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Books on the topic 'Christian cultural narratives'
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1
Christie, Ian, and Annie Oever, eds. Stories. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462985841.
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Stories are perceived as central to modern life. Not only in narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, theater, but also in social media. Telling/having "a story" is widely deemed essential, in business as well as in social life. Does this mark an intensification of what has always been part of human cultures; or has the realm of "story" expanded to dominate twenty-first century discourse? Addressing stories is an obvious priority for the Key Debates series, and Volume 7, edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, identifies new phenomena in this field — complex narration, puzzle films, transmedia storytelling — as well as new approaches to understanding these, within narratology and bio-cultural studies. Chapters on such extended television series as Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones and Dickensian explore distinctively new forms of screen storytelling in the digital age. With contributions by Vincent Amiel, Jan Baetens, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, John Ellis, Miklós Kiss, Eric de Kuyper, Sandra Laugier, Luke McKernan, José Moure, Roger Odin, Annie van den Oever, Melanie Schiller, Steven Willemsen, Robert Ziegler.
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The inside story: A narrative approach to religious understanding and truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
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School desegregation in the twenty-first century: The focus must change. Lewiston, N.Y: E. Mellen Press, 1997.
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Wood, W. Jay. Christian Theories of Virtue. Edited by Nancy E. Snow. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199385195.013.44.
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This chapter surveys important points of development in Christian thinking about the virtues. Christians have not been the only champions of virtue for the last two millennia. The centrality of imitating and following Christ to achieve one’s true telos has, however, put a very distinctive stamp on Christian thinking about what qualities of character count as virtues. Moral and theological virtues such as humility, compassion, hope, and love are largely absent from cultural landscapes Christians have shared with other virtue traditions. Even traits named in common with other virtue traditions take on a distinctive Christian form when situated within the Christian narrative. Despite the differences among Christians about how to think about particular virtues, or even whether the virtue tradition is the best way to think about the moral life, they agree that all stand in need of divine aid if they are to achieve Christlikeness.
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1944-, Hock Ronald F., Chance J. Bradley, and Perkins Judith 1944-, eds. Ancient fiction and early Christian narrative. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1998.
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Cox, Jeffrey. The Dialectics of Empire, Race, and Diocese. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199643011.003.0002.
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The history of global Anglicanism is dominated by two master narratives. In the narrative of post-colonial studies, Anglican expansion is one aspect of the expansion of the British Empire. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) reconfigured imperialism as cultural domination of the non-Western world, and the imposition of Western styles of religion. The contrasting narrative of mission studies focuses on the victory of the ‘indigenous’ over the ‘foreign’ in the spread of Christianity. Heavily influenced by the works of Lamin Sanneh, this narrative regards missionaries as detonators of indigenous Church growth. This chapter suggests a new narrative of global Anglicanism in which the antagonistic binary struggle between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘indigenous’ is replaced with a dialectical narrative of conflict and collaboration. Western and non-Western Christians cooperate in the ‘contact zone’ of mission and diocese to create a new global Anglicanism, one that is neither fully indigenous nor fully foreign, but new.
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Shattuck, Debra A. Conclusion. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040375.003.0007.
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Baseball did not become gendered as a man’s sport overnight nor did any single group dominate the cultural metanarrative of baseball as it matured from infancy to adolescence during the nineteenth century. Baseball has been used to symbolize “Americanism,” middle-class, Judeo-Christian values, and “manliness.” Though many vied to control the narrative of America’s national pastime, not every group had equal influence on the ultimate character and culture of baseball. By the end of the nineteenth century, men held almost exclusive control of the narrative of “official” baseball, while women controlled a parallel narrative for the baseball-surrogate called “women’s baseball.” This game became the precursor of softball which emerged in its official form during the 1930s.
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Brewitt-Taylor, Sam. Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Transcending ‘Religion’. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198827009.003.0005.
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This chapter outlines the radical Anglican contribution to the ‘secularization’ metanarrative, which suddenly achieved cultural dominance in British discussion in the early 1960s. During the early Cold War, it had been widely assumed that ‘religious decline’ was a regressive phenomenon, fatally detrimental to human freedom, as apparently exemplified by the Soviet Union. From the late 1950s, however, Anglican radicals drew on Christian eschatology to propagate a radically alternative vision, which interpreted recent declines in ‘religion’ as evidence of humanity’s permanent transition into an unprecedented new ‘secular age’. Once this interpretation had achieved wide circulation in the British media, it broke free from its theological origins, entering both British conventional wisdom and conventional sociology. From the early 1960s, the secularization narrative was increasingly widely enacted in British culture, as more and more people imagined themselves and their society as being unprecedentedly and permanently non-religious.
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Roy, Olivier. Is Europe Christian? Translated by Cynthia Schoch. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190099930.001.0001.
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As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism, and immigration, this book interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's ‘Christian values’? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, the book challenges the significance of secularized Western nations' reduction of Christianity to a purely cultural force relegated to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and equal marriage. It illustrates that, globally, quite the opposite has occurred: Christianity is now universalized and detached from national identity. Not only has it taken hold in the Global South, generally in a more socially conservative form than in the West, but it has also ‘returned’ to Europe, following immigration from former colonies. Despite attempts within Europe to nationalize or even racialize it, Christianity's future is global, non-European, and immigrant, as the continent's Churches well know. The book represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place in national life today.
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Barnes, SJ, Michael. Waiting on Grace. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198842194.001.0001.
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Whereas much theology of religions regards ‘the other’ as a problem to be solved, this book begins with a Church called to witness to its faith in a multicultural world by practising a generous yet risky hospitality. A theology of dialogue takes its rise from the Christian experience of being-in-dialogue. Taking its rise from the biblical narrative of encounter, call, and response, such a theology cannot be fully understood without reference to the matrix of faith that Christians share in complex ways with the Jewish people. The contemporary experience of the Shoah, the dominating religious event of the twentieth century, has complexified that relationship and left an indelible mark on the religious sensibility of both Jews and Christians. Engaging with a range of thinkers, from Heschel, Levinas, and Edith Stein who were all deeply affected by the Shoah, to Metz, Panikkar, and Rowan Williams, who are always pressing the limits of what can and cannot be said with integrity about the self-revealing Word of God, this book shows how Judaism is a necessary, if not sufficient, source of Christian self-understanding. What is commended by this foundational engagement is a hope-filled ‘waiting on grace’ made possible by virtues of empathy and patience. A theology of dialogue focuses not on metaphysical abstractions but on biblical forms of thought about God’s presence to human beings which Christians share with Jews and, under the continuing guidance of the Spirit of Christ, learn to adapt to a whole range of contested cultural and political contexts.
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Pregill, Michael E. The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198852421.001.0001.
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This book explores the story of the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf in its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts, from ancient Israel to the emergence of Islam. It focuses in particular on the Qur’an’s presentation of the narrative and its background in Jewish and Christian retellings of the episode from Late Antiquity. Across the centuries, the interpretation of the Calf episode underwent major changes reflecting the varying cultural, religious, and ideological contexts in which various communities used the story to legitimate their own tradition, challenge the claims of others, and delineate the boundaries between self and other. The book contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the relationship between Bible and Qur’an, arguing for the necessity of understanding the Qur’an and Islamic interpretations of the history and narratives of ancient Israel as part of the broader biblical tradition. The Calf narrative in the Qur’an, central to the qur’anic conception of the legacy of Israel and the status of the Jews of its own time, reflects a profound engagement with the biblical account in Exodus, as well as being informed by exegetical and parascriptural traditions in circulation in the Qur’an’s milieu in Late Antiquity. The book also addresses the issue of Western approaches to the Qur’an, arguing that the historical reliance of scholars and translators on classical Muslim exegesis of scripture has led to misleading conclusions about the meaning of qur’anic episodes.
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Gold, Barbara K. Perpetua. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195385458.001.0001.
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This book is an overview of the Christian martyr Perpetua’s life and the cultural, religious, political, literary, social, and physical contexts in which she lived. It does not attempt to be a full biography of Perpetua because we do not have enough information about her. It discusses the narrative work in Latin, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, composed by her and by her editor while she was awaiting execution, and its authenticity. It also discusses the descriptions of martyrs as athletes and the gendering of martyrs in early Christian writers; the social milieu in which Perpetua lived in ancient Carthage; the conditions in Roman Africa in the third century CE; the conditions for Christians and pagans in the third century CE; Perpetua’s family, education, and social status; the social and physical conditions of martyrdom in the third century CE; and the legacy of Perpetua and her text among later writers. The book aims to discuss in depth such contested issues as whether Perpetua herself wrote the part of the text attributed to her, how fictionalized the accounts of martyrdom accounts were, and what the status of these martyrs and their stories were during the pre-Constantinian period.
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England, Samuel. Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425223.001.0001.
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Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.
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Dueck, Jonathan, and Suzel Ana Reily, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199859993.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates the role of music in Christian practice and history across contemporary world Christianities (including chapters focused on communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia). Using ethnography, history, and musical analysis, it explores Christian groups as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book traces five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias, music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume approaches Christian musical practices as powerful windows into the ways music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) among places. It also pays attention to the ways Christian musical practices encompass and negotiate deeply rooted values. The volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural practices, narratives, and values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.
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Beste, Jennifer. College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190268503.001.0001.
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What happens at college parties? Why do students dress and behave the way they do? Who has power, and what kind? And are college students happy overall with party and hookup culture? In response to undergraduates’ skepticism of researchers’ accounts of hookup culture, the author engaged 126 college students as ethnographers to observe and analyze this complex social reality at parties. Part I presents their results, revealing a disillusionment with contemporary sexual and relational norms that challenges benevolent or even neutral views of hookup culture. Part II brings students into conversation with Christianity’s narrative of what it means to become fully human and experience genuine joy and fulfillment. The spokesperson for this vision is theologian Johann Metz, whose portrait of Jesus struggling to become fully human by embracing poverty of spirit resonates with today’s college students. Comparing Jesus’s way of being in the world with their college culture’s status quo, many undergraduates discover in Metz’s Poverty of Spirit a countercultural path to authenticity, happiness, and fulfillment. Part III culminates in a call to action: with understanding of contemporary norms gained in part I, and poverty of spirit as explored in part II, these chapters explore obstacles to sexual justice on college campuses, identify key commitments necessary for change, and envision how undergraduates can work to create the college culture they truly desire and deserve.
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Grethlein, Jonas, Luuk Huitink, and Aldo Tagliabue, eds. Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848295.001.0001.
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This volume, which brings together thirteen essays written by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. At the same time, the rich ancient material opens up a historical perspective for cognitive studies. The individual chapters tackle a wide range of narrative genres, broadly understood, besides epic, historiography, and the novel, also tragedy and early Christian texts, while also considering such media as dance and sculpture. They do so with the help of a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools, taken from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics.
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Kling, David W. A History of Christian Conversion. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195320923.001.0001.
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Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David W. Kling examines the dynamic of individuals, families, and people groups who turn to the Christian faith. Global in reach, this book progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity’s expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Although conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming), it is, when examined over two millennia, a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion, and no easily demonstrable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors—historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural—shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples. It also engages current theories and models to explain conversion and examines recurring themes in the converting process: gender, agency, motivation, testimony, coercion, self-identity, “true” conversion, music, communication, the body, and divine presence. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling’s book is, to date, the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.
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Emerich, Monica M. LOHAS, Social Reform, and Good Capitalism. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036422.003.0006.
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This chapter takes up with the healed self, the newly “conscious” change-agent, now interpellated as global “citizen” as he and she move from inner work to externalized work in the world. It focuses on social reform and the idea of “good capitalism” in LOHAS narratives. Capitalism must be exonerated in LOHAS culture, and to do so means that certain perceptions and practices that have been treated as economic and cultural axioms need to be reworked. LOHAS begins with the idea of success. The chapter investigates how the texts attempt to juggle a new meaning of success that entails doing with less—but better things—while still promoting the interests of capital. It historicizes LOHAS discourse to reveal how it is informed by various social movements including early American Christian Reform, the European Green Party of the 1960s, and the social movements occurring in the 1960s in the United States, including environmentalism, feminism, and civil rights.
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Tate, Andrew. The Novel. Edited by Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198718406.013.30.
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The nineteenth-century novel in English is frequently defined by a theological shape. Fiction was sometimes regarded with suspicion by Christian readers, particularly those shaped by the legacies of the Puritan tradition. Yet alternative understandings of the pervasive influence of evangelical culture emphasize a more complex relationship with the novel, even after the advent of the ‘Higher’ biblical criticism. The chapter builds on Callum Brown’s analysis of what he names the ‘salvation economy’: a matrix of evangelical sermons, hymnody, and popular narrative shaped British culture in the nineteenth century. Conversion, fundamental in evangelicalism, is also a frequent trope in popular fiction. The chapter examines the animating presence of Christian thought in novels by, for example, Charles Dickens, Mary Ward, Emma Jane Worboise, and the Brontë sisters. The chapter gives particular focus to George Eliot whose fiction challenges assumptions regarding the apparent binaries of faith and scepticism and sacred and profane.
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Hammond, Marlé. The Tale of al-Barrāq Son of Rawḥān and Laylā the Chaste. British Academy, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266687.001.0001.
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This book is a bilingual edition and study of a lengthy specimen of pre-modern Arabic storytelling. The tale’s origins are unknown but it probably dates from the seventeenth century. As a sustained fairy tale of the knight-in-shining-armour-rescues-damsel-in-distress variety, it reads as fiction and was probably intended as such. However, scholars in the Arab renaissance or Nahḍa received the text as history. Its pre-Islamic protagonists, ever emoting in verse, were thus celebrated as some of the earliest Arabic poets. The Arabic text featured in the monograph is sourced from five manuscripts and three published editions, and it is modelled on what I call the ‘Christian’ branch of the tale, or that version of the tale which identifies its hero as a Christian and which was promulgated by Christian scholars and literati in the nineteenth century. Two analytical chapters frame the tale: an introductory chapter which charts the evolution of the narrative and its cultural import through to the end of the twentieth century, and a concluding chapter that breaks the story down into its components and compares its structure to both the ʿUdhrī love tale and the popular epic or sīra, thereby situating the text as a hybrid precursor to the modern novel.
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Francesco, Ruffato Luigi, and Centro culturale P. M. Kolbe di Venezia-Mestre., eds. Tracce di umanità nei lager nazisti: Testimonianze raccolte dal Centro culturale P.M. Kolbe di Venezia Mestre. Bologna: EDB, 1991.
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Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. Invisible Weapons. Cornell University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501705151.001.0001.
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In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory. From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to “invisible weapons.” This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. The book tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
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Butler, Melvin L. Island Gospel. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042904.001.0001.
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For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as practitioners sing about what they believe and identify where they stand in relation to cultural and religious outsiders. This book explores these ritual functions as they are fulfilled within Jamaican church services and concerts. It highlights the ways in which Pentecostals cultivate feelings of collective distinctiveness by rendering gospel music with an island flavor and by patrolling stylistic boundaries between a holy “home” and a profane “world.” This dichotomy is destabilized through the transnational flow and appropriation of popular culture and “American” media. What emerges are the strategies of musical worship through which Pentecostals embody their religion and seek spiritual transcendence while navigating the crossroads of local and global practice. Pentecostals describe themselves as “in the world, but not of the world,” meaning that while they live and work in the broader society, they strive to be “sanctified” from it by upholding a distinct moral code. This narrative of worldly renunciation prompts believers to abandon prior habits of conduct while embracing newer, localized identities as children of God. This book uncovers how gospel music, as a dynamic cultural practice, complicates these theological affirmations and reveals the shifting foundations of Pentecostal identity in Jamaica and its diaspora.
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Ng, Su Fang. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198777687.001.0001.
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No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. This book examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders—one Christian, the other Islamic—became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries against the Ottoman Empire’s imperial center: this shared classical inheritance became part of an intensifying cross-cultural engagement in the encounter between the two, allowing a revealing examination of their cultural convergences and imperial rivalries and a remapping of the global literary networks of the early modern world. Rather than absolute alterity or strangeness, the narrative of these parallel traditions is one of contact—familiarity and proximity, unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.
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Yeo, K. K. Biblical Interpretation in the Majority World. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198702252.003.0005.
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This chapter challenges the ‘received’ view that traces the expansion of the dominant theologies of the European and North American colonial powers and their missionaries into the Majority World. When they arrived, these Westerners found ancient Christian traditions and pre-existing spiritualities, linguistic and cultural forms, which questioned their Eurocentric presumptions, and energized new approaches to interpreting the sacred texts of Christianity. The emergence of ‘creative tensions’ in global encounters are a mechanism for expressing (D)issent against attempts to close down or normalize local Bible-reading traditions. This chapter points to the elements which establish a creative tension between indigenizing Majority World approaches to the Bible and those described in the ‘orthodox’ narrative, including: self-theologizing and communal readings; concepts of the Spirit world and human flourishing; the impact of multiple contexts, vernacular languages, sociopolitical and ethno-national identities, and power/marginalization structures; and ‘framing’ public and ecological issues.
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Sharp, Carolyn J., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199859559.001.0001.
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This volume explores historical, literary, and ideological dimensions of the books of the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve—along with Daniel. The prophetic books comprise oracles, narratives, and vision reports from ancient Israel and Judah spanning several centuries. Analysis of these texts sheds light on the cultural norms, theological convictions, and political disputes of Israelite and Judean communities in the shadow of the empires of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia. ThisHandbookfeatures discussion of ancient Near Eastern social and cultic contexts; exploration of focused topics such as divination and other ritual practices of intermediation; textual criticism of the prophetic books, constructions of the persona of the prophet, and the problem of violence in prophetic rhetoric; historical and literary analysis of key prophetic texts; issues in reception history, from early reinterpretation of prophetic texts at Qumran and readings in rabbinic midrash to medieval ecclesial interpretations and modern Christian homiletical appropriations; and feminist, womanist, materialist, postcolonial, and queer readings of prophetic texts in conversation with contemporary theorists.
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McDowell, Nicholas. Rabelaisian Comedy and Satire. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580033.003.0018.
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This chapter discusses the influence of François Rabelais in English literary culture. It looks at this impact on earlier English prose narrative and fiction of Rabelais' loosely related tales of gluttonous, bibulous giants and their fantastic adventures, collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). ‘Rabelaisian’ is of course an adjective which in both criticism and common linguistic currency has become detached from its literary and authorial origins to become an alternative term for the ‘bawdy’, the ‘vulgar’, and the ‘earthily humorous’. The chapter shows the process beginning from the moment the term is coined to describe an author's character rather than appraise their literary style, evoking a sensibility healthily drawn to festivity and indulgence but also somewhat at odds with Christian decency. The generality of the term has doubtless contributed to the vagueness of much critical discussion.
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Storey, Mark. Time and Antiquity in American Empire. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198871507.001.0001.
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This is a book about two empires—ancient Rome and the United States—and what happens to historical time when we think about them together. Ranging from the present day to the late eighteenth century, it tracks how the political and cultural imagination turned Roman antiquity into an object of mutual recognition—an analogy—for the imperial US state, sometimes for the sake of its justification and perpetuation, and sometimes as a tool of critique and resistance. To tackle this, it is divided into three parts: an introduction that lays out the conceptual and methodological stakes, a second part of two chapters on American empire’s political foundations—the republic and the slave—and a third on the popular genres that have stepped into America and Rome’s sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel narratives, and science fiction. But through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, this book is also a way into a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within and across historical time. Time and Antiquity in American Empire ultimately builds a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one located in the oscillating, dialectical dynamics of the analogy, and in a grasp of temporality better understood through metaphors of interconnection—constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, it suggests that recognizing the forms of time that emerge when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read—and how we might yet, in a continuing spirit of critique, read.
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Grau, Marion. Pilgrimage, Landscape, and Identity. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197598634.001.0001.
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The book explores the ritual geography of a pilgrimage system woven around local medieval saints in Norway and the renaissance of pilgrimage in contemporary majority-Protestant Norway, facing challenges of migration, xenophobia, and climate crisis. The study is concerned with historical narratives and communal contemporary reinterpretations of the figure of St. Olav, the first Christian king who was a major impulse toward conversion to Christianity and the unification of regions of Norway in a nation unified by a Christian law and faith. This initially medieval pilgrimage network, which originated after the death of Olav Haraldsson and his proclamation as saint in 1030, became repressed after the Reformation, which had a great influence on Scandinavia and shaped Norwegian Christianity overwhelmingly. Since the late 1990s, the Church of Norway participated in a renaissance that has grown into a remarkable infrastructure supported by national and local authorities. The contemporary pilgrimage by land and by sea to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim is one site where this negotiation is paramount. The study maps how pilgrims, hosts, church officials, and government officials are renegotiating and reshaping narratives of landscape, sacrality, pilgrimage as a symbol of life journey, nation, identity, Christianity, and Protestant reflections on the durability of medieval Catholic saints. The redevelopment of this instance of pilgrimage in a majority-Protestant context negotiates various societal concerns, all of which are addressed by various groups of pilgrims or other actors in the network. One part of the network is the annual festival Olavsfest, a culture and music festival that actively and critically engages the contested heritage of St. Olav and the Church of Norway through theater, music, lectures, and discussions, and features theological and interreligious conversations. This festival is a platform for creative and critical engagement with the contested, violent heritage of St. Olav, the colonial history of Norway in relation to the Sami indigenous population, and many other contemporary social and religious issues. The study highlights facets of critical, constructive engagement of these majority-Protestant actors engaging legacy through forms of theological and ritual creativity rather than mere repetition.
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Neal, Lynn S. Religion in Vogue. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892709.001.0001.
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Religion in Vogue provides readers with a unique approach to the study of popular culture and American religion. Through its analysis of numerous primary sources ranging from fashion magazines to runway shows, the book traces how Christian symbols and imagery became an increasingly prominent part of the fashion industry and designer apparel. Examining this trajectory illuminates the longstanding and evolving relationship between Christianity and fashion. To capture this complexity, each chapter focuses on a specific element of fashion that mediates Christian ideas and images, including print articles, advertisements, jewelry, and fashion designs. Religion in Vogue examines in-depth religious elements in fashion advertisements, the popularity of cross jewelry, Catholic inspirations in designer collections, and, of course, the appearance of the divine on designer garments. Chronicling this trajectory highlights how the fashion industry constructs a vibrant textual, visual, and material discourse on Christianity that exists alongside and intersects with more dominant and familiar religious narratives. This fashionable religion, an aestheticized Christianity, offers spiritual seekers a way to be simultaneously stylish and religious. In doing so, the world of fashion both shapes and reflects trends toward religious individualism and religious eclecticism that have dominated the religious landscape of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first. Religion in Vogue helps us better understand the changing American religious landscape in a novel and fascinating way.
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Carpenedo, Manoela. Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190086923.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book investigates a growing religious movement fusing beliefs and rituals deriving from Charismatic Evangelicalism and Judaism. Unlike analogous phenomena found in the West, such as Messianic Judaism (where Jewish-born people identify as believers in Jesus) or Christian Zionism (Evangelicals who emphasize the role of the Jews living in Israel by embracing Zionist activism), it addresses a different dimension of this trend emerging from the Global South. Based on an ethnography conducted during 2013–2015 within a religious community in Brazil, this book explains why former Charismatic Evangelicals (with no Jewish background) are adopting Jewish tenets and lifestyles. Focusing particularly on women’s conversion narratives, it investigates the reasons why Brazilian Charismatic Evangelicals are embracing rules derived from Orthodox Judaism, such as strict dress codes, eating kosher food, and observing menstrual taboos, while believing in Jesus as the Messiah. The analysis indicates that Judaizing Evangelical communities should be understood as a revival seeking to restore Christianity. The incorporation of Jewish elements aims to rebuild the authenticity of Christianity while distinguishing them from Charismatic Evangelicalism and its perceived scriptural inaccuracy, moral permissiveness, and materialism. This revival also involves recovering a collective past. References to a hidden Jewish heritage and a “return” to Judaism are mobilized for justifying strict adherence to Jewish practices. Drawing upon a sociocultural analysis, this study examines the historical, theological, religious, and subjective reasons behind this emerging Judaizing trend in Charismatic Evangelicalism. This book also engages with the literature of religious conversion, cultural change, and debates examining religious hybridization processes.
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Stanley, Brian. Christianity in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691196848.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.
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Sanchez, Melissa E. Queer Faith. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, this book resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of erotic fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the long and complex historical entanglement of concepts of faith, race, and secular love is urgent to contemporary debates about normativity, agency, and subjectivity. Queer Faith puts Christian theology and Renaissance lyric poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer theory and scholarship.