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Evangelical Christianity is Mexico’s fastest-growing religious movement, with about ten million adherents today. Most belong to Protestant denominations introduced from the United States (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists), but perhaps as many as 800,000 are members of homegrown, “native” evangelical sects. These native Mexican sects share much with the American denominations of which they are spinoffs. For instance, they are Trinitarian, Anabaptist, and Millenarian; they emphasize a personal relationship with God, totally rejecting intermediation by saints; and they insist that they are the only true Christians. Beyond that, each native sect has its distinctive characteristics.

This book focuses on two sharply contrastive native evangelical sects in Central Mexico: Amistad y Vida (Friendship and Life) and La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World). The former, founded in 1982, now has perhaps 120,000 adherents nationwide. It is nonhierarchical, extremely egalitarian, and has no dogmatic directives. It is a cheerful religion that emphasizes charity, community service, and personal kindness as the path to salvation. It attracts new members, mainly from the urban middle class, through personal example rather than proselytizing. La Luz del Mundo, founded in 1926, now has about 350,000 members in Mexico and perhaps one million in the hemisphere. It is hierarchically organized and demands total devotion to the sect’s founder and his son, who are seen as direct links to Jesus on Earth. It is a proselytizing sect that recruits mainly among the urban poor by providing economic benefits within the congregations, but does no community service as such.

Based on ten years of fieldwork (1996–2006) and contextualized by nearly fifty years of anthropological study in the region, Native Evangelism in Central Mexico presents the first ethnography of Mexico’s native evangelical congregations.

Aquinas’ first proof for God’s existence is usually interpreted as a metaphysical argument immune to any objections coming from empirical science. Connections to Aquinas’ own historical understanding of physics and cosmology are ignored or downplayed. Nature and Nature's God proposes a natural philosophical interpretation of Aquinas’ argument more sensitive to the broader context of Aquinas’ work and yielding a more historically accurate account of the argument. Paradoxically, the book also shows that, on such an interpretation, Aquinas’ argument is not only consistent with modern science, but actually confirmed by the history of science, from classical mechanics through 19th century thermodynamics to contemporary cosmology. The first part of the book considers Aquinas’ argument in its historical context, exploring the key principles that everything in motion is moved by something else and that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. The structure of the First Way is analyzed and the argument is connected both with Aquinas’ Third Way—a new interpretation of which is also proposed—and Aquinas’ second proof from motion in the Summa contra Gentiles. To complete the account of what natural philosophy—prior to metaphysics—can demonstrate about God, a chapter on Aquinas’ teleological argument (the Fifth Way) is also included. The second part of the book tracks the history of modern science from Copernicus to today, showing how Aquinas’ argument fared at each major turn. The first chapter shows how Newton’s understanding of inertia and conservation of momentum supports the idea that motion cannot continue forever without God’s causality, and integrates a modern understanding of inertia and gravity with the principles of Thomistic natural philosophy. The second chapter considers the first and second laws of thermodynamics, showing how they too support Aquinas’ contention that motion cannot continue forever without God’s causality. This chapter also discusses statistical mechanics and contemporary cosmology, demonstrating that science continues to support Aquinas’ unmoved mover argument. The final chapter turns to modern biology as well as cosmological fine-tuning to show that modern science also continues to support Aquinas’ teleological argument. The result is not only a satisfying defense of Aquinas’ natural philosophical proofs for God’s existence, but a primer on the broader project of integrating Thomistic natural philosophy with modern science.

This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. On the one hand, the analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukraine-wide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning the fate of religious communities during and after socialism, the significance of national projects for religious organizations, and the politics of religious management in a situation in which local religious commitments are relatively strong and religious organizations are relatively weak. The analysis contributes to the ethnography and history of this particular region and of the post-socialist world in general. On the other hand, the changing status of the apparition site over the years allows investigation of the questions concerning authority, legitimacy, and power in religious organizations, especially in relation to management of religious experiences. The analysis aims at clarification of such concepts as religious institutions, organizations but also religious experiences and is relevant to anthropology, sociology and religious studies. It is argued that the important question in analyses of religious apparitions should not be how an individual experience becomes institutionalized and instrumentalized, but how experience becomes a tool for negotiation and transformation in the religious field. Key word: 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint-–Apparitions and miracles–Ukraine–Zakarpats'kaoblast'. 2. Zakarpats'ka oblast' (Ukraine)–Church history.

An intersectional study of New Testament and noncanonical literature

Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.

Features:

• Case studies that reveal a variety of understandings, attitudes, medical frameworks, and taxonomies for how disabled bodies were interpreted
• A methodology that uses disability as an analytical tool that contributes insights about cultural categories, ideas of otherness, and social groups’ access to or lack of power
• An intersectional perspective drawing on feminist, gender, queer, race, class, and postcolonial studies

Neither Nature nor Grace operates at the intersection of systematic and philosophical theology, exploring in particular how St. Thomas Aquinas variously uses the latter in service to the clarification and faithful advancement of the former. More specifically, Neither Nature nor Grace explores the overlooked logical difficulties that have followed the late modern debates in ecumenical Christian theology as to whether knowledge of God is available solely through God’s gracious self-revelation (e.g., Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture), or through revelation and the deliverances of natural reason. Van Wart takes the prominent French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as paradigmatic for the case that knowledge of God can be had by both revelation and natural reason. Representing the opposing position, that God can only be known through divine revelation, Van Wart highlights the work of influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth. By placing these two imposing 20th century theologians in conversation, and by providing a careful theo-philosophical analysis of the logical mechanics of each thinker’s respective arguments, Van Wart shows how both inadvertently overreach their self-professed epistemological bounds and just so run into significant problems maintaining the coherence of their relative theological positions. That is, against their expressed intentions to the contrary, both thinkers unwittingly evacuate the divine essence of the mystery Christian tradition has always previously claimed it to have, effectively reducing the being of God to mere creaturely being writ large. As a contrasting corrective to this problem, Van Wart proffers a constructive grammatical reading of Aquinas’s measured account of the crucial but often overlooked logical differences between what can be said of the divine, on the one hand, versus what can be known of God, on the other. While many recent works have attempted to solve the ongoing arguments which Garrigou-Lagrange and Barth epitomize regarding the epistemic use of God’s effects, Van Wart’s contribution constructively pushes the conversation to a different level in showing how Aquinas’s grammar of God provides a salutary means of dissolving and moving beyond these contentious debates altogether.

When Johann Adam Möhler published Symbolism in 1832, one commentator called it “the severest blow ever dealt to Protestantism.” It elicited a flurry of responses from both Protestants and Catholics, and the reactions ranged from praise to confusion and outrage. The most substantial answer came from Ferdinand Christian Baur, who published an entire monograph refuting Möhler. In response, Möhler not only began revising Symbolism, but also issued his own book-length response, New Considerations, which defended Catholic religion against Baur’s caricatures. After his untimely death at age forty-two, the fate of Möhler’s work lay largely in the hands of publishers and loyal readers, who for a time issued editions of the New Considerations as the second volume of Symbolism. This trend ended in the twentieth century when New Considerations went out of print. Now, for the first time, it has been translated into English, and readers can see how Möhler, the greatest German Catholic theologian of his century, understood Catholicism and its most essential differences to Protestantism. Grant Kaplan’s excellent and artful translation also provides an introduction that puts Möhler’s final work in its context and explains its abiding relevance for Catholic theology and for contemporary ecumenism.

This volume of the New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity series introduces scholars and students to the historical, political, civic, religious, cultural, and social context of Ephesian inscriptional evidence. Each of the twenty-five entries in this volume includes one or more original inscriptions, English translation, and a commentary that sheds light on early Christianity, particularly as it relates to Ephesians, Acts, Revelation, and the Pastoral Epistles. Contributors Bradley J. Bitner, James R. Harrison, Phillip Ort, and Isaac T. Soon examine topics such as the gods and the founder of Ephesus, the political and economic relationship between Ephesus and Rome, Ephesian elites and the dynamics of honor, building activity, local sites, and graffiti.

This volume of the New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity series includes essays exploring aspects of the political, religious, social, and cultural life of ancient Ephesus and surrounding villages as well as essays that address exegetical issues in Acts, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy from a documentary and historical perspective. Contributors Richard S. Ascough, Bradley J. Bitner, James R. Harrison, Michael Immendorfer, Elif Hilal Karaman, R. A. Kearsley, Stephen Llewelyn, Will Robinson, Guy MacLean Rogers, and Stephan Witetschek examine a range of topics, including the goddess Artemis, the imperial cult, civic associations, women, widows, slaves, confession inscriptions, benefaction and citizenship, and virtue.

The first-ever account of the historic relationship between the church and early architecture in Dublin.

Newman University Church, Dublin charts the first ever analysis of University Church’s significance within the history of Victorian revivalist architecture. Author Niamh Bhalla explores the relationship between the church’s context as the first Catholic university in Ireland and the ambiguity of its “early Christian” style, providing an effective lens to understand the architectural revivalism of the nineteenth century, particularly basilican and Byzantine revivalist architectures in the British Isles.

John Henry Newman is well-known as a theologian, philosopher, historian, writer, University rector, and poet, but can he also be associated with the field of canon law? When Newman first proposed the possibility of doctrinal development as proof that the Catholic faith was free from corruption and error, he claimed “the Church is declared to be the great and special support of the Truth, her various functionaries are said to be means towards the settlement of diversities and of uncertainty of doctrine, and securing unity of faith.” For Newman, these various functionaries included not only apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors, but also theologians and, as is argued in this work, canon lawyers. While Newman and doctrinal development have become well-explored topics in the field of theology, there has been little scholarship on how Newman’s thoughts on doctrinal development can influence current canon law and Church governance. David Long addresses that lacuna by offering a systematic analysis of Newman’s concept of development within current canonical practice. It starts by tracing Newman’s notions of personal judgment, public discussion, and episcopal moderation, followed by a presentation of the current canonical understanding of the theologian, and finally an application of the connection between Newman’s theory on development and present canonical legislation as it involves the role of the theologian. By undertaking such an application, and by creating a model for discussion that preserves both development and Tradition, this work humbly proposes a valuable model for understanding the theologian’s contribution within the life of the contemporary Church in ways not previously explored.

This is the first commentary to have been written on Nicholas of Cusa's most famous work, On Learned Ignorance. This fact testifies to the difficulty of what has long been recognized to be the most significant philosophical text produced by the Renaissance. While there are many passages in the work that can be cited in support of Cassirer's celebration of Cusanus as the first modern philosopher, that judgment is challenged by the way his work is rooted in a faith and a tradition likely to strike us as thoroughly medieval. This commentary shows how closely the two are linked. Despite the many ways in which what the cardinal has to say belongs to a past that the progress of reason would seem to have left irrecoverably behind, it yet provides us with a continuing challenge. Key to On Learned Ignorance is the incommensurability of the infinite and the finite, of God and creation. Cusanus lets us recognize the essential transcendence of reality, so different from the ontology implied by Descartes' insistence on clear and distinct understanding, which has presided over the progress of science and has helped shape our world. What makes Cusanus’ thought important is not the way it anticipates modernity, but the way it challenges often taken-for-granted presuppositions of our worldview, most importantly a distinctly modern self-assertion or self-elevation that has made our human reason the measure of reality. If it is impossible to deny the countless ways in which our science and technology have given us ever deeper insights into the mysteries of nature and improved our lives, it is equally impossible to deny that this very progress today endangers this fragile earth and the quality of our lives. Cusanus can help us preserve our humanity.

A new English translation of the first text translated from Arabic to Armenian for research and classroom use

Robert W. Thomson translates this ninth-century commentary defending the miaphysite theological position of the Armenian church against the chalcedonian position of the Greek Byzantine church. Nonnus’s exegesis of the gospel falls in the context of trends in Eastern Christian biblical exposition, primarily the Syrian tradition. Therefore, Thomson emphasizes the parallels in Syriac commentaries on the book of John, noting also earlier Greek writers whose works were influential in Syria. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Armenian church and church history.

Features:

• Introductory material on the text’s history, manuscript traditions, and theological importance
• Translation of the Armenian text and commentary
• Bibliography covering the Armenian, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts as well as secondary sources