![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Religion & Spirituality
By exploring how Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and John Calvin interpreted a set of eight messianic psalms (Psalms 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 110, 188), Sujin Pak elucidates key debates about Christological exegesis during the era of the Protestant reformation. More particularly, Pak examines the exegeses of Luther, Bucer, and Calvin in order to (a) reveal their particular theological emphases and reading strategies, (b) identify their debates over the use of Jewish exegesis and the factors leading to charges of 'judaizing' leveled against Calvin, and (c) demonstrate how Psalms reading and the accusation of judaizing serve distinctive purposes of confessional identity formation. In this way, she portrays the beginnings of those distinctive trends that separated Lutheran and Reformed exegetical principles.
Throughout church history, the book of Psalms has enjoyed wider use and acclaim than almost any other book of the Bible. Early Christians extolled it for its fullness of Christian doctrine, monks memorized and recited it daily, lay people have prayed its words as their own, and churches have sung from it as their premier hymn book. While the past half century has seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the thought of American theologian Jonathan Edwards, including his writings on the Bible, no scholar has yet explored his meditations on the Psalms. David P. Barshinger addresses this gap by providing a close study of his engagement with one of the Bibles most revered books. From his youth to the final days of his presidency at the College of New Jersey, Edwards was a devout student of Scriptureas more than 1,200 extant sermons, theological treatises, and thousands of personal manuscript pages devoted to biblical reflection bear witness. Using some of his writings that have previously received little to no attention, Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms offers insights on his theological engagement with the Psalms in the context of interpretation, worship, and preaching. Barshinger shows that he appropriated the history of redemption as an organizing theological framework within which to engage the Psalms specifically, and the Bible as a whole. This original study greatly advances Edwards scholarship, shedding new and welcome light on the theologians relationship to Scripture.
Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary
Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a
population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and
"Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are
popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the
majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews
from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa,
and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and
continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as
France, Latin America, and the United States.
Though much has been written about particular forms of violence related to religion, such as sacrificial rites and militant martyrdom, there have been few efforts to survey the phenomena in all of the world's major religious traditions, historically and in the present, viewing the subject in personal as well as social dimensions, and covering both literary themes and political conflicts. This compact collection of essays provides such an overview. Each of the essays explores the ways in which violence is justified within the literary and theological foundation of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of vengeance and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. The nature of the connection between violence and faith has always been a topic of heated debate, especially as acts of violence performed in the name of religion have erupted onto the global stage. Some scholars argue that these acts of violence are not really religious at all, but symptomatic of other elements of society or human nature. Others however point to the fact that often the perpetrators of these acts cite the faith's own foundational texts as their inspiration-and that the occurrence of violence in the name of religion exists across all faith traditions. Is violence, then, the rare exception in religious traditions or is it one of the rules? The contributors to this volume explore many possible approaches to this question and myriad others. How is religion defined? Must a religion be centered on supernatural beings? Does the term refer to social behavior or private? Is dogma or practice the key to its essence? Is it a philosophical system or a poetic structure? And how should violence be defined? From whose perspective and at what point is an act to be deemed violent? What act cannot be construed as violent in some way? For instance, are we talking only about war and genocide, or psychological coercion, social restrictions and binding categorizations? Collectively, the essays in this volume reflect the complex and contested meanings of both religion and violence, providing overviews of engagements with violence in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, African, and Pacific Island religious traditions. By shedding light on the intersection of violence with faith, this volume does much to expand the understanding of the nature of religion itself, and the diverse forms it may take.
Tantric traditions in both Buddhism and Hinduism are thriving throughout Asia and in Asian diasporic communities around the world, yet they have been largely ignored by Western scholars until now. This collection of original essays fills this gap by examining the ways in which Tantric Buddhist traditions have changed over time and distance as they have spread across cultural boundaries in Asia. The book is divided into three sections dedicated to South Asia, Central Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. The essays cover such topics as the changing ideal of masculinity in Buddhist literature, the controversy triggered by the transmission of the Indian Buddhist deity Heruka to Tibet in the 10th century, and the evolution of a Chinese Buddhist Tantric tradition in the form of the True Buddha School. The book as a whole addresses complex and contested categories in the field of religious studies, including the concept of syncretism and the various ways that the change and transformation of religious traditions can be described and articulated. The authors, leading scholars in Tantric studies, draw on a wide array of methodologies from the fields of history, anthropology, art history, and sociology. Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Translation is groundbreaking in its attempt to look past religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board, it publishes exemplary papers in any area of philosophy of religion.
In the last few decades, all major presidential candidates have openly discussed the role of faith in their lives, sharing their religious beliefs and church commitments with the media and their constituencies. And yet, to the surprise of many Americans, God played almost no role in the 2012 presidential campaign. During the campaign, incumbent Barack Obama minimized the role of religion in his administration and in his life. This was in stark contrast to his emphasis, in 2008, on how his Chicago church had nurtured him as a person, community organizer, and politician, which ultimately backfired when incendiary messages preached by his liberationist pastor Jeremiah Wright went viral. The Republican Party faced a different kind of problem in 2012, with the increasing irrelevance or absence of founders of the Religious Right such as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Furthermore, with Mormon Mitt Romney running as the GOP candidate, party operatives avoided shining a spotlight on religion, recognizing that vast numbers of Americans remain suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The absence of God during the 2012 election reveals that the United States is at a crossroads with regards to faith, even while religion continues to play a central role in almost every facet of American culture and political life. The separation of church and state and the disestablishment of religion have fostered a rich religious marketplace characterized by innovation and entrepreneurship. As the generation that launched the culture wars fades into history and a new, substantially more diverse population matures, the question of how faith is functioning in the new millennium has become more important than ever. In Faith in the New Millennium historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars tackle contemporary issues, controversies, and policies ranging from drone wars to presidential campaigns to the exposing of religious secrets in order to make sense of American life in the new millennium. This melding of past and present offers readers a rare opportunity to assess Americans' current wrestling with matters of faith, and provides valuable insight into the many ways that faith has shaped and transformed the age of Obama and how the age of Obama has shaped American religious faith.
Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) is popularly celebrated for his fascinating spiritual life. How could one man, one deeply spiritual man, serve as both a traditional Oglala Lakota medicine man and a Roman Catholic catechist and mystic? How did these two spiritual and cultural identities enrich his prayer life? How did his commitment to God, understood through his Lakota and Catholic communities, shape his understanding of how to be in the world? To fully understand the depth of Black Elk's life-long spiritual quest requires a deep appreciation of his life story. He witnessed devastation on the battlefields of Little Bighorn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, but also extravagance while performing for Queen Victoria as a member of "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West Show. Widowed by his first wife, he remarried and raised eight children. Black Elk's spiritual visions granted him wisdom and healing insight beginning in his childhood, but he grew progressively physically blind in his adult years. These stories, and countless more, offer insight into this extraordinary man whose cause for canonization is now underway at the Vatican.
The idea of the pre-existence of the soul has been extremely
important, widespread, and persistent throughout Western
history--from even before the philosophy of Plato to the poetry of
Robert Frost. When Souls Had Wings offers the first systematic
history of this little explored feature of Western culture.
This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of
all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed
attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries. Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection. Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word "faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer" indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America, self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti, and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing, contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood, Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional history of religious modernities.
Cardinal Francis E. George, O.M.I., was a model pastor and a heroic disciple of Christ. A native Chicagoan, he was told as a young man that he would never be a priest in Chicago because of a physical disability resulting from polio. He went on to be ordained a priest with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1963. He was appointed as Archbishop of Chicago in 1997, created a cardinal in 1998, and served in Chicago until 2014, just months before his death at the age of 78.
In a long-overlooked diary entry, Franz Kafka admitted to suffering
from ''bouts of clairvoyance.'' These bouts of clairvoyance can be
seen in his writing, in moments when the solid basis of human
cognition totters, the dissolution of matter seems imminent, and
objects are jarringly severed from physical referents. June O.
Leavitt offers a fascinating examination of the mystical in Kafka's
life and writings, showing that Kafka's understanding of the occult
was not only a product of his own clairvoyant experiences but of
the age in which he lived.
Cultural conflicts about the family-including those surrounding women's social roles, the debate over abortion, and in more recent years, debates about stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and contraception-have intensified over the last few decades among Catholics, as well as among American citizens generally. In fact, these conflicts comprise much of the substance of the moral polarization that currently characterizes our public politics. Scholars have demonstrated the importance of the media in the endurance of these conflicts, as well as the important role played by elites, particularly religious elites. But less is known about how individuals in local settings and cultures-especially religious settings-experience and participate in them. Why are these conflicts so resonant among ordinary Americans, and Catholics in particular? By exploring how religion and family life are intertwined in local parish settings, this book strives to understand how and why Catholics are divided around these cultural conflicts about the family. It presents a close and detailed comparative ethnographic analysis of the families and local religious cultures in two Catholic parishes: religiously conservative Our Lady of the Assumption Church and theologically progressive St. Brigitta Church. Through an examination of the activities of parish life, together with the faith stories of parishioners, this book reveals how two congregational social processes-the practice of central ecclesial metaphors, and the construction of Catholic identities-matter for the ways in which parishioners work out the routines of marriage, childrearing, and work-family balance, as well as to the ways they connect these everyday challenges to the public politics of the family. The analysis further demonstrates that these institutional processes promote polarization among Catholics through practices that unintentionally fragment the Catholic tradition in local religious settings.
The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary
obstacles--poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation--to become
one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples
and schools, and attracting crowds of students and disciples
wherever he went. Now, in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, James
Carter draws on untapped archival materials to provide a book that
is part travelogue, part history, and part biography of this
remarkable man.
W. E. B. Du Bois is an improbable candidate for a project in religion. His skepticism of and, even, hostility toward religion is readily established and canonically accepted. Indeed, he spent his career rejecting normative religious commitments to institutions and supernatural beliefs. In this book, Jonathon Kahn offers a fresh and controversial reading of Du Bois that seeks to overturn this view. Kahn contends that the standard treatment of Du Bois turns a deaf ear to his writings. For if we're open to their religious timbre, those writings-from his epoch-making The Souls of Black Folk to his unstudied series of parables that depict the lynching of an African American Christ-reveal a virtual obsession with religion. Du Bois's moral, literary, and political imagination is inhabited by religious rhetoric, concepts and stories. Divine Discontent recovers and introduces readers to the remarkably complex and varied religious world in Du Bois's writings. It's a world of sermons, of religious virtues such as sacrifice and piety, of jeremiads that fight for a black American nation within the larger nation. Unlike other African American religious voices at the time, however, Du Bois's religious orientation is distinctly heterodox--it exists outside the bounds of institutional Christianity. Kahn shows how Du Bois self-consciously marshals religious rhetoric, concepts, typologies, narratives, virtues, and moods in order to challenge traditional Christian worldview in which events function to confirm a divine order. Du Bois's antimetaphysical religious voice, he argues, places him firmly in the American tradition of pragmatic religious naturalism typified by William James. This innovative reading of Du Bois should appeal to scholars of American religion, intellectual history, African American Studies, and philosophy of religion.
Since the advent of the cinema, Jesus has frequently appeared in
our movie houses and on our television screens. Indeed, it may well
be that more people worldwide know about Jesus and his life story
from the movies than from any other medium. Indeed, Jesus' story
has been adapted dozens of times throughout the history of
commercial cinema, from the 1912 silent From the Manger to the
Cross to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. No doubt
there are more to come.
Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the
problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean
societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture.
The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching
the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary
stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and
material culture.
|
![]() ![]() You may like...
Guide to Yeast Genetics: Functional…
Jonathan Weissman, Christine Guthrie, …
Paperback
R1,944
Discovery Miles 19 440
Microbiology of Atypical Environments…
Jack T. Trevors, Volker Gurtler
Hardcover
R4,361
Discovery Miles 43 610
Guide to Yeast Genetics: Functional…
Jonathan Weissman, Christine Guthrie, …
Hardcover
R4,114
Discovery Miles 41 140
|