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Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
This collection of essays derives from a conference on Violence, Culture and Identity held in St. Andrews in June 2003. It examines postcolonial cultures and identities by investigating the way in which violence is represented by Francophone creative artists.
How the West Was Won contains articles in three main areas of the humanities. It focuses on various aspects of literary imagination, with essays ranging from Petrarch to Voltaire; on the canon, with essays on western history as one of shifting cultural horizons and ideals, and including censorship; and on the Christian Middle Ages, when an interesting combination of religion and culture stimulated the monastic and intellectual experiments of Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard. The volume is held together by the method of persistent questioning, in the tradition of the western church father and icon of the self Augustine, to discover what the values are that drive the culture of the West: where do they come from and what is their future? This volume is a Festschrift for Burcht Pranger of the University of Amsterdam.
Drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary range of sources that goes well beyond the writings of theologians and canonists to include liturgical texts and practices, the rulings of popes and church councils, saints' lives, chronicles, imaginative literature, and poetry, Faith, Fiction and Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates illuminates the emergence and fortunes of these three controversies and the historical contexts that situate their development. Each debate has its own story line, its own turning points, and its own seminal figures whose positions informed its course. The thinkers involved in each case were, and regarded one another as being, members of the orthodox western Christian communion. Thus, another finding of this book is that Christian orthodoxy in the Middle Ages was able to encompass and accept disagreements both wide and deep on a sacrament seen as fundamental to Christian identity, faith and practice.
This contribution to the global history of ideas uses biographical profiles of 18th-century contemporaries to find what Salafist and Sufi Islam, Evangelical Protestant and Jansenist Catholic Christianity, and Hasidic Judaism have in common. Such figures include Muḥammad Ibn abd al-Waḥhab, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Israel Ba’al Shem Tov. The book is a unique and comprehensive study of the conflicted relationship between the “evangelical” movements in all three Abrahamic religions and the ideas of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Centered on the 18th century, the book reaches back to the third century for precedents and context, and forward to the 21st for the legacy of these movements. This text appeals to students and researchers in many fields, including Philosophy and Religion, their histories, and World History, while also appealing to the interested lay reader.
Formerly known by its subtitle "Internationale Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaft und Grenzgebiete", the International Review of Biblical Studies has served the scholarly community ever since its inception in the early 1950's. Each annual volume includes approximately 2,000 abstracts and summaries of articles and books that deal with the Bible and related literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha, Non-canonical gospels, and ancient Near Eastern writings. The abstracts - which may be in English, German, or French - are arranged thematically under headings such as e.g. "Genesis", "Matthew", "Greek language", "text and textual criticism", "exegetical methods and approaches", "biblical theology", "social and religious institutions", "biblical personalities", "history of Israel and early Judaism", and so on. The articles and books that are abstracted and reviewed are collected annually by an international team of collaborators from over 300 of the most important periodicals and book series in the fields covered.
In Augustine's Leaders, Peter Iver Kaufman works from the premise that appropriations of Augustine endorsing contemporary liberal efforts to mix piety and politics are mistaken--that Augustine was skeptical about the prospects for involving Christianity in meaningful political change. His skepticism raises several questions for historians. What roles did one of the most influential Christian theologians set for religious and political leaders? What expectations did he have for emperors, statesmen, bishops, and pastors? What obstacles did he presume they would face? And what pastoral, polemical, and political challenges shaped Augustine's expectations--and frustrations? Augustine's Leaders answers those questions and underscores the leadership its subject provided as he continued to commend humility and compassion in religious and political cultures that seemed to him to reward, above all, celebrity and self-interest.
Enchantment and Creed in the Hymns of Ambrose of Milan offers the first critical overview of the hymns of Ambrose of Milan in the context of fourth-century doctrinal song and Ambrose's own catechetical preaching. Brian P. Dunkle, SJ, argues that these settings inform the interpretation of Ambrose's hymnodic project. The hymns employ sophisticated poetic techniques to foster a pro-Nicene sensitivity in the bishop's embattled congregation. After a summary presentation of early Christian hymnody, with special attention to Ambrose's Latin predecessors, Dunkle describes the mystagogical function of fourth-century songs. He examines Ambrose's sermons, especially his catechetical and mystagogical works, for preached parallels to this hymnodic effort. Close reading of Ambrose's hymnodic corpus constitutes the bulk of the study. Dunkle corroborates his findings through a treatment of early Ambrosian imitations, especially the poetry of Prudentius. These early readers amplify the hymnodic features that Dunkle identifies as "enchanting," that is, enlightening the "eyes of faith."
This book proposes a method of mystagogy based on the preaching of Ambrose of Milan. Chapter 1 establishes the need for mystagogy. chapter 2 lays out the historical context of Ambrose and his church. Chapters 3-8 are a series of six historical studies on Ambrose and his church that correspond to the components of a homiletic method. Chapter 9 proposes a method of mystagogy for the contemporary church based on Ambrose's preaching.
These sermons by Ambrose of Milan (340–397 AD) provide a window into the preaching and scriptural exegesis of the legendary bishop, whose exposition of the Old Testament was instrumental in the conversion of Augustine of Hippo and in the development of Latin theology. In his treatise On Noah and his two Defenses for David, Ambrose borrows from influential Greek theologians, including Philo of Alexandria, Origen, and Didymus the Blind, while developing his own commentary on the exemplary patriarchs. Ambrose’s exegesis typifies both his attention to the letter of Scripture as well as his spiritual and allegorical reading of the holy figures or “saints” who lived before Christ. The firs...