Papacy and the role of the bishop.
This edited volume explores the dynamic relationship between the Friday mosque and the Islamic city, addressing the traditional topics through a fresh new lens and offering a critical examination of each case study in its own spatial, urban, and socio-cultural context. While these two well-known themes—concepts that once defined the field—have been widely studied by historians of Islamic architecture and urbanism, this compilation specifically addresses the functional and spatial ambiguity or liminality between these spaces.
Instead of addressing the Friday mosque as the central signifier of the Islamic city, this collection provides evidence that there was (and continues to be) variety in the way architectural borders became fluid in and around Friday mosques across the Islamic world, from Cordoba to Jerusalem and from London to Lahore. By historicizing different cases and exploring the way human agency, through ritual and politics, shaped the physical and social fabric of the city, this volume challenges the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in earlier scholarship.
Now available from SBL Press
Employing social description, social scientific models, and rhetorical analysis, Alicia J. Batten argues that the letter of James is conversant with the topic of friendship within Greek and Roman literature, as well as within various texts of early Christianity. She illustrates how James drew upon some of the language and concepts related to friendship with an intriguing density to advocate resistance to wealth, avoidance of rich patrons, and reliance upon God.
Features:
Based on a decade of direct diplomatic engagement with the United Nations, a decade of teaching on international relations, and another decade of research and teaching on Islamic and comparative peace studies, this book offers a friendship-related academic framework that examines shared moral concepts, philosophical paradigms, and political experiences that can develop and expand multidisciplinary conversations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. By advancing multicultural and interreligious discourses on friendship, this book helps promote actual friendships among diverse cultures and peoples.
This is not a monologue. It provides a model of conversations among scholars and political actors who come from diverse international and interreligious backgrounds. The word “Islamic” should not mislead the reader to suspect that this edited volume delves only into religious discourses. Rather, it provides a forum for conversations within and between religious and philosophical perspectives. It sparks friendship conversations thematically and through disciplinary and cultural diversity. The result of the work of many prominent international scholars and diplomats over many years, it conveys at least one message clearly: friendship matters for not only our happiness but also for our survival.
Drawing from her many years of experience as a hospice nurse and her training as a theologian, Patricia Kobielus Thompson offers in The Dark Night of the Soul instruction to those providing care for terminally ill patients. Thompson finds in the poetry and other writings of Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross a wisdom that she argues will assist caregivers in comforting their patients through the trying times just before death. Though much has been written on Saint John of the Cross, Thompson’s application of these works is wholly new and rooted in deep empathy.
In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?
The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture.
From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.
Pessar combines cultural history spanning the colonial period to the present; comparative case studies of the Canudos, Contestado, Juazeiro, and Santa Brígida movements; and three decades of ethnographic research in the Brazilian Northeast. Highlighting the involvement of a broad range of individuals and institutions, the cross-fertilization between movements, contestation and accommodation vis-à-vis the church and state, and matters of spirituality and faith, From Fanatics to Folk reveals Brazilian millenarianism as long-enduring and constantly in flux.
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