Download or read book Myths Martyrs and Modernity written by Jitse Dijkstra and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-11 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in honour of Jan N. Bremmer contains the contributions of numerous students, colleagues, and friends offered to him on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Throughout his career, Bremmer has distinguished himself as an internationally renowned scholar of religion both past and present, including first and foremost Greek and Roman religion, but also early Christianity and post-classical developments in religion and spirituality. In line with these three main areas of Bremmer’s research, the volume is divided into three parts, bringing together contributions from distinguished scholars in many fields. The result is a diverse book which provides a broad spectrum of original ideas and innovative approaches in the history of religions, thus reflecting the nature of the scholarship of Bremmer himself.
Download or read book The Myth of Persecution written by Candida Moss and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today. According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction. There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.
Download or read book Maidens Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Jan N. Bremmer aims to bring together the worlds of early Christianity and those of ancient history and classical literature - worlds that still all too rarely interlock. Contextualising the life and literature of the early Christians in their Greco-Roman environment, he focusses on four areas. A first section looks at more general aspects of early Christianity: the name of the Christians, their religious and social capital, prophecy and the place of widows and upper-class women in the Christian movement. Second, the chronology and place of composition of the early apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and Pseudo-Clementines are newly determined by paying close attention to their doctrinal contents, but also, innovatively, to their onomastics and social vocabulary. The author also analyses the frequent use of magic in the Acts and explains the prominence of women by comparing the Acts to the Greek novel. Third, an investigation into the theme of the tours of hell suggests a new chronological order, shows that the Christian tours were indebted to both Greek and Jewish models, and illustrates that in the course of time the genre dropped a large part of its Jewish heritage. The fourth and final section concentrates on the most famous and intriguing report of an ancient martyrdom: the Passion of Perpetua. It pays special attention to the motivation and visions of Perpetua, which are analyzed not by taking recourse to modern theories such as psychoanalysis, but by looking to the world in which Perpetua lived, both Christian and pagan. It is only by seeing the early Christians in their ancient world that we might begin to understand them and their emerging communities. (Publisher's description).
Download or read book Myths of the Rune Stone written by David M. Krueger and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community’s and a state’s identity for decades. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus’s exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale’s credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold. Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862. Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America’s preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created in the stories we tell about the past, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well.
Download or read book Before Religion written by Brent Nongbri and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Download or read book From Adapa to Enoch written by Seth L. Sanders and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book asks what drove the religious visions of ancient scribes. During the first millennium BCE both Babylonian and Judean scribes wrote about and emulated their heroes Adapa and Enoch, who went to heaven to meet their god."--Preface, p. [v].
Download or read book Weeping Britannia written by Thomas Dixon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a persistent myth about the British: that we are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia - the first history of crying in Britain - comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the 'national character', the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of our past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which we express and understand our emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.
Download or read book The History of Emotions written by Jan Plamper and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate, and this is the first book-length introduction to the field, synthesizing the current research, and offering direction for future study. The History of Emotions is organized around the debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion that has shaped most emotions research in a variety of disciplines for more than a hundred years: social constructivists believe that emotions are largely learned and subject to historical change, while universalists insist on the timelessness and pan-culturalism of emotions. In historicizing and problematizing this binary, Jan Plamper opens emotions research beyond constructivism and universalism; he also maps a vast terrain of thought about feelings in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, art history, political science, the life sciences—from nineteenth-century experimental psychology to the latest affective neuroscience—and history, from ancient times to the present day.
Download or read book Aesthetics of Religion written by Alexandra K. Grieser and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first English language presentation of the innovative approaches developed in the aesthetics of religion. The chapters present diverse material and detailed analysis on descriptive, methodological and theoretical concepts that together explore the potential of an aesthetic approach for investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. In dialogue with, yet different from, other major movements in the field (material culture, anthropology of the senses, for instance), it is the specific intent of this approach to create a framework for understanding the interplay between sensory, cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of world-construction. The volume demonstrates that aesthetics, as a theory of sensory knowledge, offers an elaborate repertoire of concepts that can help to understand religious traditions. These approaches take into account contemporary developments in scientific theories of perception, neuro-aesthetics and cultural studies, highlighting the socio-cultural and political context informing how humans perceive themselves and the world around them. Developing since the 1990s, the aesthetic approach has responded to debates in the study of religion, in particular striving to overcome biased categories that confined religion either to texts and abstract beliefs, or to an indisputable sui generis mode of experience. This volume documents what has been achieved to date, its significance for the study of religion and for interdisciplinary scholarship.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations written by Ulinka Rublack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online
Download or read book The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left written by Joachim C. Häberlen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s, a multifaceted alternative scene developed in West Germany. At the core of this leftist scene was a struggle for feelings in a capitalist world that seemed to be devoid of any emotions. Joachim C. Häberlen offers here a vivid account of these emotional politics. The book discusses critiques of rationality and celebrations of insanity as an alternative. It explores why capitalism made people feel afraid and modern cities made people feel lonely. Readers are taken to consciousness raising groups, nude swimming at alternative vacation camps, and into the squatted houses of the early 1980s. Häberlen draws on a kaleidoscope of different voices to explore how West Germans became more concerned with their selves, their feelings, and their bodies. By investigating how leftists tried to transform themselves through emotional practices, Häberlen gives us a fresh perspective on a fascinating aspect of West German history.
Download or read book Pindar and the Sublime written by Robert L. Fowler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.
Download or read book New Medievalisms written by Javier Martín-Párraga and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current renewed interest in Medieval culture, literature and society is evident in recent fictional works such as Game of Thrones or the cinematographic adaptions of Tolkien’s pseudo-medieval universe. From a more academic viewpoint, there are a number of excellent journals and book series devoted to scholarly analysis of English Medieval language and literature. While “traditional” Medieval scholars use several valid vehicles for communication, those researchers who favour more innovative or eclectic approaches are not often given the same opportunities. New Medievalisms is unique in that it offers such scholars a platform to showcase their academic prestige and the quality and originality of their investigations. This multidisciplinary collection of essays includes six chapters and nineteen articles in which twenty-one renowned scholars analyse a wide range of issues related to Medieval England, from the Beowulf saga to echoes of Medieval literature in contemporary fiction, translation or didactics. As a result, the book is both kaleidoscopic and daring, as well as rigorous and accurate.
Download or read book The Study of Greek and Roman Religions written by Nickolas P. Roubekas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should ancient religious ideas be approached? Is "religion" an applicable term to antiquity? Should classicists, ancient historians, and religious studies scholars work more closely together? Nickolas P. Roubekas argues that there is a disciplinary gap between the study of Greek and Roman religions and the study of “religion” as a category-a gap that has often resulted in contradictory conclusions regarding Greek and Roman religion. This book addresses this lack of interdisciplinarity by providing an overview, criticism, and assessment of this chasm. It provides a theoretical approach to this historical period, raising the issue of the relationship between “theory of religion” and “history of religion,” and explores how history influences theory and vice versa. It also presents an in-depth critique of some crucial problems that have been central to the discussions of scholars who work on Graeco-Roman antiquity, encouraging us to re-examine how we approach the study of ancient religions.
Download or read book The Treasury of Saints and Martyrs written by Margaret Mulvihill and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1999 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children will love reading about the fascinating lives of various saints and their journeys, illustrated with beautifully colored pictures. Calendar of saints days also is included.
Download or read book The World of Greek Religion and Mythology written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging work on Greek religion and mythology, Jan N. Bremmer brings together his stimulating and innovative articles, which have all been updated and revised where necessary. In three thematic sections, he analyses central aspects of Greek religion, beginning with the gods and heroes and paying special attention to the unity of the divine nature and the emergence of the category 'hero'. The second section begins with a discussion of the nature of polis religion, continues with various facets, such as seers, secrecy and the soul, and concludes with the influence of the Ancient Near East. The third section studies human sacrifice and offers the most recent analysis of the ideal animal sacrifice, combining literature, epigraphy, iconography, and zooarchaeology. Regarding human sacrifice, it concentrates on the famous cases of Iphigeneia and the werewolves of Mount Lykaion. The fourth and final section investigates key elements of Greek mythology, such as the definition of myth and its relationship to ritual, and ends with a brief history of the study of Greek mythology. The multi-disciplinary approach and rich footnotes make this work a must for anybody interested in Greek religion and mythology.
Download or read book The Peoples of Ancient Italy written by Gary D. Farney and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are many studies of certain individual ancient Italic groups (e.g. the Etruscans, Gauls and Latins), there is no work that takes a comprehensive view of each of them—the famous and the less well-known—that existed in Iron Age and Roman Italy. Moreover, many previous studies have focused only on the material evidence for these groups or on what the literary sources have to say about them. This handbook is conceived of as a resource for archaeologists, historians, philologists and other scholars interested in finding out more about Italic groups from the earliest period they are detectable (early Iron Age, in most instances), down to the time when they begin to assimilate into the Roman state (in the late Republican or early Imperial period). As such, it will endeavor to include both archaeological and historical perspectives on each group, with contributions from the best-known or up-and-coming archaeologists and historians for these peoples and topics. The language of the volume is English, but scholars from around the world have contributed to it. This volume covers the ancient peoples of Italy more comprehensively in individual chapters, and it is also distinct because it has a thematic section.
