Search Results

Ronald Reagan’s religious convictions were crucial to his understanding of the world and performance as president, but few scholars have provided substantive analysis of his faith and its impact on his policies during his tenure in the White House. Although the circumstances of Reagan’s life and the seeming inconsistencies between his beliefs and his practices make his faith difficult to explain, it appears to have been genuine, very meaningful to him, and essential to his political philosophy. Reagan firmly believed and often declared that God intended America to be a beacon of hope, faith, freedom, and democracy — “a city on the hill”. Reagan was deeply influenced by his godly mother, Nelle, and raised in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Reagan’s firm belief that God had a plan for his life was fortified by his survival of an assassination attempt in March 1981. In many addresses, proclamations, letters, and private conversations, Reagan stressed his faith in God and prayer, the inspiration of the Bible, and the divinity of Jesus. Numerous leaders of the religious right were troubled by his infrequent church attendance and his wife’s interest in astrology. Although historians debate the nature of Reagan’s personal faith, they concur that he used religious rhetoric, discussed religious themes, and spoke to religious groups more than any other 20th-century president. Religion played a very important role in Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. Reagan’s personal life was not a paragon of evangelical piety, but his worldview was strongly shaped by his understanding of biblical teaching. His faith affected many of his policies, most notably his endeavors to curb abortion, pass a school prayer amendment, secure tuition tax credits, and oppose communism.

This chapter shows how al-Kindī interweaves ideas from Greek cosmology to give a theory that can explain the efficacy of astrology and how God’s providence is dispersed by means of heavenly influence. A concrete example is found in al-Kindī’s works on meteorology, since he thinks that weather is produced by celestial causation. The mechanics of this causation are explained differently in different works, which leads to a consideration of the authenticity of On Rays, which is ascribed to al-Kindī, and its place in his corpus. Finally, the chapter considers whether al-Kindī’s account commits him to determinism, and whether he thinks universal causal determinism is compatible with human freedom.

Chapter 8 situates the two editions of Korean Canon in Goryeo’s religious culture and the complicated international history between Korea, Song China, and the Khitan Liao and argue that the canon had been used as a gigantic talisman and was instrumental to the formation of a Buddhist culture which aimed at praying for blessing the nation and expelling calamities.

Lewis was interested in the medieval heavens both from an academic and an imaginative perspective. The pagan gods, to his mind, were aesthetically beautiful and also apologetically useful, and Ptolemaic astrology was deemed consonant with Christianity until at least the sixteenth century (Dante being chief among those poets who Christianized it). The seven planets Lewis regarded as spiritual symbols of permanent value, able to convey truths relating to psychology, rationality, and novitas. Lewis's Idealism and his dislike of spiritual introspection pertinent to the question of Enjoyment of these symbols. Contemplating the planets and their influences in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Reasons why Lewis's critics were not looking for a secret layer of meaning. Reasons why Lewis's critics were not interested in astrology. The extent to which Lewis knew about astronomy. The extent to which he believed in astrology. The circumstances in which the donegalitarian discovery was made.

The chapter dicusses the system of astrology that Manilius describes in Books 2-5 of his Astronomica. It begins with an exposition of the tenets of ancient astrology, pointing out that Manilius' astrology is both ‘strong’ (the stars hold the key to every aspect of our fate) and ‘hard’ (the stars themselves cause this fate). A brief history of ancient astrology from Mesopotamia via Hellenistic Greece to Rome is followed by a detailed examination of Manilius' text: the poet treats first the three astrologically significant circles (zodiac, fixed circle of the observer, and circle of lots) and then the influences of the heavenly bodies—in particular the signs of the zodiac and the paranatellonta—on human beings. The chapter concludes with an examination of the idiosyncrasies of Manilius' astrology, a topic that harks back to the puzzle of the planets discussed at the end of Chapter 1.

This chapter discusses different ideas about time in early India. It discusses how cyclical theories of time arise from the observance of rhythm based on the sequences in relation to the sun and the moon or the seasons. Time reckoning was generally based on a luni-solar calendar. The earliest sense of a calendar had to do with time-markers, both of the individual life cycle and involving the environment, which were gradually ritualized. The precision of the solar calendar was useful in agricultural activities and also in horoscopy, and in either case it became an agency of social control. Time measurement was required by astrology in the making of horoscopes. Indian interest in astronomy is revealed in texts dating to the fifth century BC. The mingling of Indian and Graeco–Babylonian ideas enhanced activity in astronomy and mathematics in India. This took the form of extensive calculations relating to planets, orbits, eclipses and the like.

The first references to Hermes and his works in Arabic appear among the Iranian astrologers at the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs during the second half of the 8th century. These astrologers knew works of Hermes written in Middle Persian. This chapter investigates the existence of this pre-Islamic tradition of Hermetica in Arabic. First it verifies that Middle Persian Hermetica did indeed exist, although no Hermetic work survives in Middle Persian today. Then it investigates the extant accounts of how Hermetica came to be translated into Middle Persian in the Sasanian Empire. The chapter includes an extended discussion of precisely when these Middle Persian works were composed or translated from Greek. The extant sources suggest, albeit inconclusively, that Greek Hermetica were translated into Arabic already in the 3rd century. The pre-Islamic Persian Hermetic tradition provides a historical basis for understanding the origins of the Arabic Hermetica and the earliest Arabic accounts of Hermes’ identity.

The Book of the Thousands (Kitāb al-Ulūf), written in Arabic in the middle of the 9th century by the astrologer Abū Maʿšar of Balkh, contained an important account of not one but three ancient sages named Hermes. This was to become the most widespread and influential account of Hermes’ life and history in all subsequent Arabic literature, but the original, and rather technical, work in which it first appeared does not survive. We know Abū Maʿšar's Hermes-legend only through the citations of later authors, the earliest of which is that of Ibn Ǧulǧul in the late 10th century. After providing the text and an annotated translation of Abū Maʿšar's account, this chapter pieces together its original literary context—a chronological discussion contributing to a work of historical astrology—and discovers Abū Maʿšar's sources for the stories. These sources include at least one late antique Christian world chronicle, which Abū Maʿšar knew in a translation from Syriac. This was based partly and through undetermined intermediaries on the lost chronography of the antediluvian period by the Egyptian monk Annianus (ca 400). Another source of Abū Maʿšar is found to be his contemporary, the philosopher al-Kindī. In short, Abū Maʿšar's influential account of the three Hermeses is not a fanciful invention in Arabic but a synthesis of late antique and early Arabic elements. The Arabic account of Hermes is closely connected to the history of the world chronicle and its genre.

This chapter provides general remarks on religion in Rampura. The villagers propitiated a wide variety of deities from the high gods and goddesses of all-India Hinduism in their various manifestations to local ones presiding over epidemics Deities differed from each other also in their personalities and character. This was particularly seen in the contrast between the mild, vegetarian deity Rama, and the fierce Mari. When several households had the same house deity, it was frequently indicative of the existence of an agnatic linkage between them. Astrology is woven into the fabric of Hindu religion as it is lived from day-to-day. The chapter takes into account certain ideas basic to the understanding of the day-to-day religious life of the people in Rampura and neighbouring villages.

This chapter evaluates the use of the Babylonian Talmud for the study of the history of late-Roman Palestine using astrology as a case example. It explains that the Babylonian Talmud contains much material which derives from Palestine and may sometimes preserve Palestinian rabbinic material in a form closer to the original than is found in Palestinian compilations. Palestinian sources often do not contain trustworthy evidence about Palestinian Sages and institutions.

In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of magical and occult philosophies. Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies. By the early and mid‐nineteenth century, the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave middle‐class Americans a new vocabulary for describing their inner‐relationship to unseen spiritual dimensions of life. And, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, both mesmerism and spiritualism provided general audiences with new ways of exploring this inner‐relationship to the spirit world.