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This collection of eleven essays by biblical scholars, art historians, and experts in early Christianity explores a variety of topics and issues regarding the material culture of early Christianity recovered from Italy, Syria, Tunisia, and beyond. The essays place early Christian art representing such symbols as crosses, anchors, and shepherds found in sarcophagi, catacombs, architecture, mosaics, gems, and more in dialogue with New Testament and early Christian texts. Contributors Gregory M. Barnhill, Eric J. Brewer, Jeffrey M. Dale,† Zen Hess, Heidi J. Hornik, Jeffrey M. Hubbard, Robin M. Jensen, Bruce W. Longenecker, Mikeal Parsons, Christian Sanchez, Natalie Webb, Jason A. Whitlark, and David E. Wilhite place early Christian beliefs and practices in their proper historical, cultural, political, and religious contexts for scholars and students of the ancient world.
Military effectiveness can only be fully understood by accounting for its political and military tradeoffs. This book explains those tradeoffs.
Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultima...
In Piecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom that dominates interstate peace research, Antony and Thompson make the case that industrialization provides the starting point from which we can begin to unpack the transformation in conflict propensities among certain states.
Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.
Lobbying is an integral part of the political reality of the European Union and a highly competitive and dynamic field of interest groups. This book takes a systematic look at lobbyists in order to broaden our understanding of the staff entrusted with the responsibility of influencing European politics. Who are the European lobbyists? What are their professional backgrounds, career patterns, practices, and beliefs? The study uses a sociological framework to explore the professionalisation and professionalism of the field across national proveniences, policy fields and interest groups, and develops a systematic analysis that considers three different dimensions: occupational patterns, shared ...
Life, Death, and the Western Way of War traces when and how western soldiers--once regarded as simple fighting tools--became the far less expendable beings that we know today. In Kant's terms, the study traces the process through which soldiers have been turned from mere military means into ends in themselves. The book argues that such a major transformation is largely the result of a shift in the social meaning ascribed to soldiers' death. It suggests that looking at death can somehow provide a privileged angle to understanding the value that societies attach to life. The narrative emerging from the empirical evidence will show that the story of attitudes towards soldiers' death is the stor...
This is a book about European integration and mainstream parties of the left, the main underlying question driving it being: Given that the communist left was fatally wounded by the collapse of the Berlin Wall; given that, since then, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have not infrequently been attacked (especially by populists) as being no longer useful for making sense of politics; given that social democracy, understood as ‘national Keynesianism’ no longer appears to be viable (as reflected in its long-term electoral decline), what does it mean to be on the left in the early 21st century and what can be done to revive its fortunes? Its answer is that being on the left means embracing principles of equality and international solidarity, and that since the nation state is too small to respond effectively to climate change and the other most pressing issues of the present, no viable strategy for left-wing revival in Europe can dispense with European integration as a central element, of which European democratisation is a core component.
Provides comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of the key themes and principles of conflict economics.
The letters of Ignatius of Antioch portray Jesus in terms that are both remarkably exalted and shockingly vulnerable. Jesus is identified as God and is the sole physician and teacher who truly reveals the Father. At the same time, Jesus was born of Mary, suffered, and died. Ignatius asserts both claims about Jesus with minimal attempts to reconcile how they can simultaneously be embodied in one person. This book explores the ways in which Ignatius outlines his understanding of Jesus and the effects that these views were to have on both his immediate audience as well as some of his later readers. Ignatius utilizes stories throughout his letters, describes Jesus with designations that are at once traditional and reinvigorated with fresh meaning, and employs a dizzying array of metaphors to depict how Jesus acts. In turn, Ignatius and his audience are to respond in ways befitting their status in Christ because Jesus forms a lens through which to look at the world anew. Such a dynamic Christology was not to cease development in the second century but continued to inspire readers in creative ways through late antiquity and beyond.