Violence, scripture, and textual practice in early Judaism and Christianity /
: Proceedings of a conference held Oct. 6-8, 2007 at the University of Minnesota. : 1 online resource. : Includes bibliographical references and indexes. : 9789047444787 : Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The quest for a common humanity human dignity and otherness in the religious traditions of the Mediterranean /
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The worldview that all human beings belong to one big family has, in the history of religions, never been taken for granted. Moreover, human rights are a modern notion that should not be projected back onto the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, from the Hellenistic period onwards one encounters the idea of human duties towards not only parents, neighbours and fellow citizens but to all human beings. This volume explores the development of this idea from Antiquity to the present time focussing on the \'other\' as \'neighbour, enemy, and infidel\', on the interpretation of the Biblical story of Abraham´s sacrifice and on ancient and modern ethical and legal implications of the concept of human dignity.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004211124
Revealed wisdom and inaugurated eschatology in ancient Judaism and early Christianity /
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This book examines four texts: 1 Enoch, 4QInstruction, Matthew and 2 Enoch. A common idea in these texts, which blend sapiential and apocalyptic elements, is that the revealing of wisdom to an elect group inaugurates the eschatological period. The emphasis on "revealed wisdom" is essentially apocalyptic, but facilitates the uptake of motifs, forms and language from the sapiential tradition and is important in explaining the fusion of the two traditions. In addition, revealed wisdom often has creational associations and this has significance for the notion of ethics in these texts. The book will interest anyone concerned with the development of Jewish and Christian eschatology and ethics. It also challenges the simplistic redactional assumptions of certain New Testament scholars.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-283) and indexes. :
9789047419242 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The making of manhood among Swedish missionaries in China and Mongolia, c. 1890-c. 1914 /
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Over the last thirty years, issues of gender have been creatively explored within the field of mission studies. Whereas the life and work of female missionaries have been fruitfully reflected upon, male gender identity has often been understood as an unchanging category. This book offers a pioneering account of the relationship between missionary work and masculinity. By examining four individual men this study explores how self-making occurred within foreign missions, but also how conceptions of male gender informed missionary work. Changes that occurred in the lives of these men are placed within the broader context of how issues of gender were renegotiated within the contemporary missionary movement.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [173]-183) and index. :
9789047427544 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The alphabet of nature /
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F. M van Helmont's Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The "language debate," as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-208) and index. :
9789047419983 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The challenge of the silver screen : an analysis of the cinematic portraits of Jesus, Rama, Buddha and Muhammad /
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In 1897 - only two years after the invention of film - the first feature film about Jesus appeared. This and other films about Jesus became examples for and an inspiration for films on other important religious figures like Rama, Buddha and Muhammad. Although religious leaders did not always approve of these films, they did find a ready audience among believers. This book explores these films and looks at how these films dealt with the fundamental question of portraying an individual thought to have either divine status or a very special and unique status among human beings. This book will thus benefit not only students of religious film but also those studying the portrayal of central religious figures in the contemporary world.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography and videography. :
9789004194045 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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.
AIDS and religious practice in Africa /
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This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people's resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047442691 :
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
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 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.