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The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper

James McKinnon

In his final accomplishment of a distinguished career, the author considers the musical practices of the early Church in this examination of the history of Christian chant from the years ad 200 to ... More

In his final accomplishment of a distinguished career, the author considers the musical practices of the early Church in this examination of the history of Christian chant from the years ad 200 to 800. The result is a book that is certain to have an impact on musicology, religious studies, and history.Less

Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

Daniel Gold

This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, the author develops a ... More

This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, the author develops a line of argument that begins with the aesthetics of academic writing in the field. He shows that successful writers on religion employ characteristic aesthetic strategies in communicating their visions of human truths, and examines these strategies with regard to epistemology and to the study of religion as a collective endeavor. The author looks at whether a peculiarly expressive genre of writing on religion began at a specific moment in history and, if so, what this might suggest about the cultural significance about religio-historical practice.Less

Alef Is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies

Jamal J. Elias

This book explores the emotional space occupied by children in modern Islamic societies. Focusing on visual representations of children, primarily from modern Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, it examines ... More

This book explores the emotional space occupied by children in modern Islamic societies. Focusing on visual representations of children, primarily from modern Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, it examines important concepts ranging from cuteness, innocence, devotion, violence, and sacrifice to emotion, aspiration, virtue, performance, nationhood, community, and gender. It grounds the study of the visual representation of children in a concise treatment of the history of childhood, education, and religion, as well as the national histories of the societies in question. In addition to exploring a topic that has never been studied comparatively before, it extends the boundaries of scholarship on emotion, religion, and visual culture, arguing for the centrality of conceptions of childhood to adult intentionalities at a societal level. It demonstrates the ways in which emotion is enacted in a sociocultural space that one might call an emotional habitus, ecosystem, or an emotional regime. It also uses the concept of an aesthetic social imagination to explain how public emotional acts shape the lives of more than the individual who enacts them. Emotions are kinetic and directional, directed inward at the individual's sense of self at the same time as they are directed at other members of society. This quality allows them to function morally as well as aspirationally.Less

Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death

Elliot Wolfson

This book explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western ... More

This book explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, the book draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. The book discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for this examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, “truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time—past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—between, before, beyond.Less

Becoming Religious in a Secular Age

Mark Elmore

Religion is often viewed as a universally ancient element of the human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered its religion only after India became an ... More

Religion is often viewed as a universally ancient element of the human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered its religion only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, this book tells the story of this discovery and how it transformed a community's relations to its past and to its members, as well as to those outside the community. And, as the book demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity. The book shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its development. Showing us that to become a modern, ethical subject is to become religious, this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity.Less

Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West

Robin Whelan

Recent work on the notoriously passionate Christian conflicts of the later Roman Empire has elucidated their wide-ranging political and social implications. However, the fifth-century conquest of the ... More

Recent work on the notoriously passionate Christian conflicts of the later Roman Empire has elucidated their wide-ranging political and social implications. However, the fifth-century conquest of the Roman West by “barbarian” rulers brings this train of inquiry to a juddering halt, as scholars of early Christianity turn eastward for new doctrinal developments, and early medieval historians focus on political continuity and ethnic identity in the new kingdoms. This book argues that Christian controversy retained its sophistication and its sociopolitical consequences in the post-imperial West. It examines church conflict under the Vandals, who ruled the former Roman province of Africa (the modern-day Maghreb) from 439 to 533 CE. Exploiting neglected Christian texts, this book exposes a sophisticated culture of disputation between Nicene (“Catholic”) and Homoian (“Arian”) Christians, and it explores their rival claims to represent the true church, which consciously evoked earlier ecclesiastical controversies. It argues that this Christian conflict cannot be firewalled from other developments in post-imperial Africa, revealing its implications for issues of social identity and political formation. Through careful comparison with the evidence for Homoian Christianity in the other barbarian successor kingdoms, it seeks to set out a new framework for understanding Christian identity across the post-imperial West.Less

Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

Yvonne Chireau

This book looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period ... More

This book looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, the author describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a detailed history which presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, she shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, the author also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, the book helps to explain the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.Less

Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians

David Biale

Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity — as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same ... More

Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity — as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same literary, cultural, and religious origins, on the question of blood the two religions have followed quite different trajectories. For instance, while Judaism rejects the eating or drinking of blood, Christianity mandates its symbolic consumption as a central sacrament. How did these two traditions, both originating in the Hebrew Bible's cult of blood sacrifices, veer off in such different directions? The book traces the continuing, changing, and often clashing roles of blood as both symbol and substance through the entire sweep of Jewish and Christian history from Biblical times to the present.Less

Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

Mira Balberg

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of classical rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. The book traces ... More

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of classical rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. The book traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, and examines sacrifice and worship in the temple as sites through which the rabbis negotiated new and old intellectual, political, and religious ideas and practices. In its focus on legal-ritual texts and in its cultural orientation, this book diverges from the prevalent approach to the cessation of sacrifice in early Judaism. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to transform a sacrificial religion into a non-sacrificial religion, Blood for Thought argues that the rabbis developed anewsacrificial vision. This new sacrificial vision does not seek to “substitute” obsolete sacrificial practices, but rather to rearrange, reframe, and redefine sacrifice as a critically important component of social and religious life. The book argues that through their seemingly technical legal and ritual discussions, the rabbis present remarkably innovative perspectives on sacrifices and radical interpretations of biblical cultic institutions, and that their reinvention of sacrifice gives this practice new meanings within the greater context of the rabbis’ political and religious ideology.Less

Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology

Raphael A. Cadenhead

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in ... More

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in relation to the contentious issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory’s thinking on the challenges of the ascetic life through a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre. Exploring his understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation in the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.Less

Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity

R. Marie Griffith

“Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!” screamed a headline in the tabloid Globe in November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation's largest Christian diet corporation ... More

“Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!” screamed a headline in the tabloid Globe in November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation's largest Christian diet corporation and the subject of extensive press coverage from Larry King Live to the New Yorker. In the United States today, hundreds of thousands of people are making diet a religious duty by enrolling in Christian diet programs and reading Christian diet literature such as What Would Jesus Eat? and Fit for God. Far ranging in its implications, and full of stories of real people, this book launches an investigation into Christian fitness and diet culture. Looking closely at both the religious roots of this movement and its present-day incarnations, the author analyzes Christianity's intricate role in America's obsession with the body, diet, and fitness. As she traces the underpinning of modern-day beauty and slimness ideals—as well as the bigotry against people who are overweight—she links seemingly disparate groups in American history including seventeenth-century New England Puritans, Progressive Era New Thought adherents, and late-twentieth-century evangelical diet preachers.Less

Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion

Eric Reinders

To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters ... More

To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.Less

Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults

Janja Lalich

Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate “monks” awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such ... More

Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate “monks” awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, which looks at the cult phenomenon, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives—and sometimes their very lives—to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's Gate and at the Democratic Workers Party, a radical political group of the 1970s and 1980s, the author gives an insider's look at these two cults and advances a new theoretical framework of those who join such groups. She includes in-depth interviews with cult devotees as well as reflections gained from her own experience as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Workers Party. Incorporating classical sociological concepts such as “charisma” and “commitment” with more recent work on the social psychology of influence and control, the author develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders are able to dominate their devotees. She shows how members are led into a state of “bounded choice,” in which they make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations. The book also addresses the mentality of those true believers who take extreme or violent measures in the name of a cause.Less

Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches

Robert Wuthnow

This book looks systematically at American Christianity in relation to globalization. It shows that American Christianity is increasingly influenced by globalization and is, in turn, playing a larger ... More

This book looks systematically at American Christianity in relation to globalization. It shows that American Christianity is increasingly influenced by globalization and is, in turn, playing a larger role in other countries and in U.S. policies and programs abroad. These changes, it argues, can be seen in the growth of support at home for missionaries and churches in other countries and in the large number of Americans who participate in short-term volunteer efforts abroad. These outreaches include building orphanages, starting microbusinesses, and setting up computer networks. Drawing on a comprehensive survey carried out for the writing of this book, as well as several hundred in-depth interviews with church leaders, the text refutes several prevailing stereotypes: that U.S. churches have turned away from the global church and overseas missions, that congregations only look inward, and that the growing voice of religion in areas of foreign policy is primarily evangelical. The book encourages Americans to pay attention to the grass-roots mechanisms by which global ties are created and sustained.Less

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai

Shunryu Suzuki

Mel Weitsman and Michael Wenger (eds)

When Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on ... More

When Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date. This book is the first follow-up volume to the author's important work. Like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made the author such an influential teacher. The Sandokai — a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian) — is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as expressed in this book, “things-as-it-is”). Included with the lectures are the students' questions and the author's direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. The book provides an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text of Buddhism today.Less

Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice

Laurie Patton

This book introduces a new perspective on Indic religious history by rethinking the role of mantra in Vedic ritual. The book takes a new look at mantra as “performed poetry” and in five case studies ... More

This book introduces a new perspective on Indic religious history by rethinking the role of mantra in Vedic ritual. The book takes a new look at mantra as “performed poetry” and in five case studies draws a portrait of early Indian sacrifice that moves beyond the well-worn categories of “magic” and “magico-religious” thought in Vedic sacrifice. Treating Vedic mantra as a sophisticated form of artistic composition, it develops the idea of metonymy, or associational thought, as a major motivator for the use of mantra in sacrificial performance. Filling a long-standing gap in our understanding, the book provides a history of the Indian interpretive imagination and a study of the mental creativity and hermeneutic sophistication of Vedic religion.Less

Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century

Stephen Corrigan

The “Businessmen's Revival” was a religious revival that unfolded in the wake of the 1857 market crash among white, middle-class Protestants. Delving into the religious history of Boston in the ... More

The “Businessmen's Revival” was a religious revival that unfolded in the wake of the 1857 market crash among white, middle-class Protestants. Delving into the religious history of Boston in the 1850s, this book gives an interpretive study of the revival's significance. The book uses it as a focal point for addressing a spectacular range of phenomena in American culture: the ecclesiastical and business history of Boston; gender roles and family life; the history of the theater and public spectacle; education; boy culture; and, especially, ideas about emotion during this period. The narrative recovers the emotional experiences of individuals from a wide array of little-used sources including diaries, correspondence, public records, and other materials. From these sources, the book discovers that for these Protestants, the expression of emotion was a matter of transactions. They saw emotion as a commodity, and conceptualized relations between people, and between individuals and God, as transactions of emotion governed by contract. Religion became a business relation with God, with prayer as its legal tender. Entering this relationship, they were conducting the “business of the heart.” This study shows that the revival—with its commodification of emotional experience—became an occasion for white Protestants to underscore differences between themselves and others. The display of emotion was a primary indicator of membership in the Protestant majority, as much as language, skin color, or dress style.Less

The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council

Andrew Greeley

How, a mere generation after Vatican Council II initiated the biggest reform since the Reformation, can the Catholic Church be in such deep trouble? The question resonates throughout this book. A ... More

How, a mere generation after Vatican Council II initiated the biggest reform since the Reformation, can the Catholic Church be in such deep trouble? The question resonates throughout this book. A timely and much-needed review of forty years of Church history, the book offers a genuinely new interpretation of the complex and radical shift in American Catholic attitudes since the second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Drawing on a wealth of data collected over the last thirty years, the book points to a rift between the higher and lower orders in the Church that began in the wake of Vatican Council II—when bishops, euphoric in their (temporary) freedom from the obstructions of the Roman Curia, introduced modest changes that nonetheless proved too much for still-rigid structures of Catholicism: the “new wine” burst the “old wineskins.” As the Church leadership tried to re-impose the old order, clergy and the laity, newly persuaded that “unchangeable” Catholicism could in fact change, began to make their own reforms, sweeping away the old “rules” that no longer made sense. The revolution that this book describes brought about changes that continue to reverberate—in a chasm between leadership and laity, and in a whole generation of Catholics who have become Catholic on their own terms. Coming at a time of crisis and doubt for the Catholic Church, this analysis brings light and clarity to the years of turmoil that have shaken the foundations, if not the faith, of American Catholics.Less

Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean

Francio Guadeloupe

This ethnography probes the ethos and attitude created by radio disc jockeys on the bi-national Caribbean island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten. Examining the intersection of Christianity, calypso, and ... More

This ethnography probes the ethos and attitude created by radio disc jockeys on the bi-national Caribbean island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten. Examining the intersection of Christianity, calypso, and capitalism, the book shows how a multiethnic and multi-religious island nation, where livelihoods depend on tourism, has managed to encourage all social classes to transcend their ethnic and religious differences. In the analysis, the book discusses the island DJs, whose formulations of Christian faith, musical creativity, and capitalist survival express ordinary people's hopes and fears and promote tolerance.Less

Classifying Christians: "Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity"

Todd S. Berzon

This book investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and ... More

This book investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, the book argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, the book embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.Less