Providing an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia, this book looks at Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur, including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images. The author explores a version of the classical Mahayana that foregrounds the importance of the visual in relation to Buddhist philosophy, meditation, devotion, and ritual. The book goes on to show that the architects of Borobudur designed a visual world in which the Buddha appeared in a variety of forms and could be interpreted in three ways: by realizing the true nature of his teaching, through visionary experience, and by encountering his numinous presence in images. Furthermore, the book analyses a particularly comprehensive and programmatic expression of Mahayana Buddhist visual culture so as to enrich the theoretical discussion of the monument. It argues that the relief panels of Borobudur do not passively illustrate, but rather creatively "picture" selected passages from texts. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies.

The Strangeness of Gods combines studies of changes in modern interpretations of Greek religion with studies of changes in Athenian ritual. The combination is necessary in order to combat influential stereotypes: that Greek religion consisted of ritual without theological speculation, that ritual is inherently conservative. To re-examine the evidence for Greek rituals and their interpretation is also to re-examine our own preconceptions and prejudices. The argument presented by S. C. Humphreys tries to bring Greek texts closer to the "classic" texts of other civilizations, and religion, as a form of speculative thought, closer to science. Her studies of Athenian rituals put this emphasis on changing interpretations into practice, showing that the Athenians thought about their rites as well as celebrating them.

The Zen Way is an invaluable introduction to Zen practice. It is divided into three parts: in the first, Ven. Myokyo-ni provides an overview of Buddhist belief in general, from the perspective of Zen. In her second part, she describes the daily rituals in a Rinzai Zen training monastery; while in the third, Ven. Myokyo-ni assesses Zen practice from a modern and European perspective.

This book looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material drawn from her personal experience in working with individuals and groups to show how the construction of ritual is a practice which uses storymaking and embodied action to empower women. She argues that ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. She includes stories of women who have created or participated in their own rituals to mark significant changes and transition in their lives, and reflects on these in the light of ritual theory. The book interweaves narrative and interview material drawn from case studies with insights drawn from feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies to show that the making of ritual for women is a transformative process which empowers them in constructing identity and agency. The writer shows how women are drawing from both Christian feminist theology and broader understandings of spirituality to construct their own understanding of God/Goddess through the rituals they enact.

The author applies the fields of gender studies, psychoanalysis, and literature to Talmudic texts. In opposition to the perception of Judaism as a legal system, he argues that the Talmud demands inner spiritual effort, to which the trait of humility and the refinement of the ego are central. This leads to the question of the attitude to the Other, in general, and especially to women. The author shows that the Talmud places the woman (who represents humility and good-heartedness in the Talmudic narratives) above the character of the male depicted in these narratives as a scholar with an inflated sense of self-importance. In the last chapter (that in terms of its scope and content could be a freestanding monograph) the author employs the insights that emerged from the preceding chapters to present a new reading of the Creation narrative in the Bible and the Rabbinic commentaries. The divine act of creation is presented as a primal sexual act, a sort of dialogic model of the consummate sanctity that takes its place in man's spiritual life when the option of opening one's heart to the other in a male-female dialogue is realized.

The twentieth century has been called a "century of horror". Proof of that, designation can be found in the vast and ever-increasing volume of scholarly work on violence, trauma, memory, and history across diverse academic disciplines. This book demonstrates not only the ways in which the wars of the twentieth century have altered theological engagement and religious practice, but also the degree to which religious ways of thinking have shaped the way we construct historical narratives. Drawing on diverse sources - from the Hebrew Bible to Commonwealth war graves, from Greek tragedy to post-Holocaust theology - Alana M. Vincent probes the intersections between past and present, memory and identity, religion and nationality. The result is a book that defies categorization and offers no easy answers, but instead pursues an agenda of theological realism, holding out continued hope for the restoration of the world.

This brief introduction to Judaism is designed to help readers understand this important religious tradition. With both nuance and balance, this text provides broad coverage of various forms of Judaism with an arresting layout with rich colors. It offers both historical overviews and modern perspectives on Jewish beliefs and practices. The user-friendly content is enhanced by charts of religious festivals, historic timelines, updated maps, and a useful glossary. It is ideal for courses on Judaism and will be a useful, concise reference for all readers eager to know more about this important religious tradition and its place in our contemporary world.

This book is about what makes food Jewish, or better, who and how one makes food Jewish. Making food Jewish is to negotiate between the local, regional, and now global foods available to eat and the portable Jewish taste preferences Jews have inherited from their sacred texts and calendars. What makes Jewish food "Jewish," and what makes Jewish eating practices continually viable and meaningful are not fixed dietary rules and norms, but rather culinary interpretations and adaptations of them to new times and places - culinary midrash. Jewish cuisine is a fusion of interactions, a reflection of displacement, and intentional positioning and re-positioning vis a vis sacred texts, old and new lands, Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors, old and new "family" combinations, re-imaginings of our personal ethnic, gender, and other identities. Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus questions Jewish identity in particular, and identity generally as something fixed, stable, and singular, and unintentional. Jewish food choices are situational, often temporary, expressions of Jewish identity. It addresses the tension between what Jewish "authoritative" textual sources and their proponents say is Jewish food and Jewish eating, and what Jews actually eat. So while discussing connections between ancient religious texts and modern Jewish food preferences, this book does not stop there. Using examples from his experience, Brumberg-Kraus describes the improvisational characteristics of gastronomic Judaism as the interplay of texts, tastes, artifacts, and everyday practices: not only in the classic sacred texts, but also in Jewish cookbooks and internet blogs on Jewish home cooking; seasonal intensification of "Jewish" food choices (e.g., latkes at Chanukah or keeping kosher for Passover); "safe treif;" the fusion/cultural appropriation of diasporic, "Biblical", and Palestinian foods in new Israeli cuisine; and the impact of the environmentalist "New Jewish Food movement" on contemporary Jewish food choices and identity.

In this book, Claudia Moser offers a new understanding of Roman religion in the Republican era through an exploration of sacrifice, its principal ritual. Examining the long-term imprint of sacrificial practices on the material world, she focuses on monumental altars as the site for the act of sacrifice. Piecing together the fragments of the complex kaleidoscope of Roman religious practices, she shows how they fit together in ways that shed new light on the characteristic diversity of Roman religion. This study reorients the study of sacrificial practice in three principal ways: first, by establishing the primacy of sacred architecture, rather than individual action, in determining religious authority; second, by viewing religious activities as haptic, structured experiences in the material world rather than as expressions of doctrinal, belief-based mentalities; and third, by considering Roman sacrifice as a local, site-specific ritual rather than as a single, monolithic practice.

Death and immortality played a central role in Greek and Roman thought, from Homer and early Greek philosophy to Marcus Aurelius. In this book A. G. Long explains the significance of death and immortality in ancient ethics, particularly Plato's dialogues, Stoicism and Epicureanism; he also shows how philosophical cosmology and theology caused immortality to be re-imagined. Ancient arguments and theories are related both to the original literary and theological contexts and to contemporary debates on the philosophy of death. The book will be of major interest to scholars and students working on Greek and Roman philosophy, and to those wishing to explore ancient precursors of contemporary debates about death and its outcomes.

The material symbol has become central to understanding religion in late modernity. Overtly theological approaches use words to express the values and faith of a religion, but leave out the 'incarnation' of religion in the behavioural, performative, or audio-visual form. This book explores the lived expression of religion through its material expression, demonstrating how religion and spirituality are given form, and are thus far from being detached or ethereal. Cutting across cultures, senses, disciplines and faiths, the contributors register the variety in which religions and religious groups express the sacred and numinous. Including chapters on music, architecture, festivals, ritual, artefacts, dance, dress and magic, this book offers an invaluable resource to students of sociology and anthropology of religion, art, culture, history, liturgy, theories of late modern culture, and religious studies.

This volume is concerned with the origins, development and character of ritual in Islam. The focus is upon the rituals associated with the five 'pillars of Islam': the credal formula, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage. Since the 19th century academic scholarship has sought to investigate Muslim rituals from the point of view of history, the study of religion, and the social sciences, and a set of the most important and influential contributions to this debate, some of them translated into English for the first time, is brought together here. Participation in the ritual life of Islam is for most Muslims the predominant expression of their adherence to the faith and of their religious identity. The Development of Islamic Ritual shows some of the ways in which this important aspect of Islam developed to maturity in the first centuries of Islamic history.

The events surrounding the holidays molded the foundation of the Jews as a nation and are related to their continuity and survival as Jews throughout history. In The Jewish Holidays: A Journey through History, author Larry Domnitch contends that there is a cyclical nature to the events of Jewish history. He writes, "The events that make up the themes of the Jewish holidays did not occur in a vacuum but have recurred throughout history. The actual Israelite exodus from Egypt, or the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai as celebrated on Shavuot, may have occurred once, but in a sense the themes conveyed by those momentous events have been repeated over the centuries. This book attempts to give the reader an appreciation of the cyclical nature of Jewish history and a greater appreciation of the holidays and their relevance throughout Jewish history."