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This book is a comparative study exploring the writings of an Indian Christian theologian named Ayadurai Jesudason Appasamy (1891–1975) and his comparative theological interaction with the twelfth-century Śrivaiṣṇava reformer, Rāmānuja. The doctrinal focus is Appasamy’s four-fold Johannine application of the ‘Body of God’ analogy—the ‘Universe’, ‘Incarnation’, ‘Eucharist’, and ‘Church’ being his four divine embodiments. Critics in Appasamy’s day described his theological project as ‘bold heresies’, a ‘synthesis of Christianity and Vedānta’ that has ‘shifted the axis’ from Christianity to ‘Hindu religion’. By reading Appasamy in the context of his devotional tradition, however, this study demonstrates that his application of the embodiment analogy is rooted, rather, in the sacramental theology of early twentieth-century Anglicanism. His embodiment theology, in fact, closely reflects the theological developments that took place in Anglican scholarship between the time of Charles Gore and William Temple. Methodologically, what is being argued for is the need to understand theological discourse as being already semiotically and traditionally situated. In doing so it is further argued that, just as Appasamy’s detractors have failed to read him in his devotional context, so too has Appasamy done with Rāmānuja. Reading Rāmānuja more as a Vedāntic philosophical theologian than as a Śrivaiṣṇava sectarian practitioner, the Ācārya has been abstracted from his temple-based devotional practice. On this basis, challenging Appasamy’s use of Rāmānuja’s analogy, a better reading of John’s Gospel is proposed, a temple Christology that emerges from the narrative shape of the text itself.

This book explores the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, chronicling his childhood and family life, spiritual journey, missionary work, and his role in establishing the Church of God. Its main objective is to reconcile the holiness-pentecostal tradition to its origins, and the trajectory of its subsequent history. The term “plainfolk modernist” is coined, to suggest that both Tomlinson and the world he inhabited expressed a vibrant strain of modernism, though voiced in the idioms of American plainfolk culture.

In Abelard and Heloise, a dual intellectual biography of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Heloise (d. 1164), I argue that there is a fundamental continuity to the evolution of Abelard’s thought from his early concern with dialectic, to his growing interest in theology in the 1120s and in ethical questions in the 1130s. Heloise was much more than the disciple and lover of Abelard. She emerges as a distinct thinker in her own right, deeply versed in classical ideals of friendship and ethics, which she wished to apply to her relationship to Abelard. While they have both functioned as mythic figures in the western imagination, I argue that both participated in a broader 12th-century renewal of interest in both classical literature and in religious reform. I examine Abelard’s dialectic as a theory not just about universals, but about language as a whole. Tracing the maturing of his dialectic from his earliest glosses to the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, written after his early affair with Heloise (1115–17), I argue that Abelard was initially unable to come to terms with the ethical questions presented by Heloise in her side of messages (Epistolae duorum amantium) they exchanged during those years. After Abelard became a monk at St Denis, he started to write about theology. I trace the evolution of his theological interests, from his early concern with linguistic concerns to increasing preoccupation with the Holy Spirit and divine goodness, as manifest in Jesus. After Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete from 1129, responded to his Historia calamitatum and demanded he pay greater attention to the community he had founded, Abelard started to devote much more attention to commenting on Scripture and to reflecting on the ethical questions with which she had always been concerned. Accusations spread by St Bernard that Abelard promoted heresy distort the true character of his contribution to theology, on which Heloise exercised a profound influence.

Does everything happen for a reason? Does “God’s will,” “karma,” or “fate” provide an overarching purpose to everything? Are disasters and tragedies random, meaningless events? Or is there something to our intuition that the world has a purpose? Abraham’s Dice explores this conversation with major scholars, including holders of chairs at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the University of Basel, several Gifford lecturers, and two Templeton Prize-winners. Bestselling author Jennifer Michael Hecht notes that the Judeo-Christian tradition has wrestled with questions of divine purpose for millennia. Although the Bible affirms that God blesses the righteous in an orderly way, the story of Job is a powerful counterexample to this scheme. The achingly beautiful but tragic story of Job pushes back against the idea that “everything happens for a reason.” Cosmologist John Barrow captures the dilemma with a simple question, “Is the world simple or complicated?” He notes that simple laws of physics—like gravity—produce complicated outcomes. An ordered collection of pencils standing upright falls into a disordered pile, though the gravitational force making them fall is simple and symmetric. Reality is a tangled mix of order and disorder, pattern and randomness. Nowhere is this problem more provocatively confronted than in Darwin’s theory of evolution, explored by Peter Harrison, Alister McGrath, and Michael Ruse. Ruse argues that Darwin’s theory is so devoid of purpose as to rule out the possibility that God has anything to do with the process, pushing back against the perennial intuition that humans were purposefully created.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.

In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—this book considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. It takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. The author argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, he demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. The author delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. This book traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, it demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power. Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances and immersed themselves in rugged environments, the author argues, the West shaped them; and through their labors and charities, the sisters in turn shaped the West. These female religious pioneers built institutions, brokered relationships between Indigenous peoples and encroaching settlers, and undertook varied occupations, often without organized funding or direct support from the church hierarchy. A comprehensive history of Roman Catholic nuns and sisters in the American West, the book reveals Catholic sisters as dynamic and creative architects of civic and religious institutions in western communities.

This book is an investigation into two basic concepts of ancient pagan and Christian thought, namely activity and participation. It shows how activity in Christian thought is connected with the topic of participation: for the lower levels of being to participate in the higher means to receive the divine activity into their own ontological constitution. It is mainly a discussion of some important Church Fathers. Against a background of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist philosophy, the book discusses Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and culminates with a chapter on Gregory Palamas before some conclusions are drawn. The concern of the author is to highlight how the Christians think energeia (i.e. activity or energy) is manifested as divine activity in the eternal constitution of the Trinity, the creation of the cosmos, the Incarnation of Christ, and in salvation understood as deification. Terms such as essence and energy are associated with the theology and spirituality of the fourteenth-century Byzantine thinker Gregory Palamas. One purpose of this book is to show how Palamas’ theology is in accordance with Greek patristic thinking, with its background in a definite trend in ancient pagan philosophy.

Few other cultural issues alarm conservative Protestant families and communities more than the seemingly ubiquitous threat of pornography. Thanks to widespread access to the internet, conservative Protestants now face a reality in which every Christian man, woman, and child with a smartphone can access limitless pornography in his or her bathroom, at work, or at a friend’s sleepover. Once confident of their victory over pornography in society at large, conservative Protestants now fear that “porn addiction” is consuming even the most faithful. How are conservative Protestants adjusting to this new reality? And what are its consequences in their lives? Drawing on over 130 interviews, as well as numerous national surveys, Addicted to Lust shows that, compared to other Americans, pornography shapes the lives of conservative Protestants in ways that are uniquely damaging to their mental health, spiritual lives, and intimate relationships. Samuel Perry demonstrates how certain pervasive beliefs within the conservative Protestant subculture unwittingly create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement, sometimes to the point of depression or withdrawal from faith altogether. Conservative Protestant women who use pornography feel a “double shame,” both for sinning sexually and for sinning “like a man,” while conflicts over pornography in marriages are escalated with patterns of lying, hiding, blowing up, or threats of divorce. Addicted to Lust shines new light on one of the most talked-about problems facing conservative Christians.

In his final accomplishment of a distinguished career, the author considers the musical practices of the early Church in this examination of the history of Christian chant from the years ad 200 to 800. The result is a book that is certain to have an impact on musicology, religious studies, and history.

This book sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt. This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval/early modern Islamic society.

This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, the author develops a line of argument that begins with the aesthetics of academic writing in the field. He shows that successful writers on religion employ characteristic aesthetic strategies in communicating their visions of human truths, and examines these strategies with regard to epistemology and to the study of religion as a collective endeavor. The author looks at whether a peculiarly expressive genre of writing on religion began at a specific moment in history and, if so, what this might suggest about the cultural significance about religio-historical practice.

This book explores the methodological connections between two quintessentially American traditions: liberation theology and pragmatism. It examines how pragmatism can lend philosophical clarity and depth to some of liberation theology’s core ideas and assumptions. In turn, it also shows how liberation theology offers pragmatism a more nuanced and sympathetic approach to religious faith, especially its social and pedagogical dimensions. Ultimately, this work seeks to craft a philosophical foundation that ensures the continued relevance of liberation thought in today’s world. Keeping true to the method of pragmatism, the book begins inductively with a set of actual experiences: the Good Friday liturgies at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. The author offers a thick description of the way these performative rituals integrate the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of faith. Subsequent chapters probe this integration deductively at three levels of theoretical analysis: experience/metaphysics, sociality, and pedagogy. At all three levels, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of faith emerge in different yet related ways. The author argues that utilizing the categories of the aesthetic and ethical enables a richer understanding of the dynamic relationship between faith and politics. This book builds new bridges between a number of discourses, including pragmatism, Latin American liberation theology, U.S. Latino/a theology, feminism, ritual studies, and the philosophy of education.

Martin Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, Buber published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. This book closely analyzes his writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. The author argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As the author unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism, Buber emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

In 2006, the contemporary American Pentecostal movement celebrated its 100th birthday. Over that time, its African American sector has been markedly influential, not only vis-à-vis other branches of Pentecostalism but also throughout the Christian church. Black Christians have been integrally involved in every aspect of the Pentecostal movement since its inception and have made significant contributions to its founding as well as the evolution of Pentecostal/charismatic styles of worship, preaching, music, engagement of social issues, and theology. Yet despite its being one of the fastest growing segments of the Black Church, Afro-Pentecostalism has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves. This book examines different facets of the movement, including its early history, issues of gender, relations with other black denominations, intersections with popular culture, and missionary activities, as well as the movement's distinctive theology. The chapters reflect on the state of the movement, chart its trajectories, discuss pertinent issues, and anticipate future developments.

This is a sequel to Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin (OUP 2000). The previous book attempted to situate Calvin's theological work in its historical context and to strip away various 20th-century theological grids that have clouded our perceptions of the work of the Reformer. This book carries this approach forward, with the goal of overcoming a series of 19th- and 20th-century theological frameworks characteristic of much of the scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, or what might be called “Calvinism after Calvin”.

On August 3, 1492, the same day that Columbus set sail from Spain, the long and glorious history of that nation's Jewish community officially came to a close. The expulsion of Europe's last major Jewish community ended more than a thousand years of unparalleled prosperity, cultural vitality and intellectual productivity. Yet, the crisis of 1492 also gave rise to a dynamic and resilient diaspora society spanning East and West. This book traces the various paths of migration and resettlement of Sephardic Jews and Conversos over the course of the tumultuous sixteenth century. Pivotally, it argues that the exiles did not become “Sephardic Jews” overnight. Only in the second and third generation did these disparate groups coalesce and adopt a “Sephardic Jewish” identity. The book presents a new and fascinating portrait of Jewish society in transition from the medieval to the early modern period, a portrait that challenges many longstanding assumptions about the differences between Europe and the Middle East.

Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, and Kearney's God who may be. This book attempts to represent some of the most considered responses to Richard Kearney's recent writings on the philosophy of religion, in particular The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. It brings together seventeen essays that share the common problematic of the otherness of the Other — seventeen different variations on the same theme: philosophy about God after God — that is to say, a way of thinking God otherwise than ontologically.

In the past half century there has been a significant amount of scholarly attention paid to the thought of Jonathan Edwards so that he is now one of the most studied figures in American history. Much less attention has been directed toward the theological movement that took its point of departure from Edwards, namely, the New England Theology. Yet this school of thought had a profound influence on the shape and character of nineteenth-century American theology, and it is to date the most important and influential indigenous theological movement in the history of the United States. This set of chapters by an international team of specialists in the philosophy, theology, and history of Edwards and the New England theology offers a fresh look at how Edwards’s ideas were transmitted, received, and reworked in the different phases of the life of the New England Theology. The chapters also trace the way in which his thought, and that of his intellectual progeny, had an international impact on the shape of theology in the UK, Europe, and Asia, and on present-day Reformed theology.