Download or read book Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium written by Youval Rotman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development. Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior—like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr—to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity. A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.
Download or read book Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World written by Youval Rotman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labour market, medieval politics, and religion, the author illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market.
Download or read book Miracle Tales from Byzantium written by and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-14 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miracles occupied a unique place in medieval and Byzantine life and thought. This volume makes available three collections of miracle tales never before translated into English. They deepen our understanding of attitudes toward miracles and display the remarkable range of registers in which Greek could be written during the Byzantine period.
Download or read book Inventing Superstition written by Dale B. Martin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman author Pliny the Younger characterizes Christianity as “contagious superstition”; two centuries later the Christian writer Eusebius vigorously denounces Greek and Roman religions as vain and impotent “superstitions.” The term of abuse is the same, yet the two writers suggest entirely different things by “superstition.” Dale Martin provides the first detailed genealogy of the idea of superstition, its history over eight centuries, from classical Greece to the Christianized Roman Empire of the fourth century C.E. With illuminating reference to the writings of philosophers, historians, and medical teachers he demonstrates that the concept of superstition was invented by Greek intellectuals to condemn popular religious practices and beliefs, especially the belief that gods or other superhuman beings would harm people or cause disease. Tracing the social, political, and cultural influences that informed classical thinking about piety and superstition, nature and the divine, Inventing Superstition exposes the manipulation of the label of superstition in arguments between Greek and Roman intellectuals on the one hand and Christians on the other, and the purposeful alteration of the idea by Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian apologists in late antiquity. Inventing Superstition weaves a powerfully coherent argument that will transform our understanding of religion in Greek and Roman culture and the wider ancient Mediterranean world.
Download or read book Saints and Sacred Matter written by Cynthia Jean Hahn and published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saints and Sacred Matter explores the embodied aspects of the divine--physical remains of holy men and women and objects associated with them. Contributors explore how relics linked the past and present with an imagined future in essays that discuss Christian and other religious traditions from the ancient world such as Judaism and Islam.
Download or read book Burning to Read written by James Simpson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evidence is everywhere: fundamentalist reading can stir passions and provoke violence that changes the world. Amid such present-day conflagrations, this illuminating book reminds us of the sources, and profound consequences, of Christian fundamentalism in the sixteenth century. James Simpson focuses on a critical moment in early modern England, specifically the cultural transformation that allowed common folk to read the Bible for the first time. Widely understood and accepted as the grounding moment of liberalism, this was actually, Simpson tells us, the source of fundamentalism, and of different kinds of persecutory violence. His argument overturns a widely held interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading--and a crucial tenet of the liberal tradition. After exploring the heroism and achievements of sixteenth-century English Lutherans, particularly William Tyndale, Burning to Read turns to the bad news of the Lutheran Bible. Simpson outlines the dark, dynamic, yet demeaning paradoxes of Lutheran reading: its demands that readers hate the biblical text before they can love it; that they be constantly on the lookout for unreadable signs of their own salvation; that evangelical readers be prepared to repudiate friends and all tradition on the basis of their personal reading of Scripture. Such reading practice provoked violence not only against Lutheranism's stated enemies, as Simpson demonstrates; it also prompted psychological violence and permanent schism within its own adherents. The last wave of fundamentalist reading in the West provoked 150 years of violent upheaval; as we approach a second wave, this powerful book alerts us to our peril.
Download or read book Brigham Young written by John G. Turner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brigham Young was a rough-hewn New York craftsman whose impoverished life was electrified by the Mormon faith. Turner provides a fully realized portrait of this spiritual prophet, viewed by followers as a protector and by opponents as a heretic. His pioneering faith made a deep imprint on tens of thousands of lives in the American Mountain West.
Download or read book Four Cultures of the West written by John OMALLEY and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.
Download or read book Faith on the Margins written by Charles H. Parker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the 1572 revolt against Spain, the new Dutch Republic outlawed Catholic worship and secularized all church property. Calvinism prevailed as the public faith, yet Catholicism experienced a resurgence in the first half of the seventeenth century, with membership rivaling that of the Calvinist church. In a wide-ranging analysis of a marginalized yet vibrant religious minority, Charles Parker examines this remarkable revival. It had little to do with the traditional Dutch reputation for tolerance. A keen sense of persecution, combined with a vigorous program of reform, shaped a movement that imparted meaning to Catholics in a Protestant republic. A pastoral organization known as the Holland Mission emerged to establish a vigorous Catholic presence. A chronic shortage of priests enabled laymen and women to exercise an exceptional degree of leadership in local congregations. Increased interaction between clergy and laity reveals a picture that differs sharply from the standard account of the Counter-Reformation's clerical dominance and imposition of church reform on a reluctant populace. There were few places in early modern Europe where a proscribed religious minority was so successful in remaining a permanent fixture of society. Faith on the Margins casts light on the relationship between religious minorities and hostile environments.
Download or read book The Axial Age and Its Consequences written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the bold claim that intellectual sophistication was born worldwide during the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter. A variety of utopian visions emerged and led to both reform and repression.
Download or read book How Sweet the Sound written by David Ware Stowe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stowe traces the evolution of sacred music from colonial times to the present, from the Puritans to Sun Ra, and shows how these cultural encounters have produced a rich harvest of song and faith.
Download or read book History and Presence written by Robert A. Orsi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, PROSE Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Junto Favorite Book of the Year Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. “This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle... If reformed theology has led to the gods’ ostensible absence in modern religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the present, the original and the imitator...History and Presence is a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.” —Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion “With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine–human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are included in this fascinating study of how people process what they believe.” —Catholic Herald
Download or read book A Vedic Concordance written by Maurice Bloomfield and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1964 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vedic Concordance is a monumental work by the famous American Sanskritist Maurice Bloomfield planned prepared and published during the years 1892-1906. It affords primarily an easy and ready means of ascertaining the following things: First where a given mantra occurs if it occurs but once second whether it occurs wlsewhere either with or without variants and in what places and third if it occurs with variants what those variants are. One hundred and nineteen texts in all have been drawn upon for contributions to the concordance comprising .The concordance also includes a very considerable amount of material not yet published. The concordance may also be readily put to certain indirect or secondary uses which are scarcely less important for the systematic progress of vedic study.
Download or read book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond written by Sergeĭ Arkadʹevich Ivanov and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square is a familar Russian landmark. Yet few people know what made Basil so famous. He was a saint who wandered about naked, bullied passers-by, brawled in the market-place, and once even smashed a revered icon. Saints such as Basil overturn the conventional concept of sainthood - what, we may ask, is saintly about them? This book aims to solve the mystery by exploring the figure of the holy fool in Byzantium and in later Russianhistory.
Download or read book The Reformation of the Keys written by Ronald K. Rittgers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the role of Lutheran private confession in the German Reformation, which was part of a fundamental transformation to rid the Church and society of alleged clerical abuses and had profound implications for the use of religious authority in 16th-century Germany.
Download or read book Hearing Things written by Leigh Eric Schmidt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Faith cometh by hearing”—so said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear tuned to God’s voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about “hearing things”—an intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety.The struggle was one of encyclopedic range, and Leigh Eric Schmidt conducts us through natural histories of the oracles, anatomies of the diseased ear, psychologies of the unsound mind, acoustic technologies (from speaking trumpets to talking machines), philosophical regimens for educating the senses, and rational recreations elaborated from natural magic, notably ventriloquism and speaking statues. Hearing Things enters this labyrinth—all the new disciplines and pleasures of the modern ear—to explore the fate of Christian listening during the Enlightenment and its aftermath.In Schmidt’s analysis the reimagining of hearing was instrumental in constituting religion itself as an object of study and suspicion. The mystic’s ear was hardly lost, but it was now marked deeply with imposture and illusion.
Download or read book What is Gnosticism written by Karen L. King and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of gnosticism examines the various ways early Christians strove to define themselves in a pluralistic Roman society, while questioning the traditional ideas of heresy and orthodoxy that have previously influenced historians.
