Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> History

Many recent studies have argued that the self is a modern invention, a concept developed in the last three centuries. Religion and the Self in Antiquity challenges that idea by presenting a series of studies that explore the origins, formation, and limits of the self within the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. Drawing on recent work on the body, gender, sexuality, the anthropology of the senses, and power, contributors make a strong case that the history of the self does indeed begin in antiquity, developing as Western religion itself developed.

This study of the religious landscape of Indianapolis--the summative volume of the Lilly Endowment's Project on Religion and Urban Culture conducted by the Polis Center at IUPUI--aims to understand religion's changing role in public life. The book examines the shaping of religious traditions by the changing city. It sheds light on issues such as social capital and faith-based welfare reform and explores the countervailing pressures of "decentering"--the creation of multiple (sub)urban centers--and civil religion's role in binding these centers into one metropolis.

Polis Center Series...

Soldiers of Christ brings together for the first time in one volume eleven critical writings about the saints from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

To understand European culture and society in the Middle Ages it is essential to understand the role of Christianity. And there is no better way to understand that role than to study that religion's greatest human heroes, the saints. For if Christians regarded God as their king, then the saints were the Christian nobility, human members of the divine court. To use one much-repeated phrase, they served as "soldiers of...

This easily accessible volume, which grew out of a series of lectures presented at the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, aims to provide a coherent introduction to Byzantine culture with a focus on the interconnected realms of art and religion. The eight participants have revised their lectures into chapters on Byzantine history, theology, icons and icon theory, church architecture, monumental painting, silver church furnishings, illustrated liturgical books, and pilgrimage. In addition to presenting current research on this range of topics, the chapters each contribute original scholarship...

Since 1965 the Korean American population has grown to over one million people. These Korean Americans, including immigrants and their offspring, have founded thousands of Christian congregations and scores of Buddhist temples in the United States. In fact, their religious presence is perhaps the most distinctive contribution of Korean Americans to multicultural diversity in the United States. Korean Americans and Their Religions takes the first sustained look at this new component of the American religious mosaic.

The fifteen chapters focus on cultural, racial, gender, and...

Since 1965 the Korean American population has grown to over one million people. These Korean Americans, including immigrants and their offspring, have founded thousands of Christian congregations and scores of Buddhist temples in the United States. In fact, their religious presence is perhaps the most distinctive contribution of Korean Americans to multicultural diversity in the United States. Korean Americans and Their Religions takes the first sustained look at this new component of the American religious mosaic.

The fifteen chapters focus on cultural, racial, gender, and...

In the religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, gods and demigods were neither abstract nor distant, but communicated with mankind through signs and active intervention. Men and women were thus eager to interpret, appeal to, and even control the gods and their agents. In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, a distinguished array of scholars explores the many ways in which people in the ancient world sought to gain access to--or, in some cases, to bind or escape from--the divine powers of heaven and earth....

For centuries, the rosary has been one of the most popular expressions of religious devotion among Roman Catholics, but its origins remain obscure. Stories of the Rose presents a compelling and readable history of the rosary in its formative years. It explores the many spiritual, literary, and artistic dimensions of the rosary and explains how and why it became so popular on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.

Eros for the Other takes up the problem of how truth claims and ethical norms can survive the increasingly radical recognition of the historical, cultural, pluralistic, and often ideological character of human experience. Sharing with postmodernism a suspicion of totalizing forms of knowledge and practice, Wendy Farley parts with postmodernism in defending the possibility of truth and ethics. Arguing that reality occurs in the concrete existence of actual beings (human and otherwise), she develops an interpretation of the nature of knowledge as an eros for the other--as an...

This timely collection of 13 essays addresses a variety of aspects of political-religious interaction in the former Eastern Bloc. The studies reported here draw upon both quantitative and qualitative research methods in examining politics and religion in the former Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and in Poland and Hungary. Contributors from North American and Western, Central, and Eastern Europe bring a fascinating variety of perspectives and styles of analysis to bear permitting a dual comparative overview--not only of the different countries but of different...