Download or read book The Ethnic Religious Identity of the Ethiopian in Acts 8 26 40 written by Jongmun Jung and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the background of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40. For a comprehensive study, it utilizes echoic allusion, cultural background, and narrative criticism. It explores the textual tradition of Deut 23:1–8 in Jewish literature, with a particular focus on Isaiah’s inclusive presentation of “eunuchs” and “foreigners” in contrast to the Deuteronomy stipulation for the assembly of the Lord. This work also explores the ancient practice of castration, the Jewish exiles in Elephantine, and Jewish pilgrimage to reconstruct the cultural background of the Ethiopian eunuch. Additionally, it focuses on Luke’s authorial role in presenting the gospel’s geographic, ethnic, and religious expansion to identify the Ethiopian’s ethnic and religious identity in the narrative development of the three trajectories. The conclusion drawn is that the Ethiopian eunuch cannot be identified as an uncircumcised gentile. Instead, he is more like an African man of Jewish descent, included in the Abrahamic covenant but excluded from the cultic setting of worship in the temple.
Download or read book The Ethnic Religious Identity of the Ethiopian in Acts 8 26 40 written by Jongmun Jung and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the background of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40. For a comprehensive study, it utilizes echoic allusion, cultural background, and narrative criticism. It explores the textual tradition of Deut 23:1–8 in Jewish literature, with a particular focus on Isaiah’s inclusive presentation of “eunuchs” and “foreigners” in contrast to the Deuteronomy stipulation for the assembly of the Lord. This work also explores the ancient practice of castration, the Jewish exiles in Elephantine, and Jewish pilgrimage to reconstruct the cultural background of the Ethiopian eunuch. Additionally, it focuses on Luke’s authorial role in presenting the gospel’s geographic, ethnic, and religious expansion to identify the Ethiopian’s ethnic and religious identity in the narrative development of the three trajectories. The conclusion drawn is that the Ethiopian eunuch cannot be identified as an uncircumcised gentile. Instead, he is more like an African man of Jewish descent, included in the Abrahamic covenant but excluded from the cultic setting of worship in the temple.
Download or read book Unmanly Men written by Brittany E. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Testament scholars typically assume that the men who pervade the pages of Luke's two volumes are models of an implied "manliness." Scholars rarely question how Lukan men measure up to ancient masculine mores, even though masculinity is increasingly becoming a topic of inquiry in the field of New Testament and its related disciplines. Drawing especially from gender-critical work in classics, Brittany Wilson addresses this lacuna by examining key male characters in Luke-Acts in relation to constructions of masculinity in the Greco-Roman world. Of all Luke's male characters, Wilson maintains that four in particular problematize elite masculine norms: namely, Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist), the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul, and, above all, Jesus. She further explains that these men do not protect their bodily boundaries nor do they embody corporeal control, two interrelated male gender norms. Indeed, Zechariah loses his ability to speak, the Ethiopian eunuch is castrated, Paul loses his ability to see, and Jesus is put to death on the cross. With these bodily "violations," Wilson argues, Luke points to the all-powerful nature of God and in the process reconfigures--or refigures--men's own claims to power. Luke, however, not only refigures the so-called prerogative of male power, but he refigures the parameters of power itself. According to Luke, God provides an alternative construal of power in the figure of Jesus and thus redefines what it means to be masculine. Thus, for Luke, "real" men look manifestly unmanly. Wilson's findings in Unmanly Men will shatter long-held assumptions in scholarly circles and beyond about gendered interpretations of the New Testament, and how they can be used to understand the roles of the Bible's key characters.
Download or read book Perceptions of Islam in Europe written by Hakan Yilmaz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, the Islamic world has been represented as the 'other' within European identity constructions - an 'other' perceived to be increasingly at odds with European forms of modernity and culture. With the perceived gap between Islam and Europe widening, leading scholars in this work come together to provide genuine and realistic analyses about perceptions of Islam in the West. The book bridges these analyses with in-depth case studies from Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey and other parts of the European Union. This study goes beyond the usual dichotomies of 'clashes of civilizations' and 'cultural conflict' to try to understand the numerous, diverse and multifaceted ways - some conflictual, some peaceful - in which cultural exchanges have taken place historically, and which continue to take place, between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
Download or read book Metaphors in the Narrative of Ephesians 2 11 22 written by Oscar Jiménez and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This linguistically informed study of Ephesians 2:11-22 in its original language and historical context will aid readers’ understanding of Ephesians. This book develops a fully articulated methodology to approach metaphors and narrative patterns in the New Testament epistles.
Download or read book Why This New Race written by Denise K. Buell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why This New Race offers a radical new way of thinking about the origins of Christian identity. Conventional histories have understood Christianity as a religion that from its beginnings sought to transcend ethnic and racial distinctions. Denise Kimber Buell challenges this view by revealing the centrality of ethnicity and race in early definitions of Christianity. Buell's readings of various texts consider the use of "ethnic reasoning" to depict Christianness as more than a set of shared religious practices and beliefs. By asking themselves, "Why this new race?" Christians positioned themselves as members of an ethnos or genos distinct from Jews, Romans, and Greeks. Buell focuses on texts written before Christianity became legal in 313 C.E., including Greek apologetic treatises, martyr narratives, and works by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian. Philosophers and theologians used ethnic reasoning to define Christians as a distinct people within classical and ancient Near East society and in intra-Christian debates about what constituted Christianness. Many characterized Christianness as both fixed and fluid-it had a real essence (fixed) but could be acquired through conversion (fluid). Buell demonstrates how this dynamic view of race and ethnicity allowed Christians to establish boundaries around the meaning of Christianness and to develop universalizing claims that all should join the Christian people. In addressing questions of historiography, Buell analyzes why generations of scholars have refused to acknowledge ethnic reasoning in early Christian discourses. Moreover, Buell's arguments about the importance of ethnicity and religion in early Christianity provide insights into the historical legacy of Christian anti-Semitism as well as contemporary issues of race.
Download or read book Biblical Cross Cultural Leadership written by Suzana Dobrić Veiss and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Multitude of All Peoples written by Vince L. Bantu and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity Today Award of Merit Christianity is not becoming a global religion. It has always been a global religion. The early Christian movement spread from Jerusalem in every direction, taking on local cultural expression all around the ancient world. So why do so many people see Christianity as a primarily Western, white religion? In A Multitude of All Peoples, Vince Bantu surveys the geographic range of the early church's history, revealing an alternate, more accurate narrative to that of Christianity as a product of the Western world. He begins by investigating the historical roots of the Western cultural captivity of the church, from the conversion of Constantine to the rise of European Christian empires. He then shifts focus to the too-often-forgotten concurrent development of diverse expressions of Christianity across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In the process, Bantu removes obstacles to contemporary missiological efforts. Focusing on the necessity for contextualization and indigenous leadership in effective Christian mission, he draws out practical lessons for intercultural communication of the gospel. Healing the wounds of racism, imperialism, and colonialism will be possible only with renewed attention to the marginalized voices of the historic global church. The full story of early Christianity makes clear that, as the apostle Peter said, "God does not show favoritism, but accepts those from every people who fear him and do what is right." Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.
Download or read book Ecclesial Identities in a Multi Faith Context written by Darren Duerksen and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Hindus and Sikhs become followers of Christ, what happens next? Should they join Christian churches that often look and feel very unfamiliar to them? Or to what degree can or should they remain a part of their Hindu/Sikh communities and practices? Uncomfortable with the answers that were provided to them by Christian leaders in northwest India, six followers of Christ began Yeshu satsangs (Jesus truth-gatherings) that sought to follow Christ and the teachings of the Bible while remaining connected to their Hindu and/or Sikh communities. Ecclesial Identities in a Multi-faith Context analyzes the contextualized practices and identities of these leaders and their gatherings, situating these in the religious history of the region and the personal histories of the leaders themselves. Whereas Christians worry that the Yeshu satsangs and related "insider movements" are syncretizing their beliefs and are not properly identifiable as "churches," Ecclesial Identities analyzes the Yeshu satsang's narratives and practices to find vibrant expressions of local church that are grappling with questions and tensions of social and religious identity. In addition to its ethnographic approach, Ecclesial Identities also utilizes recent sociological and anthropological theory in identity formation and critical realism, as well as discussions of biblical ecclesiology from the book of Acts. This study will be a helpful resource for those interested in global Christianity, the practices and identities of churches in religiously plural environments, and the creative ways in which Christ-followers can missionally engage people of other faiths.
Download or read book The Ethiopian Eunuch and Conceptuality in the Imperial Imagination of Biblical Studies written by Gifford Rhamie and published by T&T Clark. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gifford Rhamie addresses the contentious question, “why cannot the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 be conceptualised as a Jew in the British academy?” Rhamie uses postcolonial studies and theory to examine the Ethiopian eunuch's ethnoreligious agency, finding two epistemological lenses: whiteness and 'critical conviviality'. The former is employed in the function of deconstructing, while the latter encourages opening one's conceptuality in a multidimensional way, functioning to reconstruct analyses for agency. Turning to the early Church Fathers, Rhamie argues that the anti-Jewish discourse of the time, the Adversus Judaeos trope, functioned teleologically to shift the Ethiopian eunuch's ethnoreligious agency from an Afroasiatic Jewish to a Graeco-Gentile ideal. In more recent years, the racialised imagination of the academy further identifies the eunuch as a Graeco-Roman Gentile. His being denied a Jewish identity appears to foreclose an exploration of a dynamic agency that could open up new opportunities and possibilities of (re-)conceptualising Jewish history, the book of Acts, and Christian origins. Rhamie asserts that 'Black lives matter' for Jewishness in the book of Acts and for Christian origins.
Download or read book Slavery and Identity written by Mieko Nishida and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using both primary archival and printed sources, Mieko Nishida examines the perspectives of slaves, ex-slaves, and free-born people of color and the critical factors that affected their lives and self-perceptions. The book offers a new window on slave life in nineteenth-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies.".
Download or read book Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature written by Gay L Byron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-10-04 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been growing interest in recent years in the presence and image of blacks and blackness in classical antiquity. However this pioneering and much needed work is the first to survey and theorise the black as seen by early Christian writers.
Download or read book The Acts of the Apostles written by Charles W. Carter and published by Zondervan Publishing Company. This book was released on 1973 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch written by Sean D. Burke and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have received dramatically different answers over the centuries of Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized figure at a key place in the narrative-as the gospel has expanded beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named-in such a way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense, Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new community.
Download or read book Visions of Ryukyu written by Gregory Smits and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1609 and 1879, the geographical, political, and ideological status of the Kingdom of Ryukyu (modern Okinawa) was characterized by its ambiguity. It was subordinate to its larger neighbors, China and Japan, yet an integral part of neither. A Japanese invasion force from Satsuma had conquered the kingdom in 1609, resulting in its partial incorporation into Tokugawa Japan’s bakuhan state. Given Ryukyu’s long-standing ties with China and East Asian foreign relations following the rise of the Qing dynasty, however, the bakufu maintained only an indirect link with Ryukyu from the mid-seventeenth century onward. Thus Ryukyu was able to exist as a quasi-independent kingdom for more than two centuries—albeit amidst a complex web of trade and diplomatic agreements involving the bakufu, Satsuma, Fujian, and Beijing. During this time, Ryukyu’s ambiguous position relative to China and Japan prompted its elites to fashion their own visions of Ryukyuan identity. Created in a dialogic relationship to both a Chinese and Japanese Other, these visions informed political programs intended to remake Ryukyu. In this innovative and provocative study, Gregory Smits explores early modern perceptions of Ryukyu and their effect on its political culture and institutions. He describes the major historical circumstances that informed early modern discourses of Ryukyuan identity and examines the strategies used by leading intellectual and political figures to fashion, promote, and implement their visions of Ryukyu. Early modern visions of Ryukyu were based on Confucianism, Buddhism, and other ideologies of the time. Eventually one vision prevailed, becoming the theoretical basis of the early modern state by the middle of the eighteenth century. Employing elements of Confucianism, the scholar and government official Sai On (1682–1761) argued that the kingdom’s destiny lay primarily with Ryukyuans themselves and that moral parity with Japan and China was within its grasp. Despite Satsuma’s control over its diplomatic and economic affairs, Sai envisioned Ryukyu as an ideal Confucian state with government and state rituals based on the Chinese model. In examining Sai’s thought and political program, this volume sheds new light on Confucian praxis and, conversely, uncovers one variety of an East Asian “prenational” imagined political/cultural community.
Download or read book Diaspora Online written by Ruxandra Trandafoiu and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.
Download or read book Feasting on the Word written by David Lyon Bartlett and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the twelve-volume series Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press offers one of the most extensive and well-respected resources for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes will cover all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions. The page layout is truly unique. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essaysÂ--one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume will also contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents. The printed volumes for Ordinary Time include the complementary stream during Year A, the complementary stream during the first half of Year B, the semicontinuous stream during the second half of Year B, and the semicontinuous stream during Year C. Beginning with the season after Pentecost in Year C, the alternate lections for Ordinary Time not in the print volumes will be available online at feastingontheword.net.
