BiblioVault - Books about Religion

Two Jews on a Train

Stories from the Old Country and the New

Adam Biro

University of Chicago Press, 2001

"Two Jews were traveling on a train. . . . " Many Eastern European jokes—and several of the charming and often hilarious conversations in this book—begin this way. From all regions of the world and from all walks of life, the characters are young and full of life and old and ugly; they are rabbis, matchmakers, students, and immigrants. They gossip and speak about everything from the banalities of the world to the unspeakable evils of existence all for a single purpose: to laugh and to celebrate the good luck of being alive.

As Biro recounts these tales, we hear not only his voice and the voice of his father, but those of generations of storytellers who have used humor to teach about the truly important issues in life—the delicacy of love, the fragility of friendship, the pitfalls of self-righteousness, the costs of narrow-mindedness, and the unpredictability of life itself. Biro artfully spins each story, lingering on the details, guiding the reader to the inevitable—yet always unexpected—punchline.

Taken individually, these stories will make you laugh out loud; taken as a whole, they form an invaluable record of the sensibilities of an entire people. Biro writes: "These Jewish stories of which not a single one happened to me, and of which I did not invent a single one, do describe me, do characterize me, do explain me. They are always my own story. And yours."

[more]

Two Lives of Saint Colette

With a Selection of Letters by, to, and about Colette

Pierre de Vaux and Sister Perrine de Baume

Iter Press, 2022

Two accounts of the life of Saint Colette of Corbie.

Saint Colette of Corbie (1381–1447) was a French reformer of the Franciscan Order and the founder of seventeen convents. Though of humble origin, she attracted the support of powerful patrons and important Church officials. The two biographies translated here were authored by Pierre de Vaux, her confessor and mentor, and Perrine de Baume, a nun who for decades was Colette’s companion and confidant. Both accounts offer fascinating portraits of the saint as a pious ascetic assailed by demons and performing miracles, as well as in her role as skillful administrator and caring mother of her nuns. This is the first English translation of two biographies in Middle French of the most important female figures of the Middle Ages.

[more]

Two Missionary Accounts of Southeast Asia in the Late Seventeenth Century

A Translation and Critical Edition of Guy Tachard’s Relation de Voyage aux Indes (1690–99) and Nicola Cima’s Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina

Stefan Halikowski Smith

Arc Humanities Press, 2019

This volume presents critical editions of two previously unpublished missionary accounts of Ayutthaya and the East Indies scene after the "National" Revolution of 1688 in Thailand: <i>Relation de Voyage aux Indes</i>, 1690-99, by Guy Tachard, a French Jesuit; and <i>Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina</i> (ca. 1707), by Nicola Cima, an Italian Augustinian. These interesting, substantial texts tell us a lot both about the Europeans who were writing them, and about Southeast Asia in a period when information was in much shorter supply than prior to 1688.

[more]

The Two Oldest Veda Manuscripts

Facsimile Edition of Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā 1–20 (Saṃhitā- and Padapāṭha) from Nepal and Western Tibet (c. 1150 CE)

Michael Witzel

Harvard University Press

This volume offers unexpected insights into the history of the Veda, the earliest texts of South Asia, and their underlying oral transmission. In side-by-side facsimiles, Michael Witzel and Qinyuan Wu present the two oldest known Veda manuscripts, the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā of the White Yajurveda and its contemporaneous sister text, a Vājasaneyi Padapāṭha, recently found in western Tibet. These two manuscripts have retained an unusual style of representing the pitched accents, and their juxtaposition in this edition invites comparison between the oral Veda transmission of a thousand years ago and the recitation still maintained today. Both manuscripts are important testimonies for the history of the Vedas, their medieval transmission, and their first codification in writing. As such, they are of great interest to historians, Indologists, and scholars studying the interface of oral and written traditions.

[more]

Two Shipwrecked Gospels

The Logoi of Jesus and Papias's Exposition of Logia about the Lord

Dennis R. MacDonald

SBL Press, 2012

With characteristic boldness and careful reassessment of the evidence, MacDonald offers an alternative reconstruction of Q and an alternative solution to the Synoptic Problem: the Q+/Papias Hypothesis. To do so, he reconstructs and interprets two lost books about Jesus: the earliest Gospel, which was used as a source by the authors of Mark, Matthew, and Luke; and the earliest commentary on the Gospels, by Papias of Hierapolis, who apparently knew Mark, Matthew, and the lost Gospel, which he considered to be an alternative Greek translation of a Semitic Matthew. MacDonald also explores how these two texts, well known into the fourth century, shipwrecked with the canonization of the New Testament and the embarrassment at outmoded eschatologies in both the lost Gospel and Papias’s Exposition.

[more]

The Two Wings of Catholic Thought

Essays on Fides et Ratio

David Ruel Foster

Catholic University of America Press, 2003

The purpose of this volume is to deepen the appreciation for the stereophonic approach to truth that the Holy Father recommends.

[more]

Two Women of the Great Schism

The Revelations of Constance de Rabastens by Raymond de Sabanac and Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma by Simone Zanacchi

Raymond de Sabanac and Simone Zanacchi

Iter Press, 2010

The Great Schism (1378–1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. It was a crisis of authority that brought with it spiritual anxiety and political uproar. This book presents the responses of two fascinating women whose experiences demonstrate the impact of the Schism on ordinary Christians. Constance de Rabastens (active 1384–1386), who lived in a village in rural Languedoc, had dramatic visions indicting the Avignon pope Clement VII, despite his being recognized in her region. Ursulina of Parma (1375–1408), a diminutive young woman from an urban milieu in Italy, believed that she was commanded by Christ to engage in shuttle diplomacy between the Roman and Avignon papacies in order to end the Schism. Two Women of the Great Schism translates an account of Constance’s visionary experiences as recorded by her confessor Raymond de Sabanac and a posthumous biography of Ursulina by Simone Zanacchi, a pious abbot who wrote some sixty years after his subject’s death. These texts bring to life the extraordinary spiritual and political engagement of two late medieval women who refused to be passive bystanders as rival papal factions tore Christendom apart.

[more]