History of religion Books

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisHere are explored the actual extent of Barbary Coast slavery, the dynamic relationship between master and slave, and the effects of this slaving on Italy, one of the slave takers' primary targets and victims.Trade Review'Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters is about a subject of immense importance, which has been strangely neglected...It is very well researched, and... at a time of unprecedented interest in racial slavery in America, it is interesting to read a crucial and informative preview to that subject.' - David Brion Davis, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction and Acknowledgements PART ONE: WHITE SLAVERY How Many Slaves? Slave Taking and Slave Breaking PART TWO: BARBARY Slave Labour Slaves' Life PART THREE: ITALY The Home Front Celebrating Slavery

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Book SynopsisAcknowledgements List of illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: Confidence and Uncertainty: New Jewish Questions Romania: Cruelty to an Unprecedented Pitch, 1860s and 1870s Imperial Russia: Troubles in the South, 1880s and 1890s Romania and Kishinev: Crises Intertwined, 1900-1906 Partitioned Poland: Physical and Ideological Encounters, 1890s-1914 Imperial Russia: the International Arena and the Great War, 1907-1917 Britain and Poland: Propaganda, Pogroms and Independence, 1914-1925 Who were the Jews? Ostjuden in the British Mindset, 1867-1925 BibliographyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements List of illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: Confidence and Uncertainty: New Jewish Questions Romania: Cruelty to an Unprecedented Pitch, 1860s and 1870s Imperial Russia: Troubles in the South, 1880s and 1890s Romania and Kishinev: Crises Intertwined, 1900-1906 Partitioned Poland: Physical and Ideological Encounters, 1890s-1914 Imperial Russia: the International Arena and the Great War, 1907-1917 Britain and Poland: Propaganda, Pogroms and Independence, 1914-1925 Who were the Jews? Ostjuden in the British Mindset, 1867-1925 Bibliography

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Book SynopsisIntroduction Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Hatian Case Study - Karen McCarthy Brown Voudou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival - Claudine Michel African Interpretations of the Christian Vodou Cross - Leslie G. Desmangles Resisting Freedom: Cultural Factors in Democracy: The Case for Haiti - Patrick Bellegarde-Smith "The Jew" in the Haitian Imagination: Pre-Modern Anti-Judaism the Post-Modern Caribbean - Elizabeth A McAlister The Song of Freedom: Vodoun, Conscientization and Popular Culture in Haiti - Gerdes Fleurant Water in their Eyes, Dust on their Land: Heat and Illness in a Haitian Town - Pierre Minn "I am Going to See Where My Oungan Is": The Artistry of a Haitian Vodou Flagmaker - Anna Wexler How Hougans Use the Light from Distant Stars - LeGrace Benson The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection: Zora Neale Hurston as Initiate Observer - Richard Brent TurnerTrade Review"Les invisibles are the powers that have sustained Haitians through centuries of exploitation, impoverishment, and terror. This collection of essays by leading scholars has the great merit of showing how Vodou works as a healing force that thoroughly penetrates Haitian culture and social life. From ritual temple to street festival, from song and dance to art and literature, from democracy to social justice, from Haiti to New Orleans, each essay addresses a different aspect of Vodou's living presence. Assembled together in this volume, they constitute a vital whole that provides broad access to a living religion and way of life that has all too often been maligned and misunderstood." - Patrick Taylor, Chair of the Division of Humanities, York University, editor of Nation Dance: Religion, Identity and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean "The essays of this exceptional volume throw clear, cool water on a parched terrain. Many readers will emerge from Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture with a fresh vision of the world's oldest - and most maligned - spirituality. The book's contributors, both budding and accomplished scholars from multiple disciplines, honor the Haitian people who bravely nurture Vodou and weave it through every strand of their lives. Ayibobo to Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith!" - Lois Wilcken, Ph.D., author of The Drums of Vodou "The collection makes a valuable contribution to the field, and it should draw much interest among scholars and students of Caribbean religions." - Eugenio Matibag, Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Iowa State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Hatian Case Study - Karen McCarthy Brown Voudou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival - Claudine Michel African Interpretations of the Christian Vodou Cross - Leslie G. Desmangles Resisting Freedom: Cultural Factors in Democracy: The Case for Haiti - Patrick Bellegarde-Smith "The Jew" in the Haitian Imagination: Pre-Modern Anti-Judaism the Post-Modern Caribbean - Elizabeth A McAlister The Song of Freedom: Vodoun, Conscientization and Popular Culture in Haiti - Gerdes Fleurant Water in their Eyes, Dust on their Land: Heat and Illness in a Haitian Town - Pierre Minn "I am Going to See Where My Oungan Is": The Artistry of a Haitian Vodou Flagmaker - Anna Wexler How Hougans Use the Light from Distant Stars - LeGrace Benson The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection: Zora Neale Hurston as Initiate Observer - Richard Brent Turner

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1395, Julian of Norwich''s Revelations of Divine Love is a classic and important work of Christian mysticism, and the first book in English written by a woman. It is an account of her sixteen divine and mystical visions and her meditations on them, which she experienced after being struck by a serious illness at age 30 in 1373. Notable also for being written in plain Middle English, rather than the more common Latin for religious texts of the time, Julian of Norwich puts forth her ideas for divine love and beauty. Reflecting upon her illness and the visions she experienced, she believes she received three gifts from God: an understanding of the passion and love of Christ, an understanding of the importance of her own suffering, and the gift of greater piety and reverence as a result of her illness. Julian of Norwich found indescribable beauty even in the smallest of objects and insisted that God loved and cared for each of His creations. Written at a time of immea

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Book SynopsisRobert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and the Helen Hardin Honors Program, University of Memphis, USA.Trade ReviewA deep and engaging book sure to pique the interests of researchers in both semiotics and religion. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty. -- J. L. Best, St. Thomas University * CHOICE *As Robert Yelle compellingly argues in his compact, meaty monograph, a semiotic approach to religion (magic, ritual, myth) requires attention to both semiotic form and semiotic ideology - the poetics of rhyme and repetition, but equally the underlying nominalist ideology that naming invokes the ghost ... [T]he cogent ways in which he pulls together countless familiar piecemeal insights and well-known cases and debates in the anthropology of religion make his book worthwhile reading for linguistic anthropologists ... In sum, this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work provides a compelling argument for the tools of our trade by someone firmly situated in a different discipline. * Linguistic Anthropology *This important work takes up the almost forgotten task of advancing the study of religion to a place of deeper comprehension in which the tasks of comparison and broad categorical analysis are possible. The means of advance, as the title indicates, is semiotics ... [T]his [is a] carefully plotted argument, making Semiotics of Religion a highly recommended work of theory and method. * Religious Studies Review *In [Yelle's] book he suggests a more radical reorientation for the study of religious phenomena that shifts focus from attempts to uncover the underlying cosmology of religious and magical rituals - that is, the particular ‘semantic or symbolic’ meaning of such practices - to an approach that gives closer attention to the semiotics of ritual repetition and form ... Yelle’s willingness ... to take religious discourse on its own terms as well as his explanations of the complex language ideologies at work in South Asian religious ritual and practice provide a valuable contribution to both the study of language and the study of religion. * Language in Society *Students of semiotics, semiotic anthropology, cultural anthropology, religious studies, anthropology of religion, and especially semiotics of religion, have long waited for a publication of this kind ... [This book] revitaliz[es] the domain of semiotics, and in particular that of the semiotics of religion, with new themes, insights, sensibility and, last but not least, a new style ... Another merit of Yelle’s book, perhaps the greatest one, is to demonstrate with lucidity and efficacy that the semiotic ideologies that underpin religious traditions did not vanish in the era of supposed secularization but mutated, instead, into often neglected aspects of secular, modern, and even post-modern semiotic ideologies. * Religion [from a review symposium in 44:1] *[B]road in scope and ambitious. ... According to Yelle’s compelling argument, religions develop their own poetics that promote the use of signs and languages as non-arbitrary and motivated entities; as such, religious uses are related to poetry and performance, rather than history or philosophy. ... Yelle’s book is a landmark in semiotics and religious studies, and will be the basis of many research developments for several years. * Religion [from a review symposium in 44:1) *[Yelle's] extremely interesting engagement with ritual language with regard to magic in particular provides a different reading of magic, one that takes for granted its rationality and takes seriously its discursive poetics as an aspect of its efficacy and not an aspect of its being ‘science gone wrong.’ In this kind of approach, Yelle provides a fresh and insightful reading of magic, something quite unique in the study of systems of belief and practice. * Religion [from a review symposium in 44:1) *Robert A. Yelle’s Semiotics of Religion lays important groundwork for a revival of semiotics in the study of religion. In an admirably clear and straightforward manner, he examines a number of semiotic ideologies and their implications for ritual actions and historical interpretation. ... Yelle’s account of Protestant literalism, with its entailments especially in the sphere of law, is remarkably clear and to the point. Despite an inordinately large corpus of material to grapple with, Yelle succeeds admirably in articulating the implications of ‘plain speech’ – and the rejection of ‘vain repetitions’ – within the 16th- and 17th-century moment. * Religion [from a review symposium in 44:1] *This book is vast in scope, deep in implications, and admirably clear and forthright in exposition.The study of religion has needed a work of this kind, which brings together several research traditions and pushes the resulting synthesis in new directions. The result is an agenda-setting project of huge ambition. -- Webb Keane, University of Michigan, USASemiotics of Religion displays sensational semiotic sensitivity in analyzing the practical poetics of performance - the 'pragmatics' of performativity - of various expressions of the religious life.From this perspective and with great erudition, Yelle then engages the four-hundred-year-long European Enlightenment drive both stipulatively and interpretatively to 'semanticize' religious practice - as also language itself - in an ideological project of containment that has been central to institutionalizing 'disenchanted modernity.' In this enchanting book Yelle demonstrates a more inclusive semiotics of religion. -- Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, USATable of Contents1. Introduction \ 2. Distinctive Features of Religious Symbolism and Language \ 3. Natural and Artificial Languages \ 4. The Semiotics of Ritual Form \ 5. The Attack on Semiotic Form \ 6. Protestant Literalism and Print Culture \ 7. Signs of Salvation \ Bibliography \ Index

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Book SynopsisJenny Rose is an Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, USA.Table of Contents1. Introduction; 2. Thoughts What is Zoroastrianism?; 3. Words Who is Zarathushtra/Zoroaster?; 4. Deeds How has Zoroastrianism helped to shape our world?; 5. Conclusion; Further Reading; Notes; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisAndrew Muirhead is a former librarian interested in the churches' impact on the life of Scotland. He traces his own family through several of the denominations described here and is President of the Scottish Church History Society.Trade ReviewBrilliantly presented history of Scotland’s many sects and secessions. * Scottish Review of Books *This is a ‘quiet’ book that deserves a loud welcome. Andrew Muirhead has managed to pack four hundred years of the story of Scotland’s churches into a couple of hundred pages of informative, accessible and concise writing. ... He has certainly fulfilled his modest aim of assisting the family and local historian and the book will equally be a boon for students and anyone wanting a short, clear guide to the subject. This volume deserves loud cheers for introducing such clarity to the story of Scotland’s churches. * Scottish Historical Review *‘Tradition is passing on a flame not worshipping the ashes.’ This opening quote strikes the tone of this very welcome study of four turbulent centuries where Scotland’s churches have played a pivotal role in shaping Scotland’s history, development and the lives of its citizens … I strongly commend this book to anyone who has a love for the churches in Scotland and an enthusiasm for expanding knowledge and understanding. -- Dan Gunn * Open House *Andrew Muirhead has written a splendidly clear and readable one-volume account of Scotland's churches, for which we are all in his debt. * Theology Journal *Muirhead’s attention to detail is fastidious throughout the volume, culminating in a series of maps and charts that give quick overviews of various denominations and their geographical spread throughout Scotland and trace the genetic flow of those churches. … [A] useful resource. -- Christina Hitchcock, The University of Sioux Falls * Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society *This splendid account is the Baedeker for anyone trying to find their way through the complexities of Scottish Church History since the Reformation. Muirhead balances the big picture with the local. He reminds us of the shakers and movers in the history of the Scottish church but also of the everyday supporters and their concerns. He recognises the role played by religion in individual lives but also the way that piety could be warped into peculiarity. This is the best kind of church history: clear narrative, cogent analysis and relevant anecdote. * Alastair Durie, University of Stirling, UK *This is an excellent and incisive treatment of the history of Christianity in Scotland over a four hundred year period since the Scottish Reformation. * Kenneth Roxburgh, Samford University, UK *The bewildering variety of Christian denominations past and present can confuse the historical researcher and the contemporary observer alike. Alistair Muirhead, however, reveals the origin and development of virtually every Christian body that has existed in Scotland since the Reformation, providing a concise and accessible introduction to the history of the faith in Scotland over four centuries. * David Bebbington, University of Stirling, UK *Modestly, Muirhead says that this is a 'non-academic outline of why Scotland has so many churches, Presbyterian and otherwise.' In reality, however, it is a tour de force which will reward the reader with insights into the politics and the theology of every aspect of Scottish Church history from the Reformation to the Disruption and on into the 20th Century reunion of the Churches. The historical cameos bring the text to life and there are surprising revelations which put some of our present day controversies into perspective. I heartily commend this book to anyone who wants to understand the present day Church in Scotland. * Right Reverend John P. Chalmers, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, UK *This is the first research-based ecclesiastical history of post-Reformation Scotland in a generation. From John Knox to Billy Graham, Andrew Muirhead casts his gifted eye over the whole realm of religious change, bringing up to date our understanding of how the country moved in four centuries from a Presbyterian theocracy to a multi-faith democracy. This is an authoritative narrative of the Christian churches, using extensive archival quotation and learned assessment. The book has many claims to originality, not least being the author's command of Scotland's often-neglected ecclesiastical law, and the due attention paid to the important forms of dissent which Scots not merely adopted but in many cases invented. Rich in insight and vivid description, the author provides a readable textbook for student and general reader alike. * Callum G. Brown, University of Glasgow, UK *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Overview: 1560-1688: Reformation to Revolution Chapter 2 Dissenting voices backing Bishops: Roman Catholics and Episcopalians Chapter 3 Overview: 1688-1843: After the Revolution Chapter 4 Dissenting voices The Covenanting and Secession traditions Chapter 5 Governing lives: The churches' impact on personal life. Chapter 6 Non-Presbyterian Dissent: the major lines. Chapter 7 Overview: 1843-1900: Disruption to Diversity Chapter 8 Dissenting voices: The Disruption tradition Chapter 9 Imports and other small churches Chapter 10 Non Trinitarian Churches Chapter 11 The geography of faith in Scotland Chapter 12 Overview: 1900-1960: The 20th century church Tables and Maps Further reading Index

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