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4743 books match the query 'Religion' and 158 start with e

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Essays on the Modern Japanese Church

Yamaji Aizan; Translated by Graham Squires, with Introductory Essays by Graham Squires and A. Hamish Ion

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Essays on the Modern Japanese Church (Gendai Nihon kyokai shiron), published in 1906, was the first Japanese-language history of Christianity in Meiji Japan. Yamaji Aizan’s firsthand account describes the reintroduction of Christianity to Japan—its development, rapid expansion, and decline—and its place in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Meiji period. Yamaji’s overall argument is that Christianity played a crucial role in shaping the growth and development of modern Japan.

Yamaji was a strong opponent of the government-sponsored “emperor-system ideology,” and through his historical writing he tried to show how Japan had a tradition of tolerance and openness at a time when government-sponsored intellectuals were arguing for greater conformity and submissiveness to the state on the basis of Japanese “national character.”

Essays is important not only in terms of religious history but also because it highlights broad trends in the history of Meiji Japan. Introductory chapters explore the significance of the work in terms of the life and thought of its author and its influence on subsequent interpretations of Meiji Christianity.

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Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven

Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions

Christopher M. Brown

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven treats four apparent problems concerning eternal life in order to clarify our thinking about perfect human happiness in heaven. The teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas provide the basis for solutions to these four problems about eternal life insofar as his teachings call into question common contemporary theological or philosophical presuppositions about God, human persons, and the nature of heaven itself. Indeed, these Thomistic solutions often require us to think very differently from our contemporaries. But thinking differently with St. Thomas is worth it: for the Thomistic solutions to these apparent problems are more satisfying, on both theological and philosophical grounds, than a number of contemporary theological and philosophical approaches. Christopher Brown deploys his argument in four sections. The first section lays out, in three chapters, four apparent problems concerning eternal life—Is heaven a mystical or social reality? Is heaven other-worldly or this-worldly? Is heaven static or dynamic? Won’t human persons eventually get bored in heaven? Brown then explains how and why some important contemporary Christian theologians and philosophers resolve these problems, and notes serious problems with each of these contemporary solutions. The second section explains, in five chapters, St. Thomas’ significant distinction between the essential reward of the saints in heaven and the accidental reward, and treats in detail his account of that in which the essential reward consists, namely, the beatific vision and the proper accidents of the vision (delight, joy, and charity). The third section treats, in five chapters, St. Thomas’ views on the multifaceted accidental reward in heaven, where the accidental reward includes, among other things, glorified human embodiment, participation in the communion of the saints, and the joy experienced by the saints in sensing God’s “new heavens and new earth.” Finally, section four argues, in four chapters, that St. Thomas’ views allow for powerful solutions to the four apparent problems about eternal life examined in the first section. These solutions are powerful because, not only are they consistent with authoritative, Catholic Christian Tradition, but they do not raise any of the significant theological or philosophical problems that attend the contemporary theological and philosophical solutions examined in the first section.

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Eternity in the Ether

A Mormon Media History

Gavin Feller

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Mass media and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints evolved alongside each other, and communications technology became a fundamental part of the Church’s institutions and communities. Gavin Feller investigates the impact of radio, television, and the internet on Mormonism and what it tells us about new media’s integration into American life. The Church wrestled with the promise of new media to help implement its vision of Zion. But it also had to contend with threat that media posed to the family and other important facets of the Latter-day Saint faith. Inevitably, media technologies forced the leadership and lay alike to reconsider organizational values and ethical commitments. As Feller shows, the conflicts they faced illuminate the fundamental forces of control and compromise that enmesh an emerging medium in American social and cultural life.

Intriguing and original, Eternity in the Ether blends communications history with a religious perspective to examine the crossroads where mass media met Mormonism in the twentieth century.

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Ethics and Its Sources in Nature and Revelation

Karol Wojtyla

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

The Catholic University of America Press is honored to publish the English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. Prepared under the auspices of the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC, the English Critical Edition will comprise more than 20 volumes, covering all of John Paul II’s writings in the years before his papacy and a thematic selection of his papal writings. The third volume of the series presents various ethical and anthropological works by Karol Wojtyła. In addition to multiple essays, this volume features his larger works such as Ethics: Its Concept and Methodology, A Primer of Ethics, Considerations on the Essence of Man, and On the Knowability and Knowledge of God. It also contains Wojtyła’s reviews of books, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations, written chiefly while he lectured at the Catholic University of Lublin. As was the case with previous volumes, Volume 3 also relies on the original manuscripts and typescripts of Wojtyła’s works. These original texts were compared with the Polish published editions, and all significant differences between them have been marked in the scholarly apparatus. Some of the essays in this volume have not been previously published in English, while some others have never been published before.

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Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1

Theology and Ethics

James M. Gustafson

University of Chicago Press, 1983

"Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective will surprise some, shock others, and unleash a flood of speculation about what has happened to James Gustafson. The answer quite simply is nothing has happened to Gustafson except that he has now turned his attention to developing his constructive theological position, and we should all be very glad. . . . In this, the first of two volumes, Gustafson displays his colors as a constructive theologian, and they are indeed brilliant and splendid. . . . Though Gustafson is a theologian who works in the Christian tradition, he reminds us that the God Christians worship is not merely the Christian God. For Gustafson the kind of God who is the object of the theologians's reflection eludes or surpasses the inevitably confessional activity of Christian theological reflection. Thus Gustafson, the constructive theologian, is also Gustafson the revisionist theologian who takes as his task nothing less than challenging the anthropocentrism that he alleges characterizes mainstream Western Christian theology."—Stanley Hauerwas, Journal of Religion

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Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 2

Ethics and Theology

James M. Gustafson

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Gustafson's two-volume work has been hailed as a major contribution to Christian ethics. In this second volume, Gustafson considers marriage, suicide, and the allocation of resources in famine and in biomedical research to develop an ethical outlook in which divine purpose is the basis of moral activity.

"Breadth and subtlety, wisdom and insight . . . Gustafson is a first-rate theologian."—Commonweal

"The two-volume work, now complete, will be a benchmark for discussions of Christian ethics for years to come. With it Gustafson becomes one of the thinkers by whom others can, by agreement or divergence, define their own ethics."—Roger L. Shinn, Christianity and Crisis

"Gustafson's theocentrism is an original and creative contribution to modern ethical discussion."—Douglas Sturm, Ethics

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Ethics of Liberation

In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion

Enrique Dussel

Duke University Press, 2012

Available in English for the first time, this much-anticipated translation of Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation marks a milestone in ethical discourse. Dussel is one of the world's foremost philosophers. This treatise, originally published in 1998, is his masterwork and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop.

Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative drive of those who have been excluded from Western Modernity and neoliberal rationalism. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, his thinking has figured prominently in philosophy, political theory, and liberation movements around the world.

In Ethics of Liberation, Dussel provides a comprehensive world history of ethics, demonstrating that our most fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through modern European and North American thought. The obscured and ignored origins of Modernity lie outside the Western tradition. Ethics of Liberation is a monumental rethinking of the history, origins, and aims of ethics. It is a critical reorientation of ethical theory.

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Ethics of Maimonides

Hermann Cohen, Translated by Almut Sh. Bruckstein

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

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

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Ethnic Conflict

Religion, Identity, and Politics

S. A. Giannakos

Ohio University Press, 2001

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups. The apparent inability of the international community to respond firmly and purposefully to violent conflicts can be attributed partially to a general confusion and misunderstanding of the root causes of such conflicts. In some cases, the international community argued that violent conflicts could be attributed to irreconcilable ethnic differences, which, like earthquakes, are impossible to prevent or control.

At other times, the argument was that such conflicts were the results of evil leaders capable of engineering mass violent acts. Ethnic Conflict presents an interdisciplinary and comparative effort to explain the root causes of ethnic conflicts in terms of political, economic, and social common denominators that characterize all such conflicts. It seeks to dispel misplaced assumptions about violent domestic conflicts and, by providing a clearer picture of the mechanics of such conflicts, it hopes to assist in the process of conflict resolution and prevention.

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Ethnographic Sorcery

Harry G. West

University of Chicago Press, 2007

According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery—for many of them, West’s efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In Ethnographic Sorcery, West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation.

A key theme of West’s research into sorcery is that one sorcerer’s claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West’s attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.

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Eugene England

A Mormon Liberal

Kristine L. Haglund

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Eugene England championed an optimistic Mormon faith open to liberalizing ideas from American culture. At the same time, he remained devoted to a conservative Mormonism that he saw as a vehicle for progress even as it narrowed the range of acceptable belief.

Kristine L. Haglund views England’s writing through the tensions produced by his often-opposed intellectual and spiritual commitments. Though labeled a liberal, England had a traditional Latter-day Saint background and always sought to address fundamental questions in Mormon terms. His intellectually adventurous essays sometimes put him at odds with Church authorities and fellow believers. But he also influenced a generation of thinkers and cofounded Dialogue, a Mormon academic and literary journal acclaimed for the broad range of its thought.

A fascinating portrait of a Mormon intellectual and his times, Eugene England reveals a believing scholar who emerged from the lived experiences of his faith to engage with the changes roiling Mormonism in the twentieth century.

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Europe (c.1400-1458)

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini

Catholic University of America Press, 2013

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Europe's Inner Demons

The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom

Norman Cohn

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Europe's Inner Demons is a fascinating history of the irrational need to imagine witches and an investigation of how those fantasies made the persecutions of the middle ages possible. In addition, Norman Cohn's discovery that some influential sources on European witch trials were forgeries has revolutionized the field of witchcraft, making this one of the most essential books ever written on the subject.

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European Religious Cultures

Essays Offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday

Edited by Miri Rubin

University of London Press, 2008

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Eusebius of Emesa

Church and Theology in the Mid-Fourth Century

Robert E. Winn

Catholic University of America Press, 2011

Through a careful examination of his extant sermons, some of which survive in Latin and others in classical Armenian, this book invites readers to hear a bishop's voice from the mid- fourth century, an important period in late antique Christianity

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Evagrius's Kephalaia Gnostika

A New Translation of the Unreformed Text from the Syriac

Ilaria L.E. Ramelli

SBL Press, 2015

A new English translation for scholars and students of church history

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

Features:

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

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Evaluating the Legacy of Robert W. Funk

Reforming the Scholarly Model

Andrew D. Scrimgeour

SBL Press, 2018

Enter the world of an academic trailblazer

Robert W. Funk, professor of New Testament, former Executive Secretary of the Society of Biblical Literature, and founder of Scholars Press and the Jesus Seminar, was one of the most gifted, controversial figures in modern biblical scholarship. The volume includes nineteen of his essays, correspondences, interviews, and administrative papers pertaining to the Society of Biblical Literature and Scholars Press. Colleagues introduce each section with reflections on the life and contributions of Funk.

Features:

Evaluation of the changes to scholarly societies and to scholarly research that Funk advocated

Exploration of the shift in the interpretation of Jesus’s parables initiated by Funk

Previously unpublished writings

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Evangelical Gotham
Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783–1860
Kyle B. Roberts
University of Chicago Press, 2016
A portrait of born-again Protestantism in New York City from the American Revolution to the Civil War.

At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B. Roberts, who argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today.

In Evangelical Gotham, Roberts explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared to open new neighborhoods uptown, evangelicals stood ready to build meetinghouses. As the city’s financial center emerged and solidified, evangelicals capitalized on the resultant wealth, technology, and resources to expand their missionary and benevolent causes. When they began to feel that the city’s morals had degenerated, evangelicals turned to temperance, Sunday school, prayer meetings, antislavery causes, and urban missions to reform their neighbors. The result of these efforts was Evangelical Gotham—a complicated and contradictory world whose influence spread far beyond the shores of Manhattan.

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Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life
Gallagher, Sally K
Rutgers University Press, 2003

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals—one of husbands’ authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage—from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to “secular society,” Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God.

The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over 300 evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.

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Evangelical News
Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s
Anja-Maria Bassimir
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A comprehensive study of evangelical magazine discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and how it navigated and sustained religious convictions in a time of dramatic social change

The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in US history. In tandem with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, abortion, birth control, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a surge in readership for evangelical periodicals such as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners as well as the feminist newsletter Daughters of Sarah.

While each of these magazines—and other publications and media—contributed to and participated in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they also had their own outlooks and political leanings concerning hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, Anja-Maria Bassimir presents a nuanced view of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century through the lens of the movement’s own media.

Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. To accomplish this, Evangelical News traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters investigate such topics as how evangelicals reenvisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement, the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence, and the place of evangelicals as political actors.

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Evangelicals and Democracy in America
Religion and Politics
Steven G. Brint
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Separation of church and state is a bedrock principal of American democracy, and so, too, is active citizen engagement. Since evangelicals comprise one of the largest and most vocal voting blocs in the United States, tensions and questions naturally arise. In the two-volume Evangelicals and Democracy in America, editors Steven Brint and Jean Reith Schroedel have assembled an authoritative collection of studies of the evangelical movement in America. Religion and Politics, the second volume of the set, focuses on the role of religious conservatives in party politics, the rhetoric evangelicals use to mobilize politically, and what the history of the evangelical movement reveals about where it may be going. Part I of Religion and Politics explores the role of evangelicals in electoral politics. Contributor Pippa Norris looks at evangelicals around the globe and finds that religiosity is a strong predictor of ideological leanings in industrialized countries. But the United States remains one of only a handful of post-industrial societies where religion plays a significant role in partisan politics. Other chapters look at voting trends, especially the growing number of higher-income evangelicals among Republican ranks, how voting is influenced both by "values" and race, and the management of the symbols and networks behind the electoral system of moral-values politics. Part II of the volume focuses on the mobilizing rhetoric of the Christian Right. Nathaniel Klemp and Stephen Macedo show how the rhetorical strategies of the Christian Right create powerful mobilizing narratives, but frequently fail to build broad enough coalitions to prevail in the pluralistic marketplace of ideas. Part III analyzes the cycles and evolution of the Christian Right. Kimberly Conger looks at the specific circumstances that have allowed evangelicals to become dominant in some Republican state party committees but not in others. D. Michael Lindsay examines the "elastic orthodoxy" that has allowed evangelicals to evolve into a formidable social and political force. The final chapter by Clyde Wilcox presents a new framework for understanding the relationship between the Christian Right and the GOP based on the ecological metaphor of co-evolution. With its companion volume on religion and society, this second volume of Evangelicals and Democracy in America offers the most complete examination yet of the social circumstances and political influence of the millions of Americans who are white evangelical Protestants. Understanding their history and prospects for the future is essential to forming a comprehensive picture of America today.
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Evangelicals and Democracy in America
Religion and Society
Steven G. Brint
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
By the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of U.S. churches were evangelical in outlook and practice. America's turn toward modernism and embrace of science in the early twentieth century threatened evangelicalism's cultural prominence. But as confidence in modern secularism wavered in the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicalism had another great awakening. The two volumes of Evangelicals and Democracy in America trace the development and current role of evangelicalism in American social and political life. Volume I focuses on who evangelicals are today, how they relate to other groups, and what role they play in U.S. social institutions. Part I of Religion and Society examines evangelicals' identity and activism. Contributor Robert Wuthnow explores the identity built around the centrality of Jesus, church and community service, and the born-again experience. Philip Gorski explores the features of American evangelicalism and society that explain the recurring mobilization of conservative Protestants in American history. Part II looks at how evangelicals relate to other key groups in American society. Individual chapters delve into evangelicals' relationship to other conservative religious groups, women and gays, African Americans, and mainline Protestants. These chapters show sources of both solidarity and dissension within the "traditionalist alliance" and the hidden strengths of mainline Protestants' moral discourse. Part III examines religious conservatives' influence on American social institutions outside of politics. W. Bradford Wilcox, David Sikkink, Gabriel Rossman, and Rogers Smith investigate evangelicals' influence on families, schools, popular culture, and the courts, respectively. What emerges is a picture of American society as a consumer marketplace with a secular legal structure and an arena of pluralistic competition interpreting what constitutes the public good. These chapters show that religious conservatives have been shaped by these realities more than they have been able to shape them. Evangelicals and Democracy in America, Volume I is one of the most comprehensive examinations ever of this important current in American life and serves as a corrective to erroneous popular representations. These meticulously balanced studies not only clarify the religious and social origins of evangelical mobilization, but also detail both the scope and limits of evangelicals' influence in our society. This volume is the perfect complement to its companion in this landmark series, Evangelicals and Democracy in America, Volume II: Religion and Politics.
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Everyday Apocalypse
Art, Empire, and the End of the World
David Dark
Vanderbilt University Press, 2025
Everyday Apocalypse recovers the root meaning of the term apocalypse (revelation) to use the concept as a lens through which art and other acts of creative nonviolence that often go unseen may be brought into focus. Interweaving an examination of popular culture with ancient insight and contemporary political awareness, Dark uses the concept of the apocalyptic to celebrate epiphanies about the world we live in and the meaning of human experience within it. Since its original publication in 2002, the book has become a deeply influential text among two generations of intellectual evangelical Christians who find themselves at odds with their families and communities over issues of politics and culture, particularly in the South.

This revised edition of the book includes a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib, an extensive afterword, updates in light of the passage of time since its publication, and new insights from the author, whose outspokenness has placed him outside of circles in which he was once supported and celebrated.
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Everyone's Apocalypse
A Reflection Guide, 2nd Edition
Donal A. McIlraith
Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2024
Everyone’s Apocalypse attempts to respond to the request of Dei Verbum 22 that “Easy access to Sacred Scripture should be provided for all the faithful.” In this easy-to-read introduction for beginners, modern scholarship and the Church’s tradition meet to help readers understand and pray through this demanding part of God’s Word. Following Ugo Vanni’s proved structure, the two parts of the Apocalypse (chapters 1–3 and 4–22) are presented in seven chapters. The opening two chapters show John’s vision of the Risen Jesus as Son of Man and his words to the seven churches of Asia Minor. Chapter three presents the vital section, full of worship, of the throne vision of God as creator and of Jesus, slaughtered and risen, as redeemer. The opening of the seven seals by the Lamb, the four horsemen, the Risen Jesus, the destruction wrought by the seven trumpets, the three signs of the Woman, the Dragon, and the seven angels with the seven bowls of wrath are dealt with in the next three chapters. The final chapter outlines the climax of the book. Harlot Babylon, the evil city, is judged and falls and, following the intervention of the bridegroom Lamb and the removal of God’s enemies, the marriage of the Lamb reaches its fulfillment when the prepared wife becomes the possessed bride. In the imagery of this text, the kingdom has come. Uniquely, this book reads the entire Apocalypse in a nuptial manner. This is a love story. Jesus, the lover, following the pattern of Jewish marriage in the first century, helps his espoused wife, the seven churches, to persevere in their nuptial response of love to him, their first love. After coming through the tribulation, they finally become his beloved, possessed Bride, filled with glory. This eschatological union of love is humankind’s destiny.
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Evidence Of Purpose
Scientists Discover The Creator
John Marks Templeton
Templeton Press, 1996

For nearly a century, the central theological message of science seemed to be that there was no need for theology: science could stand alone to explain the universe. But today, that message is changing. In this volume, a gallery of respected scientists describes new developments in their fields and their relationship with theological views of the universe. Contributors include Owen Gingerich, Russell Stannard, Paul Davies, Walter R. Hearn, Robert Russell, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, John C. Eccles, Daniel H. Osmond, and David Wilcox.

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Evidence of Editing
Growth and Change of Texts in the Hebrew Bible
Reinhard Müller
SBL Press, 2014
A new perspective on editorial activity in the Hebrew Bible for research and teaching

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

Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic examples of editorial activity

Clear explanations of the distinctions between textual, literary, and redaction criticism

Fifteen chapters attesting to continual editorial activity in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings

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Evolution
The Disguised Friend of Faith?
Arthur Peacocke
Templeton Press, 2004

Arthur Peacocke, eminent priest-scientist, has collected thirteen of his essays for this volume. Previously published in various academic journals and edited books, the provocative essays expand upon the theme of the evolution of nature, humanity, and belief. They are grouped into three parts:

Natural Evolution covers topics ranging from the implications of deterministic chaos; biological evolution and Christian theology; chance, potentiality, and God; complexity, emergence, and divine creativity.

Humanity Evolving in the Presence of God, articulating God’s presence in and to the world as it is unveiled by the sciences; the chrysalis of the human; the nature and purpose of man in science and Christian theology.

Theological Evolution—the Reshaping of Belief, dealing with science and the future of theology; public truth in religion; the incarnation of the self-expressive word of God; DNA; and the challenges and possibilities of western theism.

In the epilogue, Dr. Peacocke discusses wisdom in science and education, referring to Robert Grosseteste, a medieval scientist-theologian.

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Evolving God
A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition
Barbara J. King
University of Chicago Press, 2017

Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves.

But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals.

King writes with a scientist’s appreciation for evidence and argument, leavened with a deep empathy and admiration for the powerful desire to belong, a desire that not only brings us together with other humans, but with our closest animal relations as well.

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Ex Voto
Votive Giving Across Cultures
Edited by Ittai Weinryb
Bard Graduate Center, 2015
Derived from Latin ex voto suscepto “in pursuance of a vow,” an ex voto embodies the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the person who deposits it. Almost anything, regardless of size, weight, form, or original function, can become a votive object. Ultimately, the category refers to a subset of the material world in which a thing is not necessarily made to be a votive, but instead becomes charged with votive meaning once dedicated to a deity or deities. This volume, one of the first collections devoted exclusively to the subject, builds on the assumption that a shared conceptual framework underpins votive objects, and that by merit of their consecration they have become a category representing a special stage in the life of a material.

The contributors to this comparative study examine ex votos across a range of locations and time periods, including the classical Mediterranean world, medieval Europe, the period of the Catholic Reform, and on to Mexico, Shinto and Buddhist Japan, and Muslim Iran. Voluminous and diverse, Ex Voto will appeal in a wide range of fields, including history, religion, and anthropology.
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Exceptionally Queer
Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism
K. Mohrman
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
How perceptions of Mormonism from 1830 to the present reveal the exclusionary, racialized practices of the U.S. nation-state

Are Mormons really so weird? Are they potentially queer? These questions occupy the heart of this powerful rethinking of Mormonism and its place in U.S. history, culture, and politics. K. Mohrman argues that Mormon peculiarity is not inherent to the Latter-day Saint faith tradition, as is often assumed, but rather a potent expression of U.S. exceptionalism.

Exceptionally Queer scrutinizes the history of Mormonism starting with its inception in the early 1830s and continuing to the present. Drawing on a wide range of historical texts and moments—from nineteenth-century battles over Mormon plural marriage; to the LDS Church’s emphases on “individual responsibility” and “family values”; to mainstream media’s coverage of the LDS Church’s racist exclusion of Black priesthood holders, its Native assimilation programs, and vehement opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; and to much more recent legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage and on-screen Mormon polygamy—Exceptionally Queer evaluates how Mormonism has been used to motivate and rationalize the biased, exclusionary, and colonialist policies and practices of the U.S. nation-state.

Mohrman explains that debates over Mormonism both drew on and shaped racial discourses and, in so doing, delineated the boundaries of whiteness and national belonging, largely through the consolidation of (hetero)normative ideas of sex, marriage, family, and economy. Ultimately, the author shows how discussions of Mormonism in this country have been and continue to be central to ideas of what it means to be American.
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Excited Delirium
Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Duke University Press, 2024
In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.
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Exegetic Homilies
Saint Basil
Catholic University of America Press, 1963
No description available
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Exegetical Epistles
Thomas P. Jerome
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series of the 19th century rendered into English many of Jerome’s treatises and letters while bypassing his biblical commentaries as well as some of his most important exegetical letters. This omission, which was not helpful to scholarship, was probably due to the great length of these works. Although the problem was partly remedied by some new English translations of the 20th century, the present volume fills a significant lacuna by translating into English the Scriptural exegesis that Jerome conveyed in his relatively unknown epistles, many of which were composed in response to queries he had received from various correspondents. Many of these letters are presented here for the first time in English. Based on the Hilberg edition, this volume contains new translations, introduced and annotated, of Jerome’s Epistles 18-21, 25-30, 34-37, 42, 53, 55-56, 59, 64-65, 72-74, 78, 85, 106, 112, 119-121, 129, 130, and 140. Two newly translated letters from the famous exchange with Augustine over the meaning of Galatians 2:11-14 are included (Epp. 56 and 112), as well as a new rendering of Ep. 130 to Demetrias (which technically is not an “exegetical” letter but does present important information about the Pelagian controversy). Overall, this collection hopes to serve as a useful introduction to Jerome’s approach to biblical interpretation, of both the Old and the New Testament. Some letters focus on the historical meaning of Pauline and Gospel texts, while others contain allegorical expositions of Old Testament passages. Jerome’s competence as a Hebrew scholar will become evident to the reader of this volume as well as his thorough acquaintance with the antecedent Greek and Latin Christian exegetical traditions.
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Exegetical Epistles, Volume 2
Thomas P. St. Jerome
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
This is the second of a two-volume set that includes Thomas Scheck’s new translations of several of St. Jerome’s previously untranslated exegetical letters. Epistle 85 to St. Paulinus of Nola contains Jerome’s answers to two questions: how Exodus 7.13 and Romans 9.16 can be reconciled with free will, and what 1 Corinthians 7.14 means. Epistle 106 to Sunnias and Fretela, which deals with textual criticism of the Septuagint, consists of a meticulous defense of Jerome’s new translation of the Latin Psalter. Epistle 112 is a response to three letters from St. Augustine: Ep. 56 (contained in the previous volume), Ep. 67, and Ep 104. In the face of Augustine’s criticisms, Jerome defends his own endeavor to translate the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew text. He also vindicates his own ecclesiastical interpretation of Galatians 2.4-11, as he had set this forth in his Commentary on Galatians, and along the way he accuses Augustine of advocating the heresy of Judaizing. Epistle 119 to Minervius and Alexander contains Jerome’s answers to some eschatological questions regarding the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15.51 and 1 Thessalonians 4.17. In Epistle 120 to Hedibia, Jerome tackles twelve exegetical questions that focus on reconciling the discrepant Resurrection accounts in the Gospels, as well as questions about Romans 9.14-29, 2 Corinthians 2.16, and 1 Thessalonians 5.23. In Epistle 121 to Algasia, Jerome clarifies eleven exegetical questions dealing with passages in the Gospels and Paul’s letters (Romans 5.7; 7.7-25; 9.3-5; Colossians 2.18-19; 2 Thessalonians 2.3). This letter also contains an exposition of the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16.1-10), in which Jerome translates material from a commentary attributed to Theophilus of Antioch. In Epistle 129 to Dardanus, Jerome interprets “the promised land” and discusses the alleged crimes of the Jews. Epistle 130 to Demetrias is not an exegetical letter but an exhortation to the newly consecrated virgin on how to live out her vocation. In this letter Jerome reflects on Origenism and Pelagianism. Finally, in Epistle 140 to Cyprian the presbyter, Jerome expounds Psalm 90.
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Exhibiting Evangelicalism
Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past
Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Religion is a subject often overlooked or ignored by public historians. Whether they are worried about inadvertent proselytizing or fearful of contributing to America’s ongoing culture wars, many heritage professionals steer clear of discussing religion’s formative role in the past when they build collections, mount exhibits, and develop educational programming. Yet religious communities have long been active contributors to the nation’s commemorative landscape.
Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history. In their zeal to craft a particular vision of the national past, evangelicals engaged with a variety of public history practices and techniques that made them major players in the field—including becoming early adopters of public history’s experiential turn.
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Exodus!
Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2000
No other story in the Bible has fired the imaginations of African Americans quite like that of Exodus. Its tale of suffering and the journey to redemption offered hope and a sense of possibility to people facing seemingly insurmountable evil.

Exodus! shows how this biblical story inspired a pragmatic tradition of racial advocacy among African Americans in the early nineteenth century—a tradition based not on race but on a moral politics of respectability. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., begins by comparing the historical uses of Exodus by black and white Americans and the concepts of "nation" it generated. He then traces the roles that Exodus played in the National Negro Convention movement, from its first meeting in 1830 to 1843, when the convention decided—by one vote—against supporting Henry Highland Garnet's call for slave insurrection.

Exodus! reveals the deep historical roots of debates over African-American national identity that continue to rage today. It will engage anyone interested in the story of black nationalism and the promise of African-American religious culture.
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Expanding Humanitys Vision Of God
Robert Herrmann
Templeton Press, 2001

How has our understanding of our world and our place in the universe changed in recent decades through the momentous discoveries of science? Do recent developments in the philosophy of science, which place limitations on scientific knowing, provide a more level playing field? This collection of essays and sermons, which have not been readily available before, address these thought-provoking questions.

The John Templeton Foundation sponsored an essay and sermon contest to convey an expanded vision of God, one that is informed by recent discoveries of science on the nature of the universe and the place we have in the world. These selections are the winners of that competition.

The book is divided into three sections: “Contemporary Science Raising Theological Questions,” “New Visions of Theology,” and “Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on the Science-Religion Dialogue.” The essays cover such areas as physics, theology, cosmology, origins, and artificial intelligence.

“There is another way to conceive our life together. There is another way to conceive of our life in God, but it requires a different worldview—not a clockwork universe in which individuals function as discrete springs and gears, but one that looks more like a luminous web, in which the whole is far more than the parts. In this universe, there is no such thing as an individual apart from his or her relationships. Every interaction—between people and people, between people and things, between things and things—changes the face of history. Life on earth cannot be reduced to four sure-fire rules. It is an ever-unfolding mystery that defies precise prediction. Meanwhile, in this universe, there is no such thing as 'parts‚' The whole is the fundamental unit of reality.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, “Physics and Faith,”

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Expanding the Palace of Torah
Orthodoxy and Feminism
Tamar Ross
Brandeis University Press, 2004
Expanding the Palace of Torah offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women’s revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, as well as Orthodox Judaism’s response to those challenges. Writing as an insider—herself an Orthodox Jew—Tamar Ross confronts the radical feminist critique of Judaism as a religion deeply entrenched in patriarchy. Surprisingly, very little work has been done in this area, beyond exploring the leeway for ad hoc solutions to practical problems as they arise on the halakhic plane. In exposing the largely male-focused thrust of the rabbinic tradition and its biblical grounding, she sees this critique as posing a potential threat to the theological heart of traditional Judaism—the belief in divine revelation.

This new edition brings this acclaimed and classic text back into print with a new essay by Tamar Ross which examines new developments in feminist thought since the book was first published in 2004.
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Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree
Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949
Erick D. Langer
Duke University Press, 2009
Missions played a vital role in frontier development in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were key to the penetration of national societies into the regions and indigenous lands that the nascent republics claimed as their jurisdictions. In Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, Erick D. Langer examines one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America, the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in southeastern Bolivia. Using that mission system as a model for understanding the relationship between indigenous peoples and missionaries in the post-independence period, Langer explains how the missions changed over their lifespan and how power shifted between indigenous leaders and the missionaries in an ongoing process of negotiation.
Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries’ motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.
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Expecting Teryk
An Exceptional Path to Parenthood
Dawn Prince-Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2005

“Expecting Teryk is a rich and sumptuous work that speaks to the deeper realities and represents a unique viewpoint of experiences shared by all individuals who choose the path to parenthood.”—Disability, Pregnancy, and Parenthood

The period just prior to the birth of a child is a time of profound personal transformation for expectant parents. Expecting Teryk: An Exceptional Path to Parenthood is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern society would strip of its magic.

Dawn Prince-Hughes, renowned author of Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism, considers the ways being autistic might inform her parenting. She also candidly narrates her experience of becoming a parent as part of a lesbian couple—from meeting her partner to the questions they ask about their readiness to become parents and the practical considerations of choosing a sperm donor.

Expecting Teryk is viewed through the lens of autism as Prince-Hughes shares the unique way she sees and experiences the world—as well as her aching will to be fully present for her son. Contemplating the evolutionary traditions of parenting from both animal and human perspectives and the reassurances that nature offers, Expecting Teryk is a work of sensuous wonder that speaks to the deeper realities and archetypal experiences shared by all who embark on the journey of parenthood.

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Experience
Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion
Norman Fischer
University of Alabama Press, 2015
An exploration of how language, creativity, and spiritual practice shape human experience.

By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer’s Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.

Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry’s Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience.

Fischer’s work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation.

The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme “uselessness” of art making, “late work” as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of “religious experience.” From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer’s essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing.

Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.
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Experientia, Volume 2
Linking Text and Experience
Colleen Shantz
SBL Press, 2012
This collection of essays continues the investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity begun in Experientia, Volume 1, by addressing one of the traditional objections to the study of experience in antiquity. The authors address the relationship between the surviving evidence, which is textual, and the religious experiences that precede or ensue from those texts. Drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, social memory theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, they explore a range of religious phenomena including worship, the act of public reading, ritual, ecstasy, mystical ascent, and the transformation of gender and of emotions. Through careful and theoretically informed work, the authors demonstrate the possibility of moving from written documents to assess the lived experiences that are linked to them. The contributors are István Czachesz, Frances Flannery, Robin Griffith-Jones, Angela Kim Harkins, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, John R. Levison, Carol A. Newsom, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Colleen Shantz, Leif E. Vaage, and Rodney A. Werline.
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Experiments in Mystical Atheism
Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond
Brook Ziporyn
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.

Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In this book, Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism.

In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today.
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Experiments in the Fading Light
Peck, Steven L.
Signature Books, 2025
Experiments in the Fading Light is a poetic exploration that combines science, faith, and the aesthetic dimensions of art and nature. The poems range from a mischievous reimagining of the twelfth-century nun Hildegard von Bingen’s work on animals to looking at the deep suffering brought on by illness and other sorrows. The work also explores the concept of faith and meaning in light of how complicated life has become in our contemporary world.
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Experiments with Power
Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad
J. Brent Crosson
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah.

From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.

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Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism
Contributions from Cognitive and Social Science
Petri Luomanen
SBL Press, 2016
Now in paperback!

Cognitive science of religion is a radically new paradigm in the study of religion. Historians of religion have shown increasing interest in this approach. The book is in four parts: an introduction to cognitive and social-scientific approaches, applications of cognitive science, applications of conceptual blending theory, and applications of socio-cognitive analyses.

Features:

Paperback format of an essential Brill resource

Essays that combine cognitive analysis with historical and social-scientific approaches to biblical materials, Christian origins, and early Judaism

Research for historians of religion, biblical scholars, and those working in the cognitive science of religion.

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Exploring Colossians
Living the New Reality
Roy R. Jeal
SBL Press, 2024
In this comprehensive, sociorhetorical interpretation of Colossians, Roy R. Jeal explores the letter’s portrayal of the grand vision that extends from the realm of God before the creation of the cosmos to the new reality and new culture of the life of fullness in Christ. The commentary analyzes the pictures the text evokes in the human visual imagination, identifies the persuasive modes of discourse in the letter, and evaluates the range of textures that interweave to produce the dynamic rhetorical argument of Colossians. Demands to conform to “empty deceitful philosophy, human tradition, and the elements of the world” rather than to Christ are irrelevant for believers who have been transferred from darkness to the light of the Son of God’s kingdom. The rhetoric of the letter moves believers to ideologies of living in the body of Christ where orderly behavior guided by love contrasts with the chaotic, self-indulgent, divisive uncertainties of Mediterranean existence.
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Exploring Forgiveness
Edited by Robert D. Enright and Joanna North
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998
Pioneers in the study of forgiveness, Robert Enright and Joanna North have compiled a collection of twelve essays ranging from a first-person account of the mother of a murdered child to an assessment of the United States’ post-war reconciliations with Germany and Vietnam. This book explores forgiveness in interpersonal relationships, family relationships, the individual and society relationship, and international relations through the eyes of philosophers and educators as well as a psychologist, police chief-turned-minister, law professor, sociologist, psychiatrist, social worker, and theologian.
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Exploring Philemon
Freedom, Brotherhood, and Partnership in the New Society
Roy R. Jeal
SBL Press, 2015
A new, sociorhetorical interpretation of the Letter to Philemon

Exploring Philemon shows how this letter entered the world of the ancient Mediterranean and the early church with a dramatic and powerful rhetorical force by analyzing the range of textures interwoven with each other to produce a profound effect on an early Christian (Philemon) and on the church that met in his home. It demonstrates that many striking and subtle features work together to present a rhetorical argument that the new Christian society must be one of freedom, brotherhood, and partnership not just for the powerful, but for all.

Features:

An analysis of the visual imagery of the letter

Application of up-to-date rhetorical, sensory-aesthetic, and intertextual interpretive methods

Use of Social and cultural, ideological, and theological strategies

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Exploring Second Corinthians
Death and Life, Hardship and Rivalry
B. J. Oropeza
SBL Press, 2016
A multi-faceted commentary that breathes fresh insight into Paul's letter
In Second Corinthians, Paul responds to reports of the Corinthian congregation questioning his competency as a divinely sent messenger. Through apologetic demegoria and the use of graphic imagery related to triumphal processions, siege warfare, and emissary travels and negotiation, Paul defends his constancy, persona, and speaking abilities as he extends the offer of clemency and reconciliation to his auditors. Oropeza combines rhetorical pictures (rhetography) with interpretative layers (literary features, intertextuality, socio-cultural, ideological, and sacred textures) to arrive at the rhetorical impact of Paul's message for ancient Mediterranean discourse.
Features:

A visual, sensory, and imaginative interpretation of the scripture

A comprehensive commentary

An avant-garde approach to biblical interpretation

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