You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern animal behavioral studies, and in animal rights literature, to argue both for and against the position that human beings are special and unique because of one or another attribute or skill that they are believed to possess. Some of the claims of man’s unique endowments have in recent years become the subject of intensive investigation by cognitive ethologists carried out in non-laboratory conte...
The mid-second-century apocryphal infancy gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which deals with the childhood of Jesus from age five to age twelve, has attained only limited interest from scholars. Much research into the story has also been seriously misguided - especially study of the story's origin, character, and setting. This book gives a fresh interpretation of the infancy gospel, not least by applying a variety of new approaches, including orality studies, narrative studies, gender studies, and social-scientific approaches. The book comes to a number of radically new conclusions: The Gospel of Thomas is dependent on oral storytelling and has far more narrative qualities than has been previous...
We typically take public space for granted, as if it has continuously been there, yet public space has always been the expression of the will of some agency (person or institution) who names the space, gives it purpose, and monitors its existence. And often its use has been contested. These new essays, written for this volume, approach public space through several key questions: Who has the right to define public space? How do such places generate and sustain symbolic meaning? Is public space unchanging, or is it subject to our subjective perception? Do we, given the public nature of public space, have the right to subvert it? These eighteen essays, including several case studies, offer conv...
Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the Epistle of James offers an interpretation of Jas 2:1-13 putting the text in the midst of the Roman imperial system of rank. This study shows that the conflict of the text has more to do with differences of rank than poverty and wealth. The main problem is that the Christian assemblies are acting according to Roman cultural etiquette instead of their Jewish-Christian heritage when a Roman equestrian and a beggar visit the assembly. The members of the assemblies are accused of having become too Roman. From a postcolonial perspective, this is a typical case of hybrid identities. Additional key concepts from postcolonialism, such as diaspora, ‘othering’, naming of oppressors, and binarisms such as coloniser/colonised, centre/margin, honour/shame and power/powerless, are highlighted throughout the study.
this book analyzes Q in the light of compostitional conventions of ancient wisdom genres. Genre-critical models are employed to subject the Q materials to comprehensive analysis, criticallly assess redaction-histories, and show that Q conforms to conventions of ancient paraenesis.
In this collection, Stations on the Journey of Inquiry, David Burrell launches a revolutionary reinterpretation of how any inquiry proceeds, boldly critiquing presumptuous theories of knowledge, language, and ethics. While his later publications, Analogy and Philosophical Language (1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (1979), elucidate Aquinas's linguistic theology, these early writings show what often escapes articulation: how one comes to understanding and "takes" a judgment. Although Aquinas serves as an axial figure for Burrell's expansive corpus of scholarship spanning more than fifty years, this selection of essays presents other positions and counterpositions to whom his own philosophica...
This book studies in detail the afterlife scene in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31). The description of the afterlife is related, on the one hand, to the overall Hellenistic cultural milieu and, on the other hand, to Luke's eschatological views.
In this study, Michael Immendorfer examines the relationship between the New Testament letter to the Ephesians and the ancient city of Ephesus, which had the great Artemis as its goddess. He seeks to make a contribution to the discussion on the extent to which conclusions can be drawn concerning the local-historical explanation of New Testament epistles by viewing the latter through the lens of Greco-Roman cultic practices. Thus the contents of Ephesians are compared with the abundantly available archaeological and epigraphical sources of the Asia Minor metropolis. This endeavour reveals that the letter contains numerous unequivocal references to the cult of Artemis, a nexus suggesting that the author was very familiar with the historical background of ancient Ephesus and contextualised his letter accordingly for the intended readers who lived in this particular cultic environment.
Readings in Social Evolution and Development presents a collection of articles on a specialized aspect of sociology, or social psychology. The book starts by describing social change and development and the role of institutionalization, individual behavior, and role performance on such change and development. The text also discusses the basic problems of evolutionary perspective in sociology and studies of development and modernization. The theories of social change, the problem of evolution, and the major trends of change in the contemporary setting, such as changes in the industrial societies and alternative courses of political development in the new states are also encompassed. Sociologists and social psychologists and students taking sociology courses will find the book useful.