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Dr. Arik Greenberg had studied religion and spirituality all his life, earning advanced academic degrees and teaching on the college level. But none of this would be sufficient preparation for his true spiritual journey. In The Exile, the first book of a trilogy, his challenge would be to protect his parents from their mental illnesses, borne out of a family legacy of abuse, and to rescue the family home from his mother's deadly compulsive hoarding. His journey would lead him from a simple, trusting, ingenuous faith-through stages of doubt, anger, and Job-like questioning-and ultimately to a more complex and nuanced relationship with the Divine.
As a college professor, Dr. Arik Greenberg had studied religion all his life, earning advanced academic degrees in his field. But none of this would sufficiently prepare him for his true spiritual journey. In The Exile, the first book of a trilogy, his challenge was to rescue the family home from his mother's deadly compulsive hoarding, and to protect his parents from their mental illnesses, borne out of a family legacy of abuse. In book two, I Am the Exile, he dealt with the untimely deaths of his parents and cleared out the family home to prepare it for rental, coming to grips with the lingering residue of his mother's hoarding. In book three of the Exile Trilogy, Arik continues his journey to save his family home from financial ruin, becomes a national leader in the movement to unionize adjunct faculty in higher education, and ultimately seeks to reconfigure and restore his ailing relationship with God. His journey would lead him from a simple, trusting, ingenuous faith-through stages of doubt, anger, and Job-like questioning-and ultimately to a more complex and nuanced relationship with the Divine.
«My Share of God's Reward» refers to a quote from Ignatius of Antioch, speaking of the desired compensation for his impending martyrdom. The author investigates the roles and widely varying conceptions of the afterlife presented in early Christian martyrdom accounts and concludes that personal immortality is integral to the functioning of these texts, as the anticipated reward for a martyr's death. Accordingly, the very diverse conceptions of the afterlife presented in them are indicative of the frequently ignored theological diversity and experimental spirit prevalent in both early Christianity and late Second Temple Judaism. The discussion also incorporates a unique definition of martyrdom that recognizes the genealogical and developmental connections between Christian martyrdom and its antecedents.
Death in Second-Century Christian Thought explores how the meaning of death was conceptualized in this crucial period of the history of the church. Through an exploration of some key metaphors and other figures of speech that the early church used to talk about this interesting but difficult topic, the author argues that the early church selected, modified, and utilized existing views on the subject of death in order to offer a distinctively Christian view of death based on what they believed the word of God taught on the subject, particularly in light of the ongoing story of Jesus following his death-his burial and resurrection. In short, the book shows how Christians interacted with the views of death in late antiquity, coming up with their own distinctive view of death.
In an age in which scholars continue to produce books on the nature and significance of Jesus's death, books that often assume the Old Testament cult was the New Testament authors' primary background for their conception of Jesus's death, Jarvis J. Williams offers a fresh and novel contribution regarding both the nature of and background influences behind Paul's conception of Jesus's death. He argues that Paul's conception of Jesus's death both as an atoning sacrifice and as a saving event for Jews and Gentiles was significantly influenced by Maccabean Martyr Theology. To argue his thesis, Williams engages in an intense exegesis of 2 and 4 Maccabees while also interacting with other Second T...
At the 2010 Wheaton Theology Conference, leading New Testament scholar N. T. Wright and nine other prominent biblical scholars and theologians gathered to consider Wright's prolific body of work. Compiled from their presentations, this volume includes Wright's two main addresses plus nine other essays of critical response.
Martyrdom is a phenomenon common to many of the world's religious traditions. But why? In this study, John Soboslai offers insights into the practices of self-sacrifice within specific sociopolitical contexts. Providing a new understanding of martyrdom through the lens of political theology, he analyzes discourses and performances in four religious traditions during social and political crises, beginning with second-century Christianity in Asia Minor, where the term 'martyr' first took its meaning. He also analyzes Shi'a Islam in the 1980s, when 'suicide bombing' first appeared as a strategy in West Asia; global Sikhism during World War I, where martyrs stood for and against the British Raj; and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhism, where self-immolators used their bodies in opposition to the programs of the People's Republic of China. Presenting a new theory of martyrdom linked to constructions of sovereign authority, Soboslai reveals common features of self-sacrifice and demonstrates how bodily performances buttress conceptions of authority.
In Christians, the State, and War: An Ancient Tradition for the Modern World, Gordon Heath argues that the pre-Constantinian Christian testimony regarding the state’s just use of violence was remarkably uniform and that it was arguably a catholic, or universal, tradition. More specifically, that tradition had five interrelated and intertwined constitutive areas of consensus that can best be understood as parts of one collective tradition. Heath further argues that those five related areas of an early church tradition shaped all subsequent theological developments on views of the state, its use of violence, and the conditions of Christian participation in said violence. Whereas the sorry and sordid instances in the church’s history related to violence were times when the church drifted from those convictions of consensus, the cases when Christians had a more stellar record of responding to the horrors of the world were times when they lived up to them. Consequently, the way forward today is for Christians to forgo beginning with the just war-pacifist debate, and, instead, to begin by letting their views on war and peace be shaped by that ancient tradition.