Latinos/Latinas are the largest "minority" in the United States, but the field of U.S. Latino/Latina studies is still in its infancy. This work represents the first single volume ever published on the U.S. Latino/Latina religious experience, an area that is even less explored. A carefully selected group of experts examines the major sub-groups of Latinos/Latinas including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, along with some of the lesser studied groups such as Dominicans and Central Americans. In addition, the volume includes important thematic chapters on the role of art,...

Latinos/Latinas are the largest "minority" in the United States, but the field of U.S. Latino/Latina studies is still in its infancy. This work represents the first single volume ever published on the U.S. Latino/Latina religious experience, an area that is even less explored. A carefully selected group of experts examines the major sub-groups of Latinos/Latinas including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, along with some of the lesser studied groups such as Dominicans and Central Americans. In addition, the volume includes important thematic chapters on the roles of art,...

Presents a Spanish primer on biblical criticism and key problems in religion and philosophy. This book critically reviews the classic arguments for the existence of God, alleged miracles and faith healing, the belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and many other topics."

In this radical critique of his own academic specialty, biblical scholar Hector Avalos calls for an end to biblical studies. He outlines two main arguments for this surprising conclusion. First, academic biblical scholarship has clearly succeeded in showing that the ancient civilization that produced the Bible held beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world and humanity that are fundamentally opposed to the views of modern society. The Bible is thus largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of contemporary human beings. Second, Avalos criticizes his colleagues for applying...

In this immensely wide-ranging and fascinating study, Avalos critiques the common claim that the abolition of slavery was due in large part to the influence of biblical ethics. Such a claim, he argues, is characteristic of a broader phenomenon in biblical scholarship, which focuses on defending, rather than describing, the ethical norms encountered in biblical texts. The first part of Avalos's critique explores how modern scholars have praised the supposed superiority of biblical ethics at the cost of diminishing or ignoring many similar features in ancient Near Eastern cultures. These...

Did Jesus ever do anything wrong? Judging by the vast majority of books on New Testament ethics, the answer is a resounding No. Writers on New Testament ethics generally view Jesus as the paradigm of human standards and behaviour. But since the his-torical Jesus was a human being, must he not have had flaws, like everyone else? The notion of a flawless human Jesus is a paradoxical oddity in New Testament ethics. According to Avalos, it shows that New Testament ethics is still primarily an apologetic enterprise de-spite its claim to rest on critical and historical scholarship. The Bad Jesus is...