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This book of original essays provides a dialogue between four of the most distinguished scholars now working on problems of faith, reason, and skepticism. In their essays, William P. Alston, Robert Audi, Terence Penelhum, and Richard H. Popkin address both the corrosive and the constructive influences of skepticism on Christian and Jewish concepts of faith. The authors treat questions of perennial interest in philosophy of religion: the bases of human knowledge of God, the place of reason in religious belief, the difference between religious beliefs and those based on common sense, and the reconcilability of skepticism with religious belief. In terms of current epistemology, Alston explores the implications of reliabilism for Christian knowledge of God. Audi develops a concept of non-doxastic faith, which contrasts with flat-out beliefs, arguing that such faith can support a full range of Christian attitudes and ethics. Penelhum contends that religious beliefs cannot be defended in the same way as beliefs of common sense, and thus natural theology is essential. Popkin demonstrates, in a richly historical study, that Jewish skepticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was used and can be used to neutralize questionable metaphysical theology while leaving a mysticism and spirituality without creed or institution. The essays are preceded by an Editor's Introduction and the volume concludes with a unifying dialogue between the four authors.

Places of worship are important anchor institutions in communities, helping to create social capital through discussion groups, soup kitchens, and neighborhood clean-ups. While congregations face increasing pressures, from declining attendance to political polarization, community engagement is an overall positive for their members and for democracy.

Faith and Community shows the benefits of religious people taking action in their communities. Through more than a decade of multi-method data collection, Rebecca Glazier surveyed over 4,000 congregants and nearly 500 clergy in Little Rock, Arkansas to gather opinions from members and leaders on community issues and engagement. Together with interviews and case studies, her findings indicate that active congregants are happier and more civically involved.

Faith and Community provides valuable insights into the relationship between religion and community engagement. The data illustrates how community engagement benefits individuals, congregations, and democracy and offers one solution to what ails religion in America today.

Explore a diversity of feminist readings of the Bible

This latest volume in the Bible and Women series is concerned with documenting, through word and image, both well-known and largely unknown women and their relationship to the Bible from the period of the late eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays in this collection illustrate the broad range of treatment of the Holy Scripture. Paul Chilcote, Marion Ann Taylor, Christiana de Groot, Elizabeth M. Davis, and Pamela S. Nadell offer perspectives on the Anglo-American sphere during this period. Marina Cacchi, Adriano Valerio, Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, and Alexei Klutschewski and Eva Maria Synek illuminate the areas of southern and eastern Europe. Angela Berlis, Ruth Albrecht, Doris Brodbeck, Ute Gause, and Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler examine women from the German-speaking world and their texts. Bernhard Schneider, Magda Motté, Katharina Büttner-Kirschner, and Elfriede Wiltschnigg treat the subject area of religious literature and art.

Features

• Insight into how women participated in academic exegesis and applied biblical figures as models for structuring their own lives
• Exploration of genres used by women, including letters, diaries, autobiographical records, stories, novels, songs, poems, and specialized exegetical treatises and commentaries on individual books of the Bible
• Detailed analyses of women’s interpretations ranging from those that sought to confirm traditions to those that challenged them

Some of America’s political and social identity today can be traced to the early frontier. After 1801 religion exploded across settlements in the Old Northwest and Kentucky. Not only were souls saved through camp meetings, but regular people also began applying the words “equal” and “independent” to themselves. The life of Eli P. Farmer, a circuit-riding preacher, politician, farmer, and businessman, is instructive. His autobiography includes accounts of Native Americans, brawls, flatboats, settlers, and revival meetings. Setting his story within the context of the Second Great Awakening, author Riley B. Case shows how Farmer’s life personified this religious movement, which gave birth to American evangelicalism, as well as values that would become idyllic to many Americans: self-sufficiency and individualism.

It is impossible to understand the history of Christian theology without taking into account the relationship between faith and reason. Many works give an overview of faith and reason, or outline key principles, while others put forward a thesis about how one should understand the relationship between faith and reason. In this theological essay, Grant Kaplan revisits the key figures and debates that shape how faith and reason relate. Divided into three parts, Kaplan invites readers into a conversation rather than a drive-by. Readers will encounter the words and arguments of some of Christianity’s greatest thinkers, some well-known (Augustine, Aquinas, Newman) and others nearly forgotten. Readings of these figures bring them to life in an accessible manner. In Faith and Reason through Christian History, the roughly fifty figures treated are given sufficient room to breathe. Rather than simply summarizing their thought, Kaplan traces their arguments through key texts. This book will appeal to a range of audiences: theologians and philosophers, instructors, graduate students, seminarians, lay study groups, and undergraduate theology majors. No book today accomplishes what this book does!

South Africa has repeatedly made international headlines because of its high rates of gender-based violence. In the midst of a wide range of responses to the problem, an important voice has been largely absent. Why are the religious groups that had famously protested the racial violence of apartheid faltering in their response to gendered violence in the democracy? Faith and the Fragility of Justice answers this question through a deep dive into the public discourse of three Protestant Christian organizations that had been adamant about a theological mandate to challenge apartheid, but have varied in their responses to gender-based violence in the democracy. The central argument of the book is that the organizations’ theological convictions intersect with their posture toward various social groups to shape their actions. In making this argument, Meredith Whitnah demonstrates that religious beliefs are a central dimension of institutional processes that sustain or challenge social inequality and violence.

In September of 2014 thirty new members were appointed for a five-year term to the Vatican’s International Theological Commission. These theologians, clerical and lay, were chosen from twenty-six different countries and from five continents. The commission was charged with composing three documents of contemporary theological importance, one of which was that of the relationship between faith and the sacraments. This finished document was published, with the approval of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and by Pope Francis in Spanish in early 2020 under the title: La Reciprocidad entre Fe y Sacramentos en la Economía Sacramental. A subsequent English translation was published thereafter under the title The Reciprocity Between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy. This present volume contains the text of the English translation. There follows an introduction by a member of the ITC, Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap., and subsequently followed by six explanatory and interpretive commentaries on various chapters of the document. Dr. John Yocum considers the contemporary relevance of the topic. Dr. Christopher Ruddy examines the dialogical nature of the sacramental economy of salvation. Dr. Jennifer Holmes Martin discusses the relationship between faith and the sacraments of initiation. There are two commentaries for section four concerning faith and the sacrament of marriage. Professor John Grabowski treats the strictly theological issues relating to faith and marriage. Canonist Timothy Cavanaugh takes up the canonical issues regarding faith and its relationship to enacting a valid sacramental marriage. Dr. Daniel Keating rounds off the commentaries by surveying the conclusion of the document, that is, the present need for evangelization so as to enliven the faith of the faithful, and the present relevance of the new ecclesial movements within the Church today. These commentaries are aimed at aiding priests and seminarians as they address or prepare to address the pastoral and theological concerns they encounter or will encounter on a daily basis. This volume could also be used in parish adult education groups as well, wherein the laity could better understand the relationship between faith and the sacraments.

An intimate history that puts the Black church at the heart of New England’s struggle with race, power, and belonging

On the eve of Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts—a church built by historian Todd E. Robinson’s family—was set ablaze in an act of racial terror. This devastating event echoes a long history of attacks on Black churches, institutions that have served as vital centers of faith, civic life, and community organization.

In Faith in the Fire, Robinson charts the evolution of Springfield’s Black community from its seventeenth-century beginnings through the Great Migration and into the twenty-first century. Centering the Black church, he demonstrates how African Americans shaped the city’s industrial, cultural, and civic landscape, building social networks and organizations that became enduring anchors of community life. From the League of Gileadites, an all-Black armed anti-slavery militia, to twentieth-century initiatives like the Springfield Plan—a pioneering but short-lived experiment in interracial education—Robinson uncovers the city’s deep history of Black resistance to white supremacy. In doing so, he exposes the limits of New England’s mythic racial tolerance. Racial violence, police brutality, economic inequality, educational disparities, and housing segregation, Robinson argues, are not aberrations of the South but also enduring features of Northern life and culture.

Drawing on extensive archival research and his own family’s experience, Robinson offers a powerful and deeply personal narrative that links past and present. Through the intertwined story of Springfield’s Black community and the destruction of one of its most cherished institutions, he illuminates how the long struggle for freedom, justice, and belonging continues to shape the life of Black Americans and the nation as a whole.

Dana Gioia’s characters and verses cry from the depths, their faith tried—and purified—in the furnace of doubt. Enchanted by Gioia’s visionary poetics, the reader discovers that deep faithfulness comes only by way of the via negativa: profundity is preceded by privation; suffering is the school of sure hope; a lover who cannot conquer evil’s great absence has never—has he?—ever really loved. Gioia’s poetry is an ideal site for thoughtful exposition of spiritual searching undertaken in a contemporary idiom. Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia's Poetics of Belief draws on the wisdom of St. Augustine and Søren Kierkegaard, René Girard and Jacques Maritain (all of whom Gioia cites as influences) to make intelligible the mystical unveilings and complex movements of faith and doubt that mark Gioia’s poems—from his early verse “The Burning Ladder” to his magnum opus in-progress “The Underworld.” This first full-length, in-depth study of Gioia’s poetry grants extended interpretation of the meanings a Catholic vision makes manifest. Hren conducts a close reading of poems whose spiritual charges are better grasped when read by the lights of those theologians, philosophers, and poets who have—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—raided the inarticulate: from Dante to St. Teresa of Avila, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Nietzsche, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Dostoevsky, from St. John of the Cross to St. John Henry Newman. Gioia’s litanies take all comers to the frayed edges of belief—a cliff that extends over the limits of language, the abyss of unknowing. Maybe at its highest, under the muse of divine madness, poetry can coax us across to the Word, the Lord of language, the “choreographer / of entrances and exits” who speaks all the worries and wonders we’ve left—for all those “midnight / whispers traveling the wires”—unsaid.

Explores the relationship between Hannah Arendt’s thought and theology.

This volume is a manifold approach to a less evident and much-neglected undercurrent in the work of Hannah Arendt, namely her ambiguous relation to the Judeo-Christian religious heritage. It contains discussions about strictly theological motives—like salvation or original sin—but it also explores topics such as forgiveness, love, natality, and the world within the religious aura.
 


 

Investigates the rhetorical practices used by contemporary evangelical Christian women to confront theological and cultural issues that stymie deliberation within their communities

While often perceived as an insular enclave with a high level of in-group agreement about political and social issues, predominantly white evangelicalism includes prominent voices urging deliberation about appropriate responses to sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the discourses surrounding these traumas. In Faithful Deliberation: Rhetorical Invention, Evangelicalism, and #MeToo Reckonings, T J Geiger II examines theologically reflective rhetorical invention that reconfigures trauma-minimizing commonplaces in order to facilitate community-internal deliberation.

Resting at the intersection of feminist rhetorical studies and religious rhetorics, this book contains four related theological-rhetorical case studies that consider how figures such as Beth Moore, Jen Hatmaker, Rachael Denhollander, Karen Swallow Prior, and others engaged in rhetorical invention. Each juxtaposes differing approaches to contending with rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and other traumas. Each case contrasts an approach based on appeals to highly circumscribed understandings of grace, purity, and other denomination-specific traditions and values with approaches rooted in those same traditions and values, but with an eye toward community transformation, healing through justice, and reinvigorated forms of forgiveness. Geiger skillfully argues that this faithful deliberation involves practices of thinking, reflecting, storytelling, and acting within a tightly bounded community that can foster change through a recommitment to core values.

These rhetorical practices exemplify the kind of inventive listening deliberative discourse requires, point to the sort of healing they may promote in response to trauma and trauma discourses, and occur within a range of genres including social media posts, blog entries, published interviews, victim impact statements, and petitions. This study of invention for evangelical-to-other-evangelical deliberative discourse contributes to rhetorical studies by demonstrating the civic and social possibilities of rhetoric within religious enclaves. By locating the case studies as recent moments in longer US public and evangelical histories of activism, deliberative practice, and politics, Faithful Deliberation brings into focus how enclaves and the dominant public sphere interact.
 

This book brings together selected lectures presented at the Education, Formation and the Church conference held in Kampen, August 2018. The key issue tackled by all contributors is how we can properly understand formation in the formative contexts of school and Church. The urgency of the topic is experienced by many people committed to the faith development of children and young people. Changes in society bring uncertainty and anxiety to churches, schools and families. Some Christian communities are inclined to protect their members from the perceived negative influences of the post-Christian age, while others equip them with tools to become virtuous disciples of Christ in modern society. These all are faithful efforts that seek the best for the future generation. Different responses to the challenges in society affect the various contexts in which formation is at stake, including schools, youth work, catechism and the training of pastors. The reflections in this book are intended to support people involved in these contexts in their future efforts. If you would like to order the book for delivery outside of the Netherlands, please email orders@aup.nl

This book brings together selected lectures presented at the Education, Formation and the Church conference held in Kampen, August 2018. The key issue tackled by all contributors is how we can properly understand formation in the formative contexts of school and Church. The urgency of the topic is experienced by many people committed to the faith development of children and young people. Changes in society bring uncertainty and anxiety to churches, schools and families. Some Christian communities are inclined to protect their members from the perceived negative influences of the post-Christian age, while others equip them with tools to become virtuous disciples of Christ in modern society. These all are faithful efforts that seek the best for the future generation. Different responses to the challenges in society affect the various contexts in which formation is at stake, including schools, youth work, catechism and the training of pastors. The reflections in this book are intended to support people involved in these contexts in their future efforts. If you would like to order the book for delivery outside of the Netherlands, please email orders@aup.nl

Catholic writers have made a rich contribution to British fiction, despite their minority status. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark are well-known examples, but there are many other significant novelists whose work has a Catholic aspect. This is the first book to survey the whole range of this material and examine whether valid generalizations can be made about it. In charting such fiction from its development in the Victorian period through to the work of contemporaries such as David Lodge, the author analyses its complex relationships with changes in British society and the international Church. There is more than one way of being a Catholic, as Woodman shows, but he also demosntrates that many of these writers share common themes and a distinctive perspective. They often wish in particular to use their religion as a weapon against what they portray as a complacent Protestant or secular society. Their consciousness of writing in the midst of such a society gives a special edge to their treatments of the perennial Catholic themes of suffering, sin and sex. It also has implications for literary form and relates to what has been seen as the extremist mode of Catholic fiction. The final question that Woodman puts is whether the changes in the Church since the Second Vatican Council must inevitably lead to the loss of this distinctive Catholic contribution to the novel.

In this compilation, editor George D. Smith has assembled sixteen thought-provoking essays which represent this ongoing discussion. They include “On Being a Mormon Historian” by D. Michael Quinn, “Two Integrities: An Address to the Crisis in Mormon Historiography” by Martin E. Marty, “Objectivity and History” by Kent E. Robson, “The Acids of Modernity and the Crisis in Mormon Historiography” by Louis Midgley, and “Historicity of the Canon” by Edward H. Ashment.

“History, myth, and legend are not always distinguishable,” cautions Smith,” “but there are some things we can know. The authors of these essays attempt to define the boundaries between objectivity and the biases of belief and unbelief which may color what is written about the past.”

Over the past decade Mormons have debated how their history should be written. New Mormon Historians believe that balanced, unprejudiced approaches produce the most reliable history. Traditionalists contend that no historian can be completely objective, that Mormon history should therefore be written with the “pre-understanding” that Joseph Smith restored the ancient Christian church.

”Theology of Religions” is among the most burning issues within Christian theology today. The challenge to study and discuss different ways of handling conflicting truth claims and religious narratives between religions is taken up by a growing number of theologians across denominational boundaries. This is a common and ecumenical effort undertaken by Christian theologians all over the world. And yet, the impact of specific ecclesiastical or theological traditions on different concepts of theology of religions should not be underestimated. As well known, the Second Vatican council with its pivotal decree Nostra Aetate (On the relation to other religions) not only set the agenda for Catholic theology, but even influenced the wider discussion on the topic. The papers of this volume were all given at a conference in Uppsala, Sweden in October 2017. The structure of Faithful Interpretations follows closely the way the conference was conducted. A general introduction to the development and present status of ”Theology of Religions” by Marianne Moyaert opens the book. Archbishop J Augustine Di Noia of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith then treats the recent developments in the teaching of the Magisterium regarding theology of religions. Anna Bonta Moreland adresses the issue of Muhammad and Christian Prophecy. Diego R Sarrió Cucarella focuses on early Christian theological views of Islam and concludes that Islam has been from the begining a ”disturbing” factor in the Christian view of salvation history. Wilhelmus G B M Valkenberg discusses the impact of Nostra Aetate on the Church’s relation to Muslims, using especially the precedent of Nicolaus of Cues as regards a constructive approach to Islam. Klaus von Stosch adresses a sensitive issue in Muslim-Christian relations and illustrates the advantages of the comparative theology approach for the theology of religions. Complementing this perspective, Peter Jonkers offers a hermeneutical perspective on truth claims, and reflects on ”the religious Other” with references to Jacques Derrida among others. Reinhold Bernhardt argues in favour of a biblically grounded “relational-existential” theory of truth, which would be most helpful with regard to other religions. To conclude, the prominent Catholic specialist on Theology of Religions, Gavin D’Costa, widened the perspective by addressing the relation to Judaism from the point of view of the covenant and the promises of the land. Altogether, the papers of this volume give a clear impression of the status of Roman Catholic Theology of Religions.

Malay Muslim women in Singapore cultivate piety by attending popular Islamic self-help classes. Nurhaizatul Jamil’s ethnographic study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of this phenomenon.

The Islamic self-help classes in this book exist at the nexus of sacred texts, aphorisms, and social media engagements, scaffolded by the neoliberal economy that shapes idealized Muslim subjectivities. Within a context whereby the Singapore state discursively frames Malayness in terms of cultural deficiency, Malay Muslim women’s inward focus on transformative ethics rather than societal change underscores the appeal of gendered pious self-help discourses. At the same time, Jamil’s referencing of Black, Indigenous, and Ethnic studies offers a compelling analytical frame that places affective transformation within the context of racial capitalism, historical trauma, and embodied healing.

A provocative and rich ethnography, Faithful Transformations tells the stories of Malay Muslim women desiring piety and self-improvement as minoritized subjects in contemporary Singapore while exploring the limitations of self-care.

With Faithful Translators, Jaime Goodrich offers the first in-depth examination of women’s devotional translations and of religious translations in general within early modern England. Placing female translators such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, alongside their male counterparts, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, Goodrich argues that both male and female translators constructed authorial poses that allowed their works to serve four distinct cultural functions: creating privacy, spreading propaganda, providing counsel, and representing religious groups. Ultimately, Faithful Translators calls for a reconsideration of the apparent simplicity of "faithful" translations and aims to reconfigure perceptions of early modern authorship, translation, and women writers.

Faithfully Seeking Understanding provides a first-hand opportunity for English-speaking readers to encounter the thought of Johannes Kuhn (1806-1887), widely considered the greatest speculative theologian of the renowned Catholic Tübingen School.

Faith is more than a personal choice; it’s a generational story. This study reveals when and why religious transmission succeeds or fails within families.

How does religion—or the lack of it—pass from one generation to the next? Families and Religion studies the intergenerational shifts in faith and secularism in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland, and Canada, depicting when, how, and why religious beliefs change.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the book looks into the role of family and historical context in shaping religious affiliation and identity, specifically focusing on adolescence as a key period of transformation. Comparing diverse social settings, the authors uncover the subtle yet powerful forces influencing whether religious traditions persist or fade across generations. A vital contribution to the study of religious change, this volume offers new insights for scholars of sociology and religious studies, and for those interested in understanding how faith may be passed down within families.
 

The first full-length study of a pivotal figure in American evangelical faith

James Dobson—child psychologist, author, radio personality, and founder of the Christian conservative organization Focus on the Family—published his first book, Dare to Discipline, in 1970 and quickly became the go-to family expert for evangelical parents across the United States as American evangelicalism rose as a major political force. The family expert became a leading voice in the Reagan Revolution, and played a role in making American evangelicals even more firmly associated with the Republican Party. Dobson’s principle beliefs are that the family is the center of Christian America and that the traditional family must be defended from perceived threats such as gay rights, feminism, abortion, and the secularization of public schools. Dobson and Focus on the Family dominated Christian media through print, radio, and online venues, and their message reached millions of American evangelical households, shaping the cultural sensibilities and political attitudes of evangelical families throughout the culture wars from the 1980s into the 2000s.
 
Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home by Hilde Løvdal Stephens is an insightful history and analysis of James Dobson’s rise to fame, effect on American evangelical culture, and subsequent descent from relevance. Extensively researched, Løvdal Stephens scoured through Dobson’s books, articles, and other materials published by Focus on the Family in order to explore how evangelicals defined and defended the traditional family as an ideal and as a symbol in an ever-changing world.
 
By contextualizing the history of Dobson’s reign, Løvdal Stephens’s discerning analysis fills an important gap in our understandings of the politics and culture of late twentieth-century conservative Christianity in the United States. She explores complex topics ranging from Dobson’s celebration of what he believes are timeless biblical values, such as maintaining strict and defined gender roles, to the ways Dobson and Focus on the Family balanced their basic ideals with real everyday lives of average American evangelical families, facing the realities of divorce, working mothers, and other perceived threats to the traditional family.
 

Far Too Easily Pleased was originally published in 1976, although it is just as relevant today. Catholic Education Press is thrilled to be able to bring this book back into print. To summarize the volume we can do better than to excerpt part of Fr. Schall’s introduction to the 1976 edition: This book is intended to be a helpful stimulus to incite the reader to survey the truly exciting literature in this field and to assist in organizing personal reflection about the basic themes of game, play, wonder, rite, contemplation and festivity, themes that the theology of play naturally suggests. For it can be truly said that those who have not yet been initiated into this style of religious and cultural thought have been missing highly liberating and ennobling levels of our heritage. For those who already know what rewards are to be found in play and game, it is hoped that this book can again be a fresh and different approach to wonder and fascination, to the curiously marvelous life we have been given. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher. He retired in 2012 after a long tenure as a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University Among his many books are The Universe We Think In; Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading; The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays; Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes and At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From “Brilliant Errors” To Things of Uncommon Importance (all CUA Press).

Honorable Mention, 2022 MLA Prize for a First Book

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
 

Now available in English

In discussions of the origin of the Pentateuch, the Priestly source traditionally constitutes an undisputed reference point for different source-critical models, and it is the only literary layer with concise terminology and a theological conception that can be extracted from a non-Priestly context. This English translation of Abschied von der Priesterschrift? Zum Stand der Pentateuchdebatte revisits the scholarly debate surrounding the Documentary Hypothesis and the so-called Priestly material’s position either as an independent written source or as a redaction within the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy. Contributors include Christoph Berner, Erhard Blum, Jan Christian Gertz, Christoph Levin, Eckart Otto, Christophe Nihan, and Thomas Römer.

The first critical edition of Caesarius’ Omelie morales de infantia Saluatoris—Homilies on Jesus’ Childhood.

Primarily known as the author of the Dialogus miraculorum—a collection of exemplary stories that secured his reputation as the master of Cistercian storytelling—Caesarius of Heisterbach was also the author of several sermons and homilies. Although they are not as well known today, his Homilies on Jesus’ Childhood are exceptional in many ways. Readers will immediately notice Caesarius’s versatility as he employs an impressive array of persuasive techniques: quoting scholarly works, interpreting Hebrew names and letters, delving into etymology and numerology, and including numerous examples to instruct both the learned and the common person.

A detailed history of the Church of England’s Welsh dioceses, including the building of cathedrals and churches.

The volumes in this series trace the process of reorganization and reform that took place in the Church of England after the Norman conquest, with the building of new cathedrals, the establishment of new constitutions for their chapters, and the appointment of foreign clergy. In this period, when many documents are undated, the chronological framework is provided by the careers of bishops, dignitaries, canons, and cathedral priors.  

​This volume covers the years 1541 to 1857, with a focus on the Welsh dioceses. During this period, six new dioceses were created out of larger dioceses, with former abbey churches named as their cathedrals. These fourteen cathedrals were known as the New Foundation, as compared with the thirteen medieval secular cathedrals of the Old Foundation. Further substantial reorganization took place in the 1830s, and additional dioceses were created to meet the needs of the period. This volume offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the period, making it an essential research tool for historians.

The End is always near. The Apocalypse has sparked imaginations for millennia, while in more recent times, highly publicized predictions have thrust End-Time theology briefly into the spotlight. In the 21st century, fictional depictions of various apocalyptic scenarios are found in an endless stream of films, TV shows, and novels, while real-world media coverage of global issues including climate change and the migrant crisis often features an apocalyptic tone. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances explores this prevalent human desire to envision the End by analyzing how various live End-Time performances allow people to live in and through future time.
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The book’s main focus is contemporary Christian End-Time performances and how they theatrically construct encounters with future time—not just images or ideas of a future, but viscerally and immediately real experiences of future time. Author Jill Stevenson’s examples are Hell Houses and Judgement Houses; Rapture House, a similarly styled “walk through drama” in North Carolina; Hell’s Gates, an “outdoor reality drama” in Dawsonville, Georgia; Ark Encounter, a full-size recreation of Noah’s Ark; and Tribulation Trail, an immersive thirteen-scene drama ministry based on the Book of Revelation. The book’s coda considers similarities between these Christian performances and secular survivalist prepper events, especially with respect to constructions of and language about time. In doing so, the author situates these performances within a larger tradition that challenges traditional secular/sacred distinctions and illuminates how the End Times has been employed in our current social and political moment.

"This is a book about submission and subversion, injustice and justice, heroes and villains."

In Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? Jimmy Hoke reads Romans with an innovative, intersectional approach that produces distinctive meanings for passages that probe how queer wo/men who first encountered Paul's letter could have engaged with it. Though Paul's letter to the Romans arguably contains the Bible’s strongest condemnation of queer wo/men (1:26–27), that is not the letter's full story. Hoke turns a feminist and queer gaze toward Paul’s conception of faith and ethics, making explicit how Paul's theology throughout Romans has been affectively motivated by imperial notions of gender, race, and sexuality. Moving beyond Paul's singular voice, Hoke engages with a feminist and queer praxis of assemblage to generate plausible ways wo/men of Rome interacted with this epistle. By engaging affect theory, Hoke brings to life not only ideas and words but the feelings and sensations that moved in-between some of the earliest Christ-followers, revealing how queer wo/men were there among them and what that means for queer wo/men today. Hoke includes a reader's guide with key terms used throughout the book, making this an excellent option for both students and scholars beginning to engage not only Paul's letters but also the complex worlds of feminist, queer, and affect theories.

Chart the development of feminist approaches and theories of interpretation during the period when women first joined the ranks of biblical scholars

This collection of essays on feminist biblical studies in the twentieth century seeks to explore four areas of inquiry demanding further investigation. In the first section, articles chart the beginnings and developments of feminist biblical studies as a conversation among feminists around the world. The second section introduces, reviews, and discusses the hermeneutic religious spaces created by feminist biblical studies. The third segment discusses academic methods of reading and interpretation that dismantle androcentric language and kyriarchal authority. The fourth section returns to the first with work that transgresses academic boundaries in order to exemplify the transforming, inspiring, and institutionalizing feminist work that has been and is being done to change religious mindsets of domination and to enable wo/men to engage in critical readings of the Bible.

Features:

• Essays examine the rupture or break in the malestream reception history of the Bible
• Exploration of the term feminism in different social-cultural and theoretical-religious locations
• Authors from around the world present research and future directions for research challenging the next generation of feminist interpreters