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Most recent books about Jesus focus on history and biography. This book, however, focuses on culturally specific understandings of humility and meekness. Jesus the Meek King is a study of kingship in Matthew's Gospel that, unlike similar studies embedded within various commentaries on this Gospel, links meekness and kingship, placing both within the context of the Hellenistic world. In addition, it explores the specific virtue of "meekness" in Paul and in English literature from Tyndale to the present. Modern readers probably understand Jesus' use of the term "meek" to commend and exemplify submissive or humble behavior. "The meek" may even be seen unfavorably as those likely to submit tamely to oppression of injury. This provocative volume, however, proposes that Jesus as the meek king is better and more accurately understood as exercising the virtue of "disciplined calmness".
Revelatory essays on the Mary figures of the Bible.
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought...
This book offers an introduction to the literature of the New Testament, demonstrating how these writings can be approached and critically studied in an academic setting. Bruce Chilton and Deidre J. Good, two respected New Testament scholars, provide a narrative of the historical context and social world of the books of the New Testament, a chronological survey of the Gospels and letters, and the remaining writings (Apocrypha, Apocalyptic) with their special focus on the emerging church. Together with textboxes, exercises, questions, further readings, maps, timeline, and glossary, this brief introduction surveys and employs leading methods of study and equips students with the general literacy needed for successful and serious study of New Testament writings.
The aim of this book, Courage Beyond Fear: Re-Formation in Theological Education, is to combat actual crises we have survived in theological institutions. We first document responses of resistance to authoritarian structures in student and faculty meditations and sermons. Then through them we identify dispositions in community crises: shock, witness, flight or fight, marginalization, power in community, and forgiveness. Behind these dispositions we identify strategies: opposition without rancor; shared authority; vulnerability and truth telling; hope without expectation; courage beyond fear; humility without humiliation. The book proposes that these strategies of formation and resistance can be deployed in other authoritarian and paternalistic contexts. This book also describes actual realities behind public statements of institutional changes and catastrophes through process, not outcomes. It is the first description of actual crises in theological schools from student, faculty, and staff perspectives.
'I would like to make things beautiful, but a tawdry and repulsive kind of beauty. A braver sort than people have from birth. Sexy zombies on a bicep. That sort of thing.' Ces longs to be a tattoo artist and embroider skin with beautiful images. But for now she's just trying to reach adulthood without falling apart. Powerful, poetic and disturbing, Needlework is a girl's meditation on her efforts to maintain her bodily and spiritual integrity in the face of abuse, violation and neglect.
""This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit of a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely tra...
For sisters Mary Kennedy and Deirdre Ní Chinnéide, spirituality has been at the centre of their lives since childhood. Their home on St Brigid's Road in Clondalkin, Dublin, was around the corner from a holy well, a place that signalled family, community and divinity. In these pages, they draw on this heritage, with an emphasis on Celtic spirituality - a key focus in Deirdre's work and a long-held area of interest for Mary. The journey to the well is a pilgrimage to source, to that which remains steadfast whatever challenges we face. Traversing the Celtic seasons of Samhain, Imbolc, Bealtaine and Lughnasa, the authors explore themes such as hope, love and loss, resilience and new dawns, through personal reflections, stories, lore and healing words. Journey to the Well is a book of rich connection that celebrates the divine within each of us.
2021 Catholic Media Association Award third place award in academic studies Qoheleth, also called Ecclesiastes, has been bad news for women throughout history. In this commentary Lisa Wolfe offers intriguing new possibilities for feminist interpretation of the book's parts, including Qoheleth's most offensive passages, and as a whole. Throughout her interpretation, Wolfe explores multiple connections between this book and women of all times, from investigating how the verbs in the time poem in 3:1-8 may relate to biblical and contemporary women alike, to noting that if 11:1 indicates ancient beer making it thus reveals the women who made the beer itself. In the end, Wolfe argues that, by struggling with the perplexing text of Qoheleth, we may discover fruitful, against-the-grain reading strategies for our own time.
Arguably the biggest blockbuster love song ever composed, the Song of Songs holds a unique place in Jewish and Christian canons as the “holiest” book, in the minds of some readers, and the sexiest in its language and imagery. This commentary aims to interpret this vibrant Song in a contemporary feminist key, informed by close linguistic-literary and social-cultural analysis. Though finding much in the Song to celebrate for women (and men) in their embodied, passionate lives, this work also exposes tensions, vulnerabilities, and inequities between the sexes and among society at large—just what we would expect of a perceptive, poignant love ballad that still tops the charts.