The Dreams of Matthew 1:18-2:23: Tradition, Form, and Theological Investigation critically examines the five dream passages of Matthew 1:18-2:23 to demonstrate that Matthew employed dream narratives to defend allegations concerning Jesus' birth and to provide etiological reasons both for why Jesus went to Egypt and how Jesus happened to live in Nazareth. A diachronic survey of dream records in the Ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Second Temple writings reveals that dream narratives fall into two major categories: message dreams and symbolic dreams. Every dream carries a distinct narrative function according to the objectives of the user. Typically, symbolic dreams appear in epic-like literature, and message dreams appear in narratives such as historical and religious writings. The present analysis of the five dream accounts of Matthew 1:18-2:23 reveals that they fall into the message dream category. Each dream has at least one narrative function. In other words, Matthew does not merely record the dream experiences of the individuals but uses dreams to achieve his narrative objective.

Angels are a basic tenet of belief in Islam, appearing in various types and genres of text, from eschatology to law and theology to devotional material. This book presents the first comprehensive study of angels in Islam, through an analysis of a collection of traditions (hadith) compiled by the 15th century polymath Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505). With a focus on the principal angels in Islam, the author provides an analysis and critical translation of hadith included in al-Suyuti's al-Haba'ik fi akhbar al-mala'ik ('The Arrangement of the Traditions about Angels') - many of which are translated into English for the first time. The book discusses the issues that the hadith raise, exploring why angels are named in particular ways; how angels are described and portrayed in the hadith; the ways in which angels interact with humans; and the theological controversies which feature angels. From this it is possible to place al-Suyuti's collection in its religious and historical milieu, building on the study of angels in Judaism and Christianity to explore aspects of comparative religious beliefs about angels as well as relating Muslim beliefs about angels to wider debates in Islamic Studies. Broadening the study of Islamic angelology and providing a significant amount of newly translated primary source material, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Islam, divinity, and comparative religion.

Religion and spirituality are still among the most common motivations for travel - many major tourism destinations have developed largely as a result of their connections to sacred people, places and events. Providing a comprehensive assessment of the primary issues and concepts related to this intersection of tourism and religion, this revealing book gives a balanced discussion of both the theoretical and applied subjects that destination planners, religious organizations, scholars, and tourism service providers must deal with on a daily basis. Bringing together a distinguished list of contributors, this volume takes a global approach and incorporates substantial empirical cases from Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, New Ageism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and the spiritual philosophies of East Asia. On a conceptual level, it considers, amongst other topics: contested heritage the pilgrim-tourist dichotomy secularization of pilgrimage experiences religious humanism educational aspects of religious tourism commodification of religious icons and services. A vibrant collection of essays, this outstanding book discusses many important practices, paradigms, and problems that are currently being examined and debated. It raises an array of significant and interesting questions and as such is a valuable resource for students, scholars and researchers of tourism, religion and cultural studies.

Japan is one of the most urbanised and industrialised countries in the world. Yet the Japanese continue to practise a variety of religious rituals and ceremonies despite the high-tech, highly regimented nature of Japanese society. Ceremony and Ritual in Japan focuses on the traditional and religious aspects of Japanese society from an anthropological perspective, presenting new material and making cross-cultural comparisons. The chapters in this collection cover topics as diverse as funerals and mourning, sweeping, women's roles in ritual, the division of ceremonial foods into bitter and sweet, the history of a shrine, the playing of games, the exchange of towels and the relationship between ceremony and the workplace. The book provides an overview of the meaning of tradition, and looks at the way in which new ceremonies have sprung up in changing circumstances, while old ones have been preserved, or have developed new meanings.

First published in 1952. The Real Tripitaka gives an account of the seventh century pilgrim's adventures, spiritual and material, both in India and after his return to China. In addition the book contains an account of a Japanese pilgrim's visit to China in the ninth century, which describes the Wu-t'ai Shan, China's great place of Pilgrimage, and an eye-witness's account of the great persecution of Buddhism in 842-845 A.D.

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated for jinn possession and psychosis in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. Through rich filmic and textual case studies, he shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. The book reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work to produce relief from pain, and also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both text and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, which allows patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God. -- .

This volume consists of a collection of studies which are based on papers presented at the symposium "Erloest leben - oder sterben, um befreit zu werden?" (Zurich, May 2008), organized in honour of Peter Schreiner. It offers a selective overview of individual liberation as dealt with in Indian texts and rituals at different times. Starting from the two prominent approaches to this problem, namely, that of jivanmukti ('liberation in one's lifetime') and that of videhamukti ('liberation beyond the body'), some important questions have to be considered: How has life been thought compatible with moksa? How have 'life' in the concept of the 'liberated living' and 'death' in the concept of the 'disembodied liberated' been conceived by philosophers, poets, religious thinkers, ritual practitioners and social activists? Coming from various disciplinary backgrounds - Indology, Religious Studies, Social Anthropology - the contributors explore these questions in the context of their particular fields of research. Through this multi-faceted approach, the volume presents an original and substantial analysis of an intriguing topic touching on many aspects of religious and secular life. The careful interpretation of the sources by a group of internationally renowned scholars leads to critical perspectives on some crucial developments in the history of Indian religion.

Readings in Indigenous Religions brings together classic and recent writings concerned with contemporary indigenous religions. These significant and important works contribute both to expert discussion of important religious and cultural issues and also to on-going debates about improved methods of research. The inclusion of examples of indigenous ideological, legal and fiction writing further enhances the volume's engagement with indigenous and scholarly perspectives, experiences and interests. Readings is divided into four Parts: Ontology, Performance, Knowledge and Land. Editorial introductions make explicit the links, common themes and further ramifications of the seventeen chapters. The four chapters in 'Ontology' argue that relationships are definitive in the formation and maintenance of identities, and that the notion of 'the supernatural' is misleading. 'Performance' contains five chapters that discuss various rituals and their participants, including healing, world-making, magic and shamanising. Six chapters in 'Knowledge' demonstrate the critical importance of attending to indigenous modes of discourse about knowledges. Finally, 'Land' contains two chapters that exemplify the richness of indigenous relationships and engagements with, and knowledges of, particular places. In addition to expert descriptions of aspects of particular indigenous religious lifeways and worldviews, the readings also encourage a reconsideration of academic approaches to the study of indigenous religions. The realisation that researchers and writers are engaged in relationships with indigenous hosts proffers a challenge to academic methodologies that assert objectivity and distance. New dialogical and conversational methods of engagement promise to reconnect academia in building more equitable relationships and a healthier world.

Original Arabic, transliteration and translation. It is said that the author of Dala'il ul-Khayrat, Imam Muhammad al-Jazuli, went on a journey. He found himself in great need of water for making ablutions required before prayers. He came upon a well but could not reach the water far below, as there was no bucket and rope. He became very worried . A young girl saw this and came to his assistance. She spat into the well whereupon the water rose to the top of its own accord. Seeing this miracle, he asked the girl, "And how is that possible?" She replied "I was able to do this due to my invoking excessive blessings upon Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be Allah's blessings and peace." Having thus seen the benefit of invoking blessings upon the Prophet, Imam Jazuli decided to write Dala'il ul-Khayrat. In it, he compiled litanies invoking peace and blessings upon the Prophet. It is by far the most popular and universally-acclaimed collection of prayers upon the Prophet, used throughout the Muslim world and recited individually and in groups, in homes and in mosques, silently and aloud.

Despite the considerable amount of scholarship on Mann's work, his tetralogy - composed prior to and during his exile from Nazi Germany - has received less attention and has not been examined from the perspective of the relationship of visuality to narrative. In this study of Mann's reworking of the biblical account of Jacob, father of Joseph, the author examines the ways the novel's protagonists frame their environment through knowledge and meaning gained via specific acts of seeing. While considering Mann's oft-stated intent to refunctionalize myth by means of psychology for humane and progressive purposes, the book explores the lavish narrative attention Mann gives to visual detail, visual stimulation, the protagonists' eyes, ways of seeing, and even to staging and performance in anticipation of another's way of seeing. The results reveal that the plot of the first Joseph novel is carried and propelled by a series of visual encounters during which the narrative draws attention to the protagonists' eyes and acts of looking.

The cult of St Demetrius is of considerable age but it peaked with the emergence of his city, Thessalonica, as a prominent political and cultural centre in late Byzantium. This book examines the intensification of his popularity and veneration in the late Middle Ages and his impact on contemporary thought and ritual. The encomia written in the saint's honour are significant historical and literary monuments and in their suggestiveness and beauty they are on a level with many better-known works in medieval Greek. Indeed, the encomia have added historical interest because of the prominence of those who wrote them. The likes of Nicholas Kavasilas, Gregory Palamas, Constantine Harmenopoulos and Symeon of Thessalonica were the elite of late Byzantium in intellect and personal influence, while Nikephoros Gregoras was perhaps the finest of Byzantine minds. With their clear links to individual authors, the encomia on St Demetrius present opportunities to the historian and the literary critic, which are fully explored in this book, the first to give them sustained scholarly attention.

This is a major anthropological study of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and tantric ritual in the Ladakh region of North-West India and of the role of tantric ritual in the formation and maintenance of traditional forms of state structure and political consciousness in Tibet. Containing detailed descriptions and analyses of monastic ritual, the work builds up a picture of Tibetan tantric traditions as they interact with more localised understandings of bodily identity and territorial cosmology, to produce a substantial re-interpretation of the place of monks as ritual performers and peripheral householders in Ladakh. The work also examines the central and indispensable role of incarnate lamas, such as the Dalai Lama, in the religious life of Tibetan Buddhists.

This book explores the interaction of rituals and ritualised practices utilising a cross-cultural approach. It discusses whether and why rituals are important today, and why they are possibly even more relevant than before.

The study of Jewish converts to Christianity in the modern era has long been marginalized in Jewish historiography. Labeled disparagingly in the Jewish tradition as meshumadim (apostates), many earlier Jewish scholars treated these individuals in a negative light or generally ignored them as not properly belonging any longer to the community and its historical legacy. This situation has radically changed in recent years with an outpouring of new studies on converts in variegated times and places, culminating perhaps in the most recent synthesis of modern Jewish converts by Todd Endelman in 2015. While Endelman argues that most modern converts left the Jewish fold for economic, social, or political reasons, he does acknowledge the presence of those who chose to convert for ideological and spiritual motives. The purpose of this volume is to consider more fully the latter group, perhaps the most interesting from the perspective of Jewish intellectual history: those who moved from Judaism to Christianity out of a conviction that they were choosing a superior religion, and out of doubt or lack of confidence in the religious principles and practices of their former one. Their spiritual journeys often led them to suspect their newly adopted beliefs as well, and some even returned to Judaism or adopted a hybrid faith consisting of elements of both religions. Their intellectual itineraries between Judaism and Christianity offer a unique perspective on the formation of modern Jewish identities, Jewish-Christian relations, and the history of Jewish skeptical postures. The approach of the authors of this book is to avoid broad generalizations about the modern convert in favor of detailed case studies of specific converts in four distinct localities: Germany, Russia, Poland, and England, all living in the nineteenth- century. In so doing, it underscores the individuality of each convert's life experience and self-reflection and the need to examine more intensely this relatively neglected dimension of Jewish and Christian cultural and intellectual history.

Passover and Easter constitute for Jews and Christians respectively the most important festivals of the year. Although sharing a common root, the feasts have developed in quite distinct ways in the two traditions, in part independently of one another and in part in reaction against the other. Following the pattern set in earlier volumes in this series, these two volumes bring together a group of distinguished Jewish and Christian scholars to explore the history of the two celebrations, paying particular attention to similarities and connections between them as well as to differences and contrasts. They not only present a convenient summary of current historical thought but also open up new perspectives on the evolution of these annual observances. Volume 6 focuses on the contexts in which they occur--the periods of preparation for the feasts in the respective calendars and their connection to Shavuot/Pentecost--as well as to their traditional expression in art and music. Volume 5, also in the series, focuses especially on the origins and early development of the feasts and on the way that established practices have changed in recent years. At the same time, the essays raise some fundamental questions about the future. Have modern human beings so lost the sense of sacred time in their lives, for instance, that these great feasts can never again be what they once were for former generations of believers? And what about recent attempts by some Christians to enter into their heritage by celebrating a Jewish Seder as part of their annual Holy Week and Easter services? Specialists and general readers alike will find much to interest and challenge them within these two additions to what has become a highly regarded series in the world of liturgical scholarship.

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.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"In these companion volumes of essays, Jewish and Christian liturgical scholars examine, from historical, theological, and aesthetic perspectives, the practices and intricate interrelationships of Passover and Easter. Several essays lament the antisemitism that has infected the Easter liturgy, and one-Israel Yuval's 'Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue'-pushes beyond the oft-told tale of Jewish-Christian enmity to explore ways the development of worship patterns of the two faiths have influenced one another. Both volumes are required purchases for libraries supporting liturgical studies. Volume 5 would also be a good choice for broader collections in the history of Judaism and Christianity." -Choice

Am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts setzt sich die tschechische Gesellschaft intensiv mit neuen spirituellen Stroemungen wie Theosophie, Anthroposophie und Okkultismus auseinander. Durch die UEbersetzungen der Werke von Huysmans, Strauss, Nietzsche, Steiner und anderen einflussreichen europaischen Denkern gerat der Katholizismus immer starker in den Konflikt mit der Moderne. Die Bewegung Katolicka moderna versucht in Boehmen den Katholizismus zu erneuern. Zu den Mitarbeitern der Zeitschrift Novy zivot zahlen wichtige tschechische Kunstlerpersoenlichkeiten. Auch die Autoren der Zeitschrift Moderni revue streben eine entsprechende Reform religioes ausgerichteter Kunst an. Die tschechische Musik dieser Zeit widerspiegelt die vielfaltige Auseinandersetzung mit den neuen Denkrichtungen. Charakteristisch fur die betreffenden Werke ist der Synkretismus in Form einer persoenlichen Synthese aus verschiedenen Formen der Spiritualitat. In diesem Kongressband werden neben den Beitragen zu diesen Fragen bislang unbekannte Dokumente zur tschechischen Musik der Jahrhundertwende veroeffentlicht und die Rezeptionswege von massgebenden Komponisten der Zeit (Dvorak, Janacek, Haba, Schulhoff, Novak, Martinu) untersucht. At the end of the 19th century, Czech society was preoccupied with new spiritual trends such as theosophy, anthroposophy, pantheism and occultism. The ideas of Schure, Huysmans, Peladan, Renan, Strauss, Nietzsche, Steiner, Blavatsky and other influential European thinkers were compiled and made available thanks to numerous translations. At the same time, Catholicism was coming into increasing conflict with modernism. One of the attempts at its revival in Bohemia was represented by the movement Catholic Modernism. The contributors to the review Novy zivot (New Life) were distinct personalities of Czech cultural life. The authors of the magazine Moderni revue (Modern Review) strove for reform of religion-oriented arts too. Czech music of that period reflects the multifaceted encounters with the new intellectual trends. Works are characterised by syncretism, in the form of a personal synthesis of various types of spirituality. In addition, the congress proceedings comprise research into hitherto unknown documents dealing with Czech music at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the paths of reception of the foremost composers of the time (Dvorak, Janacek, Haba, Schulhoff, Novak, Martinu).

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.

Meditative practice lies at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. This introductory anthology gives a representative sample of the various kinds of meditations described in the earliest body of Buddhist scripture, the Pali canon.

It provides a broad introduction to their traditional context and practice and supplies explanation, context and doctrinal background to the subject of meditation. The main themes of the book are the diversity and flexibility of the way that the Buddha teaches meditation from the evidence of the canon. Covering fundamental features of Buddhist practice such as posture, lay meditation, and meditative technique it provides comments both from the principal early commentators on Buddhist practice, Upatissa and Buddhaghosa, and from reputable modern meditation teachers in a number of Theravadin traditions.

This is the first book on Pali Buddhism which introduces the reader to the wide range of the canon. It demonstrates that the Buddha's meditative tradition still offers a path of practice as mysterious, awe-inspiring yet as freshly accessible as it was centuries ago, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Buddhism as well as Buddhist practitioners.