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Semiotics and Church Architecture
In recent decades semiotics has succeeded in establishing itself as a discipline with international recognition. As a discipline specifically devoted to the study of signs and sign systems, it is relevant to the discipline of theology, working as it does with verbal and non-verbal signs. Since 1976 Semanet, a Dutch study group, has applied Greimassian semiotics to linguistic theological statements. More recently, Gerard Lukken undertook the analysis of church buildings. It was at that stage that Mark Searle joint Semanet during a sabbatical leave. He applied the analytical method to a particular church: SS. Peter and Paul in Tilburg, which is of interest both as a representative modern churc...
Purity and Holiness
Purity has long been recognized as one of the essential drives which determines humankind's relationship with the holy. Codes of purity and impurity, dealing with such far-ranging topics as 'external stains' and 'inner remorse', represent the physical and 'bodily' side of religious experience and provide the key to the understanding of human orientation to nature, and the structure of society, including even relationships between the sexes. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, a number of articles study some rather neglected passages from both exegetical and cultural-anthropological standpoints. Next, it is shown that the concept of purity is far more central to the New Testament than previously ...
The Modern Pilgrim
This book is the product of a relatively long history of pilgrimage research in a Dutch theological setting. It is intended as a report for an international audience on this long-running programme. Two lines are followed in the book. The first is the track of liturgical studies, in which an historical, European ethnological and anthropological approach has predominated. The second is a social science track, with specific content coming from psychology of religion. The combination of these two lines has been extremely fruitful. In addition to results of various surveys of contemporary pilgrimage practice and the expansion of research into ritual and cultural context in which modern pilgrims find themselves, special attention is also bestowed on historiographic issues involved in orienting pilgrimage research, and its theoretical and methodological aspects. The places of pilgrimage examined here are Wittem, Dokkum and Amsterdam in The Netherlands, Banneux in Belgium, Lourdes and La Salette in France, and Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The central question which informs the whole study is to what extent one can perhaps speak of a new type of pilgrim today, the "modern pilgrim".
A Cloister on Trial
In 1517, the usually tranquil friary in the Hungarian town of Körmend found itself at the centre of controversy when its Augustinian friars, charged with drunkenness, sexual abuses and liturgical negligence, were driven out and replaced with observant Franciscans. The agent of change in this conflict, cardinal Thomas Bakócz, claimed to be acting in the name of ’cloister reform’ motivated by a religious agenda, while the Augustinians portrayed themselves as the victims of a political game. Based on the surviving interrogations of a papal enquiry into these events, this book illuminates the tensions and potential conflict that lurked within the religious culture of a seemingly unremarkab...
The Theologically Formed Heart
The Theologically Formed Heart invites the reader to consider the role of theology in the formation of virtues and passions, and, conversely, the role of virtues and passions in understanding Scripture, theology, and living a Christian life. The essays in this volume are offered in appreciation of the teaching, scholarship, and service to the church and world of Professor of Theology David J. Gouwens. They are organized in three sections: theological reflections, Reformed theology in service to the church, and studies in the thought of Soren Kierkegaard. Four important issues are explored from multiple perspectives: the Church's coming to terms with religious pluralism in mission, inter-reli...
Medieval Temporalities
"How was time experienced in the Middle Ages? What attitudes informed people's awareness of its passing - especially when tensions between eternity and human time shaped perceptions in profound and often unexpected ways? Is it a human universal or culturally specific - or both? The essays here offer a range of perspectives on and approaches to personal, artistic, literary, ecclesiastical and visionary responses to time during this period. They cover a wide and diverse variety of material, from historical prose to lyrical verse, and from liturgical and visionary writing to textiles and images, both real and imagined, across the literary and devotional cultures of England, Italy, Germany and Russia. From anxieties about misspent time to moments of pure joy in the here and now, from concerns about worldly affairs to experiences of being freed from the trappings of time, the volume demonstrates how medieval cultures and societies engaged with and reflected on their own temporalities."--Publisher's website.
Liturgy and Ethics
The connection between Christian ethics and liturgy has been on the research agenda for some decades now. Liturgy and Ethics addresses this issue departing from the particularity of the Reformed tradition and its potential for contributing to the discussion. The volume offers in-depth studies of how to understand God’s acting in worship, the centrality of justice, and the formative meaning of the liturgy, and relates these reflections to various moral issues and contemporary liturgical practices. In combining a specific theological approach with a broad disciplinary treatment of the topics this volume aims to push forward the scholarly discussion on liturgy and ethics in significant ways.
Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book
Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot—a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiousl...
Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits
Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits is a volume of 12 essays by a distinguished team of international scholars dealing with the place of indulgences in the religious life of Europe between roughly 1250 and the outbreak of the Reformation. Some of the articles offer regional analyses, stretching from Spain to the Netherlands, from England to Bohemia and Italy. Others deal with the theology and theological and practical controversies provoked by indulgences, or with thematic issues like the place of indulgences in fifteenth-century crusades, in pilgrimage, and the early exploitation of print in their distribution. The complementary nature of the articles builds into a fuller picture of the central, but hitherto neglected, role which indulgences had in late medieval European religious life.
Iconophages
An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids. How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own bo...
