Religion

Demonstrates definitively that the secularization thesis is correct, and religion is losing its grip on societies worldwide

In the decades since its introduction, secularization theory has been subjected to doubt and criticism from a number of leading scholars, who have variously claimed that it is wrong, flawed, or incomplete. In Beyond Doubt, Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun mount a strong defense for the theory, providing compelling evidence that religion is indeed declining globally as a result of modernization.

Though defenses of secularization theory have been mounted in the past, we now have many years’ worth of empirical data to illuminate trends, and can trace changes not just at a given point in time but over a trajectory. Drawing on extensive survey data from nations around the world, the book demonstrates that, in spite of its many detractors, there is robust empirical support for secularization theory. It also engages with the most prominent criticisms levied against the theory, showing that data that are said to refute the narrative of religious decline are easily explainable and in keeping with the broader tendency toward secularization.

Beyond simply defending secularization theory, the authors endeavor to formalize it, offering clear definitions of relevant terms and creating propositions that can be repeatedly and accurately tested. Beyond Doubt offers the strongest argument to date for the existence of a global secularization trend, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike who study religion and secularism.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious

For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.

Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

A rich study, with new research data, on eighteen Ptolemaic period sarcophagi housed in museums in Cairo, including the Grand Egyptian Museum

The individually designed anthropoid sarcophagi of the Ptolemaic period (ca. 330–30 BCE) offer a particularly rich and varied repertoire of hieroglyphic inscriptions and religious scenes. Being at the end of a long tradition of funerary literature, many of the epigraphs on these objects are variations or reinterpretations of older texts that have been circulated and transmitted over millennia.

Others are entirely new creations that provide insight into funerary beliefs of late ancient Egypt. The present volume is the second and last publication of a joint project between scholars from Cairo University and the University of Tübingen on Late and Ptolemaic period sarcophagi housed in the museums of Cairo. It includes the detailed publication of eighteen sarcophagi, which until now have only been known through brief descriptions. The facsimile drawings, detailed pictures, translations, and commentaries presented here will allow scholars to approach this corpus with a broad range of research questions.

An updated edition showcasing the social health of the least religious nations in the world

Religious conservatives around the world often claim that a society without a strong foundation of faith would necessarily be an immoral one, bereft of ethics, values, and meaning. Indeed, the Christian Right in the United States has argued that a society without God would be hell on earth.

In Society without God, Second Edition sociologist Phil Zuckerman challenges these claims. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secular societies are healthier, safer, greener, less violent, and more democratic and egalitarian than highly religious ones.

Society without God provides a rich portrait of life in a secular society, exploring how a culture without faith copes with death, grapples with the meaning of life, and remains content through everyday ups and downs. This updated edition incorporates new data from recent studies, updated statistics, and a revised Introduction, as well as framing around the now more highly developed field of secular studies. It addresses the dramatic surge of irreligion in the United States and the rise of the “nones,” and adds data on societal health in specific US states, along with fascinating context regarding which are the most religious and which the most secular.

A pioneering interdisciplinary study of the art, production and social functions of Late Antique ritual artefacts. Utilising case studies from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri and the Heidelberg archive it establishes new approaches, provides a holistic understanding of the multi-sensory aspects of ritual practice, and explores the transmission of knowledge traditions across faiths.

Urban Religion is an emerging research field cutting across various social science disciplines, all of them dealing with “lived religion” in contemporary and (mainly) global cities. It describes the reciprocal formation and mutual influence of religion and urbanity in both their material and ideational dimensions. However, this approach, if duly historicized, can be also fruitfully applied to antiquity.

Aim of the volume is the analysis of the entanglement of religious communication and city life during an arc of time that is characterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments. Bringing together textual analyses and archaelogical case studies in a comparative perspective, the volume zooms in on the historical context of the advanced imperial and late antique Mediterranean space (2nd–8th centuries CE).

"Enki and the World Order," a Sumerian myth from the early second millennium BCE, depicts the god Enki's reconstitution of the Sumerian world after an unspecified catastrophe. The myth ends with a face-off between Enki and the goddess of love and war, Inana, who is dissatisfied with Enki's allotment of functions to the other goddesses.

This volume presents a critical edition of the 472-line Sumerian text, with introduction, translation and commentary, based on 25 published and unpublished manuscripts, mostly from Nippur in what is now southern Iraq. All the manuscripts, with one exception, have been collated, and there are many new fragments and joins to previously known tablets.

This monograph aims to explore the production of political landscapes in Anatolia under the Hittite rule (1650-1200 BCE). The focus of the research is the geopolitical role played within the Hittite domain by three interconnected regions, located in South-Central Anatolia: Tarhuntassa, the Lower Land, and the port city of Ura.

Tarhuntassa, briefly the capital of the Hittite Empire under Muwatalli II, later became the center of an influential appanage kingdom after the restoration of the capital back at Hattusa. Geographically, the kingdom of Tarhuntassa overlapped with the 'Lower Land,' a buffer territory vital for Hittite military engagements in Western Anatolia. Ura served as a crucial Hittite-controlled port on the southern Anatolian coast, that facilitated trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Ugarit.

The research combines material data from archaeological excavations and surveys with textual sources, offering a holistic diachronic perspective on the impact of Hittite power networks in the target region. It also explores pre-Hittite and prehistorical interactions in South-Central Anatolia to provide a broader view of long-term structures and their impact on Hittite imperial dynamics.

Die anthropologischen Konzeptionen im Judentum der hellenistisch-römischen Zeit bilden ein wichtiges Bindeglied zwischen den entsprechenden Traditionen der älteren Texte der Hebräischen Bibel und denjenigen des Neuen Testaments sowie der rabbinischen Überlieferungen. Sie als einen konstitutiven Faktor religiöser Identität wahrzunehmen, ist für die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung des antiken Judentums wie auch für eine an Traditionslinien orientierte Biblische Theologie unabdingbar. Trotz zahlreicher Forschungen zur Antropologie der biblischen Überlieferungen im Alten und Neuen Testament bzw. zu den anthropologischen Konzepten ihrer Nachbarkulturen stellt eine Aufarbeitung dieser Thematik aber ein Forschungsdesiderat dar. Vor diesem Hintergrund versammelt dieser Band 20 einschlägige Aufsätze international bekannter Wissenschaftler zum Thema „Sünde und Tod“ . Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Einbeziehung des Materials aus den benachbarten Kulturen, wobei auch ägyptische Quellen zu Wort kommen. Der Band bietet so exemplarisch wichtige Grundlagen für die weitere Erforschung der antik-jüdischen Anthropologie in ihren kulturellen Bezügen.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Despite considerable scholarly efforts for many years, the last two decades of the Kingdom of Israel are still beneath the veil of history. What was the status of the Kingdom after its annexation by Assyria in 732 BCE? Who conquered Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom? When did it happen? One of the primary reasons for this situation lies in the discrepancies found in the historical sources, namely the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian texts.

Since biblical studies and Assyriology are two distinct disciplines, the gaps in the sources are not easy to bridge. Moreover, recent great progress in the archaeological research in the Southern Levant provides now crucial new data, independent of these textual sources.

This volume, a collection of papers by leading scholars from different fields of research, aims to bring together, for the first time, all the available data and to discuss these conundrums from various perspectives in order to reach a better and deeper understanding of this crucial period, which possibly triggered in the following decades the birth of "new Israel" in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and eventually led to the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its underlying theology.

Leviathan, a manifestation of one of the oldest monsters in recorded history (3rd millennium BCE), and its sidekick, Behemoth, have been the object of centuries of suppression throughout the millennia. Originally cosmic, terrifying creatures who represented disorder and chaos, they have been converted into the more palatable crocodile and hippo by biblical scholars today.

However, among the earliest Jews (and Muslims) and possibly Christians, these creatures occupied a significant place in creation and redemption history. Before that, they formed part of a backstory that connects the Bible with the wider ancient Near East. When examining the reception history of these fascinating beasts, several questions emerge.

Why are Jewish children today familiar with these creatures, while Christian children know next to nothing about them? Why do many modern biblical scholars follow suit and view them as minor players in the grand scheme of things? Conversely, why has popular culture eagerly embraced them, assimilating the words as symbols for the enormous? More unexpectedly, why have fundamentalist Christians touted them as evidence for the cohabitation of dinosaurs and humans?

In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar–scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations.

In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "Izi", both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "Izi" as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.

Babylonia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE is one of the most understudied periods of Mesopotamian history. In the last few years, discoveries of new texts and archaeological materials from the Sealand Dynasty have emerged, which expand the possibilities to fill this gap in our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. At the same time, scholars have started to revive Kassite studies using new materials, methods, and questions.

While those works are groundbreaking contributions to the field, many questions about the history and chronology, archaeology, economy, language of Babylonia during this period are still unsolved. This volume brings together eleven contributions by leading scholars in the Sealand and Kassite period, approaching those questions from an archaeological, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and economical point of view. The book opens with an introduction into the history and research on Babylonia under the Sealand Dynasty and the Kassites.

This book is the first comprehensive study of debts and credit system at Emar. It focuses on the socio-economic aspects of credit access and indebtedness as well as on the motivations behind debts and debt settlement in the city of Emar.

The credit system is analyzed through several factors: the purpose of debts, i.e., productive or consumptive; the procedures for granting loans; the strategies put in place to meet an obligation and to cope with economic difficulties; the consequences of non-fulfillment, which may lead to servitude or slavery; the different types of slavery; slave prices; the mechanisms of enslavement; and termination of slavery. Moneylending practices and the formation of servile conditions at Emar are studied in the context of the Syrian economy aiming to understand whether the Emar evidence conforms with a socio political and economic crisis that is generally acknowledged to have struck Syria, Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

This work is of sure relevance for scholars interested in socio-economic history, not only of the pertinent historical-geographical area.

In 1999, five scholars presented lectures at Washington National Cathedral about our images of God and what difference they make. This book is ideal for parish study groups and individuals to consider and discuss the viewpoints of Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Jack Miles, James Cone, and Andrew Sung Park.

"Does the face of God change? Years ago I would have said, 'No.' Countless hymns, passage of Scripture and confessions of faith assert or imply the changelessness of God. To take issue with traditions that are centuries, if not millennia old, seemed to be daunting and misguided....But when the great professions of confidence in God harden into philosophical propositions, one is bound to ask: What difference would it make to say that God has only one face? Even if true in some sense, the fact of the matter is that features each of us would count as necessary and changeless would be a matter of considerable debate."
- From the Introduction

The triliteral Arabic root ẓ-l-m occurs on almost every single page of the printed Qurʾān. Despite this central and consistent usage, it has not yet been studied within the field of Western Qurʾānic Studies. In its most basic sense, ẓ-l-m means ‘putting something in the wrong place’ but is often translated as ‘to do wrong’, ‘to act unjustly’, ‘injustice’, ‘evildoing’, or finally, ‘oppression’. As such, a study of ẓ-l-m elucidates significant ethico-religious dynamics and power relations that obtain within the qurʾānic text. While the present book does not contain a grand thesis on the origin or canonization of the Qurʾān nor claim to answer questions pertaining to the ultimate origins and formation of this multifaceted religious and historical text, it will contribute a systematic philological and semantic study of one root and its relations to other roots in the Qurʾān through a synthesis of three methodologies: Synchronic/diachronic analysis, semantic field analysis, and formulaic analysis.

This is what happened at the famous Zen monastery south of San Francisco.

From the best-selling author of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki (Crooked Cucumber), comes a memoir and oral history of Tassajara—a monastery founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Peopled like a Sixties film of Buddhist invasion, with hippies, dreamers, lovers, a wave of serious practitioners. Nyogen Senzaki, D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and of course Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker are all here. This is the story of what happened at and surrounding the founding of the first Zen monastery in the West.

Not every Catholic mother wants her son to be a priest.

The true story of a young man’s journey to become a Jesuit priest—written by his mother, a fallen-away Catholic who must come to terms with her son’s decision or risk losing him. It is an intimate, sometimes irreverent, and often searing examination of faith, family, and reconciliation.

“You send your son off to college and you think that in a few years you might get a call, and he’ll announce that he has someone he’s bringing home, someone he wants you to meet. But then that someone turns out to be a recruiter hawking a lifetime of poverty, chastity and obedience. What college kid in his right mind would sign up for that?”

The book offers a rare, often entertaining, glimpse into the highly unusual Jesuit formation process—which includes sending would-be priests off on pilgrimages with $35 in their pockets. It also takes on tough issues, from the church’s history of sexual abuse to its treatment of women, and asks tough questions: Is it possible to be Catholic, liberal, and a feminist all at the same time? What does it mean to call yourself a Catholic?

“We have a contemplation problem,” and here’s what to do about it.

Jacob Riyeff draws on 1,600 years of contemplative tradition in the West to show how humans are contemplative beings, what it means to contemplate in different areas of life, and how embracing a contemplative life can help lead anyone to a fuller experience of self, world, and communion with the Divine.

This is a volume of “spiritual theology,” using theological principles and understandings but exploring how to apply those principles and understandings to shape one’s daily living. Drawing on the ways that John Cassian, St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, William of Saint-Thierry, Dame Gertrude More, and others shaped and passed on the Christian inheritance, Contemplate brings this directly to bear on contemporary social and cultural situations. It seeks to answer the question, what does the contemplative tradition of the Latin west have to offer Christians living post-industrial, digitally-saturated, ecologically fraught lives?

This book is first in a new series, “Beyond Our Instincts”: succinct, multi-disciplinary, countercultural stances in an environment that sells us the idea that happiness is whatever you want now. These authors—all scholars of religion who are also religiously involved—suggest there are more important things, including some we may have forgotten.
     Coming in future publishing seasons:
     *Join (being together; refusing too much solitariness)
     *Imagine (on opting out of technique-obsessed culture)
     *Wait (the lost value of open questions and not-knowing)

The author of The Jew in the Lotus seeks to answer the Dalai Lama’s question.

Rodger Kamenetz, author of international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus, about a pilgrimage of rabbis to see H.H. the Dalai Lama (a historic dialogue between Jewish and Buddhist masters), watched as the rabbis asked H.H. in Dharamsala, “How does your spiritual practice purify afflictive emotions?” Rodger explains in this book, “This is the most fundamental question we might ask of any spiritual practice, any religion or philosophy of life. How do your practices help you purify afflictive emotions such as anxiety, envy, resentment, and shame?”

Kamenetz sets out to answer this question experimentally, in spiritual practice, through the contemplation of images in memory, dreams, perception, and prayer. These practices lead to a life of feeling which displaces negativity and reactivity.

Seeing into the Life of Things will help readers cultivate these skills—perception, memory, dreams, and prayer. The book is structured as a commentary on these practices building step-by-step from the simple “count your blessings” to more difficult images in dreams. Kamenetz shows how to use dreams as prompts and scripts, in order to learn how to experience feelings by acting them out.

Memoir and narrative threads also run through the book, revolving around the author’s relationship with Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—the most important Jewish teacher of the 20th century and the anchor of that trip to Dharamsala in 1990.

The pace of scholarly research and academic publication in fields of Judaica has quickened dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. The major consumers and producers of this new scholarship are found in Jewish Studies programs that have proliferated at institutions of higher learning around the world since the 1960s. From the vantage point of the nineties, it is difficult to fathom that until thirty years ago, Jewish studies courses were mainly limited to a few elite universities, rabbinical seminaries, and Hebrew teachers' colleges. Today there are few colleges at public or private insitutions of higher learning that do not sponsor at least some courses on aspects of Jewish study.
In light of this explosion of research on Jewish topics, non-specialists and educators can benefit from guidance through the thicket of new monographs, source anthologies, textbooks and scholarly essays. The Modern Jewish Experience, the result of a multi-year collaboration between the International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, offers just such guidance on a range of issues pertaining to modern Jewish history, culture, religion, and society.
With contributions from two dozen leading scholars, The Modern Jewish Experience presents practical information and guidelines intended to expand the teaching repertoire for undergraduate courses on modern Jewish life, as well as a means for college professors to enrich and diversify their courses with discussions on otherwise neglected Jewish communities, social and political issues, religious and ideological movements, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Sample syllabi are also included for survey courses set in diverse linguistic settings. An indispensible resource for undergraduate instruction, this volume may also be used to great profit by educators of adults in synagogue and Jewish communal settings, as well as by individual students engaged in private study.

This study explores the plausibility of a sexual morality that was primarily intended to ensure the production of ‘legitimate offspring’ in the traditional lifeworld. With this goal in mind, it is not surprising that adultery, contraception, homosexual relationships, divorce, and remarriage were subject to moral disapproval and in some cases even legal proscription. In this context, Christian theology followed its own path by drastically devaluing sexual lust and increasingly attempting to prohibit divorce and remarriage, despite the fact that no models for this approach existed in either the biblical or the pagan world. Both of these tendencies can be explained with reference to their socio-historical origins, which also necessarily include the establishment of the church as an organization. In the process of tracing these histories, it becomes clear that traditional sexual morality is a product of its time. For this reason, the book also includes a systematic section devoted to considering why this traditional sexual morality has largely lost its validity in modern society, as well as which norms may take its place.

Literature’s probative force travels across the realm of sense in this world to what lies beyond it. When we speak of what is beyond our grasp in this world, we think most immediately of the world of the spirit. Shakespeare famously celebrates literature’s power to explore the "forms of things unknown." How many great works of literature guide us through a familiar world to the edge of the spiritual unknown? Not only Shakespeare, but Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Hopkins, Eliot, O’Connor, and many others in these pages carry us there. This book follows their quest.

Literary apologetics is the study of the characteristic moves by the authors who take readers on their journey of faith with them. Most notably, that tradition begins with Latin authors, spreads across Europe in a continuous literary culture, and extends over world literature to the present day. While early apologetics is proclamation, rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry, above all it is witness to the faith manifesting itself in time. The early faith community produces a distinct literary culture as Christian witness takes all these forms and more. From then until now, this kind of literature probes ultimate questions, adumbrates numinous experience, and extrapolates ethical outcomes of Christian teachings across a wide variety of literary forms. The Handbook of Literary Apologetics provides an authoritative introduction to the scope of this tradition and its major figures.

Christoph Schwöbel shaped a generation of theologians with his vision of the Trinity as an eternal conversation which addresses all humans and draws them into conversation with each other and God. This volume continues Schwöbel’s theology through essays engaging his central topics of conversation: Trinity, tradition, the arts, religion and society.

Inhalte stehen im Fokus eines jeden Unterrichts. Seinem Grundverständnis entsprechend bezieht sich der islamische Religionsunterricht auf die islamisch-theologische Diskurstradition. Der Traditionsbegriff selbst ist allerdings vielfältig. Fakt ist, dass die religiöse Verortung unter den muslimischen Schüler*innen heterogener denn je ist. Wenn die Subjektorientierung im Religionsunterricht ein ernstgemeinter Anspruch ist, welche Rolle spielen dabei die Perspektiven auf Tradition? Wie wirkt Tradition aus der Vergangenheit heraus? Wie schließt sie als Bildungsinhalt und im Kontext methodischer Arrangements im Religionsunterricht den Blick auf die Gestaltung von Gegenwart und Zukunft ein?

Der Sammelband setzt sich mit der Frage auseinander, wie in aktueller Forschung der islamischen Religionspädagogik und -didaktik Tradition und Lebenswelt wechselseitig in einen Dialog miteinander gebracht werden. Dabei werden Perspektiven aus verschiedenen Gegenstandsbereichen in einen Dialog miteinander gebracht, mit dem Ziel, den Diskurs um qualifizierte religiöse Bildungsangebote zu erweitern.

The vast and ancient topic of kingship in India has mostly been studied from the perspectives of rulers and other elites. But what constitutes sovereignty viewed from "below"? This book — ethnographic and comparative in its essence — deals with indigenous conceptualizations of sovereignty taking as its starting point a local proverb that connects the ritual (Dasara) of the king with festivals performed by his "tribal" subjects. The first part of the book initially introduces some pan-Indian ideas of kingship and proceeds to discuss indigenous notions of sovereignty as represented in rituals and myths in the region concerned (highland Odisha). The second part is devoted to the investigation of the proverbial performances. Mainly based on historical sources first the Dasara festival of the king is discussed, subsequently the indigenous rituals are described and analyzed, which the author ethnographically documented around the turn of the millennium. Ultimately, the proverb and the rituals constitute the idea of a sacrificial polity in which rulers and ruled share sovereignty in the sense that they are co-responsible for the flow of life.

David Hazelton, with the mind of a high-powered lawyer and the heart of a Sunday School teacher, dives into God’s Plan for Marriage. 

With clarity and conviction, David explores God’s divine blueprint for marriage at the dawn of creation. The Bible’s opening chapters explain that men and women are created equally in God’s image and are given responsibilities that can only be accomplished together. In the sanctity of marriage, the two are to become “one,” which involves a spiritual, emotional, and physical union.

But sin has a devasting effect on marriage. It introduces shame, fear, and guilt that can divide a couple. Instead of oneness, there is a competition for control that distorts God’s creation plan. These issues are beyond human capacity to resolve, requiring divine intervention and guidance.

In God’s Plan for Marriage, Hazelton presents a restorative vision for marriage. This vision is not a human invention but is built on the life and teaching of Christ. God’s Plan for Marriage offers insights into the original design for marriage and practical pathways for couples to reclaim their relationships as beautiful, harmonious partnerships intended by the Creator. 

Explores the influence of Kabbalah in shaping America’s religious identity

In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he called the mystical theology of the Jews. Around that same time, one of the leading Puritan ministers developed a messianic theology based in part on the mystical conversion of the Jews. This led to the actual conversion of a Jew in Boston a few decades later, an event that directly produced the first kabbalistic book conceived of and published in America. That book was read by an eventual president of Yale College, who went on to engage in a deep study of Kabbalah that would prod him to involve the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and to give a public oration at Yale in 1781 calling for an infusion of Kabbalah and Jewish thought into the Protestant colleges of America.

Kabbalah and the Founding of America traces the influence of Kabbalah on early Christian Americans. It offers a new picture of Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange in pre-Revolutionary America, and illuminates how Kabbalah helped to shape early American religious sensibilities. The volume demonstrates that key figures, including the well-known Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather and Yale University President Ezra Stiles, developed theological ideas that were deeply influenced by Kabbalah. Some of them set out to create a more universal Kabbalah, developing their ideas during a crucial time of national myth building, laying down precedents for developing notions of American exceptionalism. This book illustrates how, through fascinating and often surprising events, this unlikely inter-religious influence helped shape the United States and American identity.

Argues that anti-Muslim activity reveals how fear is corroding core American values

In a 2018 national poll, over ninety percent of respondents reported that treating people equally is an essential American value. Almost eighty percent said accepting people of different racial backgrounds is very important. Yet about half of the general public reported that they doubt whether Muslims can truly dedicate themselves to American values and society. Why do many people who say they believe in equality and acceptance of those of different backgrounds also think that Muslims could be an exception to that rule?

In Fear in Our Hearts, Caleb Iyer Elfenbein examines Islamophobia in the United States, positing that rather than simply being an outcome of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim activity grows out of a fear of difference that has always characterized US public life. Elfenbein examines the effects of this fear on American Muslims, as well as describing how it works to shape and distort American society. Drawing on over 1,800 news reports documenting anti-Muslim activity, Elfenbein pinpoints trends, draws connections to the broader histories of immigration, identity, belonging, and citizenship in the US, and examines how Muslim communities have responded.

In the face of public fear and hate, American Muslim communities have sought to develop connections with non-Muslims through unprecedented levels of community transparency, outreach, and public engagement efforts. Despite the hostile environment that has made these efforts necessary, American Muslims have faced down their own fears to offer a model for building communities and creating more welcoming conditions of public life for everyone.

Arguing that anti-Muslim activity tells us as much about the state of core American values in general as it does about the particular experiences of American Muslims, this compelling look at Muslims in America offers practical ideas about how we can create a more welcoming public life for all in our everyday lives.

A modernized, queer reading of the Torah

In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. These weekly portions, read aloud in synagogues around the world, have been subject to interpretation and commentary for centuries. Following on this ancient tradition, Torah Queeries brings together some of the world’s leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a "bent lens". With commentaries on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and six major Jewish holidays, the concise yet substantive writings collected here open up stimulating new insights and highlight previously neglected perspectives.

This incredibly rich collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in contemporary American Judaism. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life. Torah Queeries offers cultural critique, social commentary, and a vision of community transformation, all done through biblical interpretation. Written to engage readers, draw them in, and, at times, provoke them, Torah Queeries examines topics as divergent as the Levitical sexual prohibitions, the experience of the Exodus, the rape of Dinah, the life of Joseph, and the ritual practices of the ancient Israelites. Most powerfully, the commentaries here chart a future of inclusion and social justice deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition.

A labor of intellectual rigor, social justice, and personal passions, Torah Queeries is an exciting and important contribution to the project of democratizing Jewish communities, and an essential guide to understanding the intersection of queerness and Jewishness.

Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies
Recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual & Cultural History
It has become an accepted truth: after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis.
In this compelling work, Hasia R. Diner shows the assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances—in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms—We Remember with Reverence and Love shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish “forgetfulness,” she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy.
Diner also offers a compelling new perspective on the 1960s and its potent legacy, by revealing how our typical understanding of the postwar years emerged from the cauldron of cultural divisions and campus battles a generation later. The student activists and “new Jews” of the 1960s who, in rebelling against the American Jewish world they had grown up in “a world of remarkable affluence and broadening cultural possibilities” created a flawed portrait of what their parents had, or rather, had not, done in the postwar years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth.

The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil.
The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology brings together a distinguished international array of senior scholars—many of whose work is available here in English for the first time—to consider key topics from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust.
Contributors: Yosef Achituv, Yehoyada Amir, Ester Farbstein, Gershon Greenberg, Warren Zev Harvey, Tova Ilan, Shmuel Jakobovits, Dan Michman, David Novak, Shalom Ratzabi, Michael Rosenak, Shalom Rosenberg, Eliezer Schweid, and Joseph A. Turner.

Ever since its appearance in Europe five centuries ago, the rosary has been a widespread, highly visible devotion among Roman Catholics. Its popularity has persisted despite centuries of often seismic social upheaval, cultural change, and institutional reform. In form, the rosary consists of a ritually repeated sequence of prayers accompanied by meditations on episodes in the lives of Christ and Mary. As a devotional object of round beads strung on cord or wire, the rosary has changed very little since its introduction centuries ago. Today, the rosary can be found on virtually every continent, and in the hands of hard-line traditionalists as well as progressive Catholics. It is beloved by popes, professors, protesters, commuters on their way to work, children learning their “first prayers,” and homeless persons seeking shelter and safety.
Why has this particular devotional object been so ubiquitous and resilient, especially in the face of Catholicism’s reinvention in the Early Modern, or “Counter-Reformation,” Era? Nathan D. Mitchell argues in lyric prose that to understand the rosary’s adaptability, it is essential to consider the changes Catholicism itself began to experience in the aftermath of the Reformation.
Unlike many other scholars of this period, Mitchell argues that after the Reformation Catholicism actually became more innovative and diversified rather than retrenched and monolithic. This innovation was especially evident in the sometimes “subversive”; visual representations of sacred subjects, such as in the paintings of Caravaggio, and in new ways of perceiving the relation between Catholic devotion and the liturgy’s ritual symbols. The rosary was thus involved not only in how Catholics gave flesh to their faith, but in new ways of constructing their personal and collective identity. Ultimately, Mitchell employs the history of the rosary, and the concomitant devotion to the Virgin Mary with which it is associated, as a lens through which to better understand early modern Catholic history.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008

A broad and compelling look at the impact of the largest Catholic order of men on American culture


With infectious energy and a genuine gift for storytelling, Raymond A. Schroth recounts the history of Jesuits in the United States. The American Jesuits isn’t simply a book for Catholics; it’s for anyone who loves a well-told historical tale. For more than 450 years, Jesuit priests have traveled the globe out of a religious commitment to serve others. Their order, the Society of Jesus, is the largest religious order of men in the Catholic Church, with more than 20,000 members around the world and almost 3,000 in the United States. It is one of the more liberal orders in the Church, taking very public stands in the U.S. on behalf of social justice causes such as the promotion of immigrants’ rights and humanitarian aid, including assistance to Africa’s poor, and against American involvement in “unjust wars.” Jesuits have played an important part in Americanizing the Catholic Church and in preparing Catholic immigrants for inclusion into American society.

Starting off with the first Jesuit to reach the New World—he was promptly murdered on the Florida coast—Schroth focuses on the key periods of the Jesuit experience in the Americas, beginning with the era of European explorers, many of whom were accompanied by Jesuits and some of whom were Jesuits themselves. Suppressed around the time of the American Revolution, the Society experienced resurgence in the nineteenth century, arriving in the U.S. along with waves of Catholic immigrants and establishing a network of high schools and universities. In the mid-twentieth century, the Society transformed itself to serve an urbanizing nation.

Schroth is not blind to the Society’s shortcomings and not all of his story reflects well on the Jesuits. However, as he reminds readers, Jesuits are not gods and they don’t dwell in mountaintop monasteries. Rather, they are imperfect men who work in a messy world to “find God in all things” and to help their fellow men and women do the same.
A quintessential American tale of men willing to take risks — for Indians, blacks, immigrants, and the poor, and to promote a loving picture of God—The American Jesuits offers a broad and compelling look at the impact of this 400-year-old international order on American culture and the culture’s impact on the Jesuits.

Enter most African American congregations and you are likely to see the century-old pattern of a predominantly female audience led by a male pastor. How do we explain the dedication of African American women to the church, particularly when the church's regard for women has been questioned?
Following in the footsteps of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's pathbreaking work, Righteous Discontent, Daphne Wiggins takes a contemporary look at the religiosity of black women. Her ethnographic work explores what is behind black women's intense loyalty to the church, bringing to the fore the voices of the female membership of black churches as few have done. Wiggins illuminates the spiritual sustenance the church provides black women, uncovers their critical assessment of the church's ministry, and interprets the consequences of their limited collective activism.
Wiggins paints a vivid portrait of what lived religion is like in black women's lives today.

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties.
The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

Winner of the Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award for 2008
Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came to adopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media.
Despite early successes in attracting new adherents with the lure of the film, the early Christian film industry ultimately failed, in large part due to growing fears that film would corrupt the church by substituting an American “civil religion” in place of solid Christian values and amidst continuing Christian unease about the potential for the glorification of images to revert to idolatry. While radio eclipsed the motion picture as the Christian communication media of choice by the 1920, the early film makers had laid the foundations for the current re-emergence of Christian film and entertainment, from Veggie Tales to The Passion of the Christ.

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860—1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published—or even read—to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls’ adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education.
Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents of acculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society.
While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history.
Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.

The image of the West looms large in the American imagination. Yet the history of American Jewry and particularly of American Jewish women—has been heavily weighted toward the East. Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail rectifies this omission as the first full book to trace the history and contributions of Jewish women in the American West.
In many ways, the Jewish experience in the West was distinct. Given the still-forming social landscape, beginning with the 1848 Gold Rush, Jews were able to integrate more fully into local communities than they had in the East. Jewish women in the West took advantage of the unsettled nature of the region to “open new doors” for themselves in the public sphere in ways often not yet possible elsewhere in the country. Women were crucial to the survival of early communities, and made distinct contributions not only in shaping Jewish communal life but outside the Jewish community as well. Western Jewish women's level of involvement at the vanguard of social welfare and progressive reform, commerce, politics, and higher education and the professions is striking given their relatively small numbers.
This engaging work—full of stories from the memoirs and records of Jewish pioneer women—illuminates the pivotal role these women played in settling America's Western frontier.

Decodes the long history of Hebrew and its influential place as the ancestor of many modern written languages

Hebrew as a language is just over 3,000 years old, and the story of its alphabet is unique among the languages of the world. Hebrew set the stage for almost every modern alphabet, and was arguably the first written language simple enough for everyone, not just scribes, to learn, making it possible to make a written record available to the masses for the first time.

Written language has existed for so many years—since around 3500 BCE—that most of us take it for granted. But as Hoffman reveals in this entertaining and informative work, even the idea that speech can be divided into units called “words” and that these words can be represented with marks on a page, had to be discovered. As Hoffman points out, almost every modern system of writing descends from Hebrew; by studying the history of this language, we can learn a good deal about how we express ourselves today.

Hoffman follows and decodes the adventure that is the history of Hebrew, illuminating how the written record has survived, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient translations, and attempts to determine how the language actually sounded. He places these developments into a historical context, and shows their continuing impact on the modern world.

This sweeping history traces Hebrew's development as one of the first languages to make use of vowels. Hoffman also covers the dramatic story of the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern, spoken language.

Packed with lively information about language and linguistics and history, In the Beginning is essential reading for both newcomers and scholars interested in learning more about Hebrew and languages in general.

Exposes the invisible ways in which white Christian privilege disadvantages racial and religious minorities in America

The United States is recognized as the most religiously diverse country in the world, and yet its laws and customs, which many have come to see as normal features of American life, actually keep the Constitutional ideal of “religious freedom for all” from becoming a reality. Christian beliefs, norms, and practices infuse our society; they are embedded in our institutions, creating the structures and expectations that define the idea of “Americanness.” Religious minorities still struggle for recognition and for the opportunity to be treated as fully and equally legitimate members of American society. From the courtroom to the classroom, their scriptures and practices are viewed with suspicion, and bias embedded in centuries of Supreme Court rulings create structural disadvantages that endure today.

In White Christian Privilege, Khyati Y. Joshi traces Christianity’s influence on the American experiment from before the founding of the Republic to the social movements of today. Mapping the way through centuries of slavery, westward expansion, immigration, and citizenship laws, she also reveals the ways Christian privilege in the United States has always been entangled with notions of White supremacy.

Through the voices of Christians and religious minorities, Joshi explores how Christian privilege and White racial norms affect the lives of all Americans, often in subtle ways that society overlooks. By shining a light on the inequalities these privileges create, Joshi points the way forward, urging readers to help remake America as a diverse democracy with a commitment to true religious freedom.

A masterful overview of Islamic law and its diversity

Al-Qadi al-Nu'man was the chief legal theorist and ideologue of the North African Fatimid dynasty in the tenth century. This translation makes available in English for the first time his major work on Islamic legal theory, which presents a legal model in support of the Fatimids’ principle of legitimate rule over the Islamic community. Composed as part of a grand project to establish the theoretical bases of the official Fatimid legal school, Disagreements of the Jurists expounds a distinctly Shi'i system of hermeneutics, which refutes the methods of legal interpretation adopted by Sunni jurists.

The work begins with a discussion of the historical causes of jurisprudential divergence in the first Islamic centuries, and goes on to address, point by point, the specific interpretive methods of Sunni legal theory, arguing that they are both illegitimate and ineffective. While its immediate mission is to pave the foundation of the legal Isma'ili tradition, the text also preserves several Islamic legal theoretical works no longer extant—including Ibn Dawud’s manual, al-Wusul ila ma'rifat al-usul—and thus throws light on a critical stage in the historical development of Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) that would otherwise be lost to history.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A brilliant cross-cultural Arabic interpretation of a key text of yoga philosophy

The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali is the foundational text of yoga philosophy to this day and is still used by millions of yoga practitioners and students worldwide. Written in a question-and-answer format, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali deals with the theory and practice of yoga and the psychological question of the liberation of the soul from attachments.

This book is a new edition and translation into English of the Arabic translation and commentary on this text by the brilliant eleventh-century polymath al-Bīrūnī. Given the many historical variants of the Yoga Sutras, his Kitāb Bātanjali is important for yoga studies as the earliest translation of the Sanskrit text. It is also of unique value as an Arabic text within Islamic studies, given the intellectual and philosophical challenges that faced the medieval Muslim reader when presented with the intricacy of composition, interpretation, and allusion that permeates this translation.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

In Jesus Goes to College, author Mike Veraldi draws on his journey of faith to offer a refreshingly candid perspective on Christianity that breaks free from traditional teachings.

With a deep love for Jesus at its core, Jesus Goes to College unapologetically emphasizes the central commandment to love thy neighbor, pushing people to connect with the heart of Jesus’s message. Mike doesn’t shy away from calling out the church’s shortcomings, challenging the status quo, and separating the profound teachings of Jesus from what he believes are misguided directions from religious institutions.

Jesus Goes to College isn’t the typical Sunday school book; instead it guides people through the journey of Christ and the history and context of the Bible, applying it to current issues. Written as a testament to his own commitment to following Jesus, Mike’s mission was to help others experience the unconditional love of Jesus and the life-changing impact that comes from living life boldly in His footsteps.

Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE) is most famous for introducing into rabbinic tradition several legends about biblical figures not found in the classical rabbinic corpus of Talmud and Midrash. Modern scholarship considers the non-rabbinic legends in PRE an example of the survival of Second Temple literature within Jewish tradition. The present study, however, will attempt to explain the non-rabbinic material found in PRE as the result of the author’s adoption (and adaptation) of elements from the surrounding Christian and Muslim cultures rather than through the direct transmission of Second Temple works among Jews. This hypothesis will be tested through the examination of two works close to PRE in form and content, Jubilees (second century BCE) and the Cave of Treasures (sixth century CE). All three are examples of the "Rewritten Bible," which recount the history of ancient Israel independently of the biblical text. The study concludes that region, rather than religion, shaped the author’s presentation of the history of the ancient prophets and patriarchs

Michel Chodkiewicz's work on Ibn al-'Arabî and his dissemination, such as Emir Abd el-Kader, Spiritual writings and The Seal of Saints. Prophecy and sanctity in the works of Ibn Arabî and A Ocean without Shore. Ibn Arabi, the Book and the Law have profoundly influenced not only those who attended his courses at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), but also numerous colleagues and young researchers. In this volume dedicated to his memory, they wish to bear witness to their gratitude and their debt to a fertile work that has borne much fruit, as this volume shows. The studies gathered here focus first on different aspects of Ibn al-ʿArabī's work, on its antecedents and extensions, and finally on various paths to holiness, right up to our own time. The volume contains: a biography and bibliography by Michel Chodkiewicz; 32 contributions divided into four parts: 1) Listening to the Master 2) In the Sillage of Ibn al-'Arabī 3) Sinety and Initiative Ways 4) Witnesses; indexes.

Michel Chodkiewicz was deeply involved in all the fields that are dealt with in this volume, and there could be no better tribute to his memory than to make his intellectual legacy bear fruit.

Wie hängen Existenzphilosophie, Ägyptens Dekolonisierungsprozess und die Neubewertung der arabisch-islamischen Kulturgeschichte zusammen? Lassen sich philosophische Entwürfe losgelöst von ihren jeweiligen spezifischen kulturellen, gesellschaftlichen und politischen Kontexten und den ihnen inhärenten diskurstreibenden Kräften verstehen?

Diesen und anderen Fragen geht die Autorin in der vorliegenden Publikation nach. Sie interpretiert den radikalen Subjektivitätsbegriff des ägyptischen Intellektuellen ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Badawī (1917-2002) als Versuch einer doppelten kognitiven Emanzipation von den bestehenden politischen und religiösen Strukturen und verortet dessen intellektuelles Schaffen in seinem spezifischen Entstehungskontext. Diesen fächert die Autorin mit Blick auf Badawis bildungsgeschichtliche Hintergründe an der Universität Kairo als mehrdimensionales Geflecht auf, in welchem verschiedene Wissenstraditionen vor dem Hintergrund gesellschaftspolitischer Anliegen verhandelt werden.

Entlang einer Auswahl zentraler philosophischer Begrifflichkeiten erschliesst die Autorin in einer subtilen Analyse das bislang unübersetzte existenz- und kulturphilosophische Werk von ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Badawī.

Ibn Taymiyya is commonly characterized as a fundamentalist advocate of “sola scriptura” despite the findings of new research which demonstrate his participation in the “Avicennan-turn” of post-classical Islamic thought. The text, edited and published here in Arabic and English for the first time as The Defense of Ibn Taymiyya, is an important record of how, just a few decades after Ibn Taymiyya’s death, he was accused of Avicennism and defended from that accusation by one of his last living disciples. Ibn Qāḍī al-Jabal’s Defense shows the reader another side of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, fully articulate in the metaphysics of post-classical Islamic philosophy, and suing for respectability within its intellectual circles. It is a scholarly apologia with a literary flair, making vivid reference to personal tutelage under Ibn Taymiyya himself, citing literary documents for his distinct theological theses while observing Mamluk conventions of respectability. Among its findings is the importance of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and his interpreters for establishing Ibn Taymiyya’s intellectual horizons, as this publication aims to both provoke and answer enduring questions about Ibn Taymiyya’s status in the history of Islamic theology and philosophy.

Diese Studie untersucht die Riḥla des Gelehrten Ibn Ǧubayr (gest. 614/1217) und überwindet das Verständnis dieses Textes als Reisebericht. Mit einem disziplinenübergreifenden Ansatz legt Nadine El-Hussein eine Neuinterpretation des Werkes vor. In Abgrenzung von gängigen Interpretationen zeigt sie erstmals auf, wie die Riḥla vor dem Hintergrund der almohadischen Bewegung zu lesen ist und welche Rückschlüsse dieser Text auf die politische und religiöse Kultur der Almohaden im westlichen Mittelmeerraum erlaubt. Dafür hinterfragt die Studie die Darstellungen Ibn Ǧubayrs auf die Zusammenhänge von Religion und Politik, deren Bedeutungen insbesondere im almohadischen Kontext keineswegs evident sind: Hinter Ibn Ǧubayrs Darstellungen stehen religiöse Ansprüche und kritische Positionierungen. Auf Grundlage konzeptioneller Überlegungen präsentiert sich die Riḥla im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Almohadismus und Sunnismus. Diese Studie eröffnet eine neue Perspektive auf die Riḥla und leistet einen innovativen Beitrag hin zu einer fundierteren Erfassung dieses Textes, der Almohaden sowie der Wechselbeziehung von Religion und Politik in al-Andalus und im Maghreb.

The gospel of Mark purposefully employs characters with specific and nuanced representations of dis/ability to portray the unique authority, the engaging message, and the mission of the Markan Jesus.
Based on hermeneutical insights from Dis/ability Studies, this monograph is a contribution to the research of culturally and historically normalized corporeality in the biblical scriptures. At the core of the investigation are the healing narratives: passages that explicitly deal with a transformation from a described deviant bodily state to a positively valued corporeality. Lena Nogossek-Raithel not only analyzes the terminological and historical descriptions of these physical phenomena but also investigates their narrative function for the gospel text. The author argues that the images of dis/ability employed are far from accidental. Rather, they significantly influence the narrative’s structure and impact, embody its theological claims, and characterize its protagonist Jesus.
With this thorough exegetical analysis, Nogossek-Raithel offers a firm historical foundation for anyone interested in the critical interpretation and theological application of the Markan healing narratives.

Der Band repräsentiert die internationale Diskussion über Christologie protestantischer, römisch-katholischer und anglikanischer Provenienz und belebt den Diskurs neu. Fokussiert werden Innovationen in den Wissenschaften vom Neuen Testament und der Patristik auf Christologie hin. Dabei werden vor allem zwei aktuelle Entwürfe von Christologie diskutiert , in denen die Dimensionen Kreuz, Auferweckung, Menschwerdung, ‚Jesus Remembered‘ neu bearbeitet sind – paradigmatisch im Ansatz und vollständig in der Ausführung.

Die Beiträge umfassen

Paradigmen von Christologie: Christologie als Verständigungsmedium über den Charakter heutiger Dogmatik in der Pluralität konfessioneller und positioneller Standpunkte, modernitätstheoretischer und traditionsbestimmter Kontexte.

Bestandsaufnahme und Revision: Kritische Auseinandersetzungen mit Heinrich Assel Elementare Christologie Bände 1-3 (2020) und Bruce McCormack The Humility of the Eternal Son (2021).

Christology – Revised: Beiträge zu gegenwärtig anstehenden Themen und möglichen künftigen Revisionen von Christologie.

The concept of inspiration is part and parcel of the theological tradition in several religious confessions, but it has largely receded to the background, if not vanished altogether, in the discussions of biblical scholars. The question "Do we still need inspiration?" might well reflect the perplexity of many exegetes today. Systematic theologians, for their part, often further their own reflections on the subject independently of developments in the field of exegesis, with the risk of remaining purely theoretical. Biblical research in the last decades has been marked by new insights about the nature of the biblical texts, stemming from the study of their inner plurality (insofar as they combine and sometimes intertwine conflicting theologies), of their textual fluidity, and of their reception. Can these new insights be integrated into a theological reflection on the notion of inspiration? These questions are often explicitly raised about the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but they also prove increasingly relevant for Qur’ānic studies. This volume addresses them through contributions from exegetes of the Bible and of the Qur’an and systematic theologians.