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Books > Religion & Spirituality
"Rediscovering the Beauty of Sabbath Rest"
Our bodies and souls were "created "to rest--regularly--and when
they do, we experience heightened productivity, improved health,
and more meaningful relationships.
In these pages you'll find wonderful stories of the senator's
spiritual journey, as well as special Sabbath experiences with
political colleagues such as Bill Clinton, Al and Tipper Gore, John
McCain, Colin Powell, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, and others. Senator
Joe Lieberman shows how his observance of the Sabbath has not only
enriched his personal and spiritual life but enhanced his career
and enabled him to serve his country to his greatest capacity.
In Leaves from the Garden of Eden, Howard Schwartz, a three-time
winner of the National Jewish Book Award, has gathered together one
hundred of the most astonishing and luminous stories from Jewish
folk tradition.
Just as Schwartz's award-winning book Tree of Souls: The Mythology
of Judaism collected the essential myths of Jewish tradition,
Leaves from the Garden of Eden collects one hundred essential
Jewish tales. As imaginative as the Arabian Nights, these stories
invoke enchanted worlds, demonic realms, and mystical experiences.
The four most popular types of Jewish tales are gathered
here--fairy tales, folktales, supernatural tales, and mystical
tales--taking readers on heavenly journeys, lifelong quests, and
descents to the underworld. King David is still alive in the City
of Luz, which the Angel of Death cannot enter, and somewhere deep
in the forest a mysterious cottage contains the candle of your
soul. In these stories, a bride who is not careful may end up
marrying a demon, while the charm sewn into a dress may drive a
pious woman to lascivious behavior. There is a dybbuk lurking in a
well, a book that comes to life, and a world where Lilith, the
Queen of Demons, seduces the unsuspecting. Here too are Jewish
versions of many of the best-known tales, including "Cinderella,"
"Snow White," and "Rapunzel." Schwartz's retelling of one of these
stories, "The Finger," inspired Tim Burton's film Corpse
Bride.
With its broad selection from written and oral sources, Leaves
from the Garden of Eden is a landmark collection, representing the
full range of Jewish folklore, from the Talmud to the present. It
is a must-read for everyone who loves fiction and an ideal holiday
gift.
Evangelicals are increasingly turning their attention toward issues
such as the environment, international human rights, economic
development, racial reconciliation, and urban renewal. This marks
an expansion of the social agenda advanced by the Religious Right
over the past few decades. For outsiders to evangelical culture,
this trend complicates simplistic stereotypes. For insiders, it
brings contention over what "true" evangelicalism means today. The
New Evangelical Social Engagement brings together an impressive
interdisciplinary team of scholars to map this new religious
terrain and spell out its significance. The volume's introduction
describes the broad outlines of this "new evangelicalism." The
editors identify its key elements, trace its historical lineage,
account for the recent changes taking place within evangelicalism,
and highlight the implications of these changes for politics, civic
engagement, and American religion. Part One of the book discusses
important groups and trends: emerging evangelicals, the New
Monastics, an emphasis on social justice, Catholic influences,
gender dynamics and the desire to rehabilitate the evangelical
identity, and evangelical attitudes toward the new social agenda.
Part Two focuses on specific issues: the environment, racial
reconciliation, abortion, international human rights, and global
poverty. Part Three contains reflections on the new evangelical
social engagement by three leading scholars in the fields of
American religious history, sociology of religion, and Christian
ethics.
The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American
literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept,
chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed
but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and
philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as
probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and
sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became
more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its
power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory,
statistics, military science, and financial strategy. Uncertain
Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way
nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and
belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic
methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate
moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African
American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns
to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order.
Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective
experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century
writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful
possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate
extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism,
determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational
confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of
modernity.
Although puritans in 17th-century New England lived alongside both
Native Americans and Africans, the white New Englanders imagined
their neighbors as something culturally and intellectually distinct
from themselves. Legally and practically, they saw people of color
as simultaneously human and less than human, things to be owned.
Yet all of these people remained New Englanders, regardless of the
color of their skin, and this posed a problem for puritans. In
order to fulfill John Winthrop's dream of a "city on a hill," New
England's churches needed to contain all New Englanders. To deal
with this problem, white New Englanders generally turned to
familiar theological constructs to redeem not only themselves and
their actions (including their participation in race-based slavery)
but also to redeem the colonies' Africans and Native Americans.
Richard A. Bailey draws on diaries, letters, sermons, court
documents, newspapers, church records, and theological writings to
tell the story of the religious and racial tensions in puritan New
England.
This book studies Egyptian ideas about death and the afterlife
during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods. Mark Smith analyses
Egyptian attitudes toward death, looks at the various means by
which the Egyptians attempted to ensure a smooth transition from
existence in this world to that in the next, and examines how they
envisaged life in the hereafter. Traversing Eternity is based on a
corpus of sixty texts specially selected for the light which they
throw upon these topics. Some of the texts are ritual in character,
and were recited for the benefit of the deceased by priests, while
others were interred along with the dead so that they themselves
could make use of them in the afterlife. Each text is translated in
its entirety, with annotation to elucidate obscure points, and each
is supplied with a detailed introduction. Smith also addresses key
issues such as that of continuity and change in Egyptian religious
beliefs during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and attempts to
answer the question of why the composition of texts for the
afterlife flourished to such a remarkable extent at this time.
This groundbreaking study looks beyond biblical texts, which have
had a powerful influence over our views of women's roles and worth,
in order to reconstruct the typical everyday lives of women in
ancient Israel. Carol Meyers argues that biblical sources alone do
not give a true picture of ancient Israelite women because urban
elite males wrote the vast majority of the scriptural texts and the
stories of women in the Bible concern exceptional individuals
rather than ordinary Israelite women. Drawing on archaeological
discoveries and ethnographic information as well as biblical texts,
Meyers depicts Israelite women not as submissive chattel in an
oppressive patriarchy, but rather as strong and significant actors
within their families and society. In so doing, she challenges the
very notion of patriarchy as an appropriate designation for
Israelite society.
The figure of the renegade - a European Christian or Jew who had
converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan - is
omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian
Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries
failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented
among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable
attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European
literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been
surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts
in the Ottoman military-administrative elite. The Sultan's
Renegades inserts these 'foreign' converts into the context of
Ottoman elite life to reorient the discussion of these individuals
away from the present focus on their exceptionality, towards a
qualified appreciation of their place in the Ottoman imperial
enterprise and the Empire's relations with its neighbours in
Christian Europe. Drawing heavily on Central European sources, this
study highlights the deep political, religious, and cultural
entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe
beyond the Mediterranean Basin as the 'shared world' par
excellence. The existence of such trans-imperial subjects is not
only symptomatic of the Empire's ability to attract and integrate
people of a great diversity of backgrounds, it also illustrates the
extent to which the Ottomans participated in processes of religious
polarization usually considered typical of Christian Europe in this
period. Nevertheless, Christian Europeans remained ambivalent about
those they dismissed as apostates and traitors, frequently relying
on them for support in the pursuit of familial and political
interests.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been theological
disputes that caused fissures among the faithful. There were the
major ruptures of the Great Schism of 1054 and the Protestant
Reformation. Since the Reformation, though, there has been an
eruption of new denominations. The World Christian Database now
list over 9000 worldwide. And new denominations are created every
day, often when a group splits off from an established church
because of a dispute over doctrine or leadership. With such a
proliferation of denominations, could there possibly be one core
Christian message that all churches share?
That's the question that Ted Campbell sets out to answer in this
book. He begins his examination of Christian doctrine where it
started: in the gospels. He then shows how the gospel has been
received and professed by Christian communities through the
centuries, from the first "proto-Orthodox" Christian communities
right through the modern evangelical, Pentecostal, and ecumenical
movements. Campbell shows that, despite all the divisions, there is
indeed a single unifying core of the faith that all Christians
share. In the process, he offers a brief, well-written, and
acceptable history of Christian doctrine that will be ideal for
courses in the history of Christian thought.
Mission Mississippi is the largest interracial ecumenical
church-based racial reconstruction group in the United States.
Peter Slade offers a sustained examination of whether the Mission's
model of racial reconciliation (which stresses one-on-one,
individual friendships among religious people of different races)
can effectively address the issue of social justice. Slade argues
that Mission Mississippi's goal of "changing Mississippi one
relationship at a time" is both a pragmatic strategy and a
theological statement of hope for social and economic change in
Mississippi. Carefully tracing the organization's strategies of
biracial church partnerships and sponsorships of large civic
events, and intercessory prayer breakfast groups, he concludes that
they do indeed offer hope for not only for racial reconciliation
but for enabling the mobilization of white economic and social
power to benefit broad-based community development. At the same
time, he honestly conveys the considerable obstacles to the success
of these strategies. Slade's work comes out of the vibrant Lived
Theology movement, which looks at the ways theologies go beyond
philosophical writings to an embodiment in the grassroots lives of
religious people. Drawing on extensive interviews and observations
of Mission Mississippi activities, church sources, and theological
texts, this book is important not only for scholars not only of
theology and race relations but Southern studies and religious
studies as well.
This is the first of Newman's Anglican works to be presented in a
fully annotated edition. Newman published the first two editions in
1836 and 1837 at the height of his career within the Oxford
Movement. The third edition was published in 1877, when Newman had
been a Roman Catholic for thiry-two years. It represents a dialogue
between the Evangelical Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, and Roman
Catholic Newman. As such it is a critical work in understanding
Newman's development, as well as the impact of his thought on the
larger Christian Church in his century and even in this one as it
comes to a close. The text of this edition is based on the edition
of 1889 (with obvious errors and misprints silently corrected), the
edition to be seen through the press by Newman before his death in
1890; its pagination is preserved in the margin alongside the
present text to facilitate reference to the uniform edition of the
collected works. The text is supplemented by an introduction and
textual appendix which lists all the variant readings between the
editions of 1836, 1837, 1877 and the final edition.
Provincial Hinduism explores intersecting religious worlds in an
ordinary Indian city that remains close to its traditional roots,
while bearing witness to the impact of globalization. Daniel Gold
looks at modern religious life in Gwalior, in the state of Mahdya
Pradesh, drawing attention to the often complex religious
sensibilities behind ordinary Hindu practice. Turning his attention
to public places of worship, Gold describes temples of different
types in the city, their legendary histories, and the people who
patronize them. Issues of community and identity are discussed
throughout the book, but particularly in the context of caste and
class. Gold also explores concepts of community among Gwalior's
Maharashtrians and Sindhis, groups with roots in other parts of the
subcontinent that have settled in the city for generations.
Functioning as internal diasporas, they organize in different ways
and make distinctive contributions to local religious life. The
book concludes by exploring characteristically modern religious
institutions. Gold considers three religious service organizations
inspired by the nineteenth-century reformer Swami Vivekenanda, as
well as two groups that stem from the nineteenth-century Radhasoami
tradition but have developed in different ways: the very large and
populist North Indian movement around the late Baba Jaigurudev (d.
2012); and the devotees of Sant Kripal, a regional guru based in
Gwalior who has a much smaller, middle-class following. As the
first book to analyze religious life in an ordinary, midsized
Indian city, Provincial Hinduism will be an invaluable resource for
scholars of contemporary Indian religion, culture, and society.
Grazia Mangano Ragazzi offers an in-depth examination of the
concept of discretion in the spiritual writings of Saint Catherine
of Siena (1347-1380), who is honored as one of the few female
''Doctors'' of the Catholic Church and who in 2000 was named a
co-patroness of Europe by Pope John Paul II. Despite her
illiteracy, which necessitated that she dictate to a scribe,
Catherine is revered for her writings, which reveal spiritual
reflection of remarkable depth. At the same time she is an
inspiring example of one who remained active in the political and
ecclesiastical life of her time without sacrificing an intense
contemplative life. This book investigates the concept of
"discretion," to which Catherine dedicates chapters IX to XI of her
Dialogue and letter 213. Discretion, Ragazzi argues, is a helpful
tool for interpreting the whole edifice of Catherine's
spirituality. The term evades precise definition but can be
summarized as a form of self-knowledge that leads to an authentic
knowledge of God. Ragazzi first examines the role played by scribes
in the composition of Catherine's writings, and whether it is
possible to consider such writings as authentic representations of
her thought, then provides a detailed analysis of Catherine's works
to determine the meaning and importance of discretion in her
spirituality, and how it relates to the concept of prudence.
Ragazzi finds that the clearest influence on Catherine's thought
was that of Dominican spirituality: her spiritual director, Raymond
of Capua, was a Dominican, as was the majority of those belonging
to her circle. But Franciscan mysticism, which was prevalent in
religious life during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, also
seems to have exerted considerable influence. Ragazzi's meticulous
study shows how Catherine's way of being a theologian exemplifies
the principle that any person authentically striving to live a
Christian life, if gifted with great faith and intellectual
ability, can engage in theology in a creative manner without the
abstract and specialized speculation reserved for academic
theologians.
Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold
among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the
complications and questions arising from the translation of myth.
How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new
civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is
gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case
studies which address the artistic and political implications of
the changing condition of myth - this most primal and malleable of
forms. 'Translation' is treated broadly to encompass not only
literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures
and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis,
Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth's
endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth
studies as a discipline in its own right.
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Catholic New Hampshire
(Paperback)
Barbara D Miles; Introduction by Monsignor Anthony R Frontiero
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Delve into the complex history of Herod the Great—his rise to power and
ultimate fall in pursuit to be the "King of the Jews." Under a
flourishing yet tumultuous background of Jerusalem, consider Mary of
Nazareth's place under Herod's rule and the promise of a Messiah to
free her people. Kathie Lee Gifford with Bryan M. Litfin, Ph.D. deftly
weave a truthful historical narrative full of accurate details and
sweeping prose that ushers in the true King and glorifies God's
powerful plan to bring a savior into the world through unlikely means.
A coda between the authors, full of honest revelation and insightful
meaning, follows each chapter for added in-depth reading.
The first installment in the Ancient Evil, Living Hope series, Herod
and Mary begins with the tragic life of King Herod—Christianity's first
true persecutor. As an impressionable boy, he is forever marked by the
raw power of Rome. Throughout the course of Herod's career, he gains
power, fame, and riches beyond belief. Yet murderous intrigues stalk
this man—and infect his own dark soul.
Under the rule of King Herod, Jerusalem becomes a prominent city of
wealth and prosperity, but Mary saw the struggle of her people under a
tyrant. Like all Jewish women, she knew the promises of Torah and
longed for a deliverer. But no one could have prepared her for what the
angel of God revealed: that the Messiah wouldn't arrive with the
blaring of trumpets, the clash of arms, or the fanfare of a mighty
host. He would arrive as an infant within her own womb. The light of
the world was born in a cave: not a king who maims and destroys, but
the gentle King of the Jews.
This riveting narrative nonfiction work reveals deep insight to how
Herod came to power, how corruption and an ancient evil threatened the
stability of a nation, and how a teenage Mary was called to traverse
these obstacles to bring the Savior, Jesus, our living hope, into the
world.
Winner of the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise
Matthew Thiessen offers a nuanced and wide-ranging study of the
nature of Jewish thought on Jewishness, circumcision, and
conversion. Examining texts from the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple
Judaism, and early Christianity, he gives a compelling account of
the various forms of Judaism from which the early Christian
movement arose.
Beginning with analysis of the Hebrew Bible, Thiessen argues that
there is no evidence that circumcision was considered to be a rite
of conversion to Israelite religion. In fact, circumcision,
particularly the infant circumcision practiced within Israelite and
early Jewish society, excluded from the covenant those not properly
descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period, many Jews
began to subscribe to a definition of Jewishness that enabled
Gentiles to become Jews. Other Jews, such as the author of
Jubilees, found this definition problematic, reasserting a strictly
genealogical conception of Jewish identity. As a result, some
Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced
criticism because of their suspect genealogy.
Thiessen's examination of the way in which Jews in the Second
Temple period perceived circumcision and conversion allows a deeper
understanding of early Christianity. Contesting Conversion shows
that careful attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based
on genealogical descent has crucial implications for understanding
the variegated nature of early Christian mission to the Gentiles in
the first century C.E.
In The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Kenneth
Baxter Wolf offers a study and translation of the testimony given
by witnesses at the canonization hearings of St. Elizabeth of
Hungary, who died in 1231 in Marburg, Germany, at the age of
twenty-four. The bulk of the depositions were taken from people who
claimed to have been healed by the intercession of this new saint.
Their descriptions of their maladies and their efforts to secure
relief at Elizabeth's shrine in Marburg provide the modern reader
not only with a detailed, inside look at the genesis of a saint's
cult, but also with an unusually clear window into the lives and
hopes of ordinary people living in Germany at the time.
Beyond testimony about her miracles, the papal commissioners also
heard witnesses speak to the holiness of Elizabeth's life. Four
women who knew Elizabeth from her arrival at the Wartburg castle in
Thuringia as the future wife of Landgrave Ludwig IV to her death as
a caregiver in the hospital that she founded in Marburg provide
vivid vignettes about her life. Together with the testimony of
Elizabeth's confessor and guardian, Conrad of Marburg, they capture
in words the Hungarian princess's tireless, creative efforts to
"cure" her life of privilege with its opposite: a life of voluntary
deprivation and direct service to the poor and sick.
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