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The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars created completely new conditions for making Christianity plausible for the modern age.
The book describes the enormous efforts under which Catholic and Protestant men and women faced the upheavals between the Reformation and the Revolution. Many of these efforts were similar. And yet ‘religious knowledge’ developed significantly apart.
Classification is an inherent feature of all societies. The distinction between Jews and non-Jews has been a major theme of Western society for over two millennia. In the middle of the twentieth century, dire consequences were associated with being Jewish. Even after the Shoah, the labelling of Jews as “other” continued. In this book, leading historians including Michael Brenner, Elisheva Carlebach and Michael Miller illuminate the meaning of Jewishness from pre-modern and early-modern times to the present day. Their studies offer new perspectives on constructing and experiencing Jewish identity.
Gregory of Nyssa, the great Cappadocian Father of the IV century, is not as yet deemed one of the outstanding figures in our Histories of Philosophy. However, this monograph argues that his remarkable theories of freedom transcend his own time and, traversing centuries of Medieval and Byzantine history, they become one of the core theoretical inspirations for the anthropological revolution of the Quattrocento, as evinced in eminent philosophers such as Nicholas of Cusa and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Our research methodology integrates a thorough study of the Greek and Latin sources ‒ resorting to Philology, Palaeography and Codicology ‒ with a systematic historical and philosophical analysis of different theories and argumentative strategies.
Has Orthodoxy accepted the consequences of modernity or the Orthodox still feel a nostalgia for pre-modern forms of organization and structures of a glorified past, following in this way fundamentalism? Did even the movement called Return to the Fathers, as it was understood, and in spite of its initially renewal character, functioned unwittingly as a barrier, against modernity and its challenges?
Modernity and post-modernity constitute, however, the broader historical, social and cultural context within which the Church is called to accomplish its mission and to ceaselessly incarnate the Christian truth.
In 20 articles very prominent Orthodox theologians and experts on Orthodox theology and Orthodox Christianity from academic fields like sociology of religion or political studies are discussing, in what sense politics, society and culture are considered in Orthodox Theology in a global horizon. Contributors are Alfons Brüning, Ina Merdjanova, Nathaniel Wood, Cyril Hovorun, Dimitrios Moschos, Lucien Turcescu, K. M. George (Kondortha), Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Branko Sekulić, Georgios Vlantis, Nikolaos Asproulis, Atanas Slavov, Sveto Riboloff, Haralambos Ventis, Ioannis Kaminis, Irena Pavlović, Athanasios N. Papathanasiou, Chris Durante, Kateřina Kočandrle Bauer, Vasilios N. Makrides.
Bringing together articles by scholars from diverse disciplines, this volume aims at a deeper understanding of the legacy, importance, and challenges of Syriac Theology. The articles in the first part of the volume focus on the biblical, exegetical, and christological tradition of the Syriac Orthodox Church. The articles in the second part of the volume explore the dialogical intertextuality between Syriac Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and the Quran.
During the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE), Jews became reticent to speak and write the divine name, YHWH, also known by its four letters in Greek as the tetragrammaton. Priestly, pious, and scribal circles limitted the use of God’s name, and then it disappeared. The variables are poorly understood and the evidence is scattered. This study brings together all ancient Jewish literary and epigraphic evidence in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek to describe how, when, and in what sources Jews either used or avoided the divine name. Instead of a diachronic contrast from use to avoidance, as is often the scholarly assumption, the evidence suggests diverse and overlapping naming practices that draw specific meaning from linguistic, geographic, and social contexts.
“The Post-Secular City” examines the alleged shift from a “secular” to a “post-secular” dispensation from the perspective of the ongoing de-construction of the secularization “theorem” (as Hans Blumenberg called it). Accordingly, the new secularization debate is described as being polarized between the “de-constructors” and the “maintainers” of the standard thesis of secularization. This is the assumption underlying an ambitious effort to map the field, which consists of a long introduction where “secularization” is analyzed as a deeply problematic concept-of-process and of eight chapters in which several protagonists of the recent debate are discussed as crucial junctions of a multidisciplinary conversation.
The struggle against the climate crisis and for a livable future on earth raises profound questions of justice that call for theological engagement. Anchored in concrete situations of climate vulnerability and responsibility, this volume investigates the theological epistemologies, practices and imaginaries that have profoundly shaped climate politics in the past and explores possible theological reformulations that can open up sustainable and just futures. With these critical and constructive theological reflections, it seeks to contribute to practices of climate justice by inspiring the development of socially and economically just ways of living in global, inter-special community.