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Books > Religion & Spirituality
In this book, Lenn E. Goodman writes about the commandment to "love
thy neighbor as thyself" from the standpoint of Judaism, a topic
and perspective that have not often been joined before. Goodman
addresses two big questions: What does that command ask of us? and
what is its basis? Drawing extensively on Jewish sources, both
biblical and rabbinic, he fleshes out the cultural context and
historical shape taken on by this Levitical commandment. In so
doing, he restores the richness of its material content to this
core articulation of our moral obligations, which often threatens
to sink into vacuity as a mere nostrum or rhetorical formula.
Goodman argues against the notion that we have this obligation
simply because God demands it -- a position that too readily makes
ethics seem arbitrary, relativistic, dogmatic, authoritarian,
contingent or just unpalatable. Rather he proposes that we learn
much about how we ought to think about God from what we know about
morals. He shows that natural reasoning and appeals to scripture,
tradition, and revelation reinforce one another in ethical
deliberation. For Goodman, ethics and theology are not worlds apart
connected only by a kind of narrow one-way passage; the two realms
of discourse can and should inform each other.
Engaging the philosophers, including Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant,
and assembling three-thousand years worth of Jewish textual
masterpieces, Goodman skillfully weaves his Gifford Lectures, which
he delivered in 2005, into an indispensable work.
This book is a detailed account of and commentary on Thomas
Aquinas's most influential work: the Summa Theologiae. Intended for
students and general readers interested in medieval philosophy and
theology, the book will also appeal to professors and scholars,
although it does not presuppose any previous knowledge of its
subject. Following a scholarly account of Aquinas's life, the book
explores his purposes in writing the Summa Theologiae and works
systematically through each of its three Parts. It also relates
their contents and Aquinas's teachings to that of other works and
other thinkers both theological and philosophical. In addition to
being expository, the volume aims to help readers think about the
value of the Summa Theologiae for themselves. The concluding
chapter considers the impact Aquinas's best-known work has had
since its first appearance, and why it is still studied today.
Davies's study is a solid and reflective introduction both to the
Summa Theologiae and to Aquinas in general.
The emergence of formative Judaism has traditionally been examined
in light of a theological preoccupation with the two competing
religious movements, 'Christianity' and 'Judaism' in the first
centuries of the Common Era. In this book Ariel Schremer attempts
to shift the scholarly consensus away from this paradigm, instead
privileging the rabbinic attitude toward Rome, the destroyer of the
temple in 70 C.E., over their concern with the nascent Christian
movement. The palpable rabbinic political enmity toward Rome, says
Schremer, was determinative in the emerging construction of Jewish
self-identity. He asserts that the category of heresy took on a new
urgency in the wake of the trauma of the Temple's destruction,
which demanded the construction of a new self-identity. Relying on
the late 20th-century scholarly depiction of the slow and measured
growth of Christianity in the empire up until and even after
Constantine's conversion, Schremer minimizes the extent to which
the rabbis paid attention to the Christian presence. He goes on,
however, to pinpoint the parting of the ways between the rabbis and
the Christians in the first third of the second century, when
Christians were finally assigned to the category of heretics.
Behind the walls of a church, Liliana and her baby eat, sleep, and
wait. Outside, protestors shout ''Go back to Mexico!'' and ''Tax
this political church!'' They demand that the U.S. government
deport Liliana, which would separate her from her husband and
children. Is Liliana a criminal or a hero? And why does the church
protect her? Grace Yukich draws on extensive field observation and
interviews to reveal how immigration is changing religious activism
in the U.S. In the face of nationwide immigration raids and public
hostility toward ''illegal'' immigration, the New Sanctuary
Movement emerged in 2007 as a religious force seeking to humanize
the image of undocumented immigrants like Liliana. Building
coalitions between religious and ethnic groups that had rarely
worked together in the past, activists revived and adapted
''sanctuary,'' the tradition of providing shelter for fugitives in
houses of worship. Through sanctuary, they called on Americans to
support legislation that would keep immigrant families together.
But they sought more than political change: they also pursued
religious transformation, challenging the religious nationalism in
America's faith communities by portraying undocumented immigrants
as fellow children of God. Yukich shows progressive religious
activists struggling with the competing goals of newly diverse
coalitions, fighting to expand the meaning of ''family values'' in
a globalizing nation. Through these struggles, the activists both
challenged the public dominance of the religious right and created
conflicts that could doom their chances of impacting immigration
reform.
David Brown explores the ways in which the symbolic associations of
the body and what we do with it have helped shape religious
experience and continue to do so. A Church narrowly focused on
Christ's body wracked in pain needs to be reminded that the body as
beautiful and sexual has also played a crucial role not only in
other religions but also in the history of Christianity itself.
Dance was one way in which the connection was expressed. The irony
is not that such a connection has gone but that it now exists
almost wholly outside the Church. Much the same could be said about
music more generally, and Brown writes excitingly about the
spiritual potential of not just classical music but also pop, jazz,
musicals, and opera. Like Brown's much-praised earlier volumes, God
and Enchantment of Place, Tradition and Imagination, and
Discipleship and Imagination, the present book will enlarge
horizons and challenge the narrowness of much theological thinking.
Death is an element at the center of all religious imagination.
Analysts from Freud to Agamben have pondered religion's fascination
with death, and religious art is saturated with images of suffering
unto death. As this volume shows, religious fascination with death
extends to the notion of elective death, its circumstances, the
virtue of those who perform it, and how best to commemorate it. The
essays in Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation address
the legendary foundations for those elective deaths which can be
categorized as religiously sanctioned suicides. Broadly condemned
as cowardice across the world's moral codes, suicide under certain
circumstances-such as martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or
self-immolation-carries a dynamic importance in religious legends,
some tragic and others uplifting. Believers respond to such legends
presumably because choosing death is seen as heroic and redemptive
for the individuals who die, for their communities, or for
humanity. Envisioning suicide as virtuous clashes with popular
conceptions of suicide as weak, immoral, and even criminal, but
that is precisely the point. This volume offers analyses from
renowned scholars with the literary tools and historical insights
to investigate the delicate issue of religiously sanctioned
elective death.
Joseph W. Williams examines the changing healing practices of
pentecostals in the United States over the past 100 years, from the
early believers, who rejected mainstream medicine and overtly
spiritualized disease, to the later generations of pentecostals and
their charismatic successors, who dramatically altered the healing
paradigms they inherited. Williams shows that over the course of
the twentieth century, pentecostal denunciations of the medical
profession often gave way to ''natural'' healing methods associated
with scientific medicine, natural substances, and even psychology.
By 2000, figures such as the pentecostal preacher T. D. Jakes
appeared on the Dr. Phil Show, other healers marketed their books
at mainstream retailers such as Wal-Mart, and some developed
lucrative nutritional products that sold online and in health food
stores across the nation. Exploring the interconnections,
resonances, and continued points of tension between adherents and
some of their fiercest rivals, Spirit Cure chronicling adherents'
embrace of competitors' healing practices and illuminates
pentecostals' dramatic transition from a despised minority to major
players in the world of American evangelicalism and mainstream
American culture.
Barth stands before us as the greatest theologian of the twentieth
century, yet the massive corpus of work which he left behind, the
multi volume Church Dogmatics, can seem daunting and formidable to
readers today. Fortunately his Dogmatics in Outline first published
in English in 1949, contains in brilliantly concentrated form even
in shorthand, the essential tenets of his thinking. Built around
the assertions made in the Apostles Creed the book consists of a
series of reflections on the foundation stones of Christian
doctrine. Because Dogmatics in Outline derives from very particular
circumstances namely the lectures Barth gave in war-shattered
Germany in 1946, it has an urgency and a compassion which lend the
text a powerful simplicity. Despite its brevity the book makes a
tremendous impact, which in this new edition will now be felt by a
fresh generation of readers.
There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and
secular love songs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two
disparate genres-one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the
other vernacular-both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous
woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of
traditional medieval song forms - Marian prayer derived from
earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval
courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two
musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together.
Author David Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success,
producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and
liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative
analysis of this devotional form with the words and music of
secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines
the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within
polyphonic music from c. 1200 to c. 1500. Through case studies of
works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian
devotional and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive
ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of
an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies,
literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide
application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope
and unique, incisive analysis, this book is suited for scholars,
students, and general readers alike. Undergraduate and graduate
students of musicology, Medieval and Renaissance studies,
comparative literature, art history, Western reglious history, and
music history-especially that of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and
sacred music-will find this book a useful and informative resource
on the period. The Flower of Paradise is also of interest to those
with a particular dedication to any of its diverse subject areas.
For individuals involved in religious organizations or those who
frequent Medieval or Renaissance cultural sites and museums, this
book will deepen their knowledge and open up new ways of thinking
about the history and development of secular and sacred music and
the Marian tradition.
Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I lays the groundwork for a
constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding
divine action. Noted scholar, William J. Abraham argues that the
concept of divine action is not a closed concept-like knowledge-but
an open concept with a variety of context-dependent meanings. The
volume charts the history of debate about divine action among key
Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were
largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action
as a closed concept. After developing an argument that divine
action should be understood as an open, fluid concept, Abraham
engages the work of William Alston, Process metaphysics, quantum
physics, analytic Thomist philosophy of religion, and the theology
of Kathryn Tanner. Abraham argues that divine action as an open
concept must be shaped by distinctly theological considerations,
and thus all future work on divine action among philosophers of
religion must change to accord with this vision. Only deep
engagement with the Christian theological tradition will remedy the
problems ailing contemporary discourse on divine action.
Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982) is generally regarded as the most
important Hindu woman saint of the twentieth century. Venerated
alternately as a guru and as an incarnation of God on earth, Ma had
hundreds of thousands of devotees. Through the creation of a
religious movement and a vast network of ashrams-unprecedented for
a woman-Ma presented herself as an authority figure in a society
where female gurus were not often recognized. Because of her
widespread influence, Ma is one of the rare Hindu saints whose cult
has outlived her. Today, her tomb is a place of veneration, and she
is venerated by those who knew her and by those too young to have
known her. Orianne Aymard has performed extensive fieldwork among
Ma's current devotees. In this book, she examines what happens to a
cult after the death of its leader. Does it decline, stagnate, or
grow? Or is it rather transformed into something else entirely?
Aymard's work sheds new light not only on Hindu sainthood-and
particularly female Hindu sainthood-but on the nature of
charismatic religious leadership and devotion
The diversity of Nietzsche's books, and the sheer range of his
philosophical interests, have posed daunting challenges to his
interpreters. This Oxford Handbook addresses this multiplicity by
devoting each of its 32 essays to a focused topic, picked out by
the book's systematic plan. The aim is to treat each topic at the
best current level of philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. The
first group of papers treat selected biographical issues: his
family relations, his relations to women, and his ill health and
eventual insanity. In Part 2 the papers treat Nietzsche in
historical context: his relations back to other philosophers-the
Greeks, Kant, and Schopenhauer-and to the cultural movement of
Romanticism, as well as his own later influence in an unlikely
place, on analytic philosophy. The papers in Part 3 treat a variety
of Nietzsche's works, from early to late and in styles ranging from
the 'aphoristic' The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil through
the poetic-mythic Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the florid
autobiography Ecce Homo. This focus on individual works, their
internal unity, and the way issues are handled within them, is an
important complement to the final three groups of papers, which
divide up Nietzsche's philosophical thought topically. The papers
in Part 4 treat issues in Nietzsche's value theory, ranging from
his metaethical views as to what values are, to his own values of
freedom and the overman, to his insistence on 'order of rank', and
his social-political views. The fifth group of papers treat
Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including such well-known
ideas as his perspectivism, his INSERT: Included in Starkmann 40%
promotion, September-October 2014 being, and his thought of eternal
recurrence. Finally, Part 6 treats another famous idea-the will to
power-as well as two linked ideas that he uses will to power to
explain, the drives, and life. This Handbook will be a key resource
for all scholars and advanced students who work on Nietzsche.
The practice of making votive offerings into fire dates from the
earliest periods of human history, and is found in many different
religious cultures. Throughout the tantric world, this kind of
ritual offering practice is known as the homa. With roots in Vedic
and Zoroastrian rituals, the tantric homa developed in early
medieval India. Since that time it has been transmitted to Central
and East Asia by tantric Buddhist practitioners. Today, Hindu forms
are also being practiced outside of India as well. Despite this
historical and cultural range, the homa retains an identifiable
unity of symbolism and ritual form. The essays collected in Homa
Variations provide detailed studies of a variety of homa forms,
providing an understanding of the history of the homa from its
inception up to its use in the present. At the same time, the
authors cover a wide range of religious cultures, from India and
Nepal to Tibet, China, and Japan. The theoretical focus of the
collection is the study of ritual change over long periods of time,
and across the boundaries of religious cultures. The identifiable
unity of the homa allows for an almost unique opportunity to
examine ritual change from such a broad perspective.
Over the last decade, "New Atheists" such as Sam Harris, Richard
Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have pushed the issue of atheism
to the forefront of public discussion. Yet very few of the ensuing
debates and discussions have managed to provide a full and
objective treatment of the subject. Atheism: What Everyone Needs to
Know provides a balanced look at the topic, considering atheism
historically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically and
psychologically. Written in an easily accessible style, the book
uses a question and answer format to examine the history of
atheism, arguments for and against atheism, the relationship
between religion and science, and the issue of the meaning of
life-and whether or not one can be a happy and satisfied atheist.
Above all, the author stresses that the atheism controversy is not
just a matter of the facts, but a matter of burning moral concern,
both about the stand one should take on the issues and the
consequences of one's commitment.
""'A painstakingly researched, meticulously documented, cogently
reasoned and eminently readable book. It represents an important
step forward in New Testament study which henceforward scholars,
even if they do not agree with it will not be able to ignore.'
Times Literary Supplement 'For those who are concerned to penetrate
to the historical realities within the gospel records this is an
extremely important book.' Expository Times 'Can only be described
as epoch-making.' Jewish Chronicle"" In this, Geza Vermes' best
known book, there emerges perhaps the closest portrayal that we
have of a genuinely historical Jesus. Freed from the weight and
onus of Christian doctrine or Jewish animus, Jesus here appears as
a vividly human, yet profoundly misunderstood, figure, thoroughly
grounded and contextualised within the extraordinary intellectual
and cultural cross currents of his day. Jesus the Jew is a
remarkable portrait by a brilliant scholar writing at the height of
his powers, informed by insights from the New Testament, Jewish
literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls alike.
Jacob Arminius (1559-1609) is one of the few theologians in the
history of Christianity who has lent his name to a significant
theological movement. The dissemination of his thought throughout
Europe, Great Britain, and North America, along with the appeal of
his ideas in current Protestant evangelical spheres (whether
rightly understood or misunderstood), continue to attract both
scholarly and popular attention. Keith Stanglin and Thomas McCall's
Jacob Arminius offers a constructive synthesis of the current state
of Arminius studies. There is a chasm separating technical,
scholarly discussions of Arminius and popular-level appeals to his
thought. The authors seek to bridge the scholarly and general
discussions, providing an account based on interaction with all the
primary sources and latest secondary research that will be helpful
to the scholar as well as comprehensible and relevant to the
undergraduate student. The authors describe key elements of
Arminius' theology with careful attention to its proper context;
they also explore the broader theological implications of his
views.
In a groundbreaking examination of the antislavery origins of
liberal Protestantism, Molly Oshatz contends that the antebellum
slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to adopt an
historicist understanding of truth and morality. Unlike earlier
debates over slavery, the antebellum slavery debates revolved
around the question of whether or not slavery was a sin in the
abstract. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to answer the
proslavery claim that slavery was not a sin in and of itself,
antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis
Wayland, Moses Stuart, Leonard Bacon, and Horace Bushnell, argued
that biblical principles opposed slavery and that God revealed
slavery's sinfulness through the gradual unfolding of these
principles. Although they believed that slavery was a sin,
antislavery Protestants' sympathy for individual slaveholders and
their knowledge of the Bible made them reluctant to denounce all
slaveholders as sinners. In order to reconcile slavery's sinfulness
with their commitments to the Bible and to the Union, antislavery
Protestants defined slavery as a social rather than an individual
sin. Oshatz demonstrates that the antislavery notions of
progressive revelation and social sin had radical implications for
Protestant theology. Oshatz carries her study through the Civil War
to reveal how emancipation confirmed for northern Protestants the
antislavery notion that God revealed His will through history. She
describes how after the war, a new generation of liberal
theologians, including Newman Smyth, Charles Briggs, and George
Harris, drew on the example of antislavery and emancipation to
respond to evolution and historical biblical criticism. The
theological innovations rooted in the slavery debates came to
fruition in liberal Protestantism's acceptance of the historical
and evolutionary nature of religious truth.
In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and
beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation
in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the
emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and
Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As
revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching
clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their
listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To
encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in
their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were
already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into
confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to
feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on
the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the
decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that
ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late
fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual
sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews
at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the
Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were
intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she
discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at
least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper
devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather
than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to
remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in
the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict
adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an
adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in
their faith.
Robert Frykenberg's insightful study explores and enhances
historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and
institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings down to
the present. As one out of several manifestations of a newly
emerging World Christianity, in which Christians of a
Post-Christian West are a minority, it has focused upon those
trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments
which have made Christians in this part of the world distinctive.
It seeks to uncover various complexities in the proliferation of
Christianity in its many forms and to examine processes by which
Christian elements intermingled with indigenous cultures and which
resulted in multiple identities, and also left imprints upon
various cultures of India.
Thomas Christians believe that the Apostle Thomas came to India in
52 A.D./C.E., and that he left seven congregations to carry on the
Mission of bringing the Gospel to India. In our day the impulse of
this Mission is more alive than ever. Catholics, in three
hierarchies, have become most numerous; and various
Evangelicals/Protestant communities constitute the third great
tradition. With the rise of Pentecostalism, a fourth great wave of
Christian expansion in India has occurred. Starting with movements
that began a century ago, there are now ten to fifteen times more
missionaries than ever before, virtually all of them Indian.
Needless to say, Christianity in India is profoundly Indian and
Frykenberg provides a fascinating guide to its unique history and
culture.
Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last
century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an
introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a
demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education
in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and
Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately two thousand Jewish
scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational
culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw
the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was
unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain.
The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to
writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral
tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern
times.
Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the
Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different
aims. Marc Hirshman explores the evolution and institutionalization
of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At
its core, he argues, the Jewish cultural thrust in the first
centuries of the Common Era was a sustained effort to preserve the
language of its culture in its most pristine form. Hirshman traces
and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as
presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the
subject in late antique rabbinic sources. The Stabilization of
Rabbinic Culture is a pioneering attempt to characterize the unique
approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late
antiquity.
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