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Books > Religion & Spirituality
Since the beginning of recorded history, Iran/Persia has been one
of the most important world civilizations. Iran remains a distinct
civilization today despite its status as a major Islamic state with
broad regional influence and its deep integration into the global
economy through its vast energy reserves. Yet the close attention
paid to Iran in recent decades stems from the impact of the 1979
revolution, which unleashed ideological shock waves throughout the
Middle East that reverberate to this day. Many observers look at
Iran through the prism of the Islamic Republic's adversarial
relationship with the US, Israel, and Sunni nations in its region,
yet as Michael Axworthy shows in Iran: What Everyone Needs to Know,
there is much more to contemporary Iran than its fraught and
complicated foreign relations. He begins with a concise account of
Iranian history from ancient times to the late twentieth century,
following that with sharp summaries of the key events since the1979
revolution. The final section of the book focuses on Iran today-its
culture, economy, politics, and people-and assesses the challenges
that the nation will face in coming years. Iran will be an
essential overview of a complex and important nation that has
occupied world headlines for nearly four decades.
During the last twenty years, the theory of recognition has become
an established field of philosophy and social studies. Variants of
this theory often promise applications to the burning political
issues of current society, such as the challenges of
multiculturalism, group identity, and conflicts between ideologies
and religions. The seminal works of this trend employ Hegelian
ideas to tackle the problem of modernity. Although some recent
studies also investigate the pre-Hegelian roots of recognition,
this concept is normally considered to be a product of the secular
modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recognition
and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study challenges this
assumption and claims that important intellectual roots of the
concept and conceptions of recognition are found in much earlier
religious sources. Risto Saarinen outlines the first intellectual
history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament
to present day. He connects the history of religion with
philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a
considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious
processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition
has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some
important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of
the insights provided by the tradition of religious recognition. He
proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the
long history of religious recognition.
There is a paradox in American Christianity. According to Gallup,
nearly eight in ten Americans regard the Bible as either the
literal word of God or the inspired by God. At the same time,
surveys have revealed gaps in these same Americans' biblical
literacy. These discrepancies reveal the complex relationship
between American Christians and Holy Writ, a subject that is widely
acknowledged but rarely investigated. The Bible in American Life is
a sustained, collaborative reflection on the ways Americans use the
Bible in their personal lives. It also considers how other
influences, including religious communities and the internet, shape
individuals' comprehension of scripture. Employing both
quantitative methods (the General Social Survey and the National
Congregations Study) and qualitative research (historical studies
for context), The Bible in American Life provides an unprecedented
perspective on the Bible's role outside of worship, in the lived
religion of a broad cross-section of Americans both now and in the
past. The Bible has been central to Christian practice, and has
functioned as a cultural touchstone, throughout American history,
but too little is known about how people engage it every day. How
do people read the Bible for themselves outside of worship? How
have denominational and parachurch publications influenced the
interpretation and application of scripture? How have clergy and
congregations influenced individual understandings of scripture?
These questions are especially pressing in a time when
denominations are losing much of their traditional cultural
authority, technology is changing reading and cognitive habits, and
subjective experience is continuing to eclipse textual authority as
the mark of true religion. From the broadest scale imaginable,
national survey data about all Americans, down to the smallest
details, such as the portrayal of Noah and his ark in children's
Bibles, this book offers insight and illumination from scholars
across the intellectual spectrum. It will be useful and informative
for scholars seeking to understand changes in American Christianity
as well as clergy seeking more effective ways to preach and teach
about scripture in a changing environment.
In Popes and Jews, 1095-1291, Rebecca Rist explores the nature and
scope of the relationship of the medieval papacy to the Jewish
communities of western Europe. Rist analyses papal pronouncements
in the context of the substantial and on-going social, political,
and economic changes of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth
centuries, as well the characters and preoccupations of individual
pontiffs and the development of Christian theology. She breaks new
ground in exploring the other side of the story - Jewish
perceptions of both individual popes and the papacy as an
institution - through analysis of a wide range of contemporary
Hebrew and Latin documents. The author engages with the works of
recent scholars in the field of Christian-Jewish relations to
examine the social and legal status of Jewish communities in light
of the papacy's authorisation of crusading, prohibitions against
money lending, and condemnation of the Talmud, as well as
increasing charges of ritual murder and host desecration, the
growth of both Christian and Jewish polemical literature, and the
advent of the Mendicant Orders. Popes and Jews, 1095-1291 is an
important addition to recent work on medieval Christian-Jewish
relations. Furthermore, its subject matter - religious and cultural
exchange between Jews and Christians during a period crucial for
our understanding of the growth of the Western world, the rise of
nation states, and the development of relations between East and
West - makes it extremely relevant to today's multi-cultural and
multi-faith society.
Early Americans have long been considered "A People of the Book"
Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close
associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to
overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic
location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a
cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and
fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to
such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which
can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books
stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable
void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in
various historical moments and in relationship to specific
institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact
that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised
considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful
intellectual design that has inspired everything from national
religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic
endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This
Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well
as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly
overview-rich with bibliographic resources-to those interested in
the Bible's role in American cultural formation.
The number of non-religious men and women has increased
dramatically over the past several decades. Yet scholarship on the
non-religious is severely lacking. In response to this critical gap
in knowledge, The Nonreligious provides a comprehensive summation
and analytical discussion of existing social scientific research on
the non-religious. The authors present a thorough overview of
existing research, while also drawing on ongoing research and
positing ways to improve upon our current understanding of this
growing population. The findings in this book stand out against the
corpus of secular writing, which is comprised primarily of
polemical rants critiquing religion, personal life-stories/memoirs
of former believers, or abstract philosophical explorations of
theology and anti-theology. By offering the first research- and
data-based conclusions about the non-religious, this book will be
an invaluable source of information and a foundation for further
scholarship. Written in clear, jargon-free language that will
appeal to the increasingly interested general readers, this book
provides an unbiased, thorough account of all relevant existing
scholarship within the social sciences that bears on the lived
experience of the non-religious.
This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically
crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk
and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer
biographical research and a growing international body of
scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse
literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the
two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his
reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and
salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical
life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his
intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient
christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein
Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine
imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single
(divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition.
Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian"
worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the
participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or
reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric
energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the
christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his
rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own
composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers
additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus,
inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of
creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or
interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies
how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology
in the seventh century-the repercussions of which cost him his
life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the
later history of theology.
In Union Made, Heath W. Carter advances a bold new interpretation
of the origins of American Social Christianity. While historians
have often attributed the rise of the Social Gospel to middle-class
ministers, seminary professors, and social reformers, this book
places working people at the very center of the story. The major
characters-blacksmiths, glove makers, teamsters, printers, and the
like-have been mostly forgotten, but as Carter convincingly argues,
their collective contribution to American Social Christianity was
no less significant than that of Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane
Addams. Leading readers into the thick of late-19th-century
Chicago's tumultuous history, Carter shows that countless
working-class believers participated in the heated debates over the
implications of Christianity for industrializing society, often
with as much fervor as they did in other contests over wages and
the length of the workday. Throughout the Gilded Age the city's
trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists advanced theological
critiques of laissez faire capitalism and protested "scab
ministers" who cozied up to the business elite. Their criticisms
compounded church leaders' anxieties about losing the poor, such
that by the turn-of-the-century many leading Christians were
arguing that the only way to salvage hopes of a Christian America
was for the churches to soften their position on "the labor
question." As denomination after denomination did just that, it
became apparent that the Social Gospel was, indeed, ascendant-from
below.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1148 - 1210) wrote prolifically in the
disciplines of theology, Quranic exegesis, and philosophy. He
composed treatises on jurisprudence, medicine, physiognomy,
astronomy, and astrology. His body of work marks a momentous
turning point in the Islamic tradition and his influence within the
post-classical Islamic tradition is striking. After his death in
1210 his works became standard textbooks in Islamic institutions of
higher learning. Razi investigates his transformative contributions
to the Islamic intellectual tradition. One of the leading
representatives of Sunni orthodoxy in medieval Islam, Razi was the
first intellectual to exploit the rich heritage of ancient and
Islamic philosophy to interpret the Quran. Jaffer uncovers Razi's
boldly unconventional intellectual aspirations. The book elucidates
the development of Razi's unique appropriation of methods and ideas
from ancient and Islamic philosophy into a unified Quranic
commentary-and consequently into the Sunni worldview. Jaffer shows
that the genre of Quranic commentary in the post-classical period
contains a wealth of philosophical material that is of major
interest for the history of philosophical ideas in Islam and for
the interaction of the aqli ("rational") and naqli ("traditional")
sciences in Islamic civilization. Jaffer demonstrates the ways Razi
reconciled the opposing intellectual trends of his milieu on major
methodological conflicts. A highly original work, this book
brilliantly repositions the central aims of Razi's intellectual
program.
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