Search results for ""author christo"

Putting on Christ aims to situate Augustine's early soteriology and sacramental theology within the context of his personal history and intellectual development. Beginning with an extended analysis of the theology of salvation and sacramental efficacy contained within Augustine's Confessions (ca. 400), the study then traces the maturation of his views on these matters, beginning with his earliest extant works, the Cassicacum dialogues (ca. 386). The journey entails treating Augustine's earliest discussions of Christ's person and his saving work, as well as the believer's subjective experience of conversion and salvation. As Augustine's corpus shifts from philosophical dialogues to explicitly apologetic and scriptural-exegetical works, so too does his soteriological lexicon expand to include concepts and terms that will later become his stock-in-trade, such as the virtue of humilitas. And as his roles in the North African Church come to include participation in the presbyterate and the episcopacy, so too does his engagement expand to a wider set of polemical contexts, both anti-Manichaean and anti-Donatist.Putting on Christ tracks these and many other aspects of Augustine's maturing thought, showing where lines of both continuity and development lie and aiming to uncover their reasons. In doing so, it reveals Augustine to be a thinker and a teacher who continued to hone his understanding of salvation, the very heartbeat of Christian life and thought, as well as its relation to various other aspects of the Christian theological worldview, from Christology and anthropology to sacramental theology and ecclesiology.

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Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

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The scholarly quality of all of these contributions does justice to the richness of the entire collection. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW Articles examining aspects of the French manuscripts in the Parker Library. `This wide-ranging volume contains Philippe Ménard's study of the Proverbs in MS 450 - Elspeth Kennedy's contribution on the prose Lancelot in MS 45 -concentrating on how the manuscript gives evidence of a medieval tendencyto improve a romance text in terms of narrative consistency; Danielle Quéruel's essay on the Chronique d'un Ménestrel de Reims in MS 435 - Françoise Ferrand's discussion of the magnificent Apocalypse in MS 20, which she suggests maywell have been produced to commemorate the coronation of Edward III; René Stuip's brief survey of the mid-fifteenth-century Histoire des Seigneurs de Gavre (MS 91) - Diana Tyson's examination of the five prose Brutmanuscripts,followed by a lengthy analysis by J.C. Thiolier of one of them, Thomas de Gray's Scalacronica(MS 133) with its interesting royalist slant on the murder of Thomas Becket; Jacques Beauroy's study of MSS 37and 301, examples of treatises on agricultural management - Fittingly, the editor's tail-piece is on fragments of French texts in the Parker Library - the volume is an interesting contribution.' FRENCH STUDIES NIGEL WILKINSis Librarian at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The contributors are: PHILIPPE MÉNARD, ELSPETH KENNEDY, DANIELLE QUÉRUEL, FRANÇOISE FERRAND, RENÉSTUIP, JEAN-CLAUDE THIOLIER, DIANA TYSON, JACQUES BEAUROY, NIGEL WILKINS

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