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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Religious intolerance, persecution & conflict
John Foxe's ground-breaking chronicle of Christian saints and
martyrs put to death over centuries remains a landmark text of
religious history. The persecution of Christians was for centuries
a fact of living in Europe. Adherence to the faith was a great
personal risk, with the Roman Empire leading the first of such
persecutions against early Christian believers. Many were
crucified, put to the sword, or burned alive - gruesome forms of
death designed to terrify and discourage others from following the
same beliefs. Appearing in 1563, Foxe's chronicle of Christian
suffering proved a great success among Protestants. It gave
literate Christians the ability to discover and read about brave
believers who died for expressing their religion, much as did Jesus
Christ. Perhaps in foretelling, the final chapter of the book
focuses upon the earliest Christian missions abroad: these, to the
Americas, Asia and other locales, would indeed see many more
martyrs put to death by the local populations.
John Foxe's ground-breaking chronicle of Christian saints and
martyrs put to death over centuries remains a landmark text of
religious history. The persecution of Christians was for centuries
a fact of living in Europe. Adherence to the faith was a great
personal risk, with the Roman Empire leading the first of such
persecutions against early Christian believers. Many were
crucified, put to the sword, or burned alive - gruesome forms of
death designed to terrify and discourage others from following the
same beliefs. Appearing in 1563, Foxe's chronicle of Christian
suffering proved a great success among Protestants. It gave
literate Christians the ability to discover and read about brave
believers who died for expressing their religion, much as did Jesus
Christ. Perhaps in foretelling, the final chapter of the book
focuses upon the earliest Christian missions abroad: these, to the
Americas, Asia and other locales, would indeed see many more
martyrs put to death by the local populations.
In 1969 the once peaceful Catholic civil rights movement in
Northern Ireland degenerated into widespread violence between the
nationalist and unionist communities. The conflict, known as the
Troubles, would last for thirty years. The early years of the
Troubles helped to define the nature of the conflict for years to
come. This was the period in which unionism divided into moderate
and extreme wings; the Provisional IRA emerged amidst the
resurgence of violent republicanism; and British military and
governmental responsibility for Northern Ireland culminated in
direct rule. Based on extensive research in British, Irish and
American archives, Anglo-Irish Relations in the Early Troubles
examines the diplomatic relationship between the key players in the
formative years of the Northern Ireland conflict. It analyses how
the Irish government attempted to influence British policy
regarding Northern Ireland and how Britain sought to affect
Dublin's response to the crisis. It was from this strained
relationship of opposition and co-operation that the long-term
shape of the Troubles emerged.
In this all-embracing Christian church history, E. H. Broadbent
details the growth, traditions and teachings of churches and
denominations through the ages. Intended as an introduction to
organized Christianity, the Pilgrim Church selects examples from
the time of Christ onward of Christian denominations. From the
beginning, Broadbent is keen to emphasize how gaps in history mean
much of the church history is simply obscured. How exactly
Christians almost two thousand years ago, or in the pre-Reformation
Middle Ages, worshipped and practiced their faith is simply a
mystery for theologians and historians. The central argument of
Broadbent's book is that the Catholic church, in its effort to
suppress divergence it deemed as heresy, destroyed much of the
evidence of other churches. Much of the book is composed with this
underpinning principle; a truth that resounds through the entire
text, which is informed by the undoubted scholarship of the author.
This collection of new essays examines third-generation Holocaust
narratives and the inter-generational transmission of trauma and
memory. This collection demonstrates the ways in which memory of
the Holocaust has been passed along inter-generationally from
survivors to the second-generation-the children of survivors-to a
contemporary generation of grandchildren of survivors-those writers
who have come of literary age at a time that will mark the end of
direct survivor testimony. This collection, in drawing upon a
variety of approaches and perspectives, suggests the rich and fluid
range of expression through which stories of the Holocaust are
transmitted to and by the third generation, who have taken on the
task of bearing witness to the enormity of the Holocaust and the
ways in which this pronounced event has shaped the lives of the
descendants of those who experienced the trauma first-hand. The
essays collected-essays written by renowned scholars in Holocaust
literature, philosophy, history, and religion as well as by
third-generation writers-show that Holocaust literary
representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first
century, gaining increased momentum as a third generation of
writers has added to the growing corpus of Holocaust literature.
Here we find a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a
generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended
trauma of the Holocaust. The third-generation writers, in writing
against a contemporary landscape of post-apocalyptic apprehension
and anxiety, capture and penetrate the growing sense of loss and
the fear of the failure of memory. Their novels, short stories, and
memoirs carry the Holocaust into the twenty-first century and
suggest the future of Holocaust writing for extended generations.
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