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Books > Religion & Spirituality > General > History of religion
In this biography of Reformed theologian Francis Turretin
(1623-87), Nicholas A. Cumming provides critical context for the
life and theology of this important seventeenth-century theologian
and his impact on the Reformed tradition as a whole. Turretin has
commonly been identified as a strict scholastic theologian; this
work places Turretin in his broader context, analyzing his life and
theology in terms of the political and religious aspects of
post-Reformation Europe and his posthumous influence on nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Reformed theology. This work begins with a
biography of Turretin, including his education and ministry, then
proceeds to the context of Turretin's theology in the early modern
and modern periods, particularly in relation to his major work The
Institutes of Elenctic Theology.
As inheritors of Platonic traditions, many Jews and Christians
today do not believe that God has a body. God is instead invisible
and incorporeal, and even though Christians believe that God can be
seen in Jesus, God otherwise remains veiled from human sight. In
this ground-breaking work, Brittany E. Wilson challenges this
prevalent view by arguing that early Jews and Christians often
envisioned God as having a visible form. Within the New Testament,
Luke-Acts in particular emerges as an important example of a text
that portrays God in visually tangible ways. According to Luke, God
is a perceptible, concrete being who can take on a variety of
different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined
with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God
of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic
philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes.
Given the corporeal connections between God and Jesus, Luke's
depiction of Jesus's body also points ahead to future controversies
concerning his divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed,
questions concerning God's body are inextricably linked with
Christology and shed light on how we are to understand Jesus's own
visible embodiment in relation to God. In The Embodied God, Wilson
reframes approaches to early Christology within New Testament
scholarship and calls for a new way of thinking about divine-and
human-bodies and embodied experience.
Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland explores the life and
legacy of Jon Halldorsson, Bishop of Skalholt (1322-39), a
Dominican who had studied the liberal arts in Paris and canon law
in Bologna. Combining different disciplinary approaches (literary
and intellectual history, manuscript studies, musicology), this
book aims to examine the conditions under which literate culture
thrived in 14th-century Scandinavia. The studies included in this
volume consider Jon Halldorsson's educational background and his
contributions as a storyteller to Old Norse literature, focusing
especially upon legendary sagas such as Clari saga and examining
their link to the Dominican tradition of exempla. The volume also
includes critical studies of manuscripts that contain tales and
adventures, secular law and canon law, administrative writings, as
well as music and liturgy from the province of Nidaros. Combining
these various analytical perspectives results in rich insights with
broad implications for our understanding of medieval Nordic
culture. Contributors are Astrid Marner, Christian Etheridge, Embla
Aae, Gisela Attinger, Gottskalk Jensson, Gunnar Hardarson, Hjalti
Snaer AEgisson, Karl G. Johansson, Stefan Drechsler, Vedis
Ragnheidardottir, and Vidar Palsson
This book is the first scholarly English translation of the Ze'enah
U-Re'enah, a Jewish classic originally published in the beginning
of the seventeenth century, and was the first significant
anthological commentary on the Torah, Haftorot and five Megillot.
The Ze'enah U-Re'enah is a major text that was talked about but has
not adequately studied, although it has been published in two
hundred and seventy-four editions, including the Yiddish text and
partial translation into several languages. Many generations of
Jewish men and women have studied the Torah through the Rabbinic
and medieval commentaries that the author of the Ze'enah U-Re'enah
collected and translated in his work. It shaped their understanding
of Jewish traditions and the lives of Biblical heroes and heroines.
The Ze'enah U-Re'enah can teach us much about the influence of
biblical commentaries, popular Jewish theology, folkways, and
religious practices. This translation is based on the earliest
editions of the Ze'enah U-Re'enah, and the notes annotate the
primary sources utilized by the author.
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