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Books on the topic 'Spread of Christianity'
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1
Caldwell, Moore Edward. The spread of Christianity in the modern world. University of Chicago Press, 1986.
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Muvumba, Joshua. The spread of christianity in Ankore since 1901. J. Muvumba, 2001.
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The lopsided spread of Christianity: Toward an understanding of the diffusion of religions. Praeger, 2002.
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The Italian influence on Western law and culture and the spread of Christianity. P.A. Rapisarda, 1993.
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1937-, Hopler Marcia, and Hopler Thom 1936-1978, eds. Reaching the world next door: How to spread the gospel in the midst of many cultures. InterVarsity Press, 1993.
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The savage text: How the Bible has been used to spread hatred. Blackwell Pub., 2008.
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Woodhead, Linda. 3. The spread of Christianity. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199687749.003.0004.
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‘The spread of Christianity’ charts Christianity’s growth and spread, from being a tiny movement within a Jewish context to being the world’s largest religion with a global presence. How did Eastern Christianity develop differently from Western Christendom? Christianity’s growth was not smooth and uniform. It was most successful when in alliance with political powers, and least successful where other religions, such as Islam, were well established and it faced unfriendly political forces. Christianity has suffered repeated setbacks and retreats and at no time has it acted as a unified force. From the very start it has been internally divided, and it remains so.
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Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity. McClelland & Stewart, 2013.
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Jr, Henry Reyenga. The Spontaneous Spread of Home-Discipleship Christianity. Home Discipleship Press, 2006.
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Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity. McClelland & Stewart, 2012.
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Mingana, Alphonse. The Early Spread of Christianity in India. Gorgias Pr Llc, 2010.
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Harris, William V., ed. The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries. BRILL, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789047427476.
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Montgomery, Robert L. The Spread of Religions: A Social Scientific Theory Based on the Spread of Buddhism, Christianity & Islam. Long Dash Publishing Company, 2007.
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Hopelifter: Creative Ways to Spread Hope When Life Hurts. Zondervan, 2013.
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From Jerusalem to Timbuktu: A World Tour of the Spread of Christianity. IVP Books, 2018.
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Montgomery, Robert L. The Lopsided Spread of Christianity: Toward an Understanding of the Diffusion of Religions. Praeger Publishers, 2001.
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Zondervan Handbook to the History of Christianity: A Comprehensive Global Survey of the Growth, Spread And Development of Christianity. Zondervan Publishing Company, 2007.
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Montgomery, Robert L. Why Religions Spread: The Expansion of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam with Implications for Missions Second Edition. Cross Lines Publishing, 2012.
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The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition) (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition). Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.
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The Evangelical President: George Bush's Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throghout the World. Regnery Publishing, 2007.
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van Lint, Theo Maarten. From Reciting to Writing and Interpretation: Tendencies, Themes, and Demarcations of Armenian Historical Writing. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199236428.003.0010.
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This chapter details how Armenian historiography was closely tied to the spread and defense of Christianity in Armenia, which had been declared the state religion by King Trdat at around 314. Because Armenia had been within the Iranian cultural and religious orbit from Achaemenid times onwards, the emergence of a Western orientation promoted by the Armenian Church meant a categorical change in outlook, which would dominate its historiography. Often contested between powerful eastern and western neighbours, various royal dynasties reigned over Armenia, the last one — the Arsacid — being of Parthian origin and acceded to power in the first century AD. However, major religious conflicts, particularly between Mazdeism and Christianism, left a deep imprint on Armenian historiography, and have long prevented it from acknowledging the Iranian elements in the wider Armenian social and cultural spheres.
22
Woodhead, Linda. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199687749.003.0001.
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Christianity, one of the world’s most successful religions, has endured over two thousand years and, despite setbacks, has enjoyed its greatest growth and spread in the modern period. The Introduction describes Christianity as a powerful religion that contains vast resources for shaping life and death. It is flexible because it works with abstract concepts along with narratives, symbols, and rituals. But are there limitations to what Christianity can offer an individual? Three main types of Christianity—the Church, Mystical, and Biblical—are distinguished in terms of how they understand and embody authority and power, both human and divine, and how this plays out in their own structures and stances towards wider society.
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Ngom, Fallou. Ajami Literacies of West Africa. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190657543.003.0007.
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Wherever there have been significant numbers of Muslims outside of Arabia, there has been some Ajami literacy. This is because Ajami results from the spread of Islam and its accompanying Arabic script. Just as the Latin script was adapted for some languages when Christianity was adopted by many cultures, Islam also introduced the Arabic script to sub-Saharan Africa and was modified to write numerous African languages. The techniques used in contemporary Ajami writings are ancient. The Arabic script itself is believed to have resulted from analogous techniques applied to the ancient Aramaic script. This chapter shows how dual literacies in Arabic and Ajami have spread in West Africa as the result of the expansion of Islam and its Quranic education system, proselytizing, and the circulation of people and texts.
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Johnson, Andrew. Pentecostalism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238988.003.0004.
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Pentecostalism has grown rapidly in Brazil over the last century. It has changed the country’s religious landscape and has been most successful in poor, urban areas, the same areas in Rio de Janeiro where the Comando Vermelho flourishes. In the city’s favelas, Pentecostalism is now the most widely practiced religion; it is the faith of the killable people. Though Pentecostal Christianity started in the early 1900s in Los Angeles and was brought to Brazil by missionaries, it spread largely by empowering local pastors and independent churches and has few ties to foreign churches or funding sources.
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Siker, Jeffrey. Sin in the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465735.001.0001.
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This book examines what the different New Testament writings have to say about sin within the broader historical and theological contexts of first-century Christianity. These contexts include both the immediate world of Judaism out of which early Christianity emerged, as well as the larger Greco-Roman world into which Christianity quickly spread as an increasingly Gentile religious movement. The Jewish sacrificial system associated with the Jerusalem Temple was important for dealing with human sin, and early Christians appropriated the language and imagery of sacrifice in describing the salvific importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Greco-Roman understandings of sin as error or ignorance played an important role in the spreading of the Christian message to the Gentile world. The book details the distinctive portraits of sin in each of the canonical Gospels in relation to the life and ministry of Jesus. Beyond the Gospels the book develops how the letters of Paul and other early Christian writers address the reality of sin, again primarily in relation to the revelatory ministry of Jesus.
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Stolte, Bernard. Byzantine Law. Edited by Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198785521.013.10.
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This chapter sets out to show that Byzantine law is part of a common European past. The Byzantines identified themselves as Romans, their law was Roman law, and their capital Constantinople was the New Rome. This is clearly demonstrated by the history of Byzantine law, in which the Emperor Justinian occupies a prominent place and the legal language continued to employ Latin technical terms. With the spread of (Orthodox) Christianity in eastern Europe, Byzantine law was adopted as well. Thus we may see there, just as in the Latin west, a process of reception of Roman law on the shared basis of the Corpus iuris civilis, via a different channel.
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Llywelyn, Dorian. Mary and Mariology. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.62.
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The mother of Jesus is the most important female figure of Christianity. Mary appears in a small number of biblical passages, but the vast Marian phenomenon includes Christian doctrine and a range of cultural expressions. Interest in Mary emerged early in the Eastern Mediterranean, and spread into the West. With slightly different emphases, Catholics and Orthodox Christians share a number of beliefs concerning Mary and pray to her, but most forms of Protestantism reject Marian devotion. While Catholic attention to Mary diminished in the global North following the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, it has remained strong in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America. Shrines such as sites where Mary is believed to have appeared draw millions of devotees annually. Contemporary Mariology, the academic study of the figure of Mary, includes considerations from almost all the liberal arts.
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Peterson, Derek R. The East African Revival. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199643011.003.0010.
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The East African Revival was a Christian conversion movement that began in northern Rwanda and southern Uganda in the mid-1930s and spread throughout eastern Africa during the 1940s and 1950s. Learning from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—which was foundational literature in Anglican mission stations—converts engaged in radical acts of self-editing. They disavowed kin relationships, disposed of their possessions, and confessed their sins without regard to propriety. Other Christians thought them a menace to the whole social order. This chapter studies the contentious process by which the Revival was domesticated. Through the reconfiguration of legal codes, by the operation of church discipline, heedless converts were, over time, made members of civil society. There was a great amount of disciplinary work that had to occur before the Revival could safely become a source of inspiration in the field of World Christianity.
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Keevak, Michael. How Did East Asians Become Yellow? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465285.003.0011.
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This chapter offers a brief historical intervention explaining the rise of the term yellow for racial thinking about Asians. Using his binomial nomenclature species-naming system, the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus separated Homo sapiens into four continental types, with distinct colors assigned to each. Over two decades later the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach also classified Asians as yellow in his five-race scheme. Although some early twentieth-century anthropologists claimed to have proven that Mongolians (Asians) were physically yellow in an attempt to place Asians lower than Europeans, the initial categorization of yellow had no visual or biological basis. As Asians continued to refuse to take part in Western systems (Christianity, international trade), Europeans' perceptions of Asians' skin color darkened. Moreover in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the yellow idea began to spread to East Asian cultures themselves.
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Kahn, Andrew, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199663941.003.0002.
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Part I considers definitions of literature (as distinct from philology) for the medieval period, arguing that the rhetorical shape and storytelling functions of many texts composed in the Russian lands from the tenth century onward created a body of literature when understood on these terms. The Part surveys the spread of learning and a new script to Kievan Rus′, treating accounts of the conversion of the Eastern Slavs to Orthodox Christianity. It considers the conditions and scribal practices affecting the selective transmission of texts from Byzantium within the context of the larger Orthodox world and its networks of scriptoria. The Part looks at the spiritual function of writing within the monasteries, and considers the impact of appanage politics on the uses and value of literature. Through a consideration of hagiography, sermons, and chronicle narrative an idea of Rus′ and models of kingship and holiness emerged.
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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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Vélez, Karin. The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691174006.001.0001.
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In 1295, a house fell from the evening sky onto an Italian coastal road by the Adriatic Sea. Inside, awestruck locals encountered the Virgin Mary, who explained that this humble mud-brick structure was her original residence newly arrived from Nazareth. To keep it from the hands of Muslim invaders, angels had flown it to Loreto, stopping three times along the way. This story of the house of Loreto has been read as an allegory of how Catholicism spread peacefully around the world by dropping miraculously from the heavens. This book calls that interpretation into question by examining historical accounts of the movement of the Holy House across the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. These records indicate vast and voluntary involvement in the project of formulating a branch of Catholic devotion. The book surveys the efforts of European Jesuits, Slavic migrants, and indigenous peoples in Baja California, Canada, and Peru. These individuals contributed to the expansion of Catholicism by acting as unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers of Loreto. Their participation in portaging Mary's house challenges traditional views of Christianity as a prepackaged European export, and instead suggests that Christianity is the cumulative product of thousands of self-appointed editors. The book also demonstrates how miracle narratives can be treated seriously as historical sources that preserve traces of real events. Drawing on rich archival materials, the book illustrates how global Catholicism proliferated through independent initiatives of untrained laymen.
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Muessig, Carolyn. The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198795643.001.0001.
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Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.
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Wong, Wai Ching Angela, and Patricia P. K. Chiu, eds. Christian Women in Chinese Society. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888455928.001.0001.
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This volume expands on the long-standing debates about whether Christianity is a collaborator in, or a liberating force against the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia through the accounts of the Anglican church in China. Women have played an important role in the history of Chinese Christianity, but their contributions have yet to receive due recognition, partly because of the complexities arising out of the historical tension between Western imperialism and Chinese patriarchy. Single women missionaries and missionary spouses in the nineteenth century set the early examples of what women could do to spread the Gospel. The education provided to Chinese women by missionaries, which was expected to turn them into good wives and mothers, empowered the students and allowed them to become full participants not only in the Church but also in the wider society. Together, the Western female missionaries and the Chinese women whom they trained explored their newfound freedom and tried out their roles with the help of each other. These developments culminated in the ordination of Florence Li Tim Oi to priesthood in 1944, a singular event that fundamentally changed the history of the Anglican Communion. At the heart of this collection lies the rich experience of those women in the Anglican church, both Chinese and Western, who devoted their lives to their evangelizing and civilizing mission across mainland China and Hong Kong. Contributors make the most of the sources to reconstruct their voices and present sympathetic accounts of these remarkable women’s achievements.
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J. A. Talbert, Richard, and Fred S. Naiden. Mercury's Wings. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195386844.001.0001.
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Mercury’s Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World is the first volume of essays on ancient communications. The authors, who include Classicists, art historians, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists, take the broad view of communications as a vehicle, not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. Each chapter deals with either a communications network, a means or type of communication, or the special features of religious communication or communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of this volume take in the Near East as well as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years, beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West. In all, about one quarter of the chapters deal with the Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman Empire and its Persian and Indian rivals.
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Llewellyn, Matthew P., and John Gleaves. The Anatomy of Olympic Amateurism. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040351.003.0002.
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This chapter traces the origins and development of amateurism, from the plans to revive the Olympic Games of classical Greek antiquity in 1894 through its global diffusion. Though often misattributed to ancient Greece, amateurism was a distinctly modern invention born in Great Britain during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A holistic and loosely articulated set of ideas, beliefs, and practices, amateurism is commonly defined as being “about doing things for the love of them, doing them without reward or material gain or doing them unprofessionally.” The amateur played the game for the game's sake, disavowed gambling and professionalism, and competed in a composed, dignified manner. From its institutional seedbed in Victorian Britain, amateurism traveled the sporting globe, from the cosmopolitan Dominion cities of Cape Town, Sydney, and Toronto to distant British imperial outposts in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Like the spread of modern sports and games, the British diffused amateurism via a series of interrelated mechanisms: notably, the public schools, the economic and industrial system, the imperial British army, the evangelical and muscular Christianity movements, and a vast literary network of sporting journals, male adventure stories, and imperial tracts.
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Randall, David. The Concept of Conversation. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430104.001.0001.
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The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from a minor mode of rhetoric to the point where rhetoric as a whole was redefined as conversation, and argues that this was the most important change in rhetoric during the centuries between 1400 and 1700. In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations, conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Concept of Conversation traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and women. It revises Jürgen Habermas’ history of the emergence of the rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women’s speech at the centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.
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Sahner, Christian C. Christian Martyrs under Islam. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691179100.001.0001.
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How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? This book explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, the book introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity; high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet; and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. The book argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. The book examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim–Christian relations in the centuries to come.
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Naimark-Goldberg, Natalie. Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin. Liverpool University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781904113539.001.0001.
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The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. In shifting the focus to a group of educated Jewish women in Berlin, this book makes an important contribution to German-Jewish history as well as to gender studies. The study of these women's letters, literary activities, and social life reveals them as cultivated members of the European public. Their correspondence allowed them not only to demonstrate their intellectual talents but also to widen their horizons and acquire knowledge — a key concern of women seeking empowerment. The descriptions of their involvement in the public sphere, a key feature of Enlightenment culture, offer important new insights: social gatherings in their homes served the purpose of intellectual advancement, while the newly fashionable spas gave them the opportunity to expand their contacts with men as well as with other women, and with non-Jews as well as Jews, right across Europe. As avid readers and critical writers, these women reflected the secular world view that was then beginning to spread among Jews. Imbued with enlightened ideas and values and a new feminine awareness, they began to seek independence and freedom, to the extent of challenging the institution of marriage and traditional family frameworks. A final chapter discusses the relationship of the women to Judaism and to religion in general, including their attitude to conversion to Christianity — the route that so many ultimately took.
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Hawkins, J. Russell. The Bible Told Them So. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197571064.001.0001.
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The Bible Told Them So explains why southern white evangelical Christians in South Carolina resisted the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. Interpreting the Bible in such a way, these white Christians entered the battle against the civil rights movement certain that God was on their side. Ultimately, the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and, with its success, fundamentally transformed American society. But such a victory did little to change southern white evangelicals’ theological commitment to segregation and white supremacy. Rather than abandoning their segregationist theology in the second half of the 1960s, white evangelicals turned their focus on institutions they still controlled—churches, homes, denominations, and private colleges and secondary schools—and fought on. Despite suffering defeat in the public sphere, white evangelicals continued to battle for their own institutions, preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity they continued to believe reflected God’s will. Increasingly caught in the tension between their sincere beliefs that God desired segregation and their reticence to vocalize such ideas for fear of seeming bigoted or intolerant by the late 1960s, southern white evangelicals eventually embraced rhetoric of colorblindness and protection of the family as measures to maintain both segregation and respectable social standing. Such a strategy spread throughout the evangelical subculture and set southern white evangelicals on a detrimental path for race relations in the decades ahead.
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Clark, Elizabeth A. Melania the Younger. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190888220.001.0001.
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Melania the Younger: From Rome to Jerusalem analyzes one of the most richly detailed stories of a woman of late antiquity. Melania, an early fifth-century Roman Christian aristocrat, renounced her many possessions and staggering wealth to lead a life of ascetic renunciation. Hers is a tale of “riches to rags.” Born to high Roman aristocracy in the late fourth century, Melania encountered numerous difficulties posed by family members, Roman officials, and historical circumstances themselves in disposing of her wealth, property spread across at least eight Roman provinces, and thousands of slaves. Leaving Rome with her entourage a few years before Gothic sack of Rome in 410, she journeyed to Sicily, then to North Africa (where she had estates upon which she founded monasteries), before settling in Jerusalem. There, after some years of semi-solitary existence, she founded more monastic complexes. Toward the end of her life, she traveled to Constantinople in an attempt to convert to Christianity her still-pagan uncle, who was on a state mission to the eastern Roman court. Throughout her life, she frequently met and assisted emperors and empresses, bishops, and other high dignitaries. Embracing an extreme asceticism, Melania died in Jerusalem in 439. Her Life, two versions of which (Greek and Latin) were discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was composed by a longtime assistant who succeeded her in directing the male and female monasteries in Jerusalem. An English translation of the Greek version of her Life accompanies the text of this book.
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Stokes, Christopher. Romantic Prayer. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198857808.001.0001.
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Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?
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Kling, David W. Presbyterians and Congregationalists in North America. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0008.
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John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.
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Morgan, D. Densil. Spirituality, Worship, and Congregational Life. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0022.
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The chapters in this volume concentrate on the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States. The Introduction weaves together their arguments, giving an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world which also brought Anglophone Dissent to its apogee. Yet any treatment of the subject must begin by recognizing the difficulties of spotting ‘Dissent’ outside the British Isles, where church–state relations were different from those that had originally produced Dissent. The chapter starts by emphasizing that if Dissent was a political and constitutional identity, then it was a relative and tactical one, which was often only strong where a strong Church of England existed to dissent against. It also suggests that in most parts of the world the later nineteenth century saw a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity. The second section of the Introduction suggests identifying a fixation on the Bible as the watermark of Dissent. This did not mean there was agreement on what the Bible said or how to read it: the emphasis in Dissenting traditions on private judgement meant that conflict over Scripture was always endemic to them. The third section identifies a radical insistence on human spiritual equality as a persistent characteristic of Dissenters throughout the nineteenth century while also suggesting it was hard to maintain as they became aligned with social hierarchies and imperial authorities. Yet it also argues that transnational connections kept Dissenters from subsiding into acquiescence in the powers that were. The fourth section suggests that the defence and revival of a gospel faith also worked best when it was most transnational. The final section asks how far members of Dissenting traditions reconciled their allegiance to them with participation in high, national, and imperial cultures. It suggests that Dissenters could be seen as belonging to a robust subculture, one particularly marked by its domestication of the sacred and sacralization of the domestic. At the same time, however, both ‘Dissenting Gothic’ architecture and the embrace by Dissenters of denominational and national history writing illustrate that their identity was compatible with a confident grasp of national and imperial identities. That confidence was undercut in some quarters by the spread of pessimism among evangelicals and the turn to premillennial eschatology which injected a new urgency into the world mission. The itinerant holiness evangelists who turned away from the institutions built by mainstream denominations fostered Pentecostal movements, which in the twentieth century would decisively shift the balance of global Christianity from north to south. They indicate that the strength and global reach of Anglophone Dissenting traditions still lay in their dynamic heterogeneity.
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Noll, Mark A. The Bible and Scriptural Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0014.
Full textAbstract:
Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.