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In recent decades historians have emphasized just how dynamic and varied early modern Europe was. Previously held notions of monolithic and static societies have now been replaced with a model in which new ideas, different cultures and communities jostle for attention and influence. Building upon the concept of interaction, the essays in this volume develop and explore the idea with specific reference to the ways in which diasporas could act as translocal societies, connecting worlds and peoples that may not otherwise have been linked. The volume looks at the ways in which diasporas or diasporic groups, such as the Herrnhuters, the Huguenots, the Quakers, Jews, the Mennonites, the Moriscos a...
Another Modernity is a rich study of the life and thought of Elia Benamozegh, a nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher whose work profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish dialogue in twentieth-century Europe. Benamozegh, a Livornese rabbi of Moroccan descent, was a prolific writer and transnational thinker who corresponded widely with religious and intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. This idiosyncratic figure, who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for interreligious engagement, came to influence a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists i...
A selection of essays examining the significance of what Jewish history and Mediterranean studies contribute to our knowledge of the other. Jews and the Mediterranean considers the historical potency and uniqueness of what happens when Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Jews meet in the Mediterranean region. By focusing on the specificity of the Jewish experience, the essays gathered in this volume emphasize human agency and culture over the length of Mediterranean history. This collection draws attention to what made Jewish people distinctive and warns against facile notions of Mediterranean connectivity, diversity, fluidity, and hybridity, presenting a new assessment of the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean.
In God and Natural Order: Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, Shaun Henson brings a theological approach to bear on contemporary scientific and philosophical debates on the ordered or disordered nature of the universe. Henson engages arguments for a unified theory of the laws of nature, a concept with monotheistic metaphysical and theological leanings, alongside the pluralistic viewpoints set out by Nancy Cartwright and other philosophers of science, who contend that the nature of physical reality is intrinsically complex and irreducible to a single unifying theory. Drawing on the work of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg and his conception of the Trinitarian Christian god, the author argues that a theological line of inquiry can provide a useful framework for examining controversies in physics and the philosophy of science. God and Natural Order will raise provocative questions for theologians, Pannenberg scholars, and researchers working in the intersection of science and religion.
Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures/scripturalization/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) "work" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"—understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language—as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.
Translating Religion advances thinking about translation as a critical category in religious studies, combining theoretical reflection about processes of translation in religion with focused case studies that are international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious. By operating with broad conceptions of both religion and translation, this volume makes clear that processes of translation, broadly construed, are everywhere in both religious life and the study of religion; at the same time, the theory and practice of translation and the advancement of translation studies as a field has developed in the context of concerns about the possibility and propriety of translating religious texts. The ...
A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war i...
This book brings the emerging fields of practical theology and theology of the arts into a dialogue beyond the bias of modern systematic and constructive theology. The authors draw upon postmodern, post-secular, feminist, liberation, and dialogical/dialectical philosophy and theology, and their critiques of the narrow modern emphases on reason and the scientific method, as the model for all knowledge. Such a practical theology of the arts focuses the work of theology on the actual practices that engage the arts in their various forms as the means of interpreting and understanding the nature of the communities and their members, as well as the mechanisms through which these communities engage...
In popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood, and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race? Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and univ...