Download or read book Rereading Historical Theology written by Margaret R. Miles and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine of Hippo is arguably the most influential author in the history of Christian thought and institutions. Yet he has been revered by some reviewers and vilified by others. Contemporary critical approaches to historical authors can illuminate features of Augustine's thought and activities that are not noticed when reviewers' attention is either exclusively sympathetic or intransigently critical. Anyone who seeks to present an Augustine who has relevance for the twenty-first century must somehow hold together delight in the beauty of his prose and the profundity of his thought with dismay over some of the intentions and effects of his teachings. The essays in this book endeavor to read Augustine simultaneously critically and appreciatively. Miles places his thought in the context of his classical heritage and notices how pervasive in later Christian authors are the themes that informed Augustine's thought. Understanding his writings as a passionate effort to describe a metaphysical universe that accounts for the endlessly fascinating mystery of embodied life makes many of Augustine's proposals accessible, useful, and delightful in the context of contemporary quandaries and issues. His conclusions are less important than his method: In Augustine, knowledge and life mutually illuminate, energize, and critique each other, exemplifying the practice of a fully human life. Exploring some of his most persistent themes, these essays seek to show how Augustine's theology works.
Download or read book Re Reading Gregory of Nazianzus written by Christoper A. Beeley and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the newest volume in the CUA Studies in Early Christianity, presents original works by leading patristics scholars on a wide range of theological, historical, and cultural topics
Download or read book Founding the Fathers written by Elizabeth A. Clark and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at secular colleges and universities. Clark, one of the world's most eminent scholars of early Christianity, explores this development in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Based on voluminous archival materials, the book charts how American theologians traveled to Europe to study in Germany and confronted intellectual currents that were invigorating but potentially threatening to their faith. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame German biblical and philosophical criticism to fit American evangelical convictions. German models that encouraged a positive view of early and medieval Christianity collided with Protestant assumptions that the church had declined grievously between the Apostolic and Reformation eras. Trying to reconcile these views, the Americans came to offer some counterbalance to traditional Protestant hostility both to contemporary Roman Catholicism and to those historical periods that had been perceived as Catholic, especially the patristic era.
Download or read book Christianity Empire and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity written by Jeremy M. Schott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.
Download or read book Christ Circumcised written by Andrew S. Jacobs and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first full-length study of the circumcision of Jesus, Andrew S. Jacobs turns to an unexpected symbol—the stereotypical mark of the Jewish covenant on the body of the Christian savior—to explore how and why we think about difference and identity in early Christianity. Jacobs explores the subject of Christ's circumcision in texts dating from the first through seventh centuries of the Common Era. Using a diverse toolkit of approaches, including the psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist, he posits that while seeming to desire fixed borders and a clear distinction between self (Christian) and other (Jew, pagan, and heretic), early Christians consistently blurred and destabilized their own religious boundaries. He further argues that in this doubled approach to others, Christians mimicked the imperial discourse of the Roman Empire, which exerted its power through the management, not the erasure, of difference. For Jacobs, the circumcision of Christ vividly illustrates a deep-seated Christian duality: the fear of and longing for an other, at once reviled and internalized. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the full-blown Feast of the Divine Circumcision in the medieval period, Christ circumcised represents a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.
Download or read book A Rereading of Romans written by Stanley Kent Stowers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul's Letter to the Romans is one of the most influential writings of Christian theology. In this reinterpretation, the author provides a new reading that places Romans within the sociocultural, historical and rhetorical contexts of Paul's world.
Download or read book The Corporeal Imagination written by Patricia Cox Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.
Download or read book Border Lines written by Daniel Boyarin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.
Download or read book Specters of Paul written by Benjamin H. Dunning and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first Christians operated with a hierarchical model of sexual difference common to the ancient Mediterranean, with women considered to be lesser versions of men. Yet sexual difference was not completely stable as a conceptual category across the spectrum of formative Christian thinking. Rather, early Christians found ways to exercise theological creativity and to think differently from one another as they probed the enigma of sexually differentiated bodies. In Specters of Paul, Benjamin H. Dunning explores this variety in second- and third-century Christian thought with particular attention to the ways the legacy of the apostle Paul fueled, shaped, and also constrained approaches to the issue. Paul articulates his vision of what it means to be human primarily by situating human beings between two poles: creation (Adam) and resurrection (Christ). But within this framework, where does one place the figure of Eve—and the difference that her female body represents? Dunning demonstrates that this dilemma impacted a range of Christian thinkers in the centuries immediately following the apostle, including Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, and authors from the Nag Hammadi corpus. While each of these thinkers attempts to give the difference of the feminine a coherent place within a Pauline typological framework, Dunning shows that they all fail to deliver fully on the coherence that they promise. Instead, sexual difference haunts the Pauline discourse of identity and sameness as the difference that can be neither fully assimilated nor fully ejected—a conclusion with important implications not only for early Christian history but also for feminist and queer philosophy and theology.
Download or read book Narrating the Law written by Barry Wimpfheimer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Narrating the Law Barry Scott Wimpfheimer creates a new theoretical framework for considering the relationship between law and narrative and models a new method for studying talmudic law in particular. Works of law, including the Talmud, are animated by a desire to create clear usable precedent. This animating impulse toward clarity is generally absent in narratives, the form of which is better able to capture the subtleties of lived life. Wimpfheimer proposes to make these different forms compatible by constructing a narrative-based law that considers law as one of several "languages," along with politics, ethics, psychology, and others that together compose culture. A narrative-based law is capable of recognizing the limitations of theoretical statutes and the degree to which other cultural languages interact with legal discourse, complicating any attempts to actualize a hypothetical set of rules. This way of considering law strongly resists the divide in traditional Jewish learning between legal literature (Halakhah) and nonlegal literature (Aggadah) by suggesting the possibility of a discourse broad enough to capture both. Narrating the Law activates this mode of reading by looking at the Talmud's legal stories, a set of texts that sits uncomfortably on the divide between Halakhah and Aggadah. After noticing that such stories invite an expansive definition of law that includes other cultural voices, Narrating the Law also mines the stories for the rich descriptions of rabbinic culture that they encapsulate.
Download or read book Ibadi Theology Rereading Sources and Scholarly Works written by Ersilia Francesca and published by Georg Olms Verlag. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ziel dieses Band ist, verschiedene Themen der ibaditischen Religion von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart zu untersuchen. Der Ibadismus entstand in der frühen islamischen Epoche und spielte eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Entwicklung der islamischen Rechts- und Glaubenslehre. Bis heute hat er einen großen Einfluss auf den Mittleren Osten und Nordafrika. Trotz seiner langen Tradition ist der Ibadismus und vor allem die ibaditische Glaubenslehre noch immer wenig bekannt und vielfach auch verkannt. Da bis jetzt nur wenige bedeutende umfangreiche Arbeiten zur Ibaditischen Glaubenslehre in europäischen Sprachen vorliegen, versucht dieser Band Abhilfe zu schaffen, indem er die charakteristische theologische Lehre dieser einflussreichen islamischen Strömung einem breiten Publikum bekannt macht und sich sowohl an Fachleute als auch an Laien wendet. Anhand vieler Beispiele aus verschiedenen Epochen und Quellen und mit einem interdisziplinären Ansatz behandeln die Autoren Fragen zu Dogma und Bekenntnis, Glaubensverständnis, theologischen Kontroversen, Neubewertung theologischer Quellen und zum ibaditischen „Modernismus“ im Oman und Nordafrika des vergangenen Jahrhunderts. Mittelalterliche ibaditische Quellen sind ausschlaggebend, um die frühe Entwicklung der Bewegung und die Dispute über Lehre und Politik zu verstehen, die die ibaditische Glaubenslehre vom sunnitischen Islam unterscheiden. Auf der anderen Seite unterstreicht der vorliegende Band auch, dass es wichtig ist, die ibaditischen Quellen aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in den Blick zu nehmen, als die ibaditische Reformbewegung begann, sich um eine Annäherung zwischen dem Islam und der Moderne zu bemühen. The aim of this volume is to explore different issues of Ibadi theology from the early beginnings until the present day. Ibadi Islam emerged in the early Islamic period and played a pivotal role in the development of Islamic law and theology. Today, it continues to be an influential force in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Despite its antiquity, Ibadi Islam – and particularly Ibadi theology – remains little known and has often been misunderstood. Up to now only few prominent book-length works devoted to Ibadi theology in European language; this volume aims at redressing this gap by introducing the distinctive theological teachings of this influential Islamic school to a broad public, specialists and non-specialists alike. Dealing with a series of cases, from different periods and different sources and using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors address questions such as dogma and creed, conception of faith, theological controversies, reassessment of theological sources, the Ibadi “modernism” in last century Oman and North Africa. Medieval Ibadi sources are crucial to understand the early development of the movement and the doctrinal and political disputes which differentiate Ibadi doctrine from Sunni Islam, on the other hand the volume emphasize the importance of also focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries Ibadi sources, when the Ibadi reform movement started looking for reconciliation between Islam and modernity.
Download or read book The Beauty of Holiness written by Joseph Blenkinsopp and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Blenkinsopp presents an intertextual reading of Isaiah and the Psalms furthering his previous well-known work on the text of Isaiah. Blenkinsopp argues that, read together, these two biblical books can be shown to form a single religious vision, a way of experiencing and articulating a commitment to the fundamentals of the faith of Israel, with its own distinctive character. Blenkinsopp shows how the emphasis in Isaiah and the Psalms is on affect and emotion, the expression of joy and sorrow articulated in music, singing, and dancing; in praise, thanksgiving and lament. This represents a key difference from other parts of the Hebrew Bible where the focus is more on the Law and on the covenant at Sinai – in Isaiah and the Psalms these terms rarely occur, the focus is instead on Zion and on the Temple. Blenkinsopp shows how the temple singers, with their close connections with the circles which transmitted and eventually committed to writing the Book of Isaiah, demonstrate that the divine word is not incompatible with other forms of religious experience and expression, affective and even mystical, articulated and embodied in the performance of music, song, ritual prayer, and dance. The beauty of the Psalms is echoed strongly in Isaiah, and the Isaian vision of a Creator God, Lord of nature and history beyond the bounds of Israel, is joyfully proclaimed by the psalmists.
Download or read book The Fathers Refounded written by Elizabeth A. Clark and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-12-25 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, a new generation of liberal professors sought to prove Christianity's compatibility with contemporary currents in the study of philosophy, science, history, and democracy. These modernizing professors—Arthur Cushman McGiffert at Union Theological Seminary, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case at the University of Chicago Divinity School—hoped to equip their students with a revisionary version of early Christianity that was embedded in its social, historical, and intellectual settings. In The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth A. Clark provides the first critical analysis of these figures' lives, scholarship, and lasting contributions to the study of Christianity. The Fathers Refounded continues the exploration of Christian intellectual revision begun by Clark in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Drawing on rigorous archival research, Clark takes the reader through the professors' published writings, their institutions, and even their classrooms—where McGiffert tailored nineteenth-century German Protestant theology to his modernist philosophies; where LaPiana, the first Catholic professor at Harvard Divinity School, devised his modernism against the tight constraints of contemporary Catholic theology; and where Case promoted reading Christianity through social-scientific aims and methods. Each, in his own way, extricated his subfield from denominationally and theologically oriented approaches and aligned it with secular historical methodologies. In so doing, this generation of scholars fundamentally altered the directions of Catholic Modernism and Protestant Liberalism and offered the promise of reconciling Christianity and modern intellectual and social culture.
Download or read book Writing and Holiness written by Derek Krueger and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on comparative literature, ritual and performance studies, and the history of asceticism, Derek Krueger explores how early Christian writers came to view writing as salvific, as worship through the production of art. Exploring the emergence of new and distinctly Christian ideas about authorship in late antiquity, Writing and Holiness probes saints' lives and hymns produced in the Greek East to reveal how the ascetic call to imitate Christ's humility rendered artistic and literary creativity problematic. In claiming authority and power, hagiographers appeared to violate the saintly practices that they sought to promote. Christian writers meditated within their texts on these tensions and ultimately developed a new set of answers to the question "What is an author?" Each of the texts examined here used writing as a technique for the representation of holiness. Some are narrative representations of saints that facilitate veneration; others are collections of accounts of miracles, composed to publicize a shrine. Rather than viewing an author's piety as a barrier to historical inquiry, Krueger argues that consideration of writing as a form of piety opens windows onto new modes of practice. He interprets Christian authors as participants in the religious system they described, as devotees, monastics, and faithful emulators of the saints, and he shows how their literary practice integrated authorship into other Christian practices, such as asceticism, devotion, pilgrimage, liturgy, and sacrifice. In considering the distinctly literary contributions to the formation of Christian piety in late antiquity, Writing and Holiness uncovers Christian literary theories with implications for both Eastern and Western medieval literatures.
Download or read book History Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles written by Ehud Ben Zvi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles presents a new way of approaching this key biblical text, arguing that the Book employs both multiple viewpoints and the knowledge of the past held by its intended readership to reshape social memory and reinforce the authority of God. The Book of Chronicles communicates to its intended readership a theological worldview built around multiple, partial perspectives which inform and balance each other. This is a worldview which emphasizes the limitations of all human knowledge, even of theologically "proper" knowledge. When Chronicles presents the past as explainable it also affirms that those who inhabited it could not predict the future. And, despite expanding an "explainable" past, the Book deliberately frames some of YHWH's actions - crucial events in Israel's social memory - as unexplainable in human terms. The Book serves to rationalise divinely ordained, prescriptive behaviour through its emphasis on the impossibility of adequate human understanding of a past, present and future governed by YHWH.
Download or read book Pious Irreverence written by Dov Weiss and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).
Download or read book Mere Evangelism written by Randy Newman and published by The Good Book Company. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Let C.S. Lewis inspire and equip you to share your faith. Evangelism is an extraordinary task; it’s what God uses to bring people from death to life. But it has always been difficult. C.S. Lewis was used by God in the conversions of countless people, from friends and acquaintances in his own lifetime to modern-day readers of books such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity (the most influential Christian book of the 20th century). As Tim Keller comments, "C.S. Lewis was incredibly skilled at getting Christianity across in a way that’s powerful to thoughtful people." So, if we want help with evangelism, there is much we can learn from the clarity and imagination of this hugely influential Christian writer. You may feel inadequate to the task; after all, there is only one C.S. Lewis. But evangelist Randy Newman skillfully helps us to apply the methods Lewis used (storytelling, humor, imagery and more) in our own conversations. You will be equipped to talk about your faith and engage with unbelievers wisely, whatever their attitude towards the Christian faith.
