Religion

Exploring over two dozen religious traditions, myths, folkloric and spiritual traditions, the world of the supernatural, and the demons, the Devil, and fallen angels in today’s pop culture, Demons, the Devil, and Fallen Angels is a comprehensive resource of the many faces of the devil, his minions, ominous deities, and the darker side of nature and ourselves. From ancient demon worship to modern Satanism, the bloody era of the Inquisitions and later witch burnings to the Satanic Panic of the late-twentieth century, and secret occult societies to Hitler's involvement with demonology, this book covers it all!

You'll learn about the key figures in history associated with demons and the Devil, the worshiping of the dark forces, and the lives of Aleister Crowle, John Dee, and Anton LaVey, as well as well-known figures who were alleged Satanists, some of whom may surprise you! Also featured are dozens of examples of links between demons/fallen angels and aliens, cryptids, apparitions and poltergeists, and IDEs (interdimensional entities). Were the demons of the Bible possibly ancient alien visitors? Are alien abductions and poltergeists really demons in disguise? Is Slender Man a modern day demonic entity ... or totally fake?

This fascinating look at Satan, evil spirits, and their 10,000-year history has 120 photographs, drawings, and illustrations to bring the portraits of over 200 demons and fallen angels to shivering life. Demons, the Devil, and Fallen Angels also includes a helpful bibliography and an extensive index, adding to its usefulness. It is a comprehensive, clear, and objective look at a subject that fills most people with fear and dread. Yet the presence of dark angels continues to remain a part of our human experience, our popular culture, and our spiritual understandings. Come and explore the shadowy side of existence and its integral part of our nature.

What does it mean to be a Christian? What is the core of the faith? What does it mean to follow the gospel? What is the significance of the rites, rituals, and symbols of Christianity, such as baptism and the crucifix? Who was Jesus Christ and what was His life like? How did Christianity start, spread, and grow? What are the differences—and similarities—between Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism? How did Christianity influence art, architecture, music, and movies?

The Handy Christianity Answer Book provides detailed descriptions of the teachings of Jesus, Christian beliefs about Jesus, ceremonies, symbols, rituals, observations, customs, leaders, and organization of the world’s largest religion. It clearly and eloquently explains how different Christians think and delves into the richness of the Christian tradition. This engaging, user-friendly primer looks at the significance of the Bible, Jesus, the Apostles, the Trinity, the Eucharist, historical schisms, divisions among different denominations, worship, sacraments, prayer, and much more. This important reference answers nearly 900 questions and offers fun facts that cover Christian history, religious practices, and cultural perspectives, including …

This information-rich book also provides a historic timeline, a glossary of commonly used terms, and a bibliography help further exploration of the world’s largest religion. A perfect companion for anyone seeking a better understanding of Christianity.

In an age of continued Middle East volatility, religious extremists, and terrorist threats, the mere mention of Islam and Muslims too often provokes misunderstanding and even rancor. Often overlooked are the important links between the Qur'an and the Bible. Also ignored are the significant historical overlap between Islamic interpretation of history with those of Christianity and Judaism. Islam is too often confusing and even opaque to those unfamiliar with it.

Truly a must-have reference for our changing and trying times, The Handy Islam Answer Book, is clearly and eloquently written by John Renard, Ph.D., a scholar of Islam with more than 40 years of research and teaching experience. This user-friendly guide answers nearly 800 questions and offers fun facts that cover Islamic history, religious practices, and Muslim cultural perspectives, including …

The academic disciplines of Biblical Studies and Systematic Theology were long closely linked to one another. However, in the modern period they became gradually separated which led to increasing subject specialization, but also to a lamentable lacuna within the various branches of Divinity. As the lack of dialogue between Biblical Studies and the various theological disciplines increased, a minority-group of scholars in the past few decades reacted and sought to re-establish the time-honoured bonds between the disciplines. The present volume is part of this intellectual response, with contributions from scholars of various professional and denominational backgrounds. Together, the book's 25 chapters seek to reinvigorate the crucial cross-disciplinary dialogue, involving biblical, narrative, historical, systematic-theological and philosophic-theological perspectives. The book opens the horizon to contemporary research, and fills a lamentable research gap with a number of fresh contributions from scholars in the respective sub-disciplines

Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts.

This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.

The recent years have seen an upswing in studies of women in the ancient Near East and related areas. This volume, which is the result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration, seeks to highlight women as actors within the sphere of the religious. In ancient Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations, religious beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of society, and for this reason it is not possible to completely dissociate religion from politics, economy, or literature. Thus, the goal is to shift the perspective by highlighting the different ways in which the agency of women can be traced in the historical (and archaeological) record. This perspectival shift can be seen in studies of elite women, who actively contributed to (religious) gift-giving or participated in temple economies, or through showing the limits of elite women’s agency in relation to diplomatic marriages. Additionally, several contributions examine the roles of women as religious officials and the language, worship, or invocation of goddesses. This volume does not aim at completeness but seeks to highlight points for further research and new perspectives.

Una fascinante investigación histórica sobre el personaje más importante de todos los tiempos.

Un cóctel explosivo, en suma, el de la fe y la ciencia juntas, que José María Zavala sabe armar como nadie en estas páginas, en las que el lector viaja de su mano por los oscuros recovecos de la Historia, iluminados ahora tras una asombrosa investigación.   

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION 

A fascinating historical investigation into the most important character of all time.

Arguments over the relationship between Canaanite and Israelite religion often derive from fundamental differences in presupposition, methodology and definition, yet debate typically focuses in on details and encourages polarization between opposing views, inhibiting progress. This volume seeks to initiate a cultural change in scholarly practice by setting up dialogues between pairs of experts in the field who hold contrasting views.

Each pair discusses a clearly defined issue through the lens of a particular biblical passage, responding to each other’s arguments and offering their reflections on the process. Topics range from the apparent application of ‘chaos’ and ‘divine warrior’ symbolism to Yahweh in Habakkuk 3, the evidence for ‘monotheism’ in pre-Exilic Judah in 2 Kings 22–23, and the possible presence of ‘chaos’ or creatio ex nihilo in Genesis 1 and Psalm 74. This approach encourages the recognition of points of agreement as well as differences and exposes some of the underlying issues that inhibit consensus. In doing so, it consolidates much that has been achieved in the past, offers fresh ideas and perspective and, through intense debate, subjects new ideas to thorough critique and suggests avenues for further research.

The book presents the author's latest research on ancient perceptions of time; it centres on medical discussions, especially of the doctor-philosopher Galen, while also contextualizing his work within Graeco-Roman evidence and discussions – archaeological, medical, technological, philosophical, literary – more broadly. The focus is on questions of medical or experiential significance: life cycles, disease cycles, daily regimes for mind and body, clinical assessment, including the vital area of diagnosis through the pulse, technologies of time measurement. But the philosophical background is also examined: questions of the nature and definition of time and its relationship to space and motion. Galen offers original contributions in all these areas, at the same time as shedding important light on both contemporary attitudes and previous discussions.

The book thus offers an accessible and vivid overview of key issues in ancient time perception and awareness, while also offering the first in-depth exploration of the insights that the Galenic texts add to this picture.

Five thematic chapters – Time Measurement, Year and Life Cycles, Biography, Medical Cycles – consider a wide range of evidence and of recent scholarship, while highlighting the contribution of medical texts.

The enigmatic relation between religion and science still presents a challenge to European societies and to ideas about what it means to be ‘modern.’ This book argues that European secularism, rather than pushing back religious truth claims, in fact has been religiously productive itself. The institutional establishment of new disciplines in the nineteenth century, such as religious studies, anthropology, psychology, classical studies, and the study of various religious traditions, led to a professionalization of knowledge about religion that in turn attributed new meanings to religion. This attribution of meaning resulted in the emergence of new religious identities and practices. In a dynamic that is closely linked to this discursive change, the natural sciences adopted religious and metaphysical claims and integrated them in their framework of meaning, resulting in a special form of scientific religiosity that has gained much influence in the twentieth century. Applying methods that come from historical discourse analysis, the book demonstrates that religious semantics have been reconfigured in the secular sciences. Ultimately, the scientification of religion perpetuated religious truth claims under conditions of secularism.

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

Virtually from its redaction about the sixth century A.D., the Babylonian Talmud became the rabbinic document par excellence. Through its lens almost all previous canonical rabbinic tradition was refracted. Study and mastery of the Talmud marked one as a rabbi, a “master.” This book examines the character, use and social meaning of the formalized rhetoric which pervades the Babylonian Talmud. It explores, first, how the editors of the Talmud employ a consistent and highly laconic code of formalized linguistic terms and literary patterns to create the Talmud’s (renowned) dialectical, analytic “essays.” Second, the work considers the social meanings implicitly communicated by the use of this rhetoric, which not only provided an authoritative model for modes of thought and for treatment of earlier authoritative Judaic tradition, but also reflected, reinforced or helped engender new social definitions.
Through comparison of the Talmud’s rhetoric with that of other, earlier rabbinic documents and by placing the editing of the Talmud against the backdrop of the social and political situation of Rabbinism in the Late Persian Empire, the book relates the Talmud’s creation and promulgation to a major shift in Rabbinism’s understanding of the social role, “rabbi,” and to the emergence and ascendancy of the talmudic academy (the Yeshiva) as the primary institution of Rabbinism toward the end of Late Antiquity. In its agenda, and methodological and theoretical perspectives, The Rhetoric of the Babylonian Talmud brings together the insights and tools of historical, literary and rhetorical analysis of the New Testament and of early rabbinic literature, on the one hand, and the sociological and anthropological study of religion, on the other.

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is probably best known as the literary source for the myth of Eros and Psyche and as a primary source of information about mystery religions in the ancient world.
There is another realm of the Metamorphoses which has, until now, received relatively little attention — namely, the many dreams found within it. The Religious Dreamworld of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses offers an engaging portrait of the second-century dreamworld. Recognizing the centrality of the religious function and spiritual interpretation of dreams, this book illustrates their vital importance in the ancient world and the wide variety of meanings attributed to them.
James Gollnick draws deeply from historical and psychological studies and provides a historical background on the current interest in the role of dreams in psychological and spiritual transformation.
This study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses adds to an appreciation of Apuleius the dreamer and the second-century dreamworld in which he lived and wrote.