The Christian concept of heaven flourished for almost two millennia, but it has lost much of its power in the last hundred years. Indeed today even theologians tend to avoid the topic. But heaven has always been a central tenet of the Christian faith, writes Jeffrey Burton Russell. If there is no heaven, no resurrection of the dead, the entire Christian story makes no sense. In this stimulating book, Russell sets out to rehabilitate heaven by forcefully attacking a series of ideas that have made belief in heaven, not to mention belief in God, increasingly difficult for modern people....
The Christian concept of heaven flourished for almost two millennia, but it has lost much of its power in the last hundred years. Indeed today even th...
The Christian concept of heaven flourished for almost two millennia, but it has lost much of its power in the last hundred years. Indeed today even theologians tend to avoid the topic. But heaven has always been a central tenet of the Christian faith, writes Jeffrey Burton Russell. If there is no heaven, no resurrection of the dead, the entire Christian story makes no sense. In this stimulating book, Russell sets out to rehabilitate heaven by forcefully attacking a series of ideas that have made belief in heaven, not to mention belief in God, increasingly difficult for modern people....
The Christian concept of heaven flourished for almost two millennia, but it has lost much of its power in the last hundred years. Indeed today even th...
Neither Christopher Columbus nor his contemporaries thought the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers--even noted historians. Inventing the Flat Earth is Russell's attempt to set the record straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s and then snowballed to outrageous proportions by the late 19th century....
Neither Christopher Columbus nor his contemporaries thought the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly established with t...
Well-known for his historical accounts of Satan and hell, Jeffrey Burton Russell here explores the brighter side of eternity: heaven. Dispensing with the cliche images of goodness that can make even heaven seem unbearable, the author stimulates our imagination with a history of how the joy of paradise has been conceived by writers, philosophers, and artists for whom heaven was an imminent reality. Russell not only explores concepts found among the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans as well as early and medieval Christians, but also addresses the intellectual problems heaven poses: how does...
Well-known for his historical accounts of Satan and hell, Jeffrey Burton Russell here explores the brighter side of eternity: heaven. Dispensing wi...
All the known theories and incidents of witchcraft in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century are brilliantly set forth in this engaging and comprehensive history. Building on a foundation of newly discovered primary sources and recent secondary interpretations, Jeffrey Burton Russell first establishes the facts and then explains the phenomenon of witchcraft in terms of its social and religious environment, particularly in relation to medieval heresies.
Russell treats European witchcraft as a product of Christianity, grounded in heresy more than in the magic and...
All the known theories and incidents of witchcraft in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century are brilliantly set forth in this enga...
Undeniably, evil exists in our world; we ourselves commit evil acts. How can one account for evil's ageless presence, its attraction, and its fruits? The question is one that Jeffrey Burton Russell addresses in his history of the concept of the Devil the personification of evil itself. In the predecessor to this book, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, Russell traced the idea of the Devil in comparative religions and examined its development in Western thought through ancient Hebrew religion and the New Testament. This volume follows its...
Undeniably, evil exists in our world; we ourselves commit evil acts. How can one account for evil's ageless presence, its attraction, and its fruit...
This text attempts to capture a glimpse of heaven ranging from the ethereal to the mundane, utilizing means as diverse as maps, cathedrals, songs, treatises, poems, visions and even sewer systems. It examines well-known and previously unexplored texts and artifacts from the fields of history, theology, philosophy, art history and literature to compliment and challenge more general surveys of the history of heaven.
This text attempts to capture a glimpse of heaven ranging from the ethereal to the mundane, utilizing means as diverse as maps, cathedrals, songs, tre...
The desert stood in stark opposition to the oikoumene, the inhabited world of the fourth century. Not because the world was a bad place, but because the desert 'understood geographically, religiously, spiritually, and mystically ' was the harsh, uncomprising place where the Christian could be perfected by God. Far from the Christian metropolis of Alexandria, removed from the well-known and much 'visited monastic settlements of the Thebaid, and infintely remote from Rome, lay the garrison towns of Aswan and Philae. There Christians and pagans coexisted. Integral to the christian community...
The desert stood in stark opposition to the oikoumene, the inhabited world of the fourth century. Not because the world was a bad place, but becaus...
