Product Description: Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization...read more

Product Description: MisReading America presents original research on and conversation about reading formations in American communities of color, using the phenomenon of the reading of scriptures--''scripturalizing''--as an analytical wedge. Scriptures here are understood as shorthand for complex social phenomena, practices, and dynamics...read more

Product Description: The Bible and the American Myth challenges the academic study of the Bible to orient itself to cultural criticism. The essays model an approach to the study of the Bible that entails efforts to fathom not only the meanings of texts, but the role of texts in the construction of meaning...read more

Product Description: In writing to the Corinthians, Paul was grappling with fundamental issues concerning the lifestyle of Christians, and specifically with questions about marriage, interracial marriage, and remarriage. The so-called hos me passage in I Corinthians 7 has been identified as a key passage for understanding Paul's expressed understanding of an appropriate model of Christian existence in the world...read more

Product Description: Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. Their content is most frequently analyzed by clerics who do not question the underlying political or social implications of the text, but use the writing to convey messages to their congregations about how to live a holy existence...read more

Product Description: The world is increasingly assuming the characteristics of a "global village," as transportation and information technologies make travel and communications around the globe ever quicker and easier. The world of biblical scholarship has not been immune to such changes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

From meditation and fasting to celibacy and anchoritism, the ascetic impulse has been an enduring and complex phenomenon throughout history. Offering a sweeping view of this elusive and controversial aspect of religious life and culture, Asceticism looks at the ascetic impulse from a unique vantage point. Cross-cultural, cross-religious, and multidisciplinary in nature, these essays provide a broad historical and comparative perspective on asceticism--a subject rarely studied outside the context of individual religious traditions. The work represents the input of more than forty preeminent scholars in a wide range of fields and disciplines, and analyzes asceticism from antiquity to the present in European, Near Eastern, African, Asian, and North American settings. Asceticism is organized around four major themes that cut across religious traditions: origins and meanings of asceticism, which explores the motivations and impulses behind ascetic behaviors; hermeneutics of asceticism, which looks at texts and rhetorics and their presuppositions; aesthetics of asceticism, which documents responses evoked by ascetic impulses and practices, as well as the arts of ascetic practices themselves; and politics of asceticism, which analyzes the power dynamics of asceticism, especially as regards gender, cultural, and ethnic differences. Critical responses to the major papers ensure the focus upon the themes and unify the discussion. Two general addresses on broad philosophical and historical-interpretive issues suggest the importance of the subject of asceticism for wide-ranging but serious cultural-critical discussions. An Appendix, Ascetica Miscellanea, includes six short papers on provocative topics not related to the four major themes, and a panel discussion on the practices and meanings of asceticism in contemporary religious life and culture. A selected bibliography and an index are also included. The only comprehensive reference work on asceticism with a multicultural, multireligious, and multidisciplinary perspective, Asceticism offers a model not only for an understanding of a most important dimension of religious life, but also for future interdisciplinary study in general. (view table of contents)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: In writing to the Corinthians, Paul was grappling with fundamental issues concerning the lifestyle of Christians, and specifically with questions about marriage, interracial marriage, and remarriage. The so-called hos me passage in I Corinthians 7 has been identified as a key passage for understanding Paul's expressed understanding of an appropriate model of Christian existence in the world...read more