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4743 books match the query 'Religion' and 1168 start with t

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The Quotable Saint Jerome

Jerome Saint Jerome

Catholic University of America Press, 2020

Among the illustrious writers of the early Church, Saint Jerome (345-420) had a way with words few could equal. To honor the 1600th anniversary of the death of this patron saint of librarians and Scripture scholars, the Catholic University of America Press is releasing The Quotable Jerome, a well-organized collection of memorable wisdom from this early witness to Catholic truth. While Jerome is known for acerbic wits, editor Justin McClain shows that much of the time, Jerome's writings are instructive and even inspiring. Homilists will easily be able to find what Jerome said on any number of topics--Scripture, the Trinity, the sacraments, persecution, heresy, divine revelation, or chastity--just to name a few. All citations are clearly sourced if the reader wants to pursue the longer passage in question. “I am upset because I am human; I control my tongue because I am a Christian. Anger surges up in my heart, but I do not give vent to it.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 10, Psalm 76 (77) (FOTC 48) “The doer of evil has, indeed, killed his own soul; but the heretic—the liar—has killed as many souls as he has seduced.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 2, Psalm 5 (FOTC 48) “The Church does not consist in walls, but in the truths of her teachings. The Church is there where there is true faith.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 46, Psalm 133 (134) “To err is human, but to lay snares is diabolical.” - Dogmatic and Polemical Works, The Apology Against the Books of Rufinus, Book Three, paragraph 33 (FOTC 53) “So much for what Scripture says; learn now what it means.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 15, Psalm 82 (83) (FOTC 48)

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The Rabbula Corpus

Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constan

Robert R. Phenix Jr.

SBL Press, 2017

A significant new study of Rabbula and Christianity in Edessa

This volume makes available for the first time both the Syriac text and an English translation of every available original composition by Rabbula, the controversial bishop of Edessa (ca. 411–435 CE). It includes a new edition of the Life of Rabbula and other biographical traditions about him, including his conversion from paganism to Christianity. The texts collected in the volume are a valuable source for studying the reception history of biblical themes. In addition, the corpus offers insights into the beginnings of ecclesiastical legislation in the East, charitable work, pilgrimage, ascetic ideals, and church administration. Horn and Phenix examine Rabbula’s contribution to the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, including his influence on Cyril of Alexandria in his debate with Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

Features

A critical study of the theological, cultural, and historical development of Syriac Christianity
Thorough historical, theological, and socio-cultural analysis provided for each text
A previously unidentified Christian Palestinian Aramaic fragment

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The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques, Volume 1

Claude Lévi-Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1983

"Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments. . . . [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology. . . . [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History

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The Reader's Repentance

Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse

Christine L. Krueger

University of Chicago Press, 1992

"A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs," Dr. Johnson pronounced. "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The prejudice embodied in this remark has persisted over time, impeding any proper assessment of the female preaching tradition and its role in shaping social and literary discourse. The Reader's Repentance recovers this tradition, and in doing so revises the history of nineteenth-century women's writing.

Christine L. Krueger persuasively argues that Evangelical Christianity, by assuming the spiritual equality of women and men and the moral superiority of middle-class women, opened a space for the linguistic empowerment of women and fostered the emergence of women orators and writers who, in complex and contradictory ways, became powerful public figures. In the light of unpublished or long out-of-print writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women preachers, Krueger shows how these women drew on religious language to critique forms of male domination, promote female political power, establish communities of women, and, most significantly, feminize social discourse. She traces the legacy of these preachers through the work of writers as diverse as Hannah More, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—women who, despite political differences, shared an evangelical strategy for placing women's concerns on the social agenda of their time.

Documenting and analyzing the tradition of women's preaching as a powerful and distinctly feminist force in the development of nineteenth-century social fiction, The Reader's Repentance reconstitutes a significant chapter in the history of women and culture. This original work will be of interest to students of women's history, literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society.

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The Real and the Sacred

Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Jefferson J. A. Gatrall

University of Michigan Press, 2014

The figure of Jesus appears as a character in dozens of nineteenth-century novels, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and others. The Real and the Sacred focuses in particular on two fiction genres: the Jesus redivivus tale and the Jesus novel. In the former, Christ makes surprise visits to earth, from rural Flanders (Balzac) and Muscovy (Turgenev) to the bustling streets of Paris (Flaubert), Seville (Dostoevsky), Berlin, and Boston. In the latter, the historical Jesus wanders through the picturesque towns and plains of first-century Galilee and Judea, attracting followers and enemies. In short, authors subjected Christ, the second person of the Christian trinity, to the realist norms of secular fiction. Thus the Jesus of nineteenth-century fiction was both situated within a specific time and place, whether ancient or modern, and positioned before the gaze of increasingly daring literary portraitists. The highest artistic challenge for authors was to paint, using mere words, a faithful picture of Jesus in all his humanity. The incongruity of a sacred figure inhabiting secular literary forms nevertheless tested the limits of modern realist style no less than the doctrine of Christ’s divinity.

The international “quest of the historical Jesus” has been amply documented within the context of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship. Yet there has been no broad-based comparative study devoted to the depiction of Jesus in prose fiction over the same time period. The Real and the Sacred offers a comprehensive survey of this body of fiction, examining both the range of its Christ types and the varying formal means through which these types were represented. The nineteenth century—despite forecasts of God's death at the time—not only revived older Christ types but also witnessed the rise of new ones, including le Christ proletaire, the Mormon Christ, the Buddhist Christ, and the Tolstoyan Christ. Novelists played a crucial role in the invention and popularization of the historical Jesus in particular, one of modernity's major figures.

These pioneering works of fiction, written by authors of diverse religious and national backgrounds, laid the formal groundwork for an enduring fascination with the historical Jesus in later fiction and film, from Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The book is enhanced by a gallery of illustrations of the historical Jesus as depicted by nineteenth-century artists.

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The Realm Of Prester John

Robert Silverberg

Ohio University Press, 1996

In this modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg’s explores the mysterious origins of Prester John, the astonishing Christian potentate of the East.

Prester John was a legendary figure who cast a powerful spell over Latin Christendom for almost five centuries. Rumors of the warrior-king-prelate’s fabulous realms first reached Europe in the eleventh century and quickly assumed an exalted status alongside such fabled wonders as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail.

The defeat of a Moslem Turkish tribe by a Buddhist Chinese warlord seems to have been the unlikely historical nugget around which the Prester John myth grew, but contributions to this strange saga have also been traced all around the globe to the Apostle Thomas' apocryphal preaching in India, to the actual existence of small colonies of Nestorian schismatics in central Asia, and even to Genghis Khan.

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The Reason of Following

Christology and the Ecstatic I

Robert P. Scharlemann

University of Chicago Press, 1991

In the Reason of Following noted scholar Robert P. Scharlemann takes Christology in a radically new direction, suggesting that Christology itself represents a form of reason and an understanding of selfhood. For the first time, Scharlemann establishes a logical place for Christology in philosophical theology.

Scharlemann presents a christological phenomenology of the self, tracing the connections between the "I am" of the God who spoke to Moses, the "I am" of Christ, and the "I am" of autonomous self-identification. How, he asks, can the self that spontaneously responds to Jesus' "Follow me!" be compared with the everyday, autonomous self? What is the nature of "following" on the part of those who answer the summons of one whose name is "I am"? Pursuing these questions, Scharlemann develops a christological phenomenology of the self—an account in which following means not the expression of the self in action or reflection but rather self-discovery in another person.

With a deep sense of both culture and philosophy, Scharlemann distinguishes the forms of reason involved in "following" from those in ethics, aesthetics, and other modes of religious philosophic thought. His penetrating readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theological and philosophical traditions provide an introduction to lesser-known thinkers such as Hermann and Picht as well as a profound critique of major figures such as Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant.

Finally Scharlemann outlines a program for a more systematic and rounded presentation of what Christian doctrine might mean in the contemporary world. His work will be of interest to students of theology and philosophy alike.

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The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914

David G. Schultenover

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

This collection of essays provides a small revolution in the study of Roman Catholic Modernism, a movement that until now has been largely seen as an episode that underscored institutional Catholicism's isolation from the mainstream intellectual currents of the time.

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The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity

From Toland to Baur

F. Stanley Jones

SBL Press, 2012

This focused collection of essays by international scholars first uncovers the roots of the study of ancient Jewish Christianity in the Enlightenment in early eighteenth-century England, then explores why and how this rediscovery of Jewish Christianity set off the entire modern historical debate over Christian origins. Finally, it examines in detail how this critical impulse made its way to Germany, eventually to flourish in the nineteenth century under F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School. Included is a facsimile reproduction of John Toland’s seminal Nazarenus (1718), which launched the modern study of Jewish Christianity. The contributors are F. Stanley Jones, David Lincicum, Pierre Lurbe, Matt Jackson-McCabe, and Matti Myllykoski.

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The Reformation of Machismo

Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia

By Elizabeth E. Brusco

University of Texas Press, 1995

Protestant evangelicalism has spread rapidly in Latin America at the same time that foreign corporations have taken hold of economies there. These concurrent developments have led some observers to view this religious movement as a means of melding converts into a disciplined work force for foreign capitalists rather than as a reflection of conscious individual choices made for a variety of personal, as well as economic, reasons.

In this pioneering study, Elizabeth Brusco challenges such assumptions and explores the intra-household motivations for evangelical conversion in Colombia. She shows how the asceticism required of evangelicals (no drinking, smoking, or extramarital sexual relations are allowed) redirects male income back into the household, thereby raising the living standard of women and children. This benefit helps explain the appeal of evangelicalism for women and questions the traditional assumption that organized religion always disadvantages women.

Brusco also demonstrates how evangelicalism appeals to men by offering an alternative to the more dysfunctional aspects of machismo. Case studies add a fascinating human dimension to her findings.

With the challenges this book poses to conventional wisdom about economic, gender, and religious behavior, it will be important reading for a wide audience in anthropology, women’s studies, economics, and religion. For all students of Latin America, it offers thoughtful new perspectives on a major, grass-roots agent of social change.

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The Regensburg Lecture

James V. Schall, S.J.

St. Augustine's Press, 2007

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The Relic

Jose Maria Eca de Queiros

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

The Relic tells the story of an orphaned young man, Teodorico Raposo, who is brought to Lisbon from a provincial town in Portugal to live with his aunt, a rigid, stern—and oftentimes—forbidding Catholic. Her devout circle of acquaintances is made up almost entirely of priests, many of whom are more concerned with appearances than spirituality, and seeking her and their approval, Teodorico is driven to attend Mass, say rosaries, and frequent churches, all the while awakening to sensuality, women, and the material life in conflict with “Auntie’s” devotions, which are—inwardly—devoid of the charity preached by Christ. When Teodorico obtains a degree from the University of Coimbra, Auntie sends him to the Holy Land to search for a relic to cure her ills. He meets up with a learned German author and, after a sojourn to Egypt, the two make their way to the land trod by Jesus. It is there that Teodorico has the dream that takes up nearly one third of the novel: he witnesses the travails that lead to the Passion and Crucifixion, as well as the aftermath of Christ’s death. Faced now with his mission, Teodorico embarks on a search. He soon comes upon an item, a “true” relic authenticated by his German friend, the sanctity of which will send Auntie to the heights of spiritual bliss, so much so that she will make him her heir. But when Teodorico returns to Lisbon with it, deception awaits her as the result of a simple mistake that had been made, and disinheritance awaits him as a result of Auntie’s anger and vindictiveness.

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The Religion of Empire

Political Theology in Blake's Prophetic Symbolism

G. A. Rosso

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism is the first full-length study devoted to interpreting Blake’s three long poems, showing the ways in which the Bible, myth, and politics merge in his prophetic symbolism. In this book, G. A. Rosso examines the themes of empire and religion through the lens of one of Blake’s most distinctive and puzzling images, Rahab, a figure that anchors an account of the development of Blake’s political theology in the latter half of his career. Through the Rahab figure, Rosso argues, Blake interweaves the histories of religion and empire in a wide-ranging attack on the conceptual bases of British globalism in the long eighteenth century. This approach reveals the vast potential that the question of religion offers to a reconsideration of Blake’s attitude to empire.

The Religion of Empire also reevaluates Blake’s relationship with Milton, whose influence Blake both affirms and contests in a unique appropriation of Milton’s prophetic legacy. In this context, Rosso challenges recent views of Blake as complicit with the nationalism and sexism of his time, expanding the religion-empire nexus to include Blake’s esoteric understanding of gender. Foregrounding the role of female characters in the longer prophecies, Rosso discloses the variegated and progressive nature of Blake’s apocalyptic humanism.

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The Religion of Existence

Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre

Noreen Khawaja

University of Chicago Press, 2016

TheReligion of Existence reopens an old debate on an important question: What was existentialism?

At the heart of existentialism, Noreen Khawaja argues, is a story about secular thought experimenting with the traditions of European Christianity. This book explores how a distinctly Protestant asceticism formed the basis for the chief existentialist ideal, personal authenticity, which is reflected in approaches ranging from Kierkegaard’s religious theory of the self to Heidegger’s phenomenology of everyday life to Sartre’s global mission of atheistic humanism. Through these three philosophers, she argues, we observe how ascetic norms have shaped one of the twentieth century’s most powerful ways of thinking about identity and difference—the idea that the “true” self is not simply given but something that each of us is responsible for producing.

Engaging with many central figures in modern European thought, this book will appeal to philosophers and historians of European philosophy, scholars of modern Christianity, and those working on problems at the intersection of religion and modernity.

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The Religion of Falun Gong

Benjamin Penny

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In July 1999, a mere seven years after the founding of the religious movement known as the Falun Gong, the Chinese government banned it. Falun Gong is still active in other countries, and its suppression has become a primary concern of human rights activists and is regularly discussed in dealings between the Chinese government and its Western counterparts. But while much has been written on Falun Gong’s relation to political issues, no one has analyzed in depth what its practitioners actually believe and do.

The Religion of Falun Gong remedies that omission, providing the first serious examination of Falun Gong teachings. Benjamin Penny argues that in order to understand Falun Gong, one must grasp the beliefs, practices, and texts of the movement and its founder, Li Hongzhi. Contextualizing Li’s ideas in terms of the centuries-long Chinese tradition of self-cultivation and the cultural world of 1980s and ’90s China—particularly the upwelling of biospiritual activity and the influx of translated works from the Western New Age movement—Penny shows how both have influenced Li’s writings and his broader view of the cosmos. An illuminating look at this controversial movement, The Religion of Falun Gong opens a revealing window into the nature and future of contemporary China.

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The Religion of Hands

Prose Poems and Flash Fictions

Ray Gonzalez

University of Arizona Press, 2005

"A man doesn’t sleep with the moon. He sleeps with his hunger, gathers bowls of avocados and wipes his lips with his sins."

The Religion of Hands does not foster sleep. Look quickly and you will catch the hint of a fox streaking in front of your car’s headlights at night. Look more carefully out your bedroom window and you may see your life going by, lost loved ones waving hello.

"Who were you when the stars were misinterpreted as the fingertips of God?"

Ray Gonzalez blends symbolic play with lyrical beauty as he works from a vast and complex palette to infuse popular culture with myth. The Religion of Hands is imbued with magical realism: a suffocating dream of tamales, mysterious reptilian allusions, a man who "finds God walking down the stairs to hand him an old, tattered phonebook from the year he was born." It offers strange prophecies: "A steady vegetation will grow across the empire as more homeboys are killed in drive-bys. . . . Microscopic scratches on an old vinyl record will form a message discovered in twenty more years when the album is bought at a garage sale." And in 14 flash fictions, it tells of a tiny old man kept in a glass jar, an accordion stored in an old family trunk, tales of sharks and bandits. The religion of hands has its own unspoken sacraments. "The fingers take over, teaching whoever holds the moment that the rapid weight of the open hands is a dangerous way to live."

Seamlessly, effortlessly, multi-dexterously, Ray Gonzalez spins words that speak our very dreams.

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The Religion of Humanity

The Illusion of Our Times

Pierre Manent

St. Augustine's Press, 2022

"Is not modern democracy the finally-found form of the religion of Humanity?" (2007)

The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Time is the first anthology in any language of the writings of the contemporary French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, on “the religion of Humanity.” The striking phrase comes from nineteenth-century French thinker, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte coined the phrase and indeed created an atheistic religion of a self-adoring Humanity. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Manent observed victorious democracy interpreting itself in a similar framework. He took it upon himself to track this development, analyze it, and warn his fellow Europeans of its deleterious political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual effects. With conceptual precision and (most often) a sober tone, many contemporary sacred cows were gored. But in addition to cursing the humanitarian darkness, he also lit many candles of judicious political, philosophical, moral, and spiritual analysis. This anthology is thus almost unique in its subject matter, and certainly unique in its treatment of the subject. It is a rarity and gem: a first-rate work of political philosophy.

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The Religion of Java

Clifford Geertz

University of Chicago Press, 1976

Written with a rare combination of analysis and speculation, this comprehensive study of Javanese religion is one of the few books on the religion of a non-Western people which emphasizes variation and conflict in belief as well as similarity and harmony. The reader becomes aware of the intricacy and depth of Javanese spiritual life and the problems of political and social integration reflected in the religion.

The Religion of Java will interest specialists in Southeast Asia, anthropologists and sociologists concerned with the social analysis of religious belief and ideology, students of comparative religion, and civil servants dealing with governmental policy toward Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

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The Religion of Reality

Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence

Didier Maleuvre

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

The book first argues that religious feeling persists in the secular western mind; that it has taken refuge in the unlikeliest of camps, indeed with the supposed debunker of religious creed: the rationalist existential ego.

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The Religion of SEC Football

Gameday Rituals of the Football Faithful

Terry Barr and Michael Nelson

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A testament to the rituals, rivalries, loyalties, and generational faith of SEC football

For most of the United States, September marks the arrival of autumn. In the South, it signals something else entirely: the return of college football season. In The Religion of SEC Football, Terry Barr and Michael Nelson explore how SEC football has become one of the South’s most distinctive cultural traditions and the parallels it shares with religious devotion. Using history, humor, archival research, personal testimony, and decades of fandom, they examine the rituals, rivalries, communities, and legacies that transform ordinary Saturdays into something more sacred.

For generations, fans across the South have organized life around kickoff times and these “sacred Saturdays.” Weddings, family gatherings, and travel plans are often arranged around the football calendar. They make pilgrimages to beloved stadiums, gather with family and friends to observe longstanding game-day traditions, and invest their hopes, memories, and identities in the teams they love. For many, college football is more than entertainment—it’s a shared culture, a lifelong inheritance, and an enduring act of faith.

From tailgate lore to stadium pilgrimages, Barr and Nelson reveal a world where coaches become saints, miracle plays become scripture, and fandom becomes a family inheritance. Along the way, they celebrate the stories, passions, and personalities that have made SEC football a defining part of Southern life and an enduring act of faith. Regardless of your team’s colors, mascot, or fight song, The Religion of SEC Football celebrates the traditions, stories, and experiences that unite generations of fans across the South and remind us why, year after year, it truly just “means more.”

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The Religion of Science Fiction

Frederick A. Kreuziger

University of Wisconsin Press, 1986

Science fiction captures contemporary sentiment with its faith in a scientific/technological future, its explorations of the ultimate meaning of man’s existence. Kreuziger is interested particularly in the apocalyptic visions of science fiction compared to the biblical revelations of John and Daniel. For some time our confidence has been placed largely in science, which has practically become a religion. Science fiction articulates the consequences of a faith in a technological future.

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The Religion of the Etruscans

Edited by Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon

University of Texas Press, 2006

Devotion to religion was the distinguishing characteristic of the Etruscan people, the most powerful civilization of Italy in the Archaic period. From a very early date, Etruscan religion spread its influence into Roman society, especially with the practice of divination. The Etruscan priest Spurinna, to give a well-known example, warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March. Yet despite the importance of religion in Etruscan life, there are relatively few modern comprehensive studies of Etruscan religion, and none in English. This volume seeks to fill that deficiency by bringing together essays by leading scholars that collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of religion in ancient Etruria.

The eight essays in this book cover all of the most important topics in Etruscan religion, including the Etruscan pantheon and the roles of the gods, the roles of priests and divinatory practices, votive rituals, liturgical literature, sacred spaces and temples, and burial and the afterlife. In addition to the essays, the book contains valuable supporting materials, including the first English translation of an Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar (which guided priests in making divinations), Greek and Latin sources about Etruscan religion (in the original language and English translation), and a glossary. Nearly 150 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate surviving Etruscan artifacts and inscriptions, as well as temple floor plans and reconstructions.

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The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought

Stephen A. McKnight

University of Missouri Press, 2006

In this important study, Stephen A. McKnight investigates the relation of Francis Bacon’s religious views to his “instauration,” or program for reforming and advancing learning in order to bring “relief to man’s estate.” McKnight provides close textual analyses of eight of Bacon’s texts in order to establish the religious themes and motifs that pervade his writings from 1603 to 1626. Such analysis is necessary because there are so many contradictory interpretations of the same key texts and because prevailing scholarship often ignores Bacon’s religious ideas or dismisses them as part of the cultural images that Bacon supposedly manipulated to conceal or disguise his modern, secular, materialistic, and rationalistic views.

McKnight begins with the New Atlantis because it offers the fullest articulation of Bacon’s vision of instauration and because the principal religious themes in Bacon’s writings are all contained within it. Next, he turns to The Great Instauration and The New Organon to show the centrality of religious concepts in two of Bacon’s major philosophical works. He then examines five of Bacon’s early published and unpublished works, including The Advancement of Learning and Wisdom of the Ancients, to demonstrate that religious imagery and biblical themes permeate Bacon’s program of reform from the outset.

McKnight maintains that Bacon’s vision of reform is drawn from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, particularly the Genesis account of the Creation and the Fall; from apocalyptic expectation of renewal in the Old Testament; and from salvation themes of the New Testament. He also demonstrates that Bacon’s Christian ideas are augmented and transmuted by related themes and imagery found in the prisca theologia, a mixture of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy, magic, and Jewish esoteric traditions. According to McKnight, Bacon believed that scholastic error and ecclesiastical dogma obscured religious truth and required a search for a truer, deeper level of understanding of the Scriptures and of God’s saving acts in history.

The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought attempts to correct the persistent misconception of Bacon as a secular modern who dismissed religion in order to promote the human advancement of knowledge. This exploration suggests that the origins of modernity are much more complex than many current approaches allow and that modernity and the goals of science cannot be separated from the dream of a restoration of a prelapsarian relation of humanity, God, and nature.

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The Religious Question in Modern China

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present.

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

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The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World

Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States

Daniel J. Walkowitz

Rutgers University Press, 2018

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.

The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.

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The Renewal of the Kibbutz

From Reform to Transformation

Russell, Raymond

Rutgers University Press, 2015

We think of the kibbutz as a place for communal living and working. Members work, reside, and eat together, and share income “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” But in the late 1980s the kibbutzim decided that they needed to change. Reforms—moderate at first—were put in place. Members could work outside of the organization, but wages went to the collective. Apartments could be expanded, but housing remained kibbutz-owned. In 1995, change accelerated. Kibbutzim began to pay salaries based on the market value of a member’s work. As a result of such changes, the “renewed” kibbutz emerged. By 2010, 75 percent of Israel’s 248 non-religious kibbutzim fit into this new category.

This book explores the waves of reforms since 1990. Looking through the lens of organizational theories that predict how open or closed a group will be to change, the authors find that less successful kibbutzim were most receptive to reform, and reforms then spread through imitation from the economically weaker kibbutzim to the strong.

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The Reprobation of Humans and Angels

Augustinus, Tome III, Book X

Cornelius Jansen

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

Cornelius Jansen’s masterful Augustinus (1641) has recently been the center of renewed interest in the theological academic community. After the translation and publication of the chapter Jansen devoted in his work to the topic of predestination of human beings and angels, this is the first ever translation in the English language of the last chapter of the Augustinus, addressing the fate of the reprobates. Jansen illustrated the causes and justice of the divine decision to exclude the damned from the beatific vision by mostly drawing from Augustine’s works. The readers will find that Jansen’s treatment on the subject to be balanced and fair, tracing a middle course between the eschatological optimism of Universalism, which claims that all human beings, and possibly angels as well, will one day be restored to fellowship with God, and the exclusivist soteriology typical of some pre-Vatican II Catholic theology and Evangelicalism. This volume builds upon the translation of some of its central chapters in The Predestination of Humans and Angels, also in the Early Modern Catholic Sources series.

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The Republic Estranged

Christians, Muslims, and Jews between Algeria and France, 1870-1919

Yuval Tal

University of Chicago Press, 0

Examines how the modern French Republic came into being through state efforts to assimilate Christians, Muslims, and Jews across France and colonial Algeria.

In The Republic Estranged, Yuval Tal studies three religious communities—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—and their interactions with French settlers in colonial Algeria. While each of these groups wanted to “become French” without abandoning their communal identities, the French system had its own ideas about what kind of assimilation was possible or desirable. It welcomed Christians, excluded Muslims, and enfranchised Jews while insisting that Jews could never become as naturally French as Christians could. The result, Tal shows, was a “republican ethnic common sense” that continues to shape French politics today.

Tal argues we must understand France’s deeply entrenched anti-Muslim rhetoric as part of a larger strategy that selectively privileges Christians over and against Muslim and Jewish minorities. He focuses on a period between 1870 and 1919, in which we see how France’s supposedly universalist project of national assimilation was predicated on the notion that some ethnically and religiously defined communities were more capable of “becoming French” than others. Working with sources in Arabic, French, Spanish, and Italian, including literary, political, and legal texts, this book speaks to readers across French studies, Jewish studies, and Middle East and North African studies, showing the ongoing relevance of this important period in French history.

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The Republic Unsettled

Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism

Mayanthi L. Fernando

Duke University Press, 2014

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.

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The Retractions

Saint Augustine

Catholic University of America Press, 1999

No description available

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The Returns of Fetishism

Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea

Charles de Brosses, Rosalind C. Morris, and Daniel H. Leonard

University of Chicago Press, 2017

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses’s term “fetishism” has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to “magic,” but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses’s term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy.

The product of de Brosses’s autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses’s work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Böhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.

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The Revelation of Imagination

From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante

William Franke

Northwestern University Press, 2015

In The Revelation of Imagination, William Franke attempts to focus on what is enduring and perennial rather than on what is accommodated to the agenda of the moment. Franke’s book offers re-actualized readings of representative texts from the Bible, Homer, and Virgil to Augustine and Dante. The selections are linked together in such a way as to propose a general interpretation of knowledge. They emphasize, moreover, a way of articulating the connection of humanities knowledge with what may, in various senses, be called divine revelation. This includes the sort of inspiration to which poets since Homer have typically laid claim, as well as that proper to the biblical tradition of revealed religion. The Revelation of Imagination invigorates the ongoing discussion about the value of humanities as a source of enduring knowledge.

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The Revelation of Your Words

The New Evangelization and the Role of the Seminary Professor of Sacred Scripture

Kevin Zilverberg

Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2021

The Revelation of Your Words, a collection of essays, treats the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture within the context of the New Evangelization. Some of the essays concern principally the imparting of knowledge and best practices to accomplish this; others concern the fostering of delight in the sacred page and spiritual encounter with God. Although these essays are Catholic, written within a Catholic theological framework and with Catholic seminaries in mind, many of their conclusions can be applied to non-Catholic environments. This book provides insights that, even beyond the seminary, will benefit teachers of the Bible, regardless of their denomination and level of instruction. Readers will encounter the following authors and topics. Peter S. Williamson writes on the implications of the New Evangelization for priestly ministry and for teaching Scripture. Steven C. Smith makes a contribution concerning the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture in forming priests. Michael Magee treats the relevance of Johannine irony to the New Evangelization. Stephen Ryan’s chapter takes up the topic of Old Testament Wisdom literature and formation for a New Evangelization. Juana L. Manzo seeks a path to integrate modern and ancient interpretations into the seminary classroom. Kelly Anderson takes up the father of Proverbs 1–9 as a model of spiritual fatherhood for seminary professors. Scott Carl proposes a spiritual reading of sacred Scripture in the twenty-first century. Michael Magee, in his second contribution, writes on the joy of discovery in the Fourth Gospel. James Keating reflects upon the exegete as seminary formator. Finally, André Villeneuve advocates for the teaching of Biblical Hebrew in Catholic seminaries and academic institutions.

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The Rhetoric of Abraham's Faith in Romans 4

Andrew Kimseng Tan

SBL Press, 2018

Explore Romans 4 from a sociorhetorical perspective

Andrew Kimseng Tan examines Romans using sociorhetorical interpretation to determine how Paul attempted to alleviate dissension between Judean (or “Jewish”) and non-Judean (or “gentile”) Christians. Through his analysis of Paul’s rhetoric, Tan reveals that Paul used Abraham’s faith in Genesis to demonstrate that the both groups were equally children and heirs of Abraham whose acceptance by God was through the same kind of faith that Abraham possessed, not through the Mosaic law, which Judean Christians claimed gave them a special honored status with God.

Features

A model for the application of sociorhetorical interpretation for analyzing close readings of biblical texts
A demonstration of the persuasive power of Romans 4 through the use of sociorhetorical interpretation
Exploration of the relationships between important theological topics such as resurrection, the Mosaic law, the Holy Spirit, righteousness, ethical living, and eschatological salvation

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The Rhetoric of Church and State

A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence

Frederick Mark Gedicks

Duke University Press, 1995

During the middle of the twentieth century, the religiously informed communitarianism that had guided the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the relationship between church and state was partially displaced by a new secular individualist discourse. In The Rhetoric of Church and State, Frederick Mark Gedicks argues that this partial and incomplete shift is the key to understanding why the Court has failed—and continues today to fail—to provide a coherent doctrine on church/state separation.
Gedicks suggests that the Supreme Court’s inconsistent decisions mirror a divergence in American society between an increasingly secular public culture and the primarily devout private lives of the majority of Americans. He notes that while the Court is committed to principles of secular individualism, it has repeatedly endorsed government actions that violate those principles—actions that would be far more justifiable under the discourse of religious communitarianism. The impossibility of reconciling the two discourses leaves the Court no choice but to efface—often implausibly—the religious nature of practices it deems permissible. Gedicks concludes that the road to a coherent religion clause doctrine lies neither in a return to religious communitarianism nor in its complete displacement by secular individualism, but in a yet-to-be-identified discourse that would attract popular support while protecting a meaningful measure of religious freedom.

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The Rhetoric of Faith

Irenaeus and the Structure of the Adversus Haereses

Scott D. Moringiello

Catholic University of America Press, 2019

The Rhetoric of Faith argues that the structure of Irenaeus’s opus magnum, the Adversus Haereses, is the argument of the Adversus Haereses. Through a close reading of the Irenaeus’s text, as well as through a comparison with Greco-Roman rhetorical texts, Scott Moringiello argues that Irenaeus structured his argument around the articles of the faith of the Church and that this structure builds on tropes found in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition.

The argument focuses on the Adversus Haereses, although it does begin with some discussion to put Irenaeus in the context of second century Christian literature. Moringiello concludes with a discussion of Irenaeus’s Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching.Other scholars have provided introductions to Irenaeus’s work, and other scholars have argued for the structural unity of the Adversus Haereses. No other scholar, though, has argued that the faith of the Church is the basis of Irenaeus’s argument. This argument, then, presents an important contribution to the field of Irenaeus studies.

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The Right to Difference
French Universalism and the Jews
Maurice Samuels
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country’s Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious affiliations. This timely book offers a fresh perspective on the debate by showing that French equality has not always demanded an erasure of differences. Through close and contextualized readings of the way that major novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and political figures have struggled with the question of integrating Jews into French society, Maurice Samuels draws lessons about how the French have often understood the universal in relation to the particular.

Samuels demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism, whether as its foil or as proof of its reach. He traces the development of this discourse through key moments in French history, from debates over granting Jews civil rights during the Revolution, through the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy, and up to the rise of a “new antisemitism” in recent years. By recovering the forgotten history of a more open, pluralistic form of French universalism, Samuels points toward new ways of moving beyond current ethnic and religious dilemmas and argues for a more inclusive view of what constitutes political discourse in France.

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The Rise of Newport’s Catholics
From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders
John F. Quinn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Honorable Mention, 2025 Catholic Media Association Book Awards

Nineteenth-century New England was a hostile place for Catholics. In Massachusetts a mob torched a convent; in Maine a priest was tarred and feathered; and Rhode Island elected an anti-Catholic Know Nothing governor. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common.

Newport was different. It was a religiously diverse and tolerant city that welcomed Catholic French troops during the American Revolution. Later, as it became the favored summer retreat for America’s Protestant social elite, Irish Catholics arrived to work in construction jobs, the tourist economy, and the grand Gilded Age cottages. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholic community was flourishing. Moneyed Catholics acquired their own mansions, an Irish Catholic was mayor, and prominent Protestants were helping Catholic neighbors establish new schools and churches. In this deeply researched study, John F. Quinn delves into this rich Catholic history to discover why nineteenth-century Newport was particularly religiously tolerant and accepting.
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The Rise to Respectability
Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ
Calvin White
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
The Rise to Respectability documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charles Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. While examining the intersection of race, religion, and class, The Rise to Respectability details how the denomination dealt with the stringent standard of bourgeois behavior imposed on churchgoers as they moved from southern rural areas into the urban centers in both the South and North. Rooted in the hardships of slavery and coming of age during Jim Crow, COGIC's story is more than a religious debate. Rather, this book sees the history of the church as interwoven with the Great Migration, the struggle for modernity, class tension, and racial animosity--all representative parts of the African American experience.
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The Rites of Passage, Second Edition
Arnold van Gennep
University of Chicago Press, 2019
A CLASSIC WORK OF ANTHROPOLOGY—OVER SEVENTY THOUSAND COPIES SOLD
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winner David I. Kertzer

Arnold van Gennep’s masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of transitions: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, old age, and, finally, death. Van Gennep’s great insight was discerning a common structure in each of these seemingly different transitions, involving rituals of separation, liminality, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he set out the terms that would both define twentieth-century ritual theory and become a part of our everyday lexicon.

This new edition of his work demonstrates how we can still make use of its enduring critical tools to understand our own social, religious, and political worlds, and even our personal and professional lives. In his new introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and anthropologist David I. Kertzer sheds new light on van Gennep, on the battles he fought, and on the huge impact the book has had since publication of the first English edition.
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The Road to Renewal
Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905–1971
Jeremy BONNER
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
The Road to Renewal offers an important contribution to the study of Catholicism in the 1960s. Grounded in thorough archival research, the book breaks new ground in its examination of the implementation of Vatican II at the diocesan level.
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The Robert Bellah Reader
Robert N. Bellah
Duke University Press, 2006
Perhaps best known for his coauthored bestselling books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Robert N. Bellah is a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four decades, he has examined the role of religion in modern and premodern societies, attempting to discern how religious meaning is formed and how it shapes ethical and political practices. The Robert Bellah Reader brings together twenty-eight of Bellah’s seminal essays. While the essays span a period of more than forty years, nearly half of them were written in the past decade, many in the past few years.
The Reader is organized around four central concerns. It seeks to place modernity in theoretical and historical perspective, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary, from Aristotle and Rousseau through Durkheim and Weber to Habermas and Mary Douglas. It takes the United States to be in some respects the type-case of modernity and in others the most atypical of modern societies, analyzing its common faith in individual freedom and democratic self-government, and its persistent paradoxes of inequality, exclusion, and empire. The Reader is also concerned to test the axiomatic modern assumption that rational cognition and moral evaluation, fact and value, are absolutely divided, arguing instead that they overlap and interact much more than conventional wisdom in the university today usually admits. Finally, it criticizes modernity’s affirmation that faith and knowledge stand even more utterly at odds, arguing instead that their overlap and interaction, obvious in every premodern society, animate the modern world as well.
Through such critical and constructive inquiry this Reader probes many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements, at mortal risk. Through the practical self-understanding such inquiry spurs, Bellah shows how we may share responsibility for the world we have made and seek to heal it.
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The Roles of Christ's Humanity in Salvation
Insights from Theodore of Mopsuestia
Frederick G. McLeod S.J.
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
This book enables one to judge Theodore's christological statements in the wider context of how he conceives of Christ's roles in salvation.
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The Roman Goddess Ceres
By Barbette Stanley Spaeth
University of Texas Press, 1995
Interest in goddess worship is growing in contemporary society, as women seek models for feminine spirituality and wholeness. New cults are developing around ancient goddesses from many cultures, although their modern adherents often envision and interpret the goddesses very differently than their original worshippers did.

In this thematic study of the Roman goddess Ceres, Barbette Spaeth explores the rich complexity of meanings and functions that grew up around the goddess from the prehistoric period to the Late Roman Empire. In particular, she examines two major concepts, fertility and liminality, and two social categories, the plebs and women, which were inextricably linked with Ceres in the Roman mind. Spaeth then analyzes an image of the goddess in a relief of the Ara Pacis, an important state monument of the Augustan period, showing how it incorporates all these varied roles and associations of Ceres. This interpretation represents a new contribution to art history.

With its use of literary, epigraphical, numismatic, artistic, and archaeological evidence, The Roman Goddess Ceres presents a more encompassing view of the goddess than was previously available. It will be important reading for all students of Classics, as well as for a general audience interested in New Age, feminist, or pagan spirituality.
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The Root of Friendship
Anthony T. Flood
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
The Root of Friendship addresses the connections between self-love and self-governance in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and defends three related theses. First, Aquinas's account of proper self-love is a description of the nature and importance of a person's subjective self- experience. Second, his notion of self-governance cannot be understood fully unless we grasp its basis in self-love. Finally, his account both satisfies contemporary conditions of relevance for self-governance and offers attractive solutions to issues raised in analytic discussions on such matters.
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The Roots of Fundamentalism
British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930
Ernest R. Sandeen
University of Chicago Press, 1970

Ernest Sandeen’s Roots of Fundamentalism remains a landmark work in the history of religion. A National Book Award finalist, it was the first full-length study to present an intellectual historical critique of the Fundamentalist movement in America. Sandeen argues that our understanding of this movement has been grievously distorted by the Fundamentalist-Modernist debate of the 1920s, as symbolized by William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial. Rather than viewing Fundamentalism as a chiefly sociological phenomenon of the 1920s, Sandeen argues from a transatlantic perspective that the Fundamentalist movement “was a self-conscious, structured, long-lived dynamic entity” that had its origins in Anglo-American millenarian thought and movements of the nineteenth century.

"All historians need to face the issues [this book] raises. Serious theological discussion of Fundamentalism tends to be neglected because it is intellectually unfashionable: Mr. Sandeen shows that for the historian such neglect is a luxury he cannot afford.”—David M. Thompson, English Historical Review

“Sandeen’s ‘new approach to Fundamentalism’ eschews the common tendency to see the movement as parochially American, rurally based, and essentially a phenomenon of the twenties. . . . It is a highly valuable addition to American and—more singularly—to comparative theological history.”—William R. Hutchinson, Journal of American History

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The Rope of God
James T. Siegel
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The Acehnese, a Muslim people of Sumatra, fought Dutch attempts to colonize them for forty years. After its "pacification," Acehnese society evolved peacefully, yet nonetheless the Acehnese participated fully in the Indonesian revolution and in a rebellion against the Indonesian central government not long after. Based on field work done in the early 1960s, James Siegel's The Rope of God, traces the evolution in Islam, in the economy, and in the structure of the family to show how it was that Aceh mobilized itself as a society from the time of the colonial war to the emergence of the republic. At a time when this Indonesian society is once again in movement, this influential study has gained a certain new relevance. To bridge this span of time since its initial publication in 1969, Siegel has added two additional chapters to his original volume: one a description of political elements today and the other a previously published piece on Acehnese domestic politics. Important when it first appeared, The Rope of God continues to be of enduring importance today and will be warmly welcomed back into print. James Siegel is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies, Cornell University and is the author of New Criminal Type in Jakarta: A Counter-Revolution Today, among other books.
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The Royal Remains
The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty
Eric L. Santner
University of Chicago Press, 2011

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh.

Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship.

This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

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The Ruin of Souls
A Religious History of Italian Catholic Immigrants in the United States (1853-1921)
Massimo Di Gioacchino
Bridwell Press, 2025
The Ruin of Souls presents a new history of Italian Catholic life in the United States, from the founding of the first Italian Catholic church in the United States in 1853 to the end of the immigration flow as a result of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. In this book, the product of wide research in American and Roman archives that spans the last twelve years, Di Gioacchino invites the reader to look at the religious history of the Italian Catholic immigrants in the United States not through the lens of their devotional culture, but through the perspective of their ecclesiastical life. More specifically, the book aims to document the efforts, problems, and failures of the Roman Catholic Church of the time to preserve the allegiance of the Italian immigrants in the United States to the Church’s magisterium and authority.

Strengthened by largely unknown archival documentation and an original historiographic methodology, the work reveals a new political dimension in the religious history of Italian immigrants in the United States and their relationship with the Catholic religious canon. By integrating the analysis of the ecclesial practices of the Italian communities into a far-reaching epistemological reflection, the work also contributes to the continuing discussion of how we study and examine the religious practices of Catholic communities in the modern era.
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The Runes of Evolution
How the Universe became Self-Aware
Simon Conway Morris
Templeton Press, 2015

How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support the mounting scientific view that the history of life is far more predictable than once thought.

A leading evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, Conway Morris came into international prominence for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially fossils of the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence, which is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.

In The Runes of Evolution, he illustrates how the ubiquity of convergence hints at an underlying framework whereby many outcomes, not least brains and intelligence, are virtually guaranteed on any Earth-like planet. Conway Morris also emphasizes how much of the complexity of advanced biological systems is inherent in microbial forms.

By casting a wider net, The Runes of Evolution explores many neglected evolutionary questions. Some are remarkably general. Why, for example, are convergences such as parasitism, carnivory, and nitrogen fixation in plants concentrated in particular taxonomic hot spots? Why do certain groups have a particular propensity to evolve toward particular states?

Some questions lead to unexpected evolutionary insights: If bees sleep (as they do), do they dream? Why is that insect copulating with an orchid? Why have sponges evolved a system of fiber optics? What do mantis shrimps and submarines have in common? If dinosaurs had not gone extinct what would have happened next? Will a saber-toothed cat ever re-evolve?

Cona Morris observes: “Even amongst the mammals, let alone the entire tree of life, humans represent one minute twig of a vast (and largely fossilized) arborescence. Every living species is a linear descendant of an immense string of now-vanished ancestors, but evolution itself is the very reverse of linear. Rather it is endlessly exploratory, probing the vast spaces of biological hyperspace. Indeed this book is a celebration of how our world is (and was) populated by a riot of forms, a coruscating tapestry of life.”

The Runes of Evolution is the most definitive synthesis of evolutionary convergence to be published to date.

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