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Challenging the widespread classification of evangelical theologian Balthasar Hubmaier (1480-1528) as a Schleitheim-adhering Anabaptist, this book argues that Hubmaier should instead be understood as a bridge between the Radical and Magisterial branches of the Reformation and provides for a deeper understanding of one of the 16th century's most creative and sophisticated thinkers.
"The characteristics of possession are numerous and vary between different socio-cultural and historical contexts. Different ideas of possession can be observed within different cultural and social contexts both past and present. This makes defining possession all the more difficult. Various approaches to "ideas of possession" in different academic disciplines and in different cultural contexts allow the discourse(s) to benefit from insights that would otherwise remain confined to the society under discussion or the field that determines the method of study. The introduction presents an overview of recent interdisciplinary research on possession and scholarly attempts at a working definition, followed by a brief outline of the individual case studies in this volume"--
This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.
Internationally recognized scholars from many parts of the world provide a critical survey of recent developments and achievements in the global field of religious studies. The work follows in the footsteps of two former publications: Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Jacques Waardenburg (1973), and Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Frank Whaling (1984/85). New Approaches to the Study of Religion completes the survey of the comparative study of religion in the twentieth century by focussing on the past two decades. Many of the chapters, however, are also pathbreaking and point the way to future approaches.
Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pict...
Religion and magic have played important roles within Eastern European societies where social reality and socio-political balance may differ greatly from those in the West. Although often thought of as being two distinct, even antagonistic forces, religion and magic find ways to work together. By taking on various examples in the multicultural settings of post-Soviet and post-socialist spaces, this collection brings together diverse historical and ethnographic analyses of orthodoxy and heterodoxy from the pre- and post-1989 periods, studies on the relationship of religious and state institutions to individuals practicing alternative forms of spirituality, and examples of borderlands as spaces of ambiguity. This volume is at the crossroads of anthropology, history, as well as cultural memory studies. Its archival and field research findings help understand how repurposing religious and magic practices worked into the transition that countries in Eastern Europe and beyond have experienced after the end of the Cold War.
This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.
In Hindu India both orality and sonality have enjoyed great cultural significance since earliest times. They have a distinct influence on how people approach texts. The importance of sound and its perception has led to rites, models of cosmic order, and abstract formulas. Sound serves both to stimulate religious feelings and to give them a sensory form. Starting from the perception and interpretation of sound, the authors chart an unorthodox cultural history of India, turning their attention to an important, but often neglected aspect of daily religious life. They provide a stimulating contribution to the study of cultural systems of perception that also adds new aspects to the debate on orality and literality.
The book presents the results of a long research into the life and work of the German theologian and teacher Fritz Jahr (1895–1953) from Halle an der Saale, who was the first to use the term "bioethics", as early as 1926. It is a revised history of bioethics with an overview of all 22 of Jahr’s known published papers. The analysis follows the diffusion after 1997 of the discovery of Fritz Jahr worldwide and particularly the contribution of Croatian bioethicists to it.