The Quests for the Historical Jesus resulted in a move "back to the Jewish roots!" Jewish Jesus research positioned Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture and permitted Jews to feel more at ease ...with Jesus the Jew. Christians are challenged to respond now with a new Christology.
In the nineteenth century, white Americans contrasted the perceived
purity of white, middle-class women with the perceived eroticism of
women of color and the working classes. The Latter-day Saint
...practice of polygamy challenged this separation, encouraging white
women to participate in an institution that many people associated
with the streets of Calcutta or Turkish palaces. At the same time,
Latter-day Saints participated in American settler colonialism.
After their expulsion from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Latter-day
Saints dispossessed Ute and Shoshone communities in an attempt to
build their American Zion. Their missionary work abroad also helped
to solidify American influence in the Pacific Islands as the church
became a participant in American expansion. Imperial Zions
explores the importance of the body in Latter-day Saint theology
with the faith's attempts to spread its gospel as a "civilizing"
force in the American West and the Pacific. By highlighting the
intertwining of Latter-day Saint theology and American ideas about
race, sexuality, and the nature of colonialism, Imperial
Zions argues that Latter-day Saints created their
understandings of polygamy at the same time they tried to change
the domestic practices of Native Americans and other Indigenous
peoples. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto tracks the work of missionaries as
they moved through different imperial spaces to analyze the
experiences of the American Indians and Native Hawaiians who became
a part of white Latter-day Saint families. Imperial Zions
is a foundational contribution that places Latter-day Saint
discourses about race and peoplehood in the context of its ideas
about sexuality, gender, and the family.
The years from 1852 to 1890 marked a controversial period in Mormonism, when the church's official embrace of polygamy put it at odds with wider American culture. In this study, Christine Talbot ...explores the controversial era, discussing how plural marriage generated decades of cultural and political conflict over competing definitions of legitimate marriage, family structure, and American identity. In particular, Talbot examines "the Mormon question" with attention to how it constructed ideas about American citizenship around the presumed separation of the public and private spheres. Contrary to the prevailing notion of man as political actor, woman as domestic keeper, and religious conscience as entirely private, Mormons enfranchised women and framed religious practice as a political act. The way Mormonism undermined the public/private divide led white, middle-class Americans to respond by attacking not just Mormon sexual and marital norms but also Mormons' very fitness as American citizens.
In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the ...Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels.
Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.
Jesus in Asia Sugirtharajah, R. S
2018, 2018-02-19
eBook
Reconstructions of Jesus occurred in Asia long before the Western search for the historical Jesus began in earnest. This enterprise sprang up in seventh- century China and seventeenth-century India, ...encouraged by the patronage and openness of the Chinese and Indian imperial courts. While the Western quest was largely a Protestant preoccupation, in Asia the search was marked by its diversity: participants included Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Catholics, and members of the Church of the East.During the age of European colonialism, Jesus was first seen by many Asians as a tribal god of the farangis, or white Europeans. But as his story circulated, Asians remade Jesus, at times appreciatively and at other times critically. R. S. Sugirtharajah demonstrates how Buddhist and Taoist thought, combined with Christian insights, led to the creation of the Chinese Jesus Sutras of late antiquity, and explains the importance of a biography of Jesus composed in the sixteenth-century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He also brings to the fore the reconstructions of Jesus during the Chinese Taiping revolution, the Korean Minjung uprising, and the Indian and Sri Lankan anti-colonial movements.In Jesus in Asia, Sugirtharajah situates the historical Jesus beyond the narrow confines of the West and offers an eye-opening new chapter in the story of global Christianity.
This collection of studies offers Jesus researchers a gold mine of fresh research and critical appraisal of the assumptions and methods employed in the study of the historical Jesus. This publication ...has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.
The Mystical Presence of Christ
investigates the connections between exceptional
experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in
the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that
...experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are
simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard
Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and
those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of
ordinary, everyday devotional culture.
Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the
"how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's
humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for
encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer
proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from
presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer
then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations-during
prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example-with attention to
gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals
and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a
diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century
(Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of
Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among
others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations
of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience.
Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The
Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that
rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in
the workings of late medieval religion.
Revising Eternity Welker, Holly; Mason, Patrick Q; Barnwell, Kevin ...
05/2022
eBook
Marriage's central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting
widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint
marriage ...mean for men? Holly Welker presents a collection of essays
exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into
challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness,
addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other
topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the
varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the
backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic
issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender.
An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and
engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how
Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today.
In the nineteenth century, a fascination with the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints made Mormons and Mormonism a common
trope in French journalism, art, literature, politics, and popular
...culture. Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper, and Daryl Lee bring to
light French representations of Mormonism from the 1830s to 1914,
arguing that these portrayals often critiqued and parodied French
society. Mormonism became a pretext for reconsidering issues such
as gender, colonialism, the family, and church-state relations
while providing artists and authors with a means for working
through the possibilities of their own evolving national identity.
Surprising and innovative, Marianne Meets the Mormons
looks at how nineteenth-century French observers engaged with the
idea of Mormonism in order to reframe their own cultural
preoccupations.
