Download or read book Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity written by Jaclyn LaRae Maxwell and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the fourth century CE many aspects of life in the cities of the Roman Empire gradually became 'Christianized'. This book examines the role of ordinary people in this process by studying the relationship between an influential and prolific church leader, John Chrysostom, and his congregation in Antioch.

Download or read book Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity written by Jaclyn L. Maxwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did ordinary people and Church authorities communicate with each other in late antiquity and how did this interaction affect the processes of Christianization in the Roman Empire? By studying the relationship between the preacher and his congregation within the context of classical, urban traditions of public speaking, this book explains some of the reasons for the popularity of Christian sermons during the period. Its focus on John Chrysostom's sermons allows us to see how an educated church leader responded to and was influenced by a congregation of ordinary Christians. As a preacher in Antioch, Chrysostom took great care to convey his lessons to his congregation, which included a broad cross-section of society. Because of this, his sermons provide a fascinating view into the variety of beliefs held by the laity, demonstrating that many people could be actively engaged in their religion while disagreeing with their preacher.

Download or read book Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity written by Jaclyn L. Maxwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did ordinary people and Church authorities communicate with each other in late antiquity and how did this interaction affect the processes of Christianization in the Roman Empire? By studying the relationship between the preacher and his congregation within the context of classical, urban traditions of public speaking, this book explains some of the reasons for the popularity of Christian sermons during the period. Its focus on John Chrysostom's sermons allows us to see how an educated church leader responded to and was influenced by a congregation of ordinary Christians. As a preacher in Antioch, Chrysostom took great care to convey his lessons to his congregation, which included a broad cross-section of society. Because of this, his sermons provide a fascinating view into the variety of beliefs held by the laity, demonstrating that many people could be actively engaged in their religion while disagreeing with their preacher.

Download or read book Episcopal Networks in Late Antiquity written by Carmen Angela Cvetković and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent studies on the development of early Christianity emphasize the fragmentation of the late ancient world while paying less attention to a distinctive feature of the Christianity of this time which is its inter-connectivity. Both local and trans-regional networks of interaction contributed to the expansion of Christianity in this age of fragmentation. This volume investigates a specific aspect of this inter-connectivity in the area of the Mediterranean by focusing on the formation and operation of episcopal networks. The rise of the bishop as a major figure of authority resulted in an increase in long-distance communication among church elites coming from different geographical areas and belonging to distinct ecclesiastical and theological traditions. Locally, the bishops in their roles as teachers, defenders of faith, patrons etc. were expected to interact with individuals of diverse social background who formed their congregations and with secular authorities. Consequently, this volume explores the nature and quality of various types of episcopal relationships in Late Antiquity attempting to understand how they were established, cultivated and put to use across cultural, linguistic, social and geographical boundaries.

Download or read book Religious Practices and Christianization of the Late Antique City 4th 7th cent written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Education and Religion in Late Antique Christianity written by Peter Gemeinhardt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.

Download or read book Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought written by Jaclyn L. Maxwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social values of upper-class Christians in Late Antiquity often contrasted with the modest backgrounds of their religion's founders – the apostles – and the virtues they exemplified. Drawing on examples from the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and other late antique authors, this book examines attitudes toward the apostles' status as manual workers and their virtues of simplicity and humility. Due to the strong connection between these traits and low socioeconomic status, late antique bishops often allowed their own high standing to influence how they understood these matters. The virtues of simplicity and humility had been a natural fit for tentmakers and fishermen, but posed a significant challenge to Christians born into the elite and trained in prestigious schools. This volume examines the socioeconomic implications of Christianity in the Roman Empire by considering how the first wave of powerful, upper-class church leaders interpreted the socially radical elements of their religion.

Download or read book Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire written by Averil Cameron and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many reasons can be given for the rise of Christianity in late antiquity and its flourishing in the medieval world. In asking how Christianity succeeded in becoming the dominant ideology in the unpromising circumstances of the Roman Empire, Averil Cameron turns to the development of Christian discourse over the first to sixth centuries A.D., investigating the discourse's essential characteristics, its effects on existing forms of communication, and its eventual preeminence. Scholars of late antiquity and general readers interested in this crucial historical period will be intrigued by her exploration of these influential changes in modes of communication. The emphasis that Christians placed on language—writing, talking, and preaching—made possible the formation of a powerful and indeed a totalizing discourse, argues the author. Christian discourse was sufficiently flexible to be used as a public and political instrument, yet at the same time to be used to express private feelings and emotion. Embracing the two opposing poles of logic and mystery, it contributed powerfully to the gradual acceptance of Christianity and the faith's transformation from the enthusiasm of a small sect to an institutionalized world religion.

Download or read book Church and Society in Late Antique Italy and Beyond written by Claire Sotinel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers presented here explore in various ways the interactions between clerics and the society in which Christian churches put down roots in Late Antiquity. Some of these complex processes, involved in the christianization of the Late Roman world, form the theme of the first three sections. Amongst other aspects, the essays in these sections examine the Three Chapters controversy and the participation of lay and clerical protagonists in it, the social standing of Italian bishops (including their use of lay personnel and their economic impact), and a comparison of pagan and Christian places of worship. The essays included in the last section deal with communication in Late Antiquity. They present the first results of a long-term project on the changing role of information during the last centuries of the Roman world. Eight papers in the volume are published in English for the first time.

Download or read book Being Christian in Late Antiquity written by Carol Harrison and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we talk about 'being Christian' in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, `Being Christian through Reading, Writing and Hearing', analyse the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. The essays in Section II move on to explore how late antique Christians sought to create, maintain and represent Christian communities: communities that were both 'textually created' and 'enacted in living realities'. Finally in Section III, 'The Particularities of Being Christian', the contributions examine what it was to be Christian from a number of different ways of representing oneself, each of which raises questions about certain kinds of 'particularities', for example, gender, location, education and culture. Bringing together primary source material from the early Imperial period up to the seventh century AD and covering both the Eastern and Western Empires, the papers in this volume demonstrate that what it meant to be Christian cannot simply be taken for granted. 'Being Christian' was part of a continual process of construction and negotiation, as individuals and Christian communities alike sought to relate themselves to existing traditions, social structures and identities, at the same time as questioning and critiquing the past(s) in their present.

Download or read book Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity written by Richard Flower and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of religious identity in late antiquity is highly contentious. How did individuals and groups come to ascribe identities based on what would now be known as 'religion', categorizing themselves and others with regard to Judaism, Manichaeism, traditional Greek and Roman practices, and numerous competing conceptions of Christianity? How and why did examples of self-identification become established, activated, or transformed in response to circumstances? To what extent do labels (whether ancient and modern) for religious categories reflect a sense of a unified and enduring social or group identity for those included within them? How does religious identity relate to other forms of ancient identity politics (for example, ethnic discourse concerning 'barbarians')? Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity responds to the recent upsurge of interest in this issue by developing interdisciplinary research between classics, ancient and medieval history, philosophy, religion, patristics, and Byzantine studies, expanding the range of evidence standardly used to explore these questions. In exploring the malleability and potential overlapping of religious identities in late antiquity, as well as their variable expressions in response to different public and private contexts, it challenges some prominent scholarly paradigms. In particular, rhetoric and religious identity are here brought together and simultaneously interrogated to provide mutual illumination: in what way does a better understanding of rhetoric (its rules, forms, practices) enrich our understanding of the expression of late-antique religious identity? How does an understanding of how religious identity was ascribed, constructed, and contested provide us with a new perspective on rhetoric at work in late antiquity?

Download or read book Conversion in Late Antiquity Christianity Islam and Beyond written by Arietta Papaconstantinou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally spiritual one, the papers seek to isolate the behaviours and circumstances that made conversion both such a common and such a contested phenomenon. The spread of Buddhism in Asia in broadly the same period serves as an external comparator that was not caught in the net of the Abrahamic religions. The volume is organised around several themes, reflecting the concerns of the initial project with the articulation between norm and practice, the role of authorities and institutions, and the social and individual fluidity on the ground. Debates, discussions, and the expression of norms and principles about conversion conversion are not rare in societies experiencing religious change, and the first section of the book examines some of the main issues brought up by surviving sources. This is followed by three sections examining different aspects of how those principles were - or were not - put into practice: how conversion was handled by the state, how it was continuously redefined by individual ambivalence and cultural fluidity, and how it was enshrined through different forms of institutionalization. Finally, a topographical coda examines the effects of religious change on the iconic holy city of Jerusalem.

Download or read book The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity written by Mark Letteney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-12 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together ancient scholarly works and the manuscripts which carry them, this study presents a new way to answer the old question 'What does it mean for Rome to become Christian?'. It demonstrates that imperial Christianity changed not just what people believe, but how people think.

Download or read book Late Ancient Christianity written by Virginia Burrus and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The particular excitement of this volume lies in its focus on the everyday realities of Christians' lives in the era of Christian ascendancy and Roman decline. Popular fiction, childrearing and toys, rituals of inclusion, the beginning of veneration of saints and shunning of heretics, the ascetic impulse, food practices—all these and more lend color and texture to the story of a "people's" Christianity in this formative stage.

Download or read book Repentance in Late Antiquity written by Alexis C. Torrance and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The call to repentance is central to the message of early Christianity. While this is undeniable, the precise meaning of the concept of repentance for early Christians has rarely been investigated to any great extent, beyond studies of the rise of penitential discipline. In this study, the rich variety of meanings and applications of the concept of repentance are examined, with a particular focus on the writings of several ascetic theologians of the fifth to seventh centuries: SS Mark the Monk, Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, and John Climacus. These theologians provide some of the most sustained and detailed elaborations of the concept of repentance in late antiquity. They predominantly see repentance as a positive, comprehensive idea that serves to frame the whole of Christian life, not simply one or more of its parts. While the modern dominant understanding of repentance as a moment of sorrowful regret over past misdeeds, or as equivalent to penitential discipline, is present to a degree, such definitions by no means exhaust the concept for them. The path of repentance is depicted as stretching from an initial about-face completed in baptism, through the living out of the baptismal gift by keeping the Gospel commandments, culminating in the idea of intercessory repentance for others, after the likeness of Christ's innocent suffering for the world. While this overarching role for repentance in Christian life is clearest in ascetic works, these are not explored in isolation, and attention is also paid to the concept of repentance in Scripture, the early church, apocalyptic texts, and canonical material. This not only permits the elaboration of the views of the ascetics in their larger context, but further allows for an overall re-assessment of the often misunderstood, if not overlooked, place of repentance in early Christian theology.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity written by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 1294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity offers an innovative overview of a period (c. 300-700 CE) that has become increasingly central to scholarly debates over the history of western and Middle Eastern civilizations. This volume covers such pivotal events as the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the origins of Islam, and the early formation of Byzantium and the European Middle Ages. These events are set in the context of widespread literary, artistic, cultural, and religious change during the period. The geographical scope of this Handbook is unparalleled among comparable surveys of Late Antiquity; Arabia, Egypt, Central Asia, and the Balkans all receive dedicated treatments, while the scope extends to the western kingdoms, and North Africa in the West. Furthermore, from economic theory and slavery to Greek and Latin poetry, Syriac and Coptic literature, sites of religious devotion, and many others, this Handbook covers a wide range of topics that will appeal to scholars from a diverse array of disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity engages the perennially valuable questions about the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval, while providing a much-needed touchstone for the study of Late Antiquity itself.

Download or read book Christians in Conversation written by Alberto Rigolio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a particular and little-known form of writing, the prose dialogue, during the Late Antique period, when Christian authors adopted and transformed the dialogue form to suit the new needs of religious debate. Connected to, but departing from, the dialogues of Classical Antiquity, these new forms staged encounters between Christians and pagans, Jews, Manichaeans, and "heretical" fellow Christians. At times fiction, at others records of, or scripts for, actual debates, the dialogues give us a glimpse of Late Antique rhetoric as it was practiced and tell us about the theological arguments underpinning religious differences. By offering the first comprehensive analysis of Christian dialogues in Greek and Syriac from the earliest examples to the end of the sixth century CE, the present volume shows that Christian authors saw the dialogue form as a suitable vehicle for argument and apologetic in the context of religious controversy and argues that dialogues were intended as effective tools of opinion formation in Late Antique society. Most Christian dialogues are little studied, and often in isolation, but they vividly evoke the religious debates of the time and they embody the cultural conventions and refinements that Late Antique men and women expected from such debates.