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The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment pro...
Recent Reference Books in Religion provides incisive summaries and evaluations of more than 350 contemporary reference works on religious traditions ancient and modern that have been published in English, French and German. For maximum usefulness to readers, Professor Johnston has broadly defined religion to include not just the world religion of Christianity , Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism but also such alternative approaches as mythology, folklore, and the philosophy of ethics. Each entry, analyzing a particular work, includes full bibliographic details as well as commentary: outstanding articles and contributors are highlighted, strengths and weaknesses are carefully noted and weighed. Readers are directed to volumes whose strengths and weaknesses are carefully noted and weighed. Readers are directed to volumes whose strengths complement the weaknesses of others. An indispensable guide in any religious studies collection, Recent Reference Books in Religion: 2nd Edition includes works published through the end of 1997. It also includes a Glossary that describes types and functions of refernce books, and five indexes: Titles, Authors, Topics, Persons and Places.
Examines in detail the contexts of Brahms's masterpiece and demonstrates that, contrary to recent consensus, it was performed and received as an inherently Christian work during the composer's life.
This volume contains the plenary papers and a selection of shortpapers from the Seventh Annual RefoRC conference, which was held May 10–12th 2017 in Wittenberg. The contributions concentrate on the effects of Luther ́s new theology and draw the lines from Luther ́s contemporaries into the early seventeenth century. Developments in art, catholic responses and Calvinistic reception are only some of the topics. The volume reflects the interdisciplinarity and interconfessionality that characterizes present research on the 16th century reformations and underlines the fact that this research has not come to a conclusion in 2017. The papers in this conference volume point to lacunae and will certainly stimulate further research. Contributors: Wim François, Antonio Gerace, Siegrid Westphal, Edit Szegedi, Maria Lucia Weigel, Graeme Chatfield, Jane Schatkin Hettrick, Marta Quatrale, Aurelio A. García, Jeannette Kreijkes, Csilla Gábor, Gábor Ittzés, Balázs Dávid Magyar, Tomoji Odori, Gregory Soderberg, Herman A. Speelman, Izabela Winiarska-Górska, Erik A. de Boer, Donald Sinnema, Dolf te Velde.
This stimulating collection of essays by prominent scholars honors Turid Karlsen Seim. Bodies, Borders, Believers brings together biblical scholars, ecumenical theologians, archeologists, classicists, art historians, and church historians, working side by side to probe the past and its receptions in the present. The contributions relate in one way or another to Seim's broad research interests, covering such themes as gender analysis, bodily practices, and ecumenical dialogue. The editors have brought together an international group of scholars, and among the contributors many scholarly traditions, theoretical orientations, and methodological approaches are represented, making this book an interdisciplinary and border-crossing endeavor. A comprehensive bibliography of Seim's work is included.
The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers ...
This anthology assembles cross-disciplinary perspectives on the experience of and responses to forms of material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany, tracing how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of such events as war, religious reform, bankruptcy, religious marginalization, the death of spouses and children, and the loss of freedom of movement through a spectrum of activities including writing poetry, keeping diaries, erecting monuments, collecting books, singing, painting, reconfiguring space, repeatedly migrating, and painting, and thereby not only turned loss into gain but self-consciously made history. Emerging from the 2008 interdisiplinary conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, the essays reveal how loss helped to create identity and gave rise to agency and creativity on the cusp of modernity. Contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Claudia Benthien, Jill Bepler, Duane J. Corpis, Alexander J. Fisher, Ulrike Gleixner, Claudia Jarzebowski, Hans Medick, Barbara Lawatsch Melton, Christopher Ocker, Helmut Puff, Thomas Max Safley, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Lynne Tatlock, Mara Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Bethany Wiggin.
Kierkegaard has always enjoyed a rich reception in the fields of theology and religious studies. This reception might seem obvious given that he is one of the most important Christian writers of the nineteenth century, but Kierkegaard was by no means a straightforward theologian in any traditional sense. He had no enduring interest in some of the main fields of theology such as church history or biblical studies, and he was strikingly silent on many key Christian dogmas. Moreover, he harbored a degree of animosity towards the university theologians and churchmen of his own day. Despite this, he has been a source of inspiration for numerous religious writers from different denominations and t...
Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called 'superstitious' by educated elites. For centuries religious believers used 'superstition' as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith 'wrongly'. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to m...
This innovative volume spans the early modern period and ranges across literary genres, confessional divides and European borders. It brings together twenty-three scholars from thirteen different countries to explore the dynamic and profound ways in which polemical theology, its discourses and codes, interacted with non-theological literary genres in this era. Offering depth as well as breadth, the contributions chart a myriad of intersections between Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed polemics and a range of literary types composed in Latin and the vernacular across Europe. Individual essays discuss how genres such as history and poetry often represented a vehicle to promote and vali...