Search Results

The abolishment of the indigenous religion in Mexico and the replacing it with the new was uppermost in the minds of Spanish officials. This was socially and politically important. The “Uprooting of Idolatry”, the “extirpación de idolatría”, was undertaken in rural Mexico by the Jesuit, Alonso de Santarén, and by civil authorities.

This chapter suggests that the preacher's words have the capacity to act just as sacramentally as any image: to draw the listener into an experience of the God who is always present and ready to address us, whenever opportunity presents itself. It examines the positive sacramental side of preaching, then offers a comparison with the earlier, largely but by no means exclusively monastic tradition of illuminated books. Finally, it provides some assessment of the relative likelihood of either verbal or visual degenerating into idolatry.

With an interpretation of Berkeley's view of spirits in hand, this chapter turns to the task of situating that view of spirits within his overall positive metaphysics and defending the connection it bears to “common sense”. The book argues that Berkeley's metaphysics is the metaphysics of the “mob” so long as the mob is properly understood to be the mob of professing monotheists. It further argues that core aspects of traditional monotheism inevitably tend toward support for immaterialism. Wilfred Sellars' metaphilosophy from Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man is used to both elucidate and map Berkeley's core metaphysical commitments.

This chapter examines éblouissement in Marcel Proust's Venice in À la recherche du temps perdu. It suggests that Proust's sensibility and imagination were “religious” insofar as they were animated by the wish to intuit from a “feeling.” From the perspective of more rigorously conceived religious belief and doctrine, however, the chapter argues that such wish was pure folly, in many ways the blind alley of a writer for whom religious faith was not a plausible option, but who was also indifferent to what had come to replace religion—the secular narratives of “progress” underpinning the enlightenment project of “modernity.” That Proust suspected it was folly is clear from his indictment of John Ruskin with the charge of idolatry.

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, with Chapter 6, show that besides using the Laws of Hammurabi as a source, the Covenant Code also apparently used a brief native (Israelite/Judean) source (oral or written) with law formulated in participial form, often with the penalty "one shall be put to death." This source was probably brought into the Covenant Code because it contained a law against cursing parents which the Covenant Code used to "translate" laws on denouncing parents from Hammurabi's text. This opened the door to using the participial form for other capital laws in 21:12, 15–17 as well as in 22:17–19, which is an appendix of miscellaneous behavioral taboos (sorcery, bestiality, idolatrous sacrifice) derived from or inspired by the participial source.

This chapter surveys events in Pimlico in west London between the end of the 1840s and the end of the 1850s. In these dramatic years St. Paul's, Knightsbridge and St. Barnabas, Pimlico became the centre of intense disputes over ritualism in the Church of England. William Bennett was forced from the parish in the winter of 1850-51 as the result of a series of riots and disturbances partly caused by the intervention of the Prime Minister in accusing High Church Anglicans in general and, by implication, Bennett in particular, of leading people to Rome. Bennett's successor, Robert Liddell, defended a serious of high profile legal cases which culminated in 1857 in the vindication of many ritualist practices such as the use of the cross in church (so long as it were clearly seen as an ornament rather than an object of worship in its own right). The centre of opposition in the parish was Charles Westerton, a Chartist, library owner and stationer whose actions opposed the Protestant (and proto-socialist) word against the Anglo-Catholic image via repeated accusations of idolatry.

The use of icons in Jainism has not gone uncontested. In particular, the Shvetambara layman Lonka Shah agitated against icons in the fifteenth century. From this anti‐iconic tradition the Sthanakavasi movement emerged in the seventeenth century. It is still strong today. The Sthanakavasis have constructed their own historical narratives to explain the use of Jina images, understanding them not to be holy icons, but rather corrupt idols. This chapter analyzes a nineteenth‐century Sthanakavasi narrative of idols, as well as the twentieth‐century history of Jainism by the Sthanakavasi monk Hastimal. This Sthanakavasi history of idols is then contrasted with a Murtipujaka history of iconoclasm constructed by the Murtipujaka monk Jn_nsundar. The Sthanakavasi iconoclasm is then further compared with the Christian Protestant movement, in which the rejection of images is also joined with a call to return to the “original” forms of the religion, and a critique of the intervening tradition. This leads to an analysis of the ways that discourses of idolatry and critiques of tradition in some ways overlap with modern fundamentalism, and in other ways do not.

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.

In 1543 the Cristo Aparecido appeared to the Spanish missionary friar, Antonio Roa, and to the community of newly converted indigenous Christians of the pueblo of Totolapan (in modern-day Morelos, Mexico) where he ministered. This chapter weaves together two seemingly irreconcilable origin myths, one from art history, and the other the narrative of faith, to explain the circumstances in which the arrival of the crucifix was understood to be extraordinary. Beyond legend and miracle, the Cristo’s origins reveal the central role of objects of material religion in the spiritual conquest of sixteenth-century Mexico.

This chapter begins with Desideri in the court of Lhazang Khan and tackles the problem of the resemblances between Roman Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism as Desideri himself understood it. It touches on early modern theories of idolatry, discussions of the survival of primitive revelation in traditional societies, and Jesuit accounts of grace and free will. It shows that the Jesuits' philosophical and theological speculations contain an intellectual program for Christian living amid strangers.

Nineteenth-century British missionaries to India such as William Carey and William Ward of Serampore, and army chaplain Claudius Buchanan helped construct the idea of a conceptual and ritual core to an array of Hindu communities and deities. Although strenuously opposed by French scholar Abbé J. A. Dubois, a strain of Christian iconoclasm then being nurtured by a rampant anti-Catholicism in Britain fashioned a system of Hindu theology and ritual for British evangelical Christians that focused squarely on image worship and cast Hindu ritual as an infantile version of the idolatry condemned in the Christian Old and New Testaments. Idol worship and satī (widow immolation) were used to create the impression of an overarching logic in Hinduism that was then offered to the working-class audiences of the Church Missionary Society’s popular newspapers as a systematized, coherent, pan-Indian Hinduism.

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 last chapter presents a translation of a humorous satirical poem by the famous Bengali poet, Dāśarathī Rāy (1805–57). He was particularly well known as a master of the Pāñcālī form, which are basically songs interspersed with short hymns to various deities. He is also noteworthy for his rather raw and gritty—and very funny—depictions of the lives of the lower orders of Calcutta during the colonial era. Largely conservative in his religious views, Dāśarathī singled out the Kartābhajās (a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta) as the very worst example of all that was wrong with the Hindu society of his day—their sexual licentiousness, idolatry, violation of caste, overturning of traditional laws of purity, chicanery, and fraud. Hence, he provides a window onto the perception of the Kartābhajās in the eyes of the upper class elites of the day.

Common to nearly all constructions of identity is that of ‘the [stereotyped] other’, the ‘not-us’, often defined negatively, in opposition to, and in order to sustain, a self-understanding. In Graeco-Roman thought, this is represented by the idea of ‘the barbarian’, and in Jewish thought by ‘the Gentiles’. In early Christian writings, we can explore the function and construction of ‘the Gentiles’, ‘the Greeks, and ‘the Jews’. In addition, the language of otherness is applied to an undifferentiated ‘world’ as well as to those who hold other views, the construction of heresy. Yet, as in modern debate, other models of a relationship with the Other than the hostile are possible and leave their traces.

From the perspective of Christianity, religion as such is always liable to becoming idolatry. For Christians, the religious life is properly always a response to God's self‐giving in the life and the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, the Christian response to sickness and suffering are also properly shaped by God's presence to the world in Jesus; this chapter suggests that that response may properly be characterized as apocalyptic.

This chapter focuses on Leviticus 20, which considers a range of sexual behaviors, including rape, adultery, incest, homosexual sex, and bestiality. It argues that biblical law does not have a category of sexual offences as such: instead prohibited sexual relationships are understood in terms of pre-existing categories of idolatry and dishonoring parents, as well as adultery. In this way, Leviticus 20 echoes the sequence of taboos found in the Decalogue. Adultery and forms of adultery are presented schematically in biblical law as a series of binary oppositions to the norm of marriage. As a result, biblical sexual ethics is structured around a clear understanding of harm and family. Comparison with an analysis of recent sexual offences reform in England and Wales suggests that biblical law actually defines questions of consent, equality and protection, in relation to sexual behavior, differently and more broadly than modern law.