4743 books match the query 'Religion' and 138 start with g

cover of Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars

Critical Explorations in the History of Religions

Bruce Lincoln

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude.

The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian.
 
Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East

Gods in Dwellings

Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East

Michael B. Hundley

SBL Press, 2013

In this book devoted exclusively to temples and perceptions of the divine presences that inhabit them, Michael B. Hundley focuses on the official religions of the ancient Near East and explores the interface between the human and the divine within temple environs.

Hundley identifies common ancient Near Eastern temple systems and examines issues that include what temple structures communicate, how temples were understood to function, temple ideology, the installation of divine presence in a temple, the connection between presence and physical representation, and human service to the deity.

Drawing on architectural and spatial theory, ritual theory, theories of language, art history, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and comparative studies, Hundley offers a single interpretive lens through which to view temple worship.

Features:

  • A close examination of temples in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hittite Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine
  • An interdisciplinary treatment of architecture, language, ritual, and art
  • A dual focus on how a deity's divine presence connects to space and art and how human service to the deity maintains the deity's active presence
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cover of God’s Own Land: Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy, and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya

God’s Own Land

Sacred Landscape, Pilgrim Economy, and Religious Change in the Ganga Himalaya

James G. Lochtefeld

Lever Press, 2026

God’s Own Land follows the tectonic shift from traditional religious pilgrimage in the early twentieth-century to contemporary pilgrim tourism, in which ever-burgeoning visitor numbers have brought both benefits and challenges to the Garhwal region of India—the source of Hindu India’s sacred river, the Ganges. Despite Hinduism’s regional and sectarian variation, India’s Garhwal Himalaya region is one the most sacred places to Hindus, drawing pilgrims across sectarian lines from throughout the subcontinent and the world. This sacred land—dev bhumi or “land of the gods”—appears in foundational Hindu stories describing the presence and activity of gods, goddesses, saints, and cultural heroes.  

This study from James G. Lochtefeld draws out Hindu convictions regarding the Garhwal’s eternal and continuing sanctity as a holy region, based on the premise of an “imagined landscape.” This region is strongly associated with divine activity and yet this landscape is also a real place with a real history inhabited by real people, who have historically been poor because of the challenges created by the region’s geography. Juxtaposing the history of the region with its construction in the Hindu imaginary, this multidisciplinary study unpacks the nuanced image of the region, its religious significance, and the impacts of pilgrimages on the community through textual, historical, and ethnographic methods.

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cover of Going Through Ghosts

Going Through Ghosts

Mary Sojourner

University of Nevada Press, 2010

Maggie Foltz is a fifty-five-year-old cocktail waitress in a rundown casino in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert. She spends her days serving drinks to lonely old folks playing the slot machines and her nights trying to escape her bitter past. When she befriends Sarah, a young Native American woman who is hired to cook in the casino coffee shop, her life begins to change. Maggie finds herself falling in love with a memory-haunted Vietnam veteran and warily begins to hope that together they can find peace. Then Sarah is mysteriously murdered, and Sarah’s ghost enlists Maggie to accompany her on a quest for the wisdom that she needs in order to move into the next world. The story ranges from smoky casinos into the harsh magnificence of the desert and the reservation where Sarah’s people are trying to preserve their culture and find their own place in a modern world that seems to want them to be either shamans or losers. Sojourner’s characters are compellingly real, and the Mojave setting has rarely been depicted as sensitively or truthfully. This is a memorable story of love, redemption, and solace, told by one of the West’s finest writers.

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cover of Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture

Going West

Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture

Reuven Kiperwasser

SBL Press, 2021

This new book by Reuven Kiperwasser examines the social, cultural, and religious aspects of third- to sixth-century narratives involving rabbinic figures migrating between Babylonia and Palestine. Kiperwasser draws on migration and mobility studies, comparative literature, humor and satire studies, as well as social history to reveal how border-crossing rabbis were seen as exporting features of their previous eastern context into their new western homes and vice versa. Through their writing, rabbinic authors articulated the nature and legitimacy of their own scholastic practices, knowledge, and authority in relationship to their internal others.
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cover of Golden Nuggets: from Sir John Templeton

Golden Nuggets

from Sir John Templeton

John Marks Templeton

Templeton Press, 1998

For young or old, rich or poor, this wisdom will find many applications in people's lives. This inspiring collection of time wisdom by Sir John Templeton, presented in a beautiful gift book, is perfect for a person seeking deeper meaning in life. Practical and uplifting advice based on a lifetime of experience is gathered in an attractive package for personal use or as a perfect gift. Juxtaposed to his sayings are short essays that elaborate on the ideas and make them easier to understand and apply. Themes, such as thanksgiving, forgiveness, positive thinking, love, humility, and happiness, arrange the thoughts.



 
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cover of Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993

Gone to Another Meeting

The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993

Faith Rogow

University of Alabama Press, 1993

The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States

Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.

Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
 

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cover of Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World's Religions

Good Sex

Feminist Perspectives from the World's Religions

Jung, Patricia Beattie

Rutgers University Press, 2000

What is "good sex" in the globalized world of the twenty-first century? This volume brings together essays by feminist scholars from different religions and cultures to consider how women are redefining sexuality for the common good. The essays explore sexual and social restrictions on women; religiously and socially acceptable avenues of sexual expression; constructions of sexual identities; and attitudes toward women's sexual desires. How is sexual desire constructed within specific cultural and religious contexts? What sacrifices must women make (and how do they make them) simply to have sexual lives? What options and strategies are available to women to dissolve the many restrictions imposed on their sexuality? These are some of the questions being explored.
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cover of Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus

Goodbye, My Tribe

An Evangelical Exodus

Vic Sizemore

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus is Vic Sizemore’s collection of personal essays chronicling two simultaneous transformations. One is the gathering of unconnected—and nonpolitical—evangelical congregations across the nation into the political juggernaut called the Religious Right; the other is the author’s own coming to terms with the emotional and spiritual trauma of his life deep inside fundamentalist Christianity, and his struggle to free himself from its grasp. Sizemore, whose father was a preacher and professor at a small West Virginia Bible college, attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, arguably the crucible of American evangelical Christianity.
 
Sizemore began writing these essays with the aim of exploring and understanding what happened when the mythology of his “tribe” crumbled from beneath his feet. He draws heavily on his upbringing and his family history as a framework for how his “tribe” of white evangelicals have found ways to reconcile Christianity with what the author finds to be troubling stances on many social issues, among them race, gender, sexuality, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy.
 
In a clear-eyed and eloquent voice, Sizemore grapples movingly with his own bewilderment and chagrin as he struggles to reconcile the essential philosophical and moral decay that he believes many evangelicals have come to embrace. His insights, arranged topically and thematically and told through graceful and accessible prose, toggle between memoir and literary journalism, along a spectrum that touches on history, philosophy, theology, and personal reflections.

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cover of Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism

Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans

Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism

Stephen D. Moore

SBL Press, 2017

Essential reading for biblical studies students and scholars interested in cutting-edge critical theory

The current global ecological crisis has prompted a turn to the nonhuman in critical theory. This book breaks new ground in biblical studies as the first to bring nonhuman theory to bear on the gospels and Acts. Nonhuman theory, a confluence of several of the main theoretical streams that have issued forth since the heyday of high poststructuralism, includes affect theory, posthuman animality studies, critical plant studies, object-oriented new materialisms, and assemblage theory. Nonhuman theory dismantles and reassembles the Western concept of “the human” that coalesced during the Enlightenment and testifies to other conceptions of the human and of the nonhuman, not least those found in the canonical gospels and Acts. Stephen D. Moore’s exegetical explorations and defamiliarizations of these overly familiar texts and excavations of their incessantly erased strangeness are the central feature of this provocative book.

Features

  • New paths in biblical ecotheology and ecocriticism
  • A significant contribution to the analysis of emotions in biblical texts
  • Class resource for courses in methods for biblical studies, the gospels, and the Bible and ecology
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cover of Gospels: Narrative and History

Gospels

Narrative and History

Mercedes Navarro Puerto

SBL Press, 2015

An international collection of ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretations

In this volume of the Bible and Women Series, contributors examine how biblical studies intersects with feminist interpretive methods with regard to the Gospels. Authors examine the lives of women in Roman Palestine, named and unnamed women in the Gospels, and the role of gender in the reception of the Hebrew scriptures in the New Testament.

Features:

  • Essays by scholars from scholars from around the world
  • An introduction and twenty essays focused on women and gender relations
  • Coverage of power relations and ideologies within the texts and in current interpretations
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cover of Got Religion?: How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back

Got Religion?

How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Templeton Press, 2014

Why are young people dropping out of religious institutions? Can anything be done to reverse the trend? In Got Religion?, Naomi Schaefer Riley examines the reasons for the defection, why we should care, and how some communities are successfully addressing the problem.

The traditional markers of growing up are getting married and becoming financially independent. But young adults are delaying these milestones, sometimes for a full decade longer than their parents and grandparents. This new phase of “emerging adulthood” is diminishing the involvement of young people in religious institutions, sapping the strength and vitality of faith communities, and creating a more barren religious landscape for the young adults who do eventually decide to return to it. Yet, clearly there are some churches, synagogues, and mosques that are making strides in bringing young people back to religion.

Got Religion? offers in-depth, on-the-ground reporting about the most successful of these institutions and shows how many of the structural solutions for one religious group can be adapted to work for another.

The faith communities young people attach themselves to are not necessarily the biggest or the most flashy. They are not the wealthiest or the ones employing the latest technology. Rather, they are the ones that create stability for young people, that give them real responsibility in a community and that help them form the habits of believers that will last a lifetime.
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cover of Governing Perfection

Governing Perfection

Donald S. Prudlo

St. Augustine's Press, 2023

"In the beginning, God administrated." For as Donald Prudlo observes, "There can be no achievement without administration." In this book he seeks to restore the idea that while administration is necessary even in the institutional Church, holiness is not only possible for those charged with governance, but is a fulfillment and type of Christus Rector omnium, or "Christ, Ruler of all.

Scrutinizing the relevant thought of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Aquinas, and Nietzsche, among others, Prudlo pursues the notion of order in governance and confronts both the bloat of bureaucracy and the "intoxicating nature of power." How can men and women who strive to live out humility and holiness likewise establish and participate in the structures that wield the powers of governance? "For the followers of Christ does not such a combination seem doomed from the outset?" Prudlo advances a thorough investigation of saints of the Christian tradition, whose responses to the problems inherent in authority and administration are living examples of the reality of grace building upon nature.

Of particular interest is Prudlo's historical presentation of the concept of Romanitas, a style of governance inherited from ancient Rome. Four early popes are given close attention for their respective administrations: Damasus I, Leo I, Gelasius I, and Gregory I. Emphasis is also given to the specific administrative genius that emerges from the monastic orders, including the 'Pachomian solution' and the Benedictine Rule.  Prudlo gives the reader a portrait of Leo IX's reinvigoration of the ancient practice of 'synodality,' and the centrality of the papacy to internal ecclesial reform. In the context of an inquiry into monastic and papal administrations, readers encounter the beginnings of the Roman Curia as well, and are confronted with the difficulty of inserting new forms of apostolic itinerant preaching into the institutional life of the Church. 

This study is an important contribution to the history of the papacy, ecclesiology and its relevance to legal ordering, and administration within governance as affected by multiple legal and cultural traditions. It is a masterful presentation that provides both the framework and reflection needed to inspire true perfection the in administrative forum. The relevance and force of Prudlo's Governing Perfection makes it a choice follow-up to his recent translation of Bartholomew of the Martyr's classic, Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors (2022).

2025 Catholic Media Awards Honorable Mention winner
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cover of Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age: Contingency, Vulnerability, and Hospitality

Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age

Contingency, Vulnerability, and Hospitality

Philip J. Rossi

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

In the course of a long and distinguished academic and civic career, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been, for articulate atheists and learned believers alike, an incisive, insightful, gracious, and challenging conversation partner on issues that arise at the intersection and interaction of religion, society, and culture. Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age offers a concise exposition of key ideas – contingency, otherness, freedom, vulnerability and mutuality – that inform his probing analyses of the dynamics of religious belief and religious denial in the pervasive contemporary culture he calls a “a secular age,” within which religious belief and practice have, for many, become just an option. Those ideas provide the basis from which Rossi argues that, despite a clear-eyed recognition of the deep fractures of meaning and the pervasive fragmentation of once stable societal connections that a secular age has brought in its wake, Taylor also sees and affirms strong grounds for hope in a healing of our broken and fractured world and for the possibilities—and the importance of—active human participation in that healing. Taylor points to signs indicative of potent re-compositions and renewals taking place in religious belief and practice from its interaction with the dynamics of secular culture, particularly ones that make possible radical enactments of deeper human solidarity and mutuality, of which the one most often potent is the reconciliation of enemies. In pointing out these signs, Taylor suggests a richly expansive reading of the Christian doctrine of Creation, as it marks the radical contingency of all that is upon a freely bestowed divine self-giving: Creation is the ongoing enactment of the divine hospitality of the Triune God.
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cover of Grace for Grace

Grace for Grace

Alexander Y. Hwang

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

The contributors to Grace for Grace focus on the debates on grace and free will inspired by Augustine's later teachings on grace and the various reactions to it. In both popular and scholarly literature, the conflict has been traditionally referred to as the "Semi-Pelagian Controversy." For several decades, scholars have distanced themselves from that overly-simplistic and inaccurate portrayal. This book intends to solidify a disparate movement of scholarly thought and offer a secure basis for renewed study of the persons, texts, and events of this critical period in the reception of Augustine in the Early Middle Ages. This volume brings together new perspectives, based on fresh study of a wealth of primary sources, from an international team of scholars to explore the intra-church debates over grace and free will, after Augustine and Pelagius.
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cover of Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin: A Thomistic Analysis

Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin

A Thomistic Analysis

Taylor O'Neill

Catholic University of America Press, 2019

Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin seeks to analyze a revisionist movement within Thomism in the 20th century over and against the traditional or classical Thomistic commentatorial treatment of physical premotion, grace, and the permission of sin, especially as these relate to the mysteries of predestination and reprobation. The over-arching critique leveled by the revisionists against the classic treatment is that Bañezian scholasticism had disregarded the dissymmetry between the line of good (God's causation of salutary acts) and the line of evil (God's permission of defect and sin). The teaching of St. Thomas is explored via intimate consideration of his texts. The thought of St. Thomas is then compared with the work of Domingo Bañez and the foremost 'Bañezian' of the 20th century, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. The work then shifts to a consideration of the major players of the revisionist treatment, including Francisco Marín-Sola, Jacques Maritain, and Bernard Lonergan. Jean-Herve Nicolas is also taken up as one who had held both accounts during his lifetime. The work analyzes and critiques the revisionist theories according to the fundamental tenets of the classical account. Upon final analysis, it seeks to show that the classical account sufficiently distances God's causal role in regard to free salutary acts and His non-causal role in regard to free sinful acts. Moreover, the revisionist account presents significant metaphysical problems and challenges major tenets of classical theism, such as the divine omnipotence, simplicity, and the exhaustive nature of divine providence. Finally, the implications of the traditional view are considered in light of the spiritual life. It is argued that the classical account is the only one which provides an adequate theological foundation for the Church's robust mystical and spiritual tradition, and in particular, the abandonment to divine providence.
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cover of Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler

Grains of Gold

Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler

Gendun Chopel

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel (1903–51) sent a large manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in the northeastern corner of Tibet. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka. But he did not receive the welcome he imagined: he was arrested by the government of the regent of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason. He emerged from prison three years later a broken man and died soon after.
 
Gendun Chopel was a prolific writer during his short life. Yet he considered that manuscript, which he titled Grains of Gold, to be his life’s work, one to delight his compatriots with tales of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, while alerting them to the wonders and dangers of the strikingly modern land abutting Tibet’s southern border, the British colony of India. Now available for the first time in English, Grains of Gold is a unique compendium of South Asian and Tibetan culture that combines travelogue, drawings, history, and ethnography. Gendun Chopel describes the world he discovered in South Asia, from the ruins of the sacred sites of Buddhism to the Sanskrit classics he learned to read in the original. He is also sharply, often humorously critical of the Tibetan love of the fantastic, bursting one myth after another and finding fault with the accounts of earlier Tibetan pilgrims. Exploring a wide range of cultures and religions central to the history of the region, Gendun Chopel is eager to describe all the new knowledge he gathered in his travels to his Buddhist audience in Tibet.
 
At once the account of the experiences of a tragic figure in Tibetan history and the work of an extraordinary scholar, Grains of Gold is an accessible, compelling work animated by a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present.
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cover of Gratian the Theologian

Gratian the Theologian

John C. Wei

Catholic University of America Press, 2016

Gratian the Theologian shows how one of the best-known canonists of the medieval period was also an accomplished theologian. Well into the twelfth century, compilations of Church law often dealt with theological issues. Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum or Decretum, which was originally compiled around 1140, was no exception, and so Wei claims in this provocative book. The Decretum is the fundamental canon law work of the twelfth century, which served as both the standard textbook of canon law in the medieval schools and an authoritative law book in ecclesiastical and secular courts. Yet theology features prominently throughout the Decretum, both for its own sake and for its connection to canon law and canonistic jurisprudence.
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cover of Gratian's Tractatus de penitentia

Gratian's Tractatus de penitentia

Atria A. Larson

Catholic University of America Press, 2016

Gratian's Decretum is one of the major works in European history, a text that in many ways launched the field of canon law. In this new volume, Atria Larson presents to students and scholars alike a critical edition of De penitentia (Decretum C.33 q.3), the foundational text on penance, both for canon law and for theology, of the twelfth century. This edition takes into account recent manuscript discoveries and research into the various recensions of Gratian's text and proposes a model for how a future critical edition of the entire Decretum could be formatted by offering a facing-page English translation. This translation is the first of this section of Gratian's De penitentia into any modern language and makes the text accessible to a wider audience. Both the Latin and the English text are presented in a way to make clear the development of Gratian's text in various stages within two main recensions. The edition and translation are preceded by an introduction relating the latest scholarship on Gratian and his text and are followed by three appendices, including one that provides a transcription of the relevant text from the debated manuscript Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 673, and one that lists possible formal sources and related contemporary texts. This book provides a full edition and translation of the text studied in depth in Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century (CUA Press, 2014) by the same author.
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cover of Gratitude: Affirming One Another Through Stories

Gratitude

Affirming One Another Through Stories

Len Froyen

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013

Study of Gratitude, it's practice and impact are ideal for group discussion and personal study.
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cover of Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900,  New Edition

Great Basin Kingdom

An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900, New Edition

Leonard J. Arrington

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Leonard Arrington, who died in 1999, is considered by most, if not all, serious scholars of Mormon and western history as the single most important figure to write on LDS history. Great Basin Kingdom is perhaps his greatest work.

A classic in Mormon studies and western history, Great Basin Kingdom offers insights into the ‘underdeveloped' American economy, a comprehensive treatment of one of the few native American religious movements, and detailed, exciting stories from little-known phases of Mormon and American history.

This edition includes thirty new photographs and an introduction by Ronald W. Walker that provides a brief biography of Arrington, as well as the history of the work, its place in Mormon and western historiography, and its lasting impact.

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cover of Great Salt Lake: A Perspective from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Great Salt Lake

A Perspective from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Bishop W. Christopher Waddell

University of Utah Press, 2024

The Great Salt Lake is deeply tied to the identity and history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As Latter-day Saints settled in the Great Basin, they relied on the Great Salt Lake for industry and recreation. Bishop W. Christopher Waddell explains that today, given the crisis faced by the lake, leaders of the LDS Church consider preserving the Great Salt Lake to be a sacred duty to care for God’s creations and a “critical issue for our state and citizens of Utah.” The LDS Church strives to positively impact the lake and continually improve its water-wise practices by working with local and community leaders, reducing water use at meetinghouses and facilities by utilizing sustainable landscaping principles and effective water management, and donating permanent water shares that will preserve water currently flowing into the lake in perpetuity.
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cover of Greater Than a Mother's Love: The Spirituality of Francis and Clare of Assisi

Greater Than a Mother's Love

The Spirituality of Francis and Clare of Assisi

Friar Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM

University of Scranton Press, 2010

Although there are several studies dedicated to the lives of Francis and Clare of Assisi, Gilberto Cavazos-González’s Greater Than a Mother’s Love is the first to investigate their spirituality in the context of family relationships. He delves into the writings of Francis and Clare and illustrates how both used observations of their various human relationships to understand their experiences with God. Accompanying this study is an exhaustive bibliography and several appendices that enhance this unique treatment of these two beloved and admired religious figures.

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cover of Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

Edited by Robert W. Funk

University of Chicago Press, 1961

The fully up-to-date classic reference and guide for anyone studying the New Testament in the original Greek

This work was created by Friedrich Blass, professor of classical philology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, and was continued after his death by Albert Debrunner, professor of Indo-European and classical philology at the University of Bern until his retirement in 1954. The grammar has passed through ten editions from 1896 to 1960.

Robert W. Funk, in translating this long-established classic, has also revised it and, in doing so, has incorporated the notes which Professor Debrunner had prepared for a new German edition on which he was working at the time of his death in 1958. Dr. Funk has also had the co-operation of leading British, Continental, and American scholars. The translation places in the hands of English-speaking students a book that belongs in their libraries and in the libraries of every theologian, philologist and pastor alongside the Gingrich-Danker Greek-English Lexicon.

This grammar sets the Greek of the New Testament in the context of Hellenistic Greek and compares and contrasts it with the classical norms. It relates to the New Testament language to its Semitic background, to Greek dialects, and to Latin and has been kept fully abreast of latest developments and manuscript discoveries. It is at no point exclusively dependent on modern editions of the Greek New Testament text but considers variant readings wherever they are significant. It is designed to compress the greatest amount of information into the smallest amount of space consistent with clarity. There are subsections discussing difficult or disputed points and copious citations of primary texts in addition to generous bibliographies for those who wish to pursue specific items further.
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cover of Greek and Egyptian Mythologies

Greek and Egyptian Mythologies

Edited by Yves Bonnefoy

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The seventy-two entries in this volume explore, among other topics, the history, geography, and religion of Greece, Plato's mythology and philosophy, the powers of marriage in Greece, heroes and gods of war in the Greek epic, and origins of mankind in Greek myths. Ancient Egyptian cosmology, anthropology, rituals, and religion—closely linked to Greek mythology—are also discussed.

"In a world that remains governed by powerful myths, we must deepen our understanding of ourselves and others by considering more carefully the ways in which the mythological systems to which we cling and social institutions and movements to which we are committed nourish each other. Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies not only summarizes the progress that has already been made toward this end, but also lays the foundation for the difficult work that lies ahead."—Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review

"The almost 100 contributors combine, with characteristic precision and élan, the arts of science and poetry, of analysis and translation. The result is a treasury of information, brilliant guesswork, witty asides, and revealing digressions. This is a work of genuine and enduring excitement."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian cience Monitor
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cover of Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist

Gregory Corso

Doubting Thomist

Kirby Olson

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson’s Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso’s work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist.

While Corso is a subject of great controversy—his work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comic—Olson argues that Corso’s poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olson—in his approach and focus—is the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind.

In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso’s concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought.

Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso’s memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso’s poetry.

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cover of Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs

Gregory of Nyssa

Homilies on the Song of Songs

Richard A. Norris Jr.

SBL Press, 2012

Gregory of Nyssa’s fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs offer an important resource for the history of Christian biblical exegesis, as well as for the history of Christian ascetical and spiritual teaching, and stand alongside Origen’s commentary on the Song as a source for the later interpretative tradition. In addition to offering the original text and an English translation of all fifteen homilies, Norris provides an analysis of the characteristic themes of Gregory’s ascetical teaching, emphasizes its connection in his mind with the institution of baptism, and stresses the degree to which Gregory sees the teaching of the Song as addressed not to a special class of believers but to any and all Christians.
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cover of Grieving Pregnancy: Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism

Grieving Pregnancy

Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism

Maureen L. Walsh

Rutgers University Press, 2025

In Grieving Pregnancy: Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism, Maureen L. Walsh compares how the two religious traditions respond ritually and discursively to miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion experiences marked by grief for the women involved. The experience of pregnancy loss has always been a part of women’s lives, yet only recently has it garnered attention from religious leaders and scholars commensurate with its prevalence. This book examines pregnancy loss as a theological problem for both Buddhism and Catholicism and analyzes the rites and memorials that have developed to address it, such as Japanese Buddhist mizuko kuyō (water children rites) and emergent American Catholic memorial practices focused on pregnancy loss. These parallel practices have emerged within distinct religious landscapes—a fact reflected in their forms and purposes—and when considered together, they raise questions of keen interest to theological and religious studies about the goals of religious practice and the imagination of human life at its earliest stages.
 
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cover of Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity

Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity

Eric Rebillard

Catholic University of America Press, 2015

To understand the past, we necessarily group people together and, consequently, frequently assume that all of its members share the same attributes. In this ground-breaking volume, Eric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke bring renowned scholars together to challenge this norm by seeking to rediscover the individual and to explore the dynamics between individuals and the groups to which they belong.
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cover of Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children and Mainline Churches

Growing Up Protestant

Parents, Children and Mainline Churches

Margaret Lamberts Bendroth

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Home and family are key, yet relatively unexplored, dimensions of religion in the contemporary United States. American cultural lore is replete with images of saintly nineteenth-century American mothers and their children. During the twentieth century, however, the form and function of the American family have changed radically, and religious beliefs have evolved under the challenges of modernity. As these transformations took place, how did religion manage to “fit” into modern family life?

In this book, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth examines the lives and beliefs of white, middle-class mainline Protestants (principally northern Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists) who are theologically moderate or liberal. Mainliners have pursued family issues for most of the twentieth century, churning out hundreds of works on Christian childrearing. Bendroth’s book explores the role of family within a religious tradition that sees itself as America’s cultural center. In this balanced analysis, the author traces the evolution of mainliners’ roles in middle-class American culture and sharpens our awareness of the ways in which the mainline Protestant experience has actually shaped and reflected the American sense of self.

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cover of Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts

Growing Up in Ancient Israel

Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts

Kristine Henriksen Garroway

SBL Press, 2018

The first expansive reference examining the texts and material culture related to children in ancient Israel

Growing Up in Ancient Israel uses a child-centered methodology to investigate the world of children in ancient Israel. Where sources from ancient Israel are lacking, the book turns to cross-cultural materials from the ancient Near East as well as archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic sources. Acknowledging that childhood is both biologically determined and culturally constructed, the book explores conception, birth, infancy, dangers in childhood, the growing child, dress, play, and death. To bridge the gap between the ancient world and today’s world, Kristine Henriksen Garroway introduces examples from contemporary society to illustrate how the Hebrew Bible compares with a Western understanding of children and childhood.

Features:

  • More than fifty-five illustrations illuminating the world of the ancient Israelite child
  • An extensive investigation of parental reactions to the high rate of infant mortality and the deaths of infants and children
  • An examination of what the gendering and enculturation process involved for an Israelite child
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cover of Growing into God: The Fathers of the Church on Christian Maturity

Growing into God

The Fathers of the Church on Christian Maturity

John Gavin

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

Many studies of spiritual development exist under the heading of “Christian Perfection.” However, John Gavin revisits such topics as asceticism, prayer, sacraments, virtues, and spiritual combat through scriptural and patristic texts that present the Christian life as one of growth from spiritual infancy to a particular fulfillment or end (telos): divinized humanity as formed and revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus, though Christian maturity does incorporate such things as physical and cognitive development, its true distinction lies in its gifted, supernatural end that does not exclude human freedom. Part One establishes the pillars of Christian maturity – form and finality; virtue and character; vocation and mission – and explores the opposition to maturation in the form of demonic infantilism. Part Two examines the means of maturity given to us in the life of the Church: the Scriptures, the Mysteries (Sacraments), and asceticism. Finally, Part Three reviews four figures of Christian adulthood: the Witness, the Teacher, the Servant, and the Fool. A concluding chapter applies the insights from the previous chapters to our modern world to see in what ways our times need to “grow up.” Growing into God includes a variety of early Christian voices: Irenaeus of Lyons, Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caeserea, Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, John Cassian, Dionysius the Areopagite, Mark the Monk, John Moschos, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the Holy Fool, and others. Their collective insights, all the fruits of great learning and the contemplation of God’s Word, describe a wondrous figure: the mature saint transformed by union with the Father, Son, and Spirit.
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cover of Guadalupe in New Spain: Sermons, 1731-1747

Guadalupe in New Spain

Sermons, 1731-1747

Bartolome Felipe de Ita y Parra

Catholic University of America Press, 2027

Bartolomé Felipe de Ita y Parra was the most influential preacher in New Spain on Our Lady of Guadalupe. His orations helped advance expansive growth in Guadalupan devotion. The advocacy of Ita y Parra and his fellow Guadalupan promoters culminated in Pope Benedict XIV’s 1754 endorsement of Guadalupe as the patroness of New Spain, the first major international recognition of the Guadalupe tradition. While Guadalupan studies have tended to focus on the origins of her cult in the sixteenth century, the most pivotal turning points in Guadalupe’s devotional ascent occurred in the eighteenth century. A monograph dedicated to Ita y Parra’s impact on this decisive evolution is long overdue. Moreover, his sermons illuminate the theology of divine providence at the heart of colonial Guadalupan sermons and devotion, indeed at the core of colonial Catholicism and society. Guadalupe in New Spain breaks new ground through a critical examination of Ita y Parra’s Guadalupan sermons and their significance for understanding the most renowned Christian tradition indigenous to the American hemisphere.
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cover of Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith

Guarded by Two Jaguars

A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith

Eric Hoenes del Pinal

University of Arizona Press, 2022

In communities in and around Cobán, Guatemala, a small but steadily growing number of members of the Q’eqchi’ Maya Roman Catholic parish of San Felipe began self-identifying as members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Their communities dramatically split as mainstream and charismatic Catholic parishioners who had been co-congregants came to view each other as religiously distinct and problematic “others.”

In Guarded by Two Jaguars, Eric Hoenes del Pinal tells the story of this dramatic split and in so doing addresses the role that language and gesture have played in the construction of religious identity. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, the author examines how the introduction of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the parish produced a series of debates between parishioners that illustrate the fundamentally polyvocal nature of Catholic Christianity. This work examines how intergroup differences are produced through dialogue, contestation, and critique. It shows how people’s religious affiliations are articulated not in isolation but through interaction with each other.

Although members of these two congregations are otherwise socially similar, their distinct interpretations of how to be a “good Catholic” led them to adopt significantly different norms of verbal and nonverbal communication. These differences became the idiom through which the two groups contested the meaning of being Catholic and Indigenous in contemporary Guatemala, addressing larger questions about social and religious change.
 
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cover of Guide to the Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States, Fifth Edition

Guide to the Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States, Fifth Edition

Thomas P. McCarthy, C.S.V.

Catholic University of America Press, 2002

In this edition, the communities of sisters have been arranged according to their general apostolic work, viz., contemplative, domestic, foreign and home missions, nursing, retreat and social work, teaching, and writing and publications.
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cover of Guiding to a Blessed End: Andrew of Caesarea and His Apocalypse Commentary in the Ancient Church

Guiding to a Blessed End

Andrew of Caesarea and His Apocalypse Commentary in the Ancient Church

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou

Catholic University of America Press, 2013

In this interesting and insightful work, Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, the leading expert on Andrew of Caesarea and the first to translate his Apocalypse commentary into any modern language, identifies an exact date for the commentary and a probable recipient. Her groundbreaking book, the first ever written about Andrew, analyzes his historical milieu, education, style, methodology, theology, eschatology, and pervasive and lasting influence. She explains the direct correlation between Andrew of Caesarea and fluctuating status of the Book of Revelation in Eastern Christianity through the centuries.
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cover of Gurus and Media: Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the Digital

Gurus and Media

Sound, Image, Machine, Text and the Digital

Edited by Jacob Copeman, Arkotong Longkumer, and Koonal Duggal

University College London, 2023

The first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion.

Illuminating the mediatization of guruship and the guruization of media, this book bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs, and more.

The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of “absent-present” guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste, and Hindutva.

Gurus and Media foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, this book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly.
 
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cover of Guy de Brès on the Lord’s Supper as the Focus of his Ministry and Theology

Guy de Brès on the Lord’s Supper as the Focus of his Ministry and Theology

Byunghoon Kang

Central European University Press, 2026

Guy de Bres (ca.1522-1567) was an important figure in the Dutch Reformation. He was the author of the Belgic Confession, which is still among the confessional texts of many Dutch denominations. One of the key points of his choice for Reformed doctrine was the Lord’s Supper. It was ultimately the illegal ministry of this for which he was sentenced to death. This study describes De Bres’ view of the Lord’s Supper as expressed in his writings against the background of the Reformation in the Low Countries. If you would like to order the book for delivery outside of the Netherlands, please email orders@aup.nl
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