This book reconsiders several of Augustine's most well-known letter exchanges, including his famously controversial correspondence with Jerome and his efforts to engage his Donatist rivals in a ...letter exchange. It reads these letters with close attention to conventional epistolary norms and practices, in an effort to identify innovative features of Augustine's epistolary practice. In particular, it notes and analyzes Augustine's adaptation of the traditionally friendly letter exchange to the correction of perceived error in the Christian community. In transforming the practice of letter exchange into a tool of correction, Augustine draws on both the classical philosophical tradition and also scripture. His particular innovation is his insistence that this process of correction can—and often must—be done in the potentially public form of a letter exchange rather than in the privacy of a face-to-face conversation. This is particularly true when the perceived error is one that has the potential to jeopardize the salvation of the entire Christian community. In offering epistolary correction, and requesting reciprocal correction from his correspondents, Augustine treats his practice of letter exchange as a performance of Christian caritas. Indeed, in his view, the friendliest correspondence was that which was concerned solely with preserving the salvation of the participants. In recognizing Augustine's commitment to the corrective correspondence and thus reading his letters with attention to their corrective function, we gain new insights into the complicated dynamics of Augustine's relationships with Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, the Donatists, and Pelagius.
Early Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art—from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the ...agility of the mosquito on the wing, " to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis—and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts? In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.
In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place ...that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.
The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the ...Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology - and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
O objetivo deste trabalho foi analisar as compreensões de autores brasileiros dos Estudos do Lazer sobre as práticas de lazer pelo segmento protestante. Trata-se de uma pesquisa bibliográfica ...narrativa. Consultou-se os bancos de dados online de duas revistas especializadas sobre o lazer no Brasil, a saber, Licere e Revista Brasileira de Estudos do Lazer. Identificou-se no total seis artigos publicados entre os anos 2007 e 2018. Os textos analisados convocam conhecimentos de diferentes áreas como Sociologia, Estudos Culturais, História. Em geral, os artigos tecem críticas aos valores e a moral protestante que influenciam nas práticas de lazer, sem, contudo, considerar os aspectos teológicos em suas análises. Ao se aplicar os princípios teológicos adequados, análise exegética e hermenêutica, identifica-se que a Bíblia não entende que práticas de lazer sejam consideradas como pecado, desde que alinhadas aos seus valores e a moral. Todavia, a adoção de princípios morais distintos entre o protestantismo e o secularismo, geram percepções diferentes sobre o envolvimento com as práticas de lazer. Questionar os valores e a moral adotada por quaisquer matrizes religiosas sobre a licitude das práticas de lazer dos fiéis – desde que não firam os princípios da dignidade humana – sem a devida discussão teológica é persistir na continuidade de preconceitos e juízos de valor que criam dissenções sociais desnecessárias.
Palavras-chave: Cristianismo, Estudos do Lazer, Discurso
