Conceptualizing Religion, Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories.
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How might we transform a folk category - in this case, religion - into an analytical category suitable for cross-cultural research? In addressing that question, this book critically explores various approaches to the problem of conceptualizing religion for scholarly purposes, particularly with respect to certain disciplinary interests of anthropologists. The author argues that the most plausible analytical strategy can be based on the idea of family resemblances, especially as that idea has been used and developed in contemporary prototype theory. In the solution proposed, religion is conceptualized as an affair of 'more or less' rather than a matter of 'yes or no,' and no sharp line is drawn between religion and non-religion.
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1 online resource. :
9789004378797
Birthing salvation : gender and class in early Christian childbearing discourse /
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In Birthing Salvation Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores the theme of childbearing in early Christian discourse. The book maps the importance of women's childbearing in Greco-Roman culture and shows how childbearing discourse interfaces with salvation discourse in three early Christian texts: the Pastoral Epistles, the Acts of Andrew and the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Issues of gender and class are explored through an intersectional analysis. In particular, the institution of slavery, and its implications for ideas about salvation in these texts are drawn out. Birthing Salvation offers fresh interpretations of these texts, including the peculiar statement in 1 Tim 2:15 that women "will be saved through childbearing."
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1 online resource (xiv, 287 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-274) and index. :
9789004257788 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Religion and Time.
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The essays in this volume, all freshly written for this purpose, focus on the concept of time in the major religious traditions. Two essays prepare the methodological grounds - by elaborating the phenomenological and existential conceptions of time and their religious significance. The theme of time, so central to the religious point of view, offers a focal point for fruitful interreligious dialogue. The essays also demonstrate that the complexities of the understanding of time in any religious tradition no longer permit the use of familiar but outdated clichés.
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1 online resource. :
9789004378773
The Topography of Remembrance, The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia.
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The Topography of Remembrance deals with different forms of remembrance and collective memory in Mesopotamia, discussing both its public (national) and private (family) aspects. The Introduction offers a history of modern, European memory in comparison with the Mesopotamian mode. The research adds to the recent discussion on collective memory. The Mesopotamians found tools for the construction and passing on of common remembrance in liturgical repetition, in the preservation of buildings and monuments, and in communication channels. To describe these processes the author deals with different texts written between 2300-300 BC, which transport memory from a historical, administrational or religious perspective. According to this study, the need to remember was prompted by the search for identity, a dynamic process in which forgetting played an essential part. The description of this process is also relevant to modern society. It offers an important contribution to the discussion of acculturation and identity.
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1 online resource. :
9789004378902
Jerome of Stridon and the ethics of literary production in late antiquity /
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"This book becomes legible when light plays across a material substance, be it screen or page. Without the light and without the material, there is no book. To read the book, however, you must perceive meaning in the words before you and in the way that they sit relative to other words, words that are on this page or words that you know and have learned from elsewhere. Without this apprehension - which literary theorists call 'textuality' - there is no book. This book before you is about the interplay between the material and the textual.2 Without the two, it would not exist".
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Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Ph.D.)--Cardiff University, 2011, under the title: How those things which are invisible are known from the visible (Hier. Comm. ad Ephes. 1.1.9). :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004417458
Racial integration in the church of apartheid
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In Racial Integration in the Church of Apartheid Marthe Hesselmans uncovers the post-apartheid transformation of South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church. This church once constituted the religious pillar of the Afrikaner apartheid regime (1948-1994). Today, it seeks to unite the communities it long segregated into one multiracial institution. Few believe this will succeed. A close look inside congregations reveals unexpected stories of reconciliation though. Where South Africans realize they need each other to survive, faith offers common ground - albeit a feeble one. They show the potential, but also the limits of faith communities untangling entrenched national and racial affiliations. Linking South Africa's post-apartheid transition to religious-nationalist movements worldwide, Hesselmans offers a unique perspective on religion as source of division and healing.
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1 online resource. :
9789004385016
Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th-18th centuries) /
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"The book was drafted by Jesuits and their students of the Flemish province to commemorate the Society of Jesus's hundred years of existence. It was as much a homage to the Society's founders as a celebration of the spiritual and material achievements of its members over the century, with a particular emphasis on the order's missionary vocation. From the moment of its publication, the Imago was attacked by the Jesuits' enemies: both Protestants and Jansenists denounced the Society's arrogance as well as its casuistical methods. Here is not the place to relate the history of the work or its reception, but it seemed essential to us to highlight the significance of the emblems illustrating the book's"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004444195
9789004444171
Freedom through Submission: Muslim-talk in Contemporary Denmark /
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"In Freedom through Submission Johannes Renders explores Danish-Muslim statements on human freedom. Within a context where public talk of Islam is largely mediated by an incessant succession of controversies, the notion of freedom is weaponized both by and against a growing Muslim community. Danish Muslims take issue with liberal associations of the notion with autonomy and choice, and seek to reconfigure the public debate that pits freedom against Islam. This book brings out a sophisticated and reflective Muslim discourse, in which freedom is something individuals must simultaneously exercise, surrender, and achieve in a cultivated relinquishing of the will to Allah"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004448957
9789004448940
The 1720 Imperial Circumcision Celebrations in Istanbul : Festivity and Representation in the Early Eighteenth Century /
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The 1720 Imperial Circumcision Celebrations in Istanbul offers the first holistic examination of an Ottoman public festival through an in-depth inquiry into different components of the 1720 event. Through a critical and combined analysis of the hitherto unknown archival sources along with the textual and pictorial narratives on the topic, the book vividly illustrates the festival's organizational details and preparations, its complex rites (related to consumption, exchange, competition), and its representation in court-commissioned illustrated festival books (sūrnāmes). To analyze all these phases in a holistic manner, the book employs an interdisciplinary approach by using the methodological tools of history, art history, and performance studies and thus, provides a new methodological and conceptual framework for the study of Ottoman celebrations.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004437562
9789004437555
The Representation of speech events in Chariton's Callirhoe and the Acts of the Apostles /
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In The Representation of Speech Events in Chariton's Callirhoe and the Acts of the Apostles , Adrian T. Smith summarizes cross-linguistic research on how and why narrators vary the formulae that introduce direct speech. This research is applied to Chariton and to Acts. The findings demonstrate that narrators vary quotation formulae for numerous pragmatic purposes, including the tracking of conversational dynamics via a set of 'marked' and 'unmarked' quotation devices.
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1 online resource (pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004274891 :
0077-8842 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Theology as improvisation : a study in the musical nature of theological thinking /
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In Theology as Improvisation , Nathan Crawford reimagines the possibilities for how theology thinks God within a postmodern world. He argues that theology is improvisation by analyzing the nature of attunement within theological thinking and how this opens certain possibilities for theology. He does so by engaging a number of thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, David Tracy, and Saint Augustine. He navigates the nature of thinking God in a postmodern world by using these thinkers to offer critiques of onto-theological thinking and totalizing systems while also following their embrace of the fragment and focus upon the nature of thinking as attunement. The result is a unique way of approaching theological thinking in our contemporary context.
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1 online resource (ix, 235 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004245983 :
1876-1518 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Grace and the Will According to Augustine.
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The doctrine on grace, one of the most discussed themes in his later years, was regarded by Augustine as the very core of Christianity. This book traces the gradual crystallisation of this teaching, including its unacceptable consequences (such as double predestination, inherited guilt which deserves eternal punishment, and its transmission through libidinous procreation). How did the reader of Cicero and "the books of the Platonists" reach the ideas that appear in his polemic against Julian (and which remind one of Freud rather than the Stoics or Plotinus)? That is the point of departure of this book. It surely cannot be expected that there is a definite answer to the question; rather, the aim is to follow and understand the development.
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Part Three: Introduction. :
1 online resource (442 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-378) and indexes. :
9789004229211 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Missionary positions : a postcolonial feminist perspective on sex work and faith-based outreach in Australia /
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Missionary Positions examines the context for Christian outreach to people in the sex industry. Over the last 20 years, faith-based organisations have become more engaged in ministering with sex workers. But what are the methods and desired outcomes that undergird pastoral practice in this field? Most Christians see prostitution as evil, and those who sell sex are considered broken victims in need of restoration. Yet the voices and experiences of sex workers themselves often challenge these assumptions. Using feminist and postcolonial perspectives, interviews with Christian practitioners in Australia and personal narrative, Lauren McGrow carves out a space for the dynamic theological agency and life complexity of sex workers to be more fully acknowledged in faith-based outreach projects.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004353183 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Ideas on language in early Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Isidore of Seville /
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In Ideas on Language in Early Latin Christianity , Tim Denecker investigates, in a comprehensive and systematic way, the views held on the history, diversity and properties of language(s) by Christian Latin authors from Tertullian (b. c.160) to Isidore of Seville (d. 636). This historical period witnessed various sociocultural changes, affecting linguistic situations and the ways in which these were perceived. Christian intellectuals were confronted with languages other than Latin in the context of the propagation of faith, and in reflecting on language were bound to comply with the relevant biblical accounts. Whereas previous research has mostly focused on the (indeed vital) contribution of Augustine, the present study reveals the diversified and dynamic nature of linguistic reflection in early Latin Christianity.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004276659 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Judith Plaskow : feminism, theology, and justice /
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Judith Plaskow, Professor of Religious Studies Emerita at Manhattan College in New York, is a leading Jewish feminist theologian. She has forged a revolutionary vision of Judaism as an egalitarian religion and has argued for the inclusion of sexually marginalized groups in society in general and in Jewish society in particular. Rooted in the experience of women, her feminist Jewish theology reflects the impact of several philosophical strands, including hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, critical theory, and process philosophy. Most active in the American Academy of Religion, she has shaped the academic discourse on women in religion while critiquing Christian feminism for lingering forms of anti-Judaism.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004279803 :
2213-6010 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and interreligious hermeneutics
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Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other , edited by Emma O'Donnell Polyakov, examines the hermeneutics of interreligious encounter in contexts of conflict. It investigates the implicit judgments of Judaism and Islam that often arise in response to these conflicts, and explores the implications of these interpretations for relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Addressing antisemitism and Islamophobia through the tools of interreligious hermeneutics, this volume brings together three distinct discourses: the study of ancient and new tropes of antisemitism as they appear in today's world; research into contemporary expressions of fear or suspicion of Islam; and philosophical reflections on the hermeneutics of interreligious encounters.
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1 online resource. :
9789004381674
The capacity to be displaced : resilience, mission, and inner strength /
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The experience of displacement is shared by people who work internationally. The capacity to be displaced is a necessary strength and skill for people working across cultures, particularly for missionaries. In order to deal with the stressful nature of displacement people need to be resilient, resilience makes people flourish in adverse circumstances. This volume presents a specific type of resilience, namely "resilience nourished by inner sources." Cultivating inner resilience draws on all the facets of a person's interior life: thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, beliefs and convictions, concerns and emotions. The notion of inner strength and resilience from within is developed using many examples from missionaries and development workers as well as case studies from all over the world.
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1 online resource (viii, 253 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004342453 :
2452-2953 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Liquid ecclesiology : the gospel and the church /
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In Liquid Ecclesiology Pete Ward explores the theological contours of the turn to ethnography in the study of the Christian Church. His approach rests on a theology of culture that holds in tension and paradox the expression of the Church and divine presence. This theological framework is then developed through an extended qualitative empirical case study examining the communicative practices of the contemporary evangelical Church. The case study examines how the evangelical Gospel through expression has become marginalised in the everyday life of communities being replaced by a new more individual and personalised theology seen in worship songs. The final section of the book returns to the debates around ethnographic forms of theology and the question of normativity. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in empirical and theological work, as well as those researching the contemporary Church and evangelicalism
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004347359 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The worldly and heavenly wisdom of 4QInstruction /
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This volume is devoted to 4QInstruction, the last lengthy text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be officially published. It is also the largest wisdom text of this corpus. The central concern of this study is how this composition should be understood in relation to the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions. Features of 4QInstruction that are examined include its appeal to revelation, its presentation of poverty, and its eschatology. The document's relationship to both 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea sect is also discussed. This study will prove useful to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the reception of the Jewish wisdom tradition in the Second Temple period, and apocalypticism.
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Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.). :
1 online resource (x, 276 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-249) and indexes. :
9789004350489 :
0169-9962 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.