The essential objective of this study is to unpack the complicity between historians and secularization theory in the study of late ancient and early medieval Christianity—and then suggest a way out. In this work of historiography of religion, Enrico Beltramini argues that religious history is inherently secular and produces distorted representations of the Christian past. He suggests moving from an epistemological to a hermeneutical approach so that the supernatural worldview of the Christian past can be addressed on its own terms. This work also engages Markus’s saeculum and replaces Markus’s secularized relationship between the Kingdom and the government of the civitas with the Augustinian association of the Kingdom and divine government.

Henri Le Saux, OSB (1910-1973), known in India as Swami Abhishiktananda, is a well known pioneer of the interreligious dialogue in the contemporary Catholic Roman Church. This work is an introductory investigation of the ecclesiastic and ecclesiastical foundations of this dialogue. It suggests that Abhishiktananda's ecclesiology is well-founded not only in the monastic tradition, but also in the theological work of the Second Vatican Council."

Since its publication in 1964, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism has been singled out for praise as the quintessential example of Raimon Panikkar's engagement with theology of religions. Controversies over the real meaning of the title and the author's remark that Christ is unknown to Hindus and a fortiori to Christians have been waged among generations of scholars. Refusing to isolate Panikkar's concerns with the Hindu-Christian dialogue from much larger theological and biblical debates occurring in the period before and during the Vatican Council II, this book suggests that the unknown Christ of Christianity is the plastic representation of an insufficient degree of universality of the Church. Rejecting traditional interpretations that identify a gulf between the first and the second edition of The Unknown, this book argues for a continuity in Raimon Panikkar's thought.

In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, historians have turned with renewed urgency to understanding the economic dimension of historical change. In this collection, nine scholars present original research into the historical development of money and credit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the social and cultural significance of financial phenomena from a global perspective. Together with an introduction by the editors, chapters emphasize themes of creditworthiness and access to credit, the role of the state in the loan market, modernization, colonialism, and global connections between markets. The first section of the volume, "Creditworthiness and Credit Risks," examines microfinancial markets in South India and Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the United States, in which access to credit depended largely on reputation, while larger investors showed a strong interest in policing economic behavior and encouraging thrift among market participants. The second section, "The Loan Market and the State," concerns attempts by national governments to regulate the lending activities of merchants and banks for social ends, from the liberal regime of nineteenth-century Switzerland to the far more statist policies of post-revolutionary Mexico, and U.S. legislation that strove to eliminate discrimination in lending. The third section, "Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections," focuses on colonial and semicolonial societies in the Philippines, China, and Zimbabwe, where currency reform and the development of organized financial markets engendered conflict over competing models of economic development, often pitting the colony against the metropole. This volume offers a cultural history by considering money and credit as social relations, and explores how such relations were constructed and articulated by contemporaries. Chapters employ a variety of methodologies, including analyses of popular literature and the viewpoints of experts and professionals, investigations of policy measures and emerging social practices, and interpretations of quantitative data.