Portraits of spiritual authority : religious power in early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient /
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This volume deals with several figures of spiritual authority in Christianity during late antiquity and the early middle ages, and seeks to illuminate the way in which the struggle for religious influence evolved with changes in church and society. A number of literary portraits are examined, portraits which, in various literary genres, are themselves designed to establish and propagate the authority of the people whose lives and activities they describe. The sequence begins with visionary and prophetic figures of the second and third centuries, proceeds through several testimonies from the fourth century to the power of holy persons, moves on to Syriac portraits of the fifth to seventh centuries, and ends with the demise of the authority of the holy man in the eighth.
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1 online resource (xiii, 227 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004295919 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religious stories we live by : narrative approaches in theology and religious studies /
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Stories have always been important in religion, but systematic explorations of the narrative dimensions of religion are more recent and interdisciplinary explorations of narrative approaches in theology and religious studies are scarce. Religious Stories We Live By paves the ground for these much needed interdisciplinary conversations. It first offers philosophical, psychological, and epistemological reflections on the importance of narrative approaches in the study of religion. The subsequent sections contain case studies and disciplinary overviews of narrative perspectives in biblical, empirical, systematic, and historical approaches in theology and religious studies. Combined, the contributions showcase the potential of narrative perspectives in bridging theology and religious studies, as well as descriptive and normative approaches. Narrative perspectives offer a fruitful common ground for the study of religion. Contributors include Angela Berlis, Marjo Buitelaar, James Day, Maaike de Haardt, Marieke den Braber, Luco van den Brom, Marjet Derks, Toke Elshof, Dorothea Erbele Küster, John Exalto, Ruard Ganzevoort, Joep van Gennip, Annelies van Heijst, Chris Hermans, Liesbeth Hoeven, Anne-Marie Korte, Edwin Koster, Marit Monteiro, Michael Scherer-Rath, Klaas Spronk, Piet Verschuren, Wim Weren, and Willien van Wieringen.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004264069 :
1566-208X ;
Coping with violence in the New Testament /
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Violence is present in the very heart of religion and its sacred traditions - also of Christianity and the Bible. The problem, however, is not only that violence is ingrained in the mere existence of religions with their sacred traditions. It is equally problematic to realise that the icy grip of violence on the sacred has gone unnoticed and unchallenged for a very long time. The present publication aims to contribute to the recent scholarly debate about the interconnections between violence and monotheistic religions by analysing the role of violence in the New Testament as well as by offering some hermeneutical perspectives on violence as it is articulated in the earliest Christian writings. Contributors include: Andries G. van Aarde, Paul Decock, Pieter G.R. de Villiers, Ernest van Eck, Jan Willem van Henten, Rob van Houwelingen, Kobus Kok, Tobias Nicklas, Jeremy Punt, Jan G. van der Watt, and Wim Weren.
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Proceedings of a conference held Jan. 21-23, 2008 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. :
1 online resource (x, 305 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004221055 :
1566-208X ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Postcolonial Europe in the crucible of cultures : reckoning with God in a world of conflicts /
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Over the past forty years Europe has grown as a global presence and today it plays an important role in a variety of ways: politically, socially, economically, and culturally. European theologians have no choice but to take cognizance of this fact and respond to the broad social challenges by clarifying their views on God and being a prophetic voice in cultural, political and social decision-making. The authors in this volume take up four main contemporary global challenges, id est globalization, violence, gender, and the environment, and the volume provides its readers with first-rate theological reflections in Europe. The articles offered here are the result of an intensive workshop held in Leuven in September 2004 and are sponsored by the European Commission and the VLIR, as part of a three-year study program on the understanding of God in Europe.
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International conference proceedings. :
1 online resource (253 pages) :
9789401204699 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Looking through a glass Bible : postdisciplinary Biblical interpretations from the Glasgow School /
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Some biblical interpreters' imaginations extend only as far as outlandish source theories or esoteric hypothetical audiences. The interpretive energies let loose in Glasgow over the past decade or so, however, have produced a cadre of interpreters who defy the disciplinary mandates of biblical criticisms in favour of reading the Bible with imaginations both careful and carefree. Infused with literary, political, art-critical, cinematic, liturgical and other interests, these essays display interpretive verve freed from the anxiety of disciplines - with closely observed insights, critical engagement with biblical texts, and vivid inspiration from the cultural world within which they are set. Here there is no \'gap\' between world and text, but the intimate congeniality of close, dear, comfortable interpretive friends. Contributors: Ben Morse, Hugh Pyper, Alastair Hunter, Hannah Strømmen, Jonathan C. P. Birch, Anna Fisk, Kuloba Wabyanga Robert, Samuel Tongue, A. K. M. Adam, Abigail Pelham, and the Religarts Collective (with Yvonne Sherwood).
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Includes index. :
1 online resource (ca. 238 pages) :
9789004259096 :
0928-0731 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religious practices and Christianization of the late antique city (4th-7th century) /
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In Religious Practices and Christianization of the Late Antique City , historians, archaeologists and historians of religion provide studies of the phenomenon of the Christianization of the Roman Empire within the context of the transformations and eventual decline of the Greco-Roman city. The eleven papers brought together here aim to describe the possible links between religious, but also political, economic and social mutations engendered by Christianity and the evolution of the antique city. Combining a multiplicity of sources and analytical approaches, this book seeks to measure the impact on the city of the progressive abandonment of traditional cults to the advantage of new Christian religious practices.
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1 online resource (vii, 243 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004299047 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity : From the Books of Maccabees to the Babylonian Talmud /
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This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of all relevant sources concerning Jewish martyrdom in Antiquity. By viewing these narratives together, tracing their development and comparing them to other traditions, the authors seek to explore how Jewish is Jewish martyrdom? To this end, they analyse the impact of the changing social and religious-cultural circumstances and the interactions with Graeco-Roman and Christian traditions. This results in the identification of important continuities and discontinuities. Consequently, while political ideals that are prominent in 2 and 4 Maccabees are remarkably absent from rabbinic sources, the latter reveal a growing awareness of Christian motifs and discourse.
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1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004538269
Transcendence and sensoriness : perceptions, revelation, and the Arts /
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Protestant theology and culture are known for a reserved, at times skeptical, attitude to the use of art and aesthetic forms of expression in a religious context. In Transcendence and Sensoriness , this attitude is analysed and discussed both theoretically and through case studies considered in a broad theological and philosophical framework of religious aesthetics. Nordic scholars of theology, philosophy, art, music, and architecture, discuss questions of transcendence, the human senses, and the arts in order to challenge established perspectives within the aesthetics of religion and theology.
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Description based upon print version of record. :
1 online resource (583 pages) : color illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004291690 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Speaking for Islam : religious authorities in Muslim societies /
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Who speaks for Islam? To whom do Muslims turn when they look for guidance? To what extent do individual scholars and preachers exert religious authority, and how can it be assessed? The upsurge of Islamism has lent new urgency to these questions, but they have deeper roots and a much longer history, and they certainly should not be considered in the light of present concerns only. The present volume - grown out of an international symposium at the Free University, Berlin in 2002 - is not so much concerned with religious authority , but with religious authorities , men and women claiming, projecting and exerting religious authority within a given context. It addresses issues such as the relationship of knowledge, conduct and charisma, the social functions of the schools of law and theology, and the efforts on the part of governments and rulers to organize religious scholars and to implement state-centred hierarchies. The volume focuses on Middle Eastern Muslim majority societies in the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the individual papers offer case studies elucidating important aspects of the wider phenomenon. Individually and collectively, they highlight the scope and variety of religious authorities in past and present Muslim societies. This book is also available in paperback .
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047408864 :
1385-3376 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
A legacy of learning : essays in honor of Jacob Neusner /
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In a career spanning over fifty years, the questions Jacob Neusner has asked and the critical methodologies he has developed have shaped the way scholars have come to approach the rabbinic literature as well as the diverse manifestations of Judaism from rabbinic times until the present. The essays collected here honor that legacy, illustrating an influence that is so pervasive that scholars today who engage in the critical study of Judaism and the history of religions more generally work in a laboratory that Professor Neusner created. Addressing topics in ancient and Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaic context of early Christianity, American Judaism, World Religions, and the academic study of the humanities, these essays demarcate the current state of Judaic and religious studies in the academy today.
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1 online resource (xiii, 430 pages) : illustrations (color) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004284289 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Sanctity of time and space in tradition and modernity /
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Time and space can take on a sacred nature in both Judaism and Christianity accompanied by a permanent critical attitude towards the sacred. Conceptions of sacredness imply a conception of community and of society at large. This study investigates the different attitudes toward sacred time and space from an interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from the Biblical period through Qumran, Patristics, Rabbinics, archaeology and theology to modern and even to post-modern rituals. This approach offers a fascinating insight into both the common heritage of Judaism and Christianity and their mutual differences.
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1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004421387
9789004112339
Religious stories in transformation : conflict, revision and reception /
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In Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception , the editors present a collection of essays that reveal both the many similarities and the poignant differences between ancient myths in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern secular culture and how these stories were incorporated and adapted over time. This rich multidisciplinary research demonstrates not only how stories in different religions and cultures are interesting in their own right, but also that the process of transformation in particular deserves scholarly interest. It is through the changes in the stories that the particular identity of each religion comes to the fore most strikingly.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004334816 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the magicians : P. Chester Beatty 16. (with new editions of Papyrus Vindobonensis Greek inv. 29456+29828 verso and British Library Cotton Tiber...
: Greek and Latin versions of the legends with English translations : xvii, 349 pages, [19] pages of plates : illustration ; 24 cm. : Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-313) and indexes. : 9004099387
The imperial cult in the Latin west : studies in the ruler cult of the western provinces of the Roman Empire /
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This volume focuses on the headquarters of provincial cults and the principal features of the worship offered there on behalf of the province. Evidence for provincial centres survives in various forms of varying degress of reliability but, while no standard pattern emerges, it seems clear that every province established a permanent base that served similar cultic, administrative, recreational and ideological purposes. Traces of provincial worship are more fleeting but a rough picture can be reconstructed of priestly regalia and of the calendar, rites and associated liturgy and ceremonial that marked the differing cults of individual provinces. Both studies conclude with an overview of the main conclusions and are profusely illustrated with over a hundred plates or diagrams.
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1 online resource (xxiii, 397 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-397). :
9789047412762 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Inscribing devotion and death : archaeological evidence for Jewish populations of North Africa /
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Reliance on essentialist or syncretistic models of cultural dynamics has limited past evaluations of ancient Jewish populations. This reexamination of evidence for Jews of North Africa offers an alternative approach. Drawing from methods developed in cultural studies and historical linguistics, this book replaces traditional categories used to examine evidence for early Jewish populations and demonstrates how direct comparison of Jewish material evidence with that of its neighbors allows for a reassessment of what the category of "Jewish" might have meant in different North African locations and periods and, by extension, elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result is a transformed analysis of Jewish cultural identity that both emphasizes its indebtedness to larger regional contexts and allows for a more informed and complex understanding of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.
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1 online resource (xviii, 342 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-334) and index. :
9789047423843 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the magicians : P. Chester Beatty XVI (with new editions of Papyrus Vindobonensis Greek inv. 29456+29828 verso and British Library Cotton Tiber...
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The focus of this volume is the editio princeps of Papyrus Chester Beatty XVI: The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres, composed in Greek, perhaps as early as the first century C.E. A full commentary accompanies the edited text. An introductory section discusses the numerous references to the two magicians, who appear in Jewish, Christian and Pagan literatures as Moses' crafty opponents at the time of Israel's exodus from Egypt. Their exploits are recounted in over half a dozen languages, from the Syriac east to the Latin west and from Egypt's deserts to King Alfred's court. The Apocryphon is placed in its Graeco-Roman context, but is also discussed as a backdrop for the Faust saga of European literature. A basic book for anyone interested in biblical and related literatures.
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1 online resource (xvii, 399 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004295827 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Chnum, der Herr der Töpferscheibe : altägyptische Embryologie nach Ausweis der Esnatexte : das Ritual "Darbringen der Töpferscheibe" /
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viii, 173 pages : illustrations ; 31 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages [153]-162) and indexes. :
9783447112796
3447112794 :
2190-3646 ;