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The revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century witnessed copious writing about angels. This chapter suggests four complementary perspectives upon these engagements. There is a rhetorical mode, in which angel-doctrine is used metaphorically, in topical and political writing, to bring Scripture to bear upon constitutional thought and polemical force. The second mode is the exegetical, and these decades saw further development of a vernacular tradition of scriptural commentaries and systematic angelography. The third, creaturely mode describes the visible or invisible intervention of angels in recent human affairs, providential appearances, and direct communication between humans and angels. The fourth mode is a synthesis of the first three: the radical mode, not only because it is associated with religious enthusiasts, but because it evokes the immediacy of the spirit world and attempts to redescribe the history and geography of the universe, to redraw the heavens.

This chapter examines the martyrs’ rapid ascent to heaven following death and the roles that the martyrs play in the afterlife in heaven. In opposition to the ordinary dead, martyrs quickly ascend — by various routes — to heaven and participate in a number of activities similar to those of the exalted Christ. It argues that, rather than assuming that martyrs serve in a similar capacity as angels in heaven, it is possible to view the martyrs’ participation in a heavenly banquet, judgment scenes, and role as heavenly intercessor as analogous to the roles of Christ. This suggests that the question of the martyrs’ identity is more complicated than is usually assumed.

This chapter introduces the central questions involving leadership in a religiously diverse America. During the U.S. Civil War, religion fueled arguments on both sides of the conflict. Abraham Lincoln understood that people differed on religion and politics, and he called Americans to appeal in humility to the better angels of their nature rather than resorting to arms. Contemporary America is marked not by a Civil War but by culture wars, in which religious diversity is one key front. But religion does not follow easy battle lines. People of similar religious backgrounds hold divergent political commitments, and vice versa. Thomas Jefferson resisted talking about his personal faith, but he advocated for free expression of religious beliefs. Building on that foundational principle, the contemporary challenge is to help shape a culture of convivencia, or of living together peaceably and with mutual respect.

A university startup has a number of characteristics, many of which are common to any startup. Central to the startup is the business model, the mechanism by which the company will create, market, and sell products and services in exchange for money from the customer. In addition, university startups involve many discrete operations including technology development, product development, sales and marketing, and manufacturing. The university startup is set in the context of an ecosystem composed of the university, people, and money. The university provides the innovation, usually in the form of intellectual property by way of a license, around which the startup is formed. People provide the expertise, management, judgement, decision-making, advice, and connections essential for launching and growing a startup. Money is the fuel to build the startup. It comes in two basic forms: dilutive and non-dilutive. The former involving a sharing of the company ownership and the latter not.

This chapter examines rabbinic attitudes toward the angels. Enoch-Metatron, being transformed into the highest of all angels and becoming a divine figure next to God, stands at the extreme (Babylonian) end of a much larger spectrum of rabbinic attitudes toward the angels. Earlier Palestinian sources were vehemently opposed to any such possibility of the angels being granted a role transcending their traditional task of praising God and acting as his messengers. This is particularly true for the creation story and the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai. With regard to the former, the rabbis set great store in pointing out that the angels were not created on the first day of creation—to make sure that nobody should arrive at the dangerous idea that these angels participated in the act of creation. Similarly, the rabbis took great care in not granting the angels too active a role during the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

This chapter responds to J. Delobel's critique of the thesis developed in ch. 10. His objections and positive observations prompted the clarification and simplification of a number of important points. He showed convincingly that v. 10 can only be translated ‘a woman must exercise control over her head’, i.e. must dress her hair properly. Given the subjectivity of the interpretations of ‘because of the angels’ based on the assumption that they are heavenly beings, it is suggested that Paul has in mind human ‘messengers’ from other churches. The Postscript devotes particular attention to the pros and cons of the proposed meanings of kephalê ‘head,’ ‘ruler,’ ‘source,’ and ‘person’ in various contexts in this passage, while also dealing in detail with the archaeological and literary evidence for sartorial customs in Corinth.

This chapter describes the aftermath of WWII and the challenges society faced in housing and caring for the generation of baby boomers who were born into extreme deprivation. It discusses impoverished WWII war widows with children; women with illegitimate children; and WWII soldiers who falsified their death so as not to be responsible for an out-of-wedlock child. The chapter touches, for example, upon Ed Rohs' mother desperate straits and the ramifications of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy for a poor young woman in 1946. The chapter describes how, when he was six months old, Ed's parents brought him to the Angel Guardian Home for Infants in Brooklyn under the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy.

This chapter shows how book 1 of Paradise Lost metaphorically depicts the role of the devil in raising the rebel angels out of their “bottomless perdition,” an act of poetic creation analogous to the divine creation of the universe described in the invocation—“how the heavens and earth/Rose out of chaos.” The chief devils described in the catalog that occupies the center of book 1 and organizes its poetic figures and symbolic geography—Carthage, Sodom, Egypt, Babel-Babylon, Rome—are precisely those who will come to inhabit the pagan shrines that human idolatry will build next to or even inside the Jerusalem temple, profaning God's house. This catalog—whose traditional epic function is to size up military force—instead suggests the force of spiritual falsehood, and it corresponds to the defeated devils' own reluctance to pursue another direct war against God; they would rather resort to satanic fraud.

This chapter focuses on book 2 of Paradise Lost. In book 2, Milton continues the story of the demilitarization of the fallen angels and of his epic more generally when he bases all of its action around the figure of Ulysses, the hero of eloquence and fraud, whose own epic comes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The chapter demonstrates that the Odyssey, imitated and parodied in Satan's voyage through Chaos to God's newly created universe in the book's last section, is just one of the classical stories about the career of Ulysses that Milton evokes as models for its different episodes. The various parts of book 2 are held together by this pattern of allusion, as well as by the Odyssean figures of Scylla and Charybdis, the emblem of bad choices, or of loss of choice itself.

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about choreographies made to his music. He says that the most remarkable is Jiri Kylian's Falling Angels done to Drumming—Part One (1971). Reich was fortunately able to attend a performance of this work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994 when the Netherlands Dance Ensemble performed there. As a basic mark of his serious approach to the piece, Kylian had the music played live by four drummers (in a loge next to the stage in full view of the audience) under the direction of Michael de Roo, who was already familiar with his music.

Swedenborg aims vividly to describe his encounters with angels in the various “heavens” he claims to have visited. His heavens and hells might be called “real,” in that they correspond to psychological states. Swedenborg has been called the inventor of the modern heaven. The human soul contains powers and possibilities that accord with the Romantic doctrine of man as microcosm of the universe. There is an affinity of mystics such as Blake with Swedenborg. Heaven is not a reward for goodness, or hell a punishment for evil. In so far as we are good and filled with love, we are in heaven. Swedenborg's heaven is not God‐centered. There is no place for original sin in his philosophy, or for the ascetic. His is an optimistic vision, thoroughly Pelagian. Marriage and the erotic—even in heaven—is at the center of his thought, with an emphasis on “conjugial” love.

This chapter compares the treatment of Socrates by Christian writers of the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD with that by pagan authors of the same period. The Christians divided between those who regarded Socrates as a forerunner of Christianity and those who saw him — in common with the pagan world as a whole — as subject to the powers of darkness. This division focused on one phenomenon in particular, Socrates' ‘divine sign’, which those favourable to him saw as a mark of divine favour, while those opposed regarded it as an evil familiar spirit. While those writers derived their contrasting views of Socrates from their religious ideology, the pagan writers were interested in him less as a figure of doctrinal significance than as a moral exemplar and source of improving and/or entertaining anecdote. While much of this material is favourable to Socrates, there are some traces of a hostility which is absent from the major Socratic writers, and which appears to derive from a tradition of hostility to philosophy in general.

The Qur’an has little direct commentary on what will happen to individuals from the moment of death to the end of time and the bodily resurrection. The classical literature of theologians, Qur’an commentators, collectors of traditions, and others, however, has speculated about the various postdeath states. Among the topics discussed are the modalities of death, punishments, and rewards in the grave itself, potential locations of the deceased, different degrees of consciousness of those awaiting resurrection, and possible interaction between the living and the dead.

This chapter presents a few points on how selves can and should go about shaping their futures. It also takes a look at Satan, the fallen angel who does not appreciate his vulnerability. The chapter concludes that the future of vulnerable subjects not only is, but should be, an uncertain history of uncertain life.

In the context of 19th‐century American millennialism, many early converts to Mormonism heralded the Book of Mormon as a sign of the end times. In an era of many prophets and visionaries, the Book of Mormon was offered as tangible proof that Joseph was an authentic prophet. Joseph Smith's emphatic literalism and appeal to physical and historical evidence made him both more threatening and more attractive than a Jacob Boehme or an Emanuel Swedenborg. The story of angels, seer stones, and gold plates, thus displaced a focus on the Book of Mormon's content, for both critics and believers.

Rather surprisingly, Calvin's consideration of angels provides a window into his attitude to divine and human righteousness, divine power, human merit, and the Fall. It reveals his indebtedness to mediaeval discussions of angels, and also the originality of aspects of his treatment. The Chapter considers these topics chiefly by the use of material from Calvin's monumental Sermons on Job.

An introduction and translation of Testament of Abraham. Unlike the other Jewish texts, this one appears to be a full‐blown satire of the pious Abraham. Although he does not want to die, he is finally tricked by the archangel Michael and Death himself into allowing his soul to pass.

Contains a complete English translation of the first book of Jerome's Latin commentary on Ephesians plus an English translation of all the Greek excerpts from Origen's commentary on Ephesians, which treat the passages from the epistle covered by Jerome in the first book. Book I begins with a lengthy prologue and then provides commentary on Ephesians 1: 1–2: 22. Jerome appears to depend on Origen in the prologue when he discusses the task of a commentator on Scripture and when he describes the idolatry and magic practiced at Ephesus as an explanation for the obscure and mysterious nature of much of the epistle. The first two chapters of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians give Origen numerous opportunities for philological comments on Paul's use of language. They also provide the basis for discussions of themes such as the creation of the world, the origin of souls, divine foreknowledge, the demonic powers, and the reconciliation of earthly beings and angels effected by Christ.

This chapter sifts a mass of scattered evidence to elucidate official and popular belief about ghosts. Protestant authorities denounced belief in ghosts as a superstitious by-product of belief in purgatory, but had to account for the continuing propensity of people to see them after the Catholic teaching had been suppressed. They concluded that such apparitions were either frauds or delusions of the devil, though they might, just occasionally, be angels — a dilemma played out in Hamlet. At the level of popular belief, ghost stories evolved to take on aspects of the Protestant critique, but remained vibrantly traditional in other ways. The chapter demonstrates that even in condemning ghosts, educated writers were much influenced by popular assumptions, and that neither Catholic nor Protestant elites could resist deploying ghost stories for providential purposes.