This book views Jacques-Louis David s pre-Revolutionary Oath of the Horatii as the realization of political and cultural gender struggle and goes back to antiquity and to Pierre Corneille s seventeenth-century play Horace to trace major antecedents of David s work. The play begins with Livy s account of gender strife in the Roman family of the Horatians. As Horace returns from battle against Alba, he is bitterly reproached by his sister Camille for slaying her Alban fiance. Outraged, Horace kills her and is subsequently tried by the Roman state and freed. Corneille s 1640...

Ibrahim Malik's stories and imaginary dialogues with his soul, granddaughter, beloved, parents, historical figures, philosophers, politicians, invented friends, and made-up acquaintances offer a faithful picture of the various plights, worries, anxieties, and threats suffered by the Arabs (belonging to what is paradoxically called the Israeli-Palestinian community) as well as by all of modern men. These dialogues often present complex and contradictory interactions between the old and the young, parents and children, lovers and sweethearts, politicians and people, philosophers and students,...

Dances that embody the feminine teach the dancer and the observers inside and outside the faith tradition about women's experiences, expressions, and understandings within their respective faith traditions. In Embodying the Feminine in the Dances of the World's Religions, the author immerses herself in four dance traditions and explores what their dance teaches about women's experiences in their faith tradition. Bharatanatyam is a classical Indian dance stemming from the devadasi system; kabuki onnagata are Japanese male enactors of female-likeness; the Mevlevi Order of America allows...

Generosity and Gratitude: A Philosophical Psalm gives expression, in free verse, to our common human experience of generosity and gratitude. It opens with rejoicing at the presence of the abundance characterizing our world of sky, sea, and land, and laments in sorrow the scarcity we experience in that same world. In joyful response to abundance, the psalm continues as a meditative reflection on singers singing a song. Singing serves as a model for understanding generosity, which in turn corrects the lamentable scarcities we experience. In singing, or in any act of generosity, we enrich...

Pornography has always been central to debates about sex and emerging new media technologies. Today, debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography s significance as a focus of definition, debate, and myth; its development as a mainstream entertainment industry; and the emergence of the new economy of Porn 2.0, and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica, and investigates the rise of the online...

A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles explores Acts, with its twofold motif of self-exaltation and self-attribution of divine prerogatives, from the viewpoint of postcolonial criticism. The Lukan community struggles to legitimize itself, in hybrid fashion, before two structures of powers or hegemonies: the Roman Empire and its system of imperial worship and the defining institutions of Judaism.
Acts emerges as a hidden transcript within the system of imperial worship in Rome pointing to the fate of any power that would usurp divine prerogatives and claim allegiance to...

Biblical scholarship, like many other disciplines, has become increasingly isolated. As a result, the field has not borrowed as much from other areas of scholarship as it could have and has exerted a smaller impact upon the larger intellectual community. A significant portion of Pagans and Practitioners deals with how the New Testament can be read as a rebuttal of Pagan rivals. In doing so, greater linkages with other disciplines are reestablished. Discussion of how the tools developed by Biblical criticism can serve other, secular disciplines are provided. Collectively, this book...

The Last Book of Postmodernism comprises set of essays written on and about postmodernism and education. It is written in an apocalyptic tone that treats themes of religion and spiritualism, drawing on poststructuralist sources of inspiration, to contrast the present postmodern condition and the philosophical significance and historical influence of Nietzsche s statement God is dead. The book considers the meaning of the end of Christendom and the prospect of global spirituality. It also considers the end of literature and the beginning of user-generated cultures and the implications...

The Dreams of Matthew 1:18-2:23: Tradition, Form, and Theological Investigation critically examines the five dream passages of Matthew 1:18-2:23 to demonstrate that Matthew employed dream narratives to defend allegations concerning Jesus birth and to provide etiological reasons both for why Jesus went to Egypt and how Jesus happened to live in Nazareth. A diachronic survey of dream records in the Ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Second Temple writings reveals that dream narratives fall into two major categories: message dreams and symbolic dreams. Every dream...

Tirso de Molina has been the subject of less than half as much scholarly research as either of his Golden Age counterparts, Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. Tirso s only mythological play, El Aquiles, remains one of the least studied of his plays, and when studied, is generally considered in isolation from the rest of his dramatic production. The Achillean Hero in the Plays of Tirso de Molina traces the development of the figure of the Achillean hero in three of Tirso s plays, El Aquiles, La vida y muerte de Herodes, and La venganza de Tamar, and in...