Download or read book Conversion and Initiation in Antiquity written by Birgitte Bøgh and published by Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles explore individual religious transformation in Antiquity, with a focus on initiation and conversion and their definitions, content and characteristics. They investigate different facets of these phenomena in a wide range of religions in their own context and from new theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Download or read book From Death to Rebirth written by Thomas Macy Finn and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this fascinating study of antiquity, Thomas Finn explores the role of ritual and conversion in Judaism, Christianity, Greco-Roman Paganism, and the philosophical schools. Finn makes history come alive both by carefully delineating the historical, cultural, and social factors at work in conversion and by drawing on the stories and firsthand accounts of conversion in ancient times."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Religious and Philosophical Conversion in the Ancient Mediterranean Traditions written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores conversion experience in the ancient Mediterranean with attention to early Judaism, early Christianity, and philosophy in the Roman empire from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Download or read book Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity written by Klára Dolezalová and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the proceedings of the conference Materiality and Conversion: The Role of Material and Visual Cultures in the Christianization of the Latin West organized by the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in 2020. Its contributions thus focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries. The studies examine the religious change through the "material turn" approach, building on the material and sensorial dimension of Christian conversion and especially the baptismal rite as one of the key components of the process. The material and visual cultures are regarded as vectors and witnesses of conversion to Christianity, while human body is viewed as one of the agents in ritual actions. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the prebaptismal purification, the moment of immersion in the baptismal font, the postbaptismal alteration of perception, as well as the continuous changes in funeral forms. As such, the papers attempt to shed more light on the role of materiality in the complex and rapid conversion to Christianity in Late Antique West.
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 436 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 Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages written by Kenneth Mills and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2003 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writersas singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.
Download or read book The Complexity of Conversion written by Valerie Nicolet and published by Equinox Publishing. This book was released on 2020 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, conversion is a contested religious, political, and personal phenomenon, and that was also the case in the ancient world. Using several primary sources (Jewish and Christian) and case studies, this volume discusses what this change could have meant for various individuals or groups of people in the ancient world and argues that conversion can best be understood through an intersectional perspective, an approach that includes gender, class, ethnicity, and age, as well as political and economic elements in its analysis of conversion. The volume also acknowledges that a discussion of conversion benefits from taking into account conversion's history of reception. Case studies from the reception history as well as contemporary examples of contested conversions (for example, from Christianity to Islam or vice versa) are also brought to the table. In sum, the book addresses the complexity of conversion, using a range of cases, texts and theories, and initiates a dialogue between ancient sources and present concepts or practices. Close readings of ancient texts play a central role in the project. Yet, the book also considers how sacred texts and their receptions have influenced the way we generally think about conversation as religious change.
Download or read book Transforming Conversion written by Gordon T. Smith and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers much-needed theological reflection on the phenomenon of conversion and transformation. Gordon Smith provides a robust evaluation that covers the broad range of thinking about conversion across Christian traditions and addresses global contexts. Smith contends that both in the church and in discussions about contemporary mission, the language of conversion inherited from revivalism is inadequate in helping to navigate the questions that shape how we do church, how we approach faith formation, how evangelism is integrated into congregational life, and how we witness to the faith in non-Christian environments. We must rethink the nature of the church in light of how people actually come to faith in Christ. After drawing on ancient and pre-revivalist wisdom on conversion, Smith delineates the contours of conversion and Christian initiation for today's church. He concludes by discussing the art of spiritual autobiography and what it means to be a congregation.
Download or read book Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco Roman Antiquity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fills a gap in the study of mystery cults in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Focusing on the visual language surrounding these cults, it aims to understand how images depict mysteries in different cults: Dionysus, Mithras, Mother of the Gods, and Isiac cults.
Download or read book Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity written by Eric Rebillard and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand the past, we necessarily group people together and, consequently, frequently assume that all of its members share the same attributes. In this ground-breaking volume, Eric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke bring renowned scholars together to challenge this norm by seeking to rediscover the individual and to explore the dynamics between individuals and the groups to which they belong.
Download or read book Mission and Conversion written by Martin Goodman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade outsiders to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new hypothesis about the origins of Christian proselytizing, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. Much of the book focusses on the history of Judaism in late antiquity. Dr Goodman makes a detailed and radical re-evaluation of the evidence for Jewish missionary attitudes in the late Second Temple and Talmudic periods, questioning many commonly held assumptions, in particular the view that Jews proselytized energetically in the first century CE. This leads him on to take issue with the common notion that the early Christian mission to the gentiles imitated or competed with contemporary Jews. Finally, the author puts forward some novel suggestions as to how the Jewish background to Christianity may nonetheless have contributed to the enthusiastic adoption of universal proselytizing by some followers of Jesus in the apostolic age.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual written by Risto Uro and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways. Generations of New Testament and Early Christian scholars have produced detailed analyses of the belief systems of nascent Christian communities, including their ideological and political dimensions, but have by and large ignored ritual as an important element of early Christian religion and as a factor contributing to the rise and the organization of the movement. In recent years, however, scholars of early Christianity have begun to use ritual as an analytical tool for describing and explaining Christian origins and the early history of the movement. Such a development has created a momentum toward producing a more comprehensive volume on the ritual world of Early Christianity employing advances made in the field of ritual studies. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual gives a manifold account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the fifth century. The volume introduces relevant theories and approaches; central topics of ritual life in the cultural world of early Christianity; and important Christian ritual themes and practices in emerging Christian groups and factions.
Download or read book The Visual Rhetoric of the Married Laity in Late Antiquity written by Mark D. Ellison and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines third- and fourth-century portraits of married Christians and associated images, reading them as visual rhetoric in early Christian conversations about marriage and celibacy, and recovering lay perspectives underrepresented or missing in literary sources. Historians of early Christianity have grown increasingly aware that written sources display an enthusiasm for asceticism and sexual renunciation that was far from representative of the lives of most early Christians. Often called a “silent majority,” the married laity in fact left behind a significant body of work in the material record. Particularly in and around Rome, they commissioned and used such objects as sarcophagi, paintings, glass vessels, finger rings, luxury silver, other jewellery items, gems, and seals that bore their portraits and other iconographic forms of self-representation. This study is the first to undertake a sustained exploration of these material sources in the context of early Christian discourses and practices related to marriage, sexuality, and celibacy. Reading this visual evidence increases understanding of the population who created it, the religious commitments they asserted, and the comparatively moderate forms of piety they set forth as meritorious alternatives to the ascetic ideal. In their visual rhetoric, these artifacts and images comprise additional voices in Late Antique conversations about idealized ways of Christian life, and ultimately provide a fuller picture of the early Christian world. Plentifully illustrated with photographs and drawings, this volume provides readers access to primary material evidence. Such evidence, like textual sources, require critical interpretation; this study sets forth a careful methodology for iconographic analysis and applies it to identify the potential intentions of patrons and artists and the perceptions of viewers. It compares iconography to literary sources and ritual practices as part of the interpretive process, clarifying the ways images had a rhetorical edge and contributed to larger conversations. Accessibly written, The Visual Rhetoric of the Married Laity in Late Antiquity is of interest to students and scholars working on Late Antiquity, early Christian and late Roman social history, marriage and celibacy in early Christianity, and early Christian, Roman, and Byzantine art.
Download or read book Initiation into the Mysteries written by Eniko Sepsi and published by Editions L'Harmattan. This book was released on 2020-09-11 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume offers an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four studies to readers interested in the religious, philosophical and artistic aspects of initiation. In itself, the concept of initiation presupposes that there is an initiator, someone to be initiated, and secret rite or knoweledge-in short, a mystery-into which the elect few would be admitted and which must not be revealed to the rest. Initiation is thus very personal, as it encompasses-in Christian theology at least-an encounter with God but also involves a communal experience. While in European context, initiation is an essentially Christian idea, not all the papers of the present volume turn to the Christian tradition for sources. Hermetism, Neoplatonism, pre-Christian paganism and Renaissance esotericism also find a place among the studies published here. Religion and philosophy are not the only viewpoints adopted by our authors, however; the section on art and litterature discusses initiation as it appears on stage, in novels, short stories, and drama as well as poetry, especially in modern European literature.
Download or read book Conversion written by Arthur Darby Nock and published by London [Eng.] ; New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the circumstances and psychology of religious conversion during the last three centuries before Christ and the first four of the Christian era. The central theme is, of course, Christianity and its converts, of whom St. Augustine of Hippo is the great example; but the author also discusses the influence of philosophy, notably on Julian, and surveys the non-Christian religions of the ancient world, the way in which they spread and the measure of their success. The book is written in untechnical language for the general reader, and it will be of equal interest to students of the Roman Empire and to students of the general problem of religious conversion.
Download or read book Conversion written by Kenneth Mills and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical investigation of the phenomena of religious conversion from ancient to modern times. This volume explores the subject of religious conversion over broad expanses of time and space, considering cases from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries and from settings across the world. Leading scholars from a variety of historical sub-fields address the theme at a moment when the utility of the concept of conversion is vigorously debated. The historical settings treated here stretch from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century southern India and Andean Peru, from Bohemia to China during the age of the Reformations, from the fifteenth-century Low Countries to seventeenth-century New France and from the nineteenth-century Minnesota borderlands to late colonial Zimbabwe and modern India. The book's broad mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge about particular places and times, and spark new thinking about religious change, cultural appropriations, and interactive emergence across discipline and fields. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, is also published by the University of Rochester Press.
Download or read book Augustine written by Robin Lane Fox and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This narrative of the first half of Augustine's life conjures the intellectual and social milieu of the late Roman Empire with a Proustian relish for detail." --New York Times In Augustine, celebrated historian Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine of Hippo on his journey to the writing of his Confessions. Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound.
