Pieties and gender /
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Taking up the challenge of Saba Mahmood to feminist studies in religion, that there is a liberalist understanding of agency and a tendency to mix the feminist political project with the analytical, the authors of this anthology discuss the relations between pieties and politics, pieties and methodologies, virtuous masculinities, and symbolic gender representations. Several articles discuss highly controversial questions: Muslim piety, religion in the European Union between the Vatican and the Muslim populations, the religiously motivated abstinence policies of the US. Furthermore, there is an interesting section about religious masculinities in a historical and contemporary perspective.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047440611 :
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Migration and Christian identity in Congo (DRC) /
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Christianity and migration have greatly influenced society and culture of sub-Saharan Africa, yet their mutual impact is rarely studied. Through oral history research in north eastern Congo (DRC), this book studies the migration of Anglicans and the subsequent reconfiguring of their Christian identity. It engages with issues of religious contextualisation, revivalism and the rise of Pentecostalism. It examines shifting ethnic, national, gender and generational expressions, the influence of tradition, contemporanity, local needs and international networks to reveal mobile group identities developing through migration. Borrowing the metaphor of 'home' from those interviewed, the book suggests in what ways religious affiliation aids a process of belonging. The result is an original exploration of important themes in an often neglected region of Africa.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-230) and index. :
9789047443049 :
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Brot, Licht und Weinstock : intertextuelle Analysen johanneischer Ich-bin-Worte /
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This study considers the "I am" sayings in the Gospel of John, interpreted in the context of their reception in late antiquity. It takes an intertextual approach, considering both inner-biblical parallels and extra-biblical texts, which have been much neglected in recent Johannine scholarship. A comparative analysis of the "I am" formula is complemented by the consideration of the metaphors of the predicative "I am" words, focussing particularly on the use of "bread", "light" and "vine" and the context of these metaphors in the Gospel of John and elsewhere. This discussion demonstrates that Johannine Christology is profoundly incarnational. *** Gegenstand der vorliegenden Untersuchung sind die Ich-bin-Worte des Johannesevangeliums. Diese werden in ihrem spätantiken Lese- und Rezeptionskontext interpretiert, wobei die Intertextualitätstheorie als methodische Basis dient und auch außerbiblische Schriften zum Vergleich herangezogen werden, die in der Forschung der vergangenen Jahrzehnte kaum berücksichtigt worden sind. Ergänzend zur vergleichenden Untersuchung der Formel "Ich bin..." werden die prädikativen Ich-bin-Worte als Metaphoren näher bestimmt und exemplarisch drei ausgewählte Prädikationen, nämlich "Brot", "Licht" und "Weinstock" in ihrem jeweiligen Kontext analysiert. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die johanneische Christologie primär als Inkarnationchristologie zu verstehen ist.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [341]-381) and index. :
9789047433248 :
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The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the literacy of Jesus /
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Although consistently overlooked or dismissed, John 8.6, 8 in the Pericope Adulterae is the only place in canonical or non-canonical Jesus tradition that portrays Jesus as writing. After establishing that John 8.6, 8 is indeed a claim that Jesus could write, this book offers a new interpretation and transmission history of the Pericope Adulterae . Not only did the pericope's interpolator place the story in John's Gospel in order to highlight the claim that Jesus could write, but he did so at John 7.53-8.11 as a result of carefully reading the Johannine narrative. The final chapter of the book proposes a plausible socio-historical context for the insertion of the story.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-290) and index. :
9789047440192 :
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Encountering cruelty the fracture of the human heart /
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Interest in recent years in reconciliation and conflict transformation has witnessed a great deal of attention to building a future through forgiveness and preventative measures in order to impede egregious wrongdoing. This effort for a reconciled future is absent reflection on the nature of cruelty. Cruelty has always been apparent in massive acts of wrongdoing and yet is repeatedly concealed in our assessment of the acts themselves. This book is a theologically honest and deep-structure exploration of cruelty in its personal, communal and institutional encounters in human life. Drawing on Nietzsche's challenge of cruelty to the western tradition, the work offers a comprehensive study of how cruelty undermines care, trust, respect and justice - all those elements of human reciprocity that mark our lives as interdependent beings. The work concludes with a tightly written Epilogue on interpreting the theological meaning and accessibility of reconciliation today.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004205598 :
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Sight and blindness in Luke-Acts : the use of physical features in characterization /
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The ancient world often thought in terms of physiognomics-the idea that character can be discerned by studying outward, physical features. That physical descriptions carry moral freight in characterization has been largely missed in modern biblical scholarship, and this study brings that to the forefront. Specifically, this is a study of one particular physical marker-blindness. When we look at Greco-Roman literature, a kind of literary topos begins to emerge, a set of assumptions that ancient audiences would typically make when encountering blind characters. Luke-Acts makes use of such a topos in a way that becomes programmatic, serving as a kind of interpretive key to Luke-Acts that is generally unnoticed in modern scholarship.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047432968 :
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Christianity and resistance in the 20th century : from Kaj Munk and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Desmond Tutu /
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How is the Christian supposed to act when his or her government misbehaves? Should one suffer and obey the authority, or should one render resistance; and if so, should it be passive or active; and if active, should it be violent or not? This book will not provide the answer to this question, but it will describe and analyse important persons of the 20th century who were placed in a situation where they did not merely 'turn the other cheek', but felt that they had to resist a regime; a decision which had consequences for them all. Thus the book provides insight to a central and current question of Christian and indeed religious thinking.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047424574 :
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Toward a sociological theory of religion and health
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Driven by funding agencies, empirical research in the social scientific study of health and medicine has grown in quantity and developed in quality. When it became evident, in what is now a tradition of inquiry, that people's religious activities had significant health consequences, a portion of that body of work began to focus more frequently on the relationship between health and religion. The field has reached a point where book-length summaries of empirical findings, especially those pertinent to older people, can identify independent, mediating, and dependent variables of interest. Every mediating variable, even if considered as a "control" variable, represents an explanation, a small theory of some kind. However, taken in granular form, as it were, the multiple theories do not comprise mid-level theory, let alone a general theoretical framework. This volume seeks to move toward more general theoretical development.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004210844 :
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The other lands of Israel : imaginations of the land in 2 Baruch /
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According to the current scholarly consensus, the apocalypse of 2 Baruch, written after the Fall of Jerusalem, either rejected the concept of the Land of Israel as a place of salvation or regarded it as of minor importance. Inspired by the perspective of Critical Spatial Theory, this book discusses the presuppositions behind this consensus with regard to the spatial epistemology it assumes, and explores the conception of the Land as a broad redemptive category. The result is a fresh portrait of the vitality of the Land-theme in the first centuries of the common era and a new perspective on the spatial imagination of 2 Baruch.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [319]-340) and index. :
9789047442981 :
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Religion and diversity in Canada /
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Canada officially prides itself on being a multicultural nation, welcoming people from all around the world, and enshrining that status in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as in an array of laws and policies that aim to protect citizens from discrimination on various grounds, including race, cultural origin, sexual orientation, and religion. This volume explores the intersection of these diversities, foregrounding religion as the primary focus of analysis. Taking as their point of departure the contested meaning and implications of the term diversity, the various contributions address issues such as the power relations that diversity implies, the cultural context that limits the understanding and practical acceptance of religious diversity, and how Canada compares in these matters to other countries. Taken together the essays therefore elucidate the Canadian case while also having relevance for understanding this critical issue globally.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789047443544 :
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God and the world of signs Trinity, evolution, and the metaphysical semiotics of C.S. Peirce /
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Christianity has been described as "a religion seeking a metaphysic". Drawing on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce, Robinson develops a metaphysical framework centred around a 'semiotic model' of the Trinity. The model invites a fresh approach to the claim that Jesus was the incarnate Word of God and suggests a new way of understanding how nature may bear the imprint of the Triune Creator in the form of 'vestiges of the Trinity in creation'. Scientific spin-offs include a new perspective on the problem of the origin of life and a novel hypothesis about the evolution of human distinctiveness. The result is an original contribution to Trinitarian theology and a bold new way of integrating philosophy, science and religion.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [355]-367) and indexes. :
9789004195899 :
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Mapping gender in ancient religious discourses /
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This collection of essays focuses on issues related to gender at the intersection of religious discourses in antiquity. To that end, an array of traditions is analyzed with the aim of more fully situating the construction and representation of gender in early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman argumentation. Taken as a whole, these essays contribute to the goal of displaying the wide range of options that are available for examining the interconnection of gender, rhetoric, power, and ideology, especially as they relate to identity formation in the ancient world during the early centuries of the common era. The focus on ancient conceptions of gender makes this collection particularly useful not only for biblical scholars, but also for classicists and researchers working in the field of gender studies, as well as for those interested in exploring similar issues in other religious traditions or in Western religious traditions of different time periods.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [511]-545) and indexes. :
9789047411260 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The ethics of obscene speech in early Christianity and its environment /
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This book aims to contextualize early Christian rhetoric about foul language by asking such questions as: Where was foul language encountered? What were the conventional arguments for avoiding (or for using) obscene words? How would the avoidance of such speech have been interpreted by others? A careful examination of the ancient uses of and discourse about foul language illuminates the moral logic implicit in various Jewish and Christian texts (e.g. Sirach, Colossians, Ephesians, the Didache, and the writings of Clement of Alexandria). Although the Christians of the first two centuries were consistently opposed to foul language, they had a variety of reasons for their moral stance, and they held different views about what role speech should play in forming their identity as a \'holy people.\'
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-260) and index. :
9789047433675 :
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Grace, reconciliation, concor d the death of Christ in Graeco-Roman metaphors /
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How did the first Christians interpret the death of Christ? The answer lies within the earliest Christian documents, primarily within the Pauline letters. Before the users of a modern language could hope to come near an adequate description of what was expressed in these Greek texts of the first Christians, they have to deconstruct layers of later dogmatic interpretation. They need to keep to descriptive terminology reflecting the Greek of the sources and to trace the origin of the metaphoric language early Christians like Paul used. This volume sets out to construct some of the Jewish and Greco-Roman patterns of thought which were initially utilised to express the meaning of the death of Christ.
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Collection of previously published essays, with revisions. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004188044 :
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Beyond death : the mystical teachings of ʻAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī /
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The twelfth-century Iranian mystic 'Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī (d. 1131) wrote vividly of his explorations of death as a state of consciousness which he experienced while alive. This state and his visions of Doomsday and the innumerable non-corporeal worlds that lie past the world of matter confront him with paradoxical realities that upset the notional understanding of faith. The present book concerns itself with a discussion on the subject of death as it is viewed by one of the defining mystic scholars of medieval Iran. Based on medieval manuscripts and primary sources in classical Persian and Arabic, this book explores the significance of this important Iranian mystic and his insights on the nature of reality in light of death.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789047427599 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Holy nations and global identities : civil religion, nationalism, and globalisation /
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Along with the processes of globalisation and the end of the cold war we have seen an upsurge in religious nationalism and an increasing focus on the role of religion as a legitimising force in democratic secular states. Holy Nations andamp; Global Identities draws on the combined theoretical and historical insight of historians, political scientists and social scientists on the question of nationalism and globalisation with the methodological knowledge of religion presented by sociologists of religion. The book brings genuine theoretical explorations and original case studies on civil religion, nationalism and globalization. It also provides an introduction to the research history of the fields and aims to develop and elaborate on the theories and methodology of the investigated subjects.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047440635 :
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Chance and determinism in Avicenna and Averroes /
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This book examines the question whether medieval Muslim philosophers Avicenna (Arabic Ibn Sīnā 980-1037) and Averroes (Arabic Ibn Rushd 1126-1198) are determinists. With a focus on physics and metaphysics it studies their views on chance events in nature, as well as matter, in particular prime matter, and divine providence. In addition it sets their positions against the historical/philosophical background that influenced their response, the Greco-Arabic philosophical tradition - Aristotelian and Neoplatonic - on the one hand, and the tradition of Islamic theology ( kalām ) on the other. In comparing their philosophical systems, it lays emphasis on the way in which Avicenna and Averroes use these traditions to offer an original answer to the problem of determinism.
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Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Oxford, 2004. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-239) and indexes. :
9789047419150 :
0169-8729 ; :
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Sacred words orality, literacy, and religion /
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A prevalent view in the current scholarship on ancient religions holds that state religion was primarily performed and transmitted in oral forms, whereas writing came to be associated with secret, private and marginal cults, especially in the Greek world. In Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish, starting with the Sibylline books and the Annales Maximi of the Roman priests and culminating in the canonical gospels of the Christians. It is the aim of this volume to modify this view or, at least, to challenge it. Surveying the variety of ways in which different types of texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient Greek and Roman religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were in use for both Greek and Roman state and private religions.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004214217 :
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Religion and ethnocentrism : an empirical-theological study /
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Previous studies reveal that religion, despite its ideal of solidarity, hospitality and compassion, has been the primary origin of ethnocentrism. However, other researches dispute this sweeping claim by indicating several other factors that affect this complex relationship. This empirical-theological study is an endeavour to dig deeper into these factors by examining the extent to which a number of religious images which are culled from five religious themes, namely, God, Jesus, Spirit, salvation and church, contribute to ethnocentrism. It situates these religious attitudes within the framework of the Dutch civil religion, and the different reactions to it by contemporary Dutch catholic believers.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004193703 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.