Product Description: Charles Redd Center Phi Alpha Theta Book Award for the Best Book on the American West 2018 Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award from the Utah State Historical Society 2018 Best First Book Award from the Mormon History Association Newly created territories in antebellum America were designed to be extensions of national sovereignty and jurisdiction...read more

Product Description: How does performing affect those who perform? Starting from observation of the intergenerational tradition of performing the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32.1–43), Keith Stone explores ways in which the Song contributes to Deuteronomy’s educational program through the dynamics of reenactment that operate in traditions of performance...read more

Product Description: In this timely, carefully reasoned social history of the United States, the New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One places today’s heated culture wars within the context of a centuries-long struggle of right versus left and religious versus secular to reveal how, ultimately, liberals always win...read more

Product Description: This volume includes all of the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman votive reliefs found to date in the excavations of the Athenian Agora. In addition to providing a catalogue of the reliefs arranged according to their subjects, the author treats the history of their discovery, their production and workmanship, iconography, and function...read more

^Short text: The contributions to this volume give an in depth view on ancient understandings of the manifestation of divine wrath such as war, destruction and illness. There seems to be little doubt that almost all deities can get angry quite easily, but what about divine repentance? This idea is found in two penitential psalms from Mari that are published for the first time in this volume. Examples from ancient Greece also demonstrate the appeasement of divine anger, whereas in ancient Rome the situation seems to have been somewhat different. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jonah can be understood as a parable about how Yhwh can or cannot change his mind. Long text: This colloquium brought together biblical scholars, specialists of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and of the Islamic word. The motif of divine wrath is indeed a topic that can be found in almost all ancient civilizations, but is also often used in contemporary religious discourse. It presupposes that personal or collective faults provoke divine anger, which can manifest itself in political and military catastrophes but also in personal disasters. Several articles deal with war and destruction as manifestations of divine wrath. In the Hebrew Bible, the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE is often understood as the result of Yhwh's anger. In the ancient Near East, military catastrophes are seen to reflect divine punishment, such that certain texts explore the possibility of appeasing the gods. Illness is also explained as the consequence of the wrath of one or many gods. In ancient Egypt, and also in the Hebrew Bible as well as in texts from the Mamluk period, particular skin diseases are understood as a material manifestation of divine anger that stigmatizes the supposed sinner's body. In ancient Mesopotamia as well as in the Bible, other texts criticize the idea of divine retribution, arguing that a collective or personal disaster cannot or should not be explained 'logically' in terms of divine punishment. There seems to be little doubt that almost all deities can get angry quite easily, but what about divine repentance? Since the term repentance may have a strong Christian undertone, it might be preferable to speak of a change of mind, in which gods can also regret their acts, show mercy, or be appeased. This idea is found in two penitential psalms from Mari that are published for the first time in this volume. Examples from ancient Greece also demonstrate the appeasement of divine anger, whereas in ancient Rome the situation seems to have been somewhat different. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jonah can be understood as a parable about how Yhwh can or cannot change his mind.

Product Description: Well before his entry into the religious life in the spring of 386 C.E., Augustine had embarked on a lengthy comparison between teachings on the self in the philosophical traditions of Platonism and Neoplatonism and the treatment of the topic in the Psalms, the letters of St...read more

Product Description: During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape...read more

Product Description: The New Testament lay at the center of Byzantine Christian thought and practice. But codices and rolls were neither the sole way―nor most important way―the Byzantines understood the New Testament. Lectionaries apportioned much of its contents over the course of the liturgical calendar; its narratives structured the experience of liturgical time and shaped the nature of Christian preaching, throughout Byzantine history...read more

Product Description: A world-renowned scholar brings a lifetime of study to reveal how a pivotal transformation in spiritual experience during the Biblical Era made us who we are today Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine—wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind...read more

Product Description: British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest unbelief or religious indifference in Canada...read more

Product Description: The coming of Alexander the Great ushered in many changes within the southern Levant. The subsequent period saw many upheavals, including the Greek and Roman conquests, the Jewish Revolts, and the gradual Christianization of the 'Holy Land'...read more

Product Description: Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) converted to Methodism while at Dartmouth College, became a minister, and spent his Methodist years as a spiritual seeker. His two extant journals, edited and annotated by Catherine L. Albanese, appear in print for the first time and reveal the inner journey of a leading American spiritual pilgrim at a critical period in his religious search...read more

Product Description: The Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference was the most famous missions conference in modern church history. A century later, five conferences on five continents displayed the landscape of global mission at the dawn of the third millennium: Tokyo 2010, Edinburgh 2010, Cape Town 2010, 2010Boston, and CLADE V (San José, 2012)...read more

Product Description: Essays representing ten years of John J. Collins’s expert reflection on Scripture and the Qumran community are here collected in a volume that is sure to be of interest to students and scholars of Early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls...read more

Product Description: The search for a republican morality provides an exciting new study of an important event in the French Revolution and a defining moment in the career of its principal actor, Maximilien Robespierre, the Festival of the Supreme Being...read more

This volume revisits the concepts of enchantment and sacralization in light of perspectives which challenge the modern notion that man (alone) is the measure of all things. As Bruno Latour has argued, the battle against superstition entailed shifting power away from God/the gods to humans, thereby disqualifying the agency of all the other objects in the world. Might enchantment and sacralization be understood in other ways than through this battle between almighty gods and almighty humans? Might enchantment be understood to involve processes where power and control are not distributed so clearly and definitely? Like social constructionists, Latour emphasizes that things are constructed; yet, like many other new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, Manuel De Landa and Karen Barad, he emphasizes that this construction is not the result of projecting meaning onto a passive and meaningless world, but a matter of compositional achievements, whereby assemblages of actants co-compose each other and frame, enable and delimit one another's agency. This move recognizes the active and entangled participation of players beyond the humans versus God(s) framework that informed the modernist project. Understanding enchantment and sacralisation as compositionally and relationally constructed does not mean the same as understanding them as constructed by humans alone. What it means is one of the main questions posed in this book. In other words, if enchantment and sacralization are not understood (solely) in terms of projecting anthropocentric meaning onto mute objects, what are some promising alternative approaches - old and new - and what are their implications for how we understand modernity and for method and theory in the study of religion?

Product Description: Der 1962 entdeckte Derveni-Papyrus bietet für die Bereiche der frühgriechischen Philosophie und Religion sowie der antiken Literaturwissenschaft eine der wichtigsten Neuentdeckungen seit der Renaissance. Die Reste der zur Hälfte verbrannten Papyrusrolle enthalten eine Abhandlung (wohl verfasst am Ende des 5...read more