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Results by Library of Congress Code
Books near "Christianity and Race in the American South: A History", Library of Congress BR535.H379
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Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature
Liz Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Library of Congress BQ4570.W6W55 1996 | Dewey Decimal 294.3378344
In this highly original study of sexuality, desire, the body, and women,
Liz Wilson investigates first-millennium Buddhist notions of
spirituality. She argues that despite the marginal role women played in
monastic life, they occupied a very conspicuous place in Buddhist
hagiographic literature. In narratives used for the edification of
Buddhist monks, women's bodies in decay (diseased, dying, and after
death) served as a central object for meditation, inspiring spiritual
growth through sexual abstention and repulsion in the immediate world.
Taking up a set of universal concerns connected with the representation
of women, Wilson displays the pervasiveness of androcentrism in Buddhist
literature and practice. She also makes persuasive use of recent
historical work on the religious lives of women in medieval
Christianity, finding common ground in the role of miraculous
afflictions.
This lively and readable study brings provocative new tools and insights
to the study of women in religious life.
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Humble before the Void: A Western Astronomer, his Journey East, and a Remarkable Encounter Between Western Science and Tibetan Buddhism
Chris Impey
Templeton Press, 2014
Library of Congress BQ4600.I47 2014 | Dewey Decimal 294.3
“This book will provide readers with a greater awareness of the spirit of curiosity and inquiry that lies at the heart of the Buddhist tradition, as well as the fruitfulness of maintaining active communication between the Buddhist and scientific communities.” —from the Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
In Humble before the Void, Impey, a noted astronomer, educator, and author gives us a thoroughly absorbing and engaging account of his journey to Northern India to teach in the first-ever “Science for Monks” leadership program. The program was initiated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to introduce science into the Tibetan Buddhist monastic tradition.
In a vivid and compelling narrative, Impey introduces us to a group of exiled Tibetan monks whose charm, tenacity and unbridled enthusiasm for learning is infectious. Impey marvels not only at their enthusiasm, but at their tireless diligence that allows the monks to painstakingly build intricate sand mandalas—that can be swept away in an instant. He observes them as they meticulously count galaxies and notes how their enthusiasm and diligence stands in contrast to many American students who are frequently turned off by science’s inability to deliver easy, immediate payoffs. Because the Buddhist monks have had a limited science education, Impey must devise creative pedagogy. His new students immediately take to his inspired teaching methods, whether it’s the use of balloons to demonstrate the Hubble expansion or donning an Einstein mask to explain the theory of relativity.
Humble before the Void also recounts Impey’s experiences outside the classroom, from the monks’ eagerness to engage in pick-up basketball games and stream episodes of hip American sitcoms to the effects on his relationship with the teenage son who makes the trip with him. Moments of profound serenity and beauty in the Himalayas are contrasted with the sorrow of learning that other monks have set themselves on fire to protest the Chinese oppression in Tibet.
At the end of the three week program, both the monks and Impey have gained a valuable education. While the monks have a greater understanding and appreciation of science, Impey has acquired greater self- knowledge and a deeper understanding of the nature of learning and teaching in the East and West. This understanding leads to a renewed enthusiasm for making his topic come alive for others.
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Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism
Mark Michael Rowe
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Library of Congress BQ5020.R69 2011 | Dewey Decimal 294.343880952
Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism’s social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. Bonds of the Dead explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan.
Mark Rowe offers a crucial account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, Rowe argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant. Combining ethnographic research with doctrinal considerations, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in Japanese society and religion.
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Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self
Michal Pagis
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Library of Congress BQ5630.V5P325 2019 | Dewey Decimal 294.34435
Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.
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Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas
Kim Gutschow
Harvard University Press, 2004
Library of Congress BQ6160.I42J365 2004 | Dewey Decimal 294.365708209546
They may shave their heads, don simple robes, and renounce materialism and worldly desires. But the women seeking enlightenment in a Buddhist nunnery high in the folds of Himalayan Kashmir invariably find themselves subject to the tyrannies of subsistence, subordination, and sexuality. Ultimately, Buddhist monasticism reflects the very world it is supposed to renounce. Butter and barley prove to be as critical to monastic life as merit and meditation. Kim Gutschow lived for more than three years among these women, collecting their stories, observing their ways, studying their lives. Her book offers the first ethnography of Tibetan Buddhist society from the perspective of its nuns.
Gutschow depicts a gender hierarchy where nuns serve and monks direct, where monks bless the fields and kitchens while nuns toil in them. Monasteries may retain historical endowments and significant political and social power, yet global flows of capitalism, tourism, and feminism have begun to erode the balance of power between monks and nuns. Despite the obstacles of being considered impure and inferior, nuns engage in everyday forms of resistance to pursue their ascetic and personal goals.
A richly textured picture of the little known culture of a Buddhist nunnery, the book offers moving narratives of nuns struggling with the Buddhist discipline of detachment. Its analysis of the way in which gender and sexuality construct ritual and social power provides valuable insight into the relationship between women and religion in South Asia today.
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The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand
Benedict Anderson
Seagull Books, 2012
Library of Congress BQ6337.S862W377 2012
In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world’s most bizarre tourist attractions, Wat Phai Rong Wua was designed as a cautionary museum of sorts; its gruesome statues depict violent and torturous scenes that showcase what hell may be like. Over the next few decades, Anderson, who is best known for his work, Imagined Communities, found himself transfixed by this unusual amalgamation of objects, returning several times to see attractions like the largest metal-cast Buddha figure in the world and the Palace of a Hundred Spires. The concrete statuaries and perverse art in Luang Phor’s personal museum of hell included, “side by side, an upright human skeleton in a glass cabinet and a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s gigantic nude David, wearing fashionable red underpants from the top of which poked part of a swollen, un-Florentine penis,” alongside dozens of statues of evildoers being ferociously punished in their afterlife.
In The Fate of Rural Hell, Anderson unravels the intrigue of this strange setting, endeavoring to discover what compels so many Thai visitors to travel to this popular spectacle and what order, if any, inspired its creation. At the same time, he notes in Wat Phai Rong Wua the unexpected effects of the gradual advance of capitalism into the far reaches of rural Asia.
Both a one-of-a-kind travelogue and a penetrating look at the community that sustains it, The Fate of Rural Hell is sure to intrigue and inspire conversation as much as Wat Phai Rong Wua itself.
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A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism
Caroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress BQ6345.U72H86 2013 | Dewey Decimal 294.3657095177
A Monastery in Time is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery—the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia—from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural Revolution, Caroline Humphrey and Hürelbaatar Ujeed tell a story of religious formation, suppression, and survival over a history that spans three centuries.
Often overlooked in Buddhist studies, Mongolian Buddhism is an impressively self-sustaining tradition whose founding lama, the Third Mergen Gegen, transformed Tibetan Buddhism into an authentic counterpart using the Mongolian language. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Humphrey and Ujeed show how lamas have struggled to keep Mergen Gegen’s vision alive through tremendous political upheaval, and how such upheaval has inextricably fastened politics to religion for many of today’s practicing monks. Exploring the various ways Mongolian Buddhists have attempted to link the past, present, and future, Humphrey and Ujeed offer a compelling study of the interplay between the individual and the state, tradition and history.
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Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society
Nam-lin Hur
Harvard University Press, 2000
Library of Congress BQ6353.T6492S465 2000 | Dewey Decimal 306.69430952135
The unique amalgam of prayer and play at the Sensōji temple in Edo is often cited as proof of the “degenerate Buddhism” of the Tokugawa period. This investigation of the economy and cultural politics of Sensōji, however, shows that its culture of prayer and play reflected changes taking place in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in the city of Edo. Play was an integral part of the business of religion at Sensōji, and the temple supplied both in equal measure to often rootless Edoites.
Nam-lin Hur’s reappraisal of prayer and play and their inherent connectedness provides a cultural critique of conventional scholarship on Tokugawa religion and shows how Edo commoners incorporated cultural politics into their daily lives through the pursuit of prayer and play.
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Sojiji: Discipline, Compassion, and Enlightenment at a Japanese Zen Temple
Joshua A. Irizarry
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Library of Congress BQ6353.Y642S654 2022 | Dewey Decimal 294.39270952
Sōjiji is one of the two head temples of Sōtō Zen, the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism. The temple is steeped in centuries of culture and tradition, but it is very much rooted in the present and future, performing functions and catering to needs that reflect the changing demographic, social, and religious landscapes of contemporary Japan.
Based on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Sōjiji: Discipline, Compassion, and Enlightenment at a Japanese Zen Temple immerses the reader in the lives and experiences of the different groups that comprise Sōjiji's contemporary religious community. Through clear and accessible prose, ethnographically-grounded analysis, and emotionally compelling stories, the reader will explore the rich pastiche of daily life and ritual activity at a major Japanese Zen temple in institutional, historical, and social context through the lived practices of its community of clergy, practitioners, parishioners, and visitors.
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Creating a Buddhist Community: A Thai Temple in Silicon Valley
Jiemin Bao
Temple University Press, 2015
Library of Congress BQ6377.S382W383 2015 | Dewey Decimal 294.3650979473
The Wat Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley was founded in 1983 by a group of predominantly middle-class men and women with different ethnic and racial identities. The temple, which functions as a religious, social, economic, educational, and cultural hub, has become a place for the community members to engage in spiritual and cultural practices.
In Creating a Buddhist Community, Jiemin Bao shows how the Wat Thai participants practice Buddhism and rework gender relationships in the course of organizing temple space, teaching meditation, schooling children in Thai language and culture, merit making, fundraising, and celebrating festivals.
Bao’s detailed account of the process of creating an inclusive temple community with Thai immigrants as the majority helps to deconstruct the exoticized view of Buddhism in American culture. Creating a Buddhist Community also explores Wat Thai’s identification with both the United States and Thailand and how this transnational perspective reimagines and reterritorializes what is called American Buddhism.
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The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist India
Toni Huber
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Library of Congress BQ6460.H83 2008 | Dewey Decimal 294.34350954
The Dalai Lama has said that Tibetans consider themselves “the child of Indian civilization” and that India is the “holy land” from whose sources the Tibetans have built their own civilization. What explains this powerful allegiance to India? In The Holy Land Reborn¸ Toni Huber investigates how Tibetans have maintained a ritual relationship to India, particularly by way of pilgrimage, and what it means for them to consider India as their holy land.
Focusing on the Tibetan creation and recreation of India as a destination, a landscape, and a kind of other, in both real and idealized terms, Huber explores how Tibetans have used the idea of India as a religious territory and a sacred geography in the development of their own religion and society. In a timely closing chapter, Huber also takes up the meaning of India for the Tibetans who live in exile in their Buddhist holy land.
A major contribution to the study of Buddhism, The Holy Land Reborn describes changes in Tibetan constructs of India over the centuries, ultimately challenging largely static views of the sacred geography of Buddhism in India.
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The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel
Donald S. Lopez Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Library of Congress BQ7455.D483L67 2006 | Dewey Decimal 294.3923092
Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. His life spanned the two defining moments in modern Tibetan history: the entry into Lhasa by British troops in 1904 and by Chinese troops in 1951. Recognized as an incarnate lama while he was a child, Gendun Chopel excelled in the traditional monastic curriculum and went on to become expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, linguistics, geography, and tantric Buddhism. Near the end of his life, before he was persecuted and imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama, he would dictate the Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought, a work on Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” philosophy. It sparked controversy immediately upon its publication and continues to do so today.
The Madman’s Middle Way presents the first English translation of this major Tibetan Buddhist work, accompanied by an essay on Gendun Chopel’s life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings. Donald S. Lopez Jr. also provides a commentary that sheds light on the doctrinal context of the Adornment and summarizes its key arguments. Ultimately, Lopez examines the long-standing debate over whether Gendun Chopel in fact is the author of the Adornment; the heated critical response to the work by Tibetan monks of the Dalai Lama’s sect; and what the Adornment tells us about Tibetan Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. The result is an insightful glimpse into a provocative and enigmatic workthatwill be of great interest to anyone seriously interested in Buddhism or Asian religions.
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Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
Donald S. Lopez Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Library of Congress BQ7604.L66 1998 | Dewey Decimal 294.3923
Prisoners of Shangri-La is a provocative analysis of the romance of Tibet, a romance that, even as it is invoked by Tibetan lamas living in exile, ultimately imprisons those who seek the goal of Tibetan independence from Chinese occupation.
"Lopez lifts the veil on America's romantic vision of Tibet to reveal a country and a spiritual history more complex and less ideal than popular perceptions allow. . . . Lively and engaging, Lopez's book raises important questions about how Eastern religions are often co-opted, assimilated and misunderstood by Western culture."—Publishers Weekly
"Proceeding with care and precision, Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like intellectual colonialists. . . . Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could have done it as resoundingly as Lopez."—Booklist
"Fascinating. . . [A] provocative exploration. Lopez conveys the full dizziness of the Western encounter with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism."—Fred Pheil, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
"A timely and courageous exploration. . . . [Lopez's] book will sharpen the terms of the debate over what the Tibetans and their observers can or should be doing about the place and the idea of Tibet. And that alone is what will give us all back our Shambhala."—Jonathan Spence, Lingua Franca Book Review
"Lopez's most important theme is that we should be wary of the idea . . . that Tibet has what the West lacks, that if we were only to look there we would find the answers to our problems. Lopez's book shows that, on the contrary, when the West has looked at Tibet, all that it has seen is a distorted reflection of itself."—Ben Jackson, Times Higher Education Supplement
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Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress BQ7604.L66 2018 | Dewey Decimal 294.3923
To the Western imagination, Tibet evokes exoticism, mysticism, and wonder: a fabled land removed from the grinding onslaught of modernity, spiritually endowed with all that the West has lost. Originally published in 1998, Prisoners of Shangri-La provided the first cultural history of the strange encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Donald Lopez reveals here fanciful misconceptions of Tibetan life and religion. He examines, among much else, the politics of the term “Lamaism,” a pejorative synonym for Tibetan Buddhism; the various theosophical, psychedelic, and New Age purposes served by the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead; and the unexpected history of the most famous of all Tibetan mantras, om mani padme hum. More than pop-culture anomalies, these versions of Tibet are often embedded in scholarly sources, constituting an odd union of the popular and the academic, of fancy and fact.
Upon its original publication, Prisoners of Shangri-La sent shockwaves through the field of Tibetan studies—hailed as a timely, provocative, and courageous critique. Twenty years hence, the situation in Tibet has only grown more troubled and complex—with the unrest of 2008, the demolition of the dwellings of thousands of monks and nuns at Larung Gar in 2016, and the scores of self-immolations committed by Tibetans to protest the Dalai Lama’s exile.
In his new preface to this anniversary edition, Lopez returns to the metaphors of prison and paradise to illuminate the state of Tibetan Buddhism—both in exile and in Tibet—as monks and nuns still seek to find a way home. Prisoners of Shangri-La remains a timely and vital inquiry into Western fantasies of Tibet.
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Soka Gakkai: Studies in Contemporary Religion
Karel Dobbelaere
Signature Books, 2001
Library of Congress BQ8415.4.D6313 2001 | Dewey Decimal 294.3928
Why is Soka Gakkai one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today? Founded in post-World War II Japan, this Buddhist movement claims upwards of 15 million members, including more than a half million in North and South America. It sponsors two universities in the United States.
Professor Dobbelaere points to several reasons for its growth. Soka Gakkai emphasizes inner peace rather than rules of behavior or hierarchical allegiance. Sociologists describe it as “trans-modern,” meaning that it blends ancient and contemporary sensitivities such as Buddhist mysticism, science, art and music, a concern for the environment, and social activism.
Initially there was a reliance on aggressive proselyting, later replaced with a more moderate encouragement to share with friends. The movement now engages other faiths in cultural and intellectual exchanges and in pursuit of common ethical objectives. This adaptability and sincere concern for its membership and for society as a whole bode well for its future success.
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War and Faith: Ikko Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan
Carol Richmond Tsang
Harvard University Press, 2007
Library of Congress BQ8712.6.T73 2007 | Dewey Decimal 952.023
During the sengoku era--the period of "warring provinces" in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan--warlords vied for supremacy and sought to expand their influence over the realm. Powerful religious institutions also asserted their military might by calling upon their adherents to do battle against forces that threatened their spiritual and secular interests.
The Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land Sect) Buddhism was one such powerhouse that exercised its military will by fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, loosely structured "leagues of one mind" made up of mostly commoners who banded together to fight for (or against) any number of causes--usually those advanced by the Honganji's Patriarch.
Carol Richmond Tsang delves into the complex and often contradictory relationship between these ikko leagues and the Honganji institution. Moving beyond the simplistic characterization of ikki as peasant uprisings, the author argues cogently for a fuller picture of ikko ikki as a force in medieval Japanese history. By exploring the political motivations and machinations of the Honganji and the diverse aims and allegiances of its ikko followers, Tsang complicates our understanding of ikko ikki as a multifaceted example of how religion and religious belief played out in a society in conflict.
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Shugendo: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion
Miyake Hitoshi; Edited and with an Introduction by H. Byron Earhart
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Library of Congress BQ8822.M582 2001 | Dewey Decimal 299.56
This volume of essays is the first comprehensive publication in English of the work of Miyake Hitoshi, a distinguished scholar of Shugendō (mountain asceticism) and one of the foremost researchers on Japanese folk religion. Miyake defines folk religion as “religion that merges from the necessities of community life.” In Miyake’s systematic methodological and theoretical approach, Shugendō is a classic example of Japanese folk religion, for it blends many traditions (shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Shinto) into a distinctive Japanese religious worldview and is typical of Japanese religion generally.
The first part of this book is devoted to Shugendō’s history, organization, ritual, austerities, thought, and cosmology. Related subjects include exorcism and the exclusion of women. The second part of the book provides research and reflection on Japanese folk religion, including essays on the idea of nature, worldly benefits, new religions, death and rebirth, and the structure of folk religion.
Shugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion clarifies much of the logic behind Japanese religious syncretism. It is essential reading not only for those interested in Japanese history, culture, and religion but also for those studying world religions and folk culture.
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Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben
Natasha Heller
Harvard University Press, 2014
Library of Congress BQ9262.9.C5H64 2014 | Dewey Decimal 294.3095109022
A groundbreaking monograph on Yuan dynasty Buddhism, Illusory Abiding offers a cultural history of Buddhism through a case study of the eminent Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben. Natasha Heller demonstrates that Mingben, and other monks of his stature, developed a range of cultural competencies through which they navigated social and intellectual relationships. They mastered repertoires internal to their tradition—for example, guidelines for monastic life—as well as those that allowed them to interact with broader elite audiences, such as the ability to compose verses on plum blossoms. These cultural exchanges took place within local, religious, and social networks—and at the same time, they comprised some of the very forces that formed these networks in the first place. This monograph contributes to a more robust account of Chinese Buddhism in late imperial China, and demonstrates the importance of situating monks as actors within broader sociocultural fields of practice and exchange.
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Encounter with Zen: writings on poetry and Zen
Lucien. Stryk
Ohio University Press, 1981
Library of Congress BQ9262.9.J3S84 | Dewey Decimal 294.3927
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Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan
Martin Collcutt
Harvard University Press, 1981
Library of Congress BQ9294.4.J3C64 | Dewey Decimal 294.36570952
In Japan today, Zen monastic life is practiced substantially as it was practiced in medieval Japan or Sung dynasty China. More than twenty-one thousand Zen temples are active. This book examines the Zen monastery as a major institution in medieval Japanese society. Focusing on the Five Mountains network of officially sponsored Zen monasteries, it describes the transmission of Rinzai and Soto Zen to Japan, traces the patterns of secular patronage, and discusses in detail the Zen monastic environment, the monastic rule, the community, and the economy.
This is the first detailed study in any Western language of the social and institutional development of Zen Buddhism. Martin Collcutt’s illustrated text should be valuable to those interested in medieval Japanese history as well as students of Zen practice and Zen-related culture.
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The Christianity Reader
Edited by Mary Gerhart and Fabian Udoh
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Library of Congress BR50.C47 2007 | Dewey Decimal 270
Christianity is the world’s most populous religion, with some two billion adherents. As a world religion, Christianity has flourished because it is capable of taking on new forms in new contexts. To understand both the religion’s history and its present state, Mary Gerhart and Fabian Udoh gather original texts—from early Christian writings to contemporary documents on church-related issues—in The Christianity Reader. The most comprehensive anthology of Christian texts ever in English, this is a landmark sourcebook for the study of Christianity’s historical diversity. With newly edited, annotated, and translated primary texts, along with supplemental analytical essays, the volume allows Christianity, at long last, to speak in its many voices.
Focusing on Christianity as a religion, Gerhart and Udoh select texts that illuminate issues such as theology, mysticism, and ritual, while also articulating the stories of previously marginalized groups, as well as those in new and growing epicenters of the religion. With nearly three hundred selections, the texts encompass the entire history of Christian writings excluding the New Testament, from Justin Martyr and Tertullian to Fabien Eboussi Boulaga and Teresa of Calcutta. Eight thematic sections cover biblical traditions and interpretations; early influences; nascent forms; patterns of worship; structures of community; philosophy, theology, and mysticism; twentieth-century issues and challenges; and the contemporary relationship between Christianity and other world religions. The Reader’s contents are arranged chronologically and are supported with introductions and source notes that explain the rationale for their inclusion and their context.
Providing a far richer selection than ever before available in a single volume, The Christianity Reader will be welcomed as both a classroom resource and a work of reference for decades to come.
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The Apostolic Fathers
Bart D. Ehrman
Harvard University Press, 2003
Library of Congress BR60.A62 2003 | Dewey Decimal 270.1
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers give a rich and diverse picture of Christian life and thought in the period immediately after New Testament times. Some of them were accorded almost Scriptural authority in the early Church. This new Loeb edition of these essential texts reflects current idiom and the latest scholarship.
Here are the Letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, among the most famous documents of early Christianity; these letters, addressing core theological questions, were written to a half dozen different congregations while Ignatius was en route to Rome as a prisoner, condemned to die in the wild-beast arena. Also in this collection is a letter to the Philippian church by Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and friend of Ignatius, as well as an account of Polycarp's martyrdom. There are several kinds of texts in the Apostolic Fathers collection, representing different religious outlooks. The manual called the Didache sets forth precepts for religious instruction, worship, and ministry. The Epistle of Barnabas searches the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, for testimony in support of Christianity and against Judaism. Probably the most widely read in the early Christian centuries was The Shepherd of Hermas, a book of revelations that develops a doctrine of repentance.
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The Apostolic Fathers
Bart D. Ehrman
Harvard University Press, 2003
Library of Congress BR60.A62 2003 | Dewey Decimal 270.1
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers give a rich and diverse picture of Christian life and thought in the period immediately after New Testament times. Some of them were accorded almost Scriptural authority in the early Church. This new Loeb edition of these essential texts reflects current idiom and the latest scholarship.
Here are the Letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, among the most famous documents of early Christianity; these letters, addressing core theological questions, were written to a half dozen different congregations while Ignatius was en route to Rome as a prisoner, condemned to die in the wild-beast arena. Also in this collection is a letter to the Philippian church by Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and friend of Ignatius, as well as an account of Polycarp's martyrdom. There are several kinds of texts in the Apostolic Fathers collection, representing different religious outlooks. The manual called the Didache sets forth precepts for religious instruction, worship, and ministry. The Epistle of Barnabas searches the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, for testimony in support of Christianity and against Judaism. Probably the most widely read in the early Christian centuries was The Shepherd of Hermas, a book of revelations that develops a doctrine of repentance.
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Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
Johan Leemans
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Library of Congress BR60.A65R43 2011 | Dewey Decimal 261
Can writings of the church fathers related to the field of social ethics be of value to contemporary discussions on the topic? In addressing this question, the authors of this book discuss the exciting challenges that scholars of both early Christianity and contemporary Catholic social thought face regarding the interaction of historical sources and present issues.
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Seven Exegetical Works
Saint Ambrose
Catholic University of America Press, 1970
Library of Congress BR60.F3A58 | Dewey Decimal 281.1
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Against Julian
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1957
Library of Congress BR60.F3A82 vol. 16 | Dewey Decimal 230.09015
In Against Julian Augustine stresses in the first two books the traditional teachings of the Church found in the Fathers and contrasts their teaching with the rationalism of the Pelagians
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Letters, Volume 6 (1*–29*)
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1989
Library of Congress BR60.F3A82 vol. 9, etc. | Dewey Decimal 270.20924
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Eighty-three Different Questions
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1982
Library of Congress BR60.F3A8243 2002 | Dewey Decimal 270
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Tractates on the Gospel of John 1–10
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
Library of Congress BR60.F3A8246 | Dewey Decimal 270
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Tractates on the Gospel of John 55–111
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
Library of Congress BR60.F3A8246 | Dewey Decimal 270
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Tractates on the Gospel of John 28–54
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
Library of Congress BR60.F3A8246 | Dewey Decimal 270
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Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24; Tractates on the First Epistle of John
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
Library of Congress BR60.F3A8246 | Dewey Decimal 270
In this volume, which concludes John W. Rettig's translation of St. Augustine's Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine applies his keen insight and powers of rhetoric to the sacred text, drawing the audience into an intimate contemplation of Jesus through the course of his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
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Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1999
Library of Congress BR60.F3A829 1999
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Treatises on Various Subjects
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1952
Library of Congress BR60.F3A833 2002
The present volume consists of a collection of minor writings of St. Augustine often classified under the general title of 'Works of Moral and Practical Theology.'
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Letters, Volume 1
John Barsanuphius and John
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
Library of Congress BR60.F3B2513 2006 | Dewey Decimal 270.2
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Letters, Volume 2
John Barsanuphius and John
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
Library of Congress BR60.F3B2513 2006 | Dewey Decimal 270.2
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Stromateis, Books 1–3
Clement of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 1991
Library of Congress BR60.F3C56 | Dewey Decimal 270
Books One to Three of the Stromateis establish Clement's fundamental theology--a harmony of faith and knowledge that places Greek philosophy at the service of faith, which is, to Clement, more important than knowledge.
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Letters 1–50
Saint Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 1987
Library of Congress BR60.F3C917 1987 | Dewey Decimal 270.20924
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The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Volume 1
Saint Cyril of Jerusalem
Catholic University of America Press, 1969
Library of Congress BR60.F3C92 | Dewey Decimal 281.4
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The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Volume 2
Saint Cyril of Jerusalem
Catholic University of America Press, 1970
Library of Congress BR60.F3C92 2000
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