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The Sensual God
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 263

The Sensual God

In the Old Testament, God wrestles with a man (and loses). In the Talmud, God wriggles his toes to make thunder and takes human form to shave the king of Assyria. In the New Testament, God is made flesh and dwells among humans. For religious thinkers trained in Greek philosophy and its deep distaste for matter, sacred scripture can be distressing. A philosophically respectable God should be untainted by sensuality, yet the God of sacred texts is often embarrassingly sensual. Setting experts' minds at ease was neither easy nor simple, and often faith and logic were stretched to their limits. Focusing on examples from both Christian and Jewish sources, from the Bible to sources from the Late M...

Seven Deadly Sins
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 546

Seven Deadly Sins

With intellectual insight and deadpan humor, Kleinberg deftly guides the reader through Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman thoughts on sin. Each chapter weaves the past into the present and examines unchanging human passions and the deep cultural shifts in the way we make sense of them.

For Fear of the Fire
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 269

For Fear of the Fire

Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and feminist inquiry, Françoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive emphasis on opposition and difference remain blind to their nostalgia for the pre-Cartesian idea that the body and mind are the same. Engaging a number of theorists, and alternating between Joan's historical and cultural context, Meltzer also explor...

Living Letters of the Law
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 468

Living Letters of the Law

In Living Letters of the Law, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how—and why—medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture. Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civiliza...

Making Miracles in Medieval England
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 178

Making Miracles in Medieval England

The cult of the saints was central to medieval Christianity largely due to the miraculous. Saints were members of the elect of heaven and could intercede with God on the behalf of supplicants. Whilst people visited shrines and prayed to the saints for many reasons it was the hope of intercession and the praise of miracles past which drove the cult of the saints. This book examines how a person solicited aid from a saint, how they might give thanks and the ways in which post-mortem miracles structured the cult of the saints. A huge number of miracle stories survive from medieval England, in dedicated collections as well as in saints’ lives and other source material. This corpus is full of s...

Augustine the Reader
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 476

Augustine the Reader

Stock displays an enviable and intimate knowledge of the text of Augustine, above all of his Confessions and, as the book progresses, of the De Trinitate.

Wounds of Love
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 352

Wounds of Love

The Peruvian mystic St. Rose of Lima (Isabel Flores y Oliva, 1586-1617) was canonized in 1671 as the first saint of the New World and remains the object of widespread devotion today. In this engrossing new study, Frank Graziano uses the example of St. Rose to explore the meaning of female mysticism and the way in which saints are products of their cultures. Virginity, austerity, eucharistic devotion, incessant mortification, and mystical marriage to Christ characterized the devotional regimen that structured St. Rose's entire life. Many of her mystical practices echo the symptoms of such modern psychological disorders as masochism, depression, hysteria, and anorexia nervosa. Graziano offers ...

Gendered Voices
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 292

Gendered Voices

"These studies . . . not only illuminate the past with a fierce and probing light but also raise, with nuance and power, fundamental issues of interpretation and method."—from the Foreword, by Caroline Walker Bynum Female saints, mystics, and visionaries have been much studied in recent years. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which their experiences and voices were mediated by the men who often composed their vitae, served as their editors and scribes, or otherwise encouraged, protected, and collaborated with the women in their writing projects. What strategies can be employed to discern and distinguish the voices of these high and late medieval women from...

The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 2250

The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2013-12-04
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Containing over 200 articles from prominent scholars, The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion examines ways in which politics and religion have combined to affect social attitudes, spark collective action and influence policy over the last two hundred years. With a focus that covers broad themes like millenarian movements and pluralism, and a scope that takes in religious and political systems throughout the world, the Encyclopedia is essential for its contemporary as well as historical coverage. Special Features: * Encompasses religions, individuals, geographical regions, institutions and events * Describes the history of relations between religion and politics * Longer articles contain b...

Reading Families
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 256

Reading Families

Rebecca Krug argues that in the later Middle Ages, people defined themselves in terms of family relationships but increasingly saw their social circumstances as being connected to the written word. Complex family dynamics and social configurations motivated women to engage in text-based activities. Although not all or even the majority of women could read and write, it became natural for women to think of writing as a part of everyday life.Reading Families looks at the literate practice of two individual women, Margaret Paston and Margaret Beaufort, and of two communities in which women were central, the Norwich Lollards and the Bridgettines at Syon Abbey. The book begins with Paston's letters, which were written at her husband's request, and ends with devotional texts that describe the spiritual daughterhood of the Bridgettine readers.Scholars often assume that medieval women's participation in literate culture constituted a rejection of patriarchal authority. Krug maintains, however, that for most women learning to engage with the written word served as a practical response to social changes and was not necessarily a revolutionary act.