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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Theology
What is consciousness? Is the mind a machine? What makes us
persons? What does it mean to aspire to human maturity? These are
among the fundamental questions that Rowan Williams helps us to
think about in this deeply engaging exploration of what it means to
be human. The book ends with a brief but profound meditation on the
person of Christ, inviting us to consider how, through him, 'our
humanity in all its variety, in all its vulnerability, has been
taken into the heart of the divine life'.
The Babylonia Talmud is an immense collection of laws, practices,
and customs of the Jewish people, edited in its present form in the
fifth century. Tractate Megilla (literally, 'scroll') concerns a
deep exegesis of the history and customs of the holiday of Purim,
when the Jewish people in ancient Persia were saved through the
intervention of Queen Esther at the last minute from extermination
by the wicked Haman. It is a holiday of gaiety and commemoration.
The Talmud is often extremely difficult to understand, and tractate
Megilla is no exception. The Whole Megilla is an effort to explain
the text, page by page, for interested readers. It affords the
reader an opportunity to capture the flavor of the Talmud and
follow the notoriously demanding text.
The book examines the wide panorama of Russian theological
reflection found in a variety of sources-ecclesiastical books,
sermons, literature, poetry, theater, historical treatises,
scholarly works, and free translations of theology books. It
presents not only the reflections of authors who remained in the
framework of the official Orthodox theology, but also dissenters,
primarily Old Believers and masons, who often sought to infuse
Orthodox Christianity with a more personal approach.
This book provides various perspectives of leading contemporary
scholars concerning Paul's message, particularly his expressed
expectation of the end-time redemption of Israel and its relation
to the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations, in the context of Jewish
eschatological expectation. The contributors engage the
increasingly contentious enigmas relating to Paul's Jewishness: had
his perception of living in a new era in Christ and anticipating an
imminent final consummation moved him beyond the bounds of what his
contemporaries would have considered Judaism, or did Paul continue
to think and act "within Judaism"?
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