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A monumental work that presents a solid introduction to early Christian literature to the English reading public. It is the first work of its kind written originally in English. Reviewers were unanimous in heaping praise upon the publication and looking upon it as a breakthrough in studying the Fathers of the Church.
A fascinating re-creation, with impeccable scholarship, of the early attifudes towards music and singing in Christian worship, done in the context of the cultures in which the Church grew up.
"In the early Roman empire, Christians were seen by pagans as overthrowers of ancient gods and destroyers of the prevailing social order. Allegations that Christians recognized each other by secret marks, met at night and made love to one another indiscriminately, worshipped the head of an ass and the genitals of their high priests, and ate children were widely believed. In examining these charges and the Christian response to them, Benko has provided a persuasively argued and refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the confrontation of the pagan and early Christian worlds."[book cover].
This distinctive and contemporary departure from hackneyed discussions of political theory introduces readers to a contemporary personalism rooted in the work of Bartolome de Las Casas and emerging again in the contributions of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin as well as the liberation theology of Gustavo Guiterrez and Jon Sobrino. Thomas R. Rourke and Rosita A. Chazarreta Rourke introduce readers to new sources of personalism by investigating and revising the intellectual history of this theory and its development.
This volume provides an anthology of about 40 primary source documents that describe the work of religious communities that took care of pilgrims and the sick in the late antique and early medieval world. The project identifies letters, diary accounts, instructions, sermons, travelogues, and community records and rules that give us a window into a world of early communities that saw it as their duty and their privilege to care for the sick, to safeguard the pilgrim, and to host the stranger. Each document is placed in historical, geographical, and social context as it contributes to an emerging picture of these communities. The volume addresses the motivations and practices of communities that risked extending hospitality. Why did these communities take great risks for the socially vulnerable? What stake did they have in pilgrims and the sick? What communal experiences supported and sustained both the communities and their audiences? How was hospitality cultivated?
Made up of three books that are the earliest extant works of St. Augustine, these works claim to give a reliable picture of the mind and way of life of one of the greatest figures of the West, precisely at the moment that was for him most critical and vital. Augustine's Confessions and his earliest philosophical writings, represented here, are his most accessible extant works. Although his pieces are against pagan Platonism they represent the thought world which he and many other educated persons, pagan and Christian, inhabited at the time.
The purpose of this work is to determine the place of Melito's Peri Pascha in the paschal liturgy of the Quartodecimans at Sardis. Its conclusion is that Peri Pascha constitutes the two parts of the Quartodeciman liturgy. The first part of the work is a liturgical homily on Exodus 12 which was delivered on the eve of Pascha, and the second half is the text of a commemorative ritual which constituted the celebration of Pascha itself. This conclusion is based on a formal examination of the text in the contexts of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and of Jewish and Christian paschal liturgy and theology. This is the first full-length study of Peri Pascha to be published, and the first extensive study of the Quartodecimans since 1953.