Search results for ""author j. leemans""

Throughout its history, persecutions and martyrdom have been Christianity's faithful companions. Remarkably enough, Christians have always valued martyrdom in a positive way. This positive evaluation of martyrdom most certainly has to do with the absolute, uncompromising nature of it. The martyrs' lives and deaths represent the most uncompromising of answers to the divine call. The focus of the contributions in this volume is not in the first place on reconstructing the historical events of the martyr's life and death "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," but on the discourse generated by this event as mediated in texts."More than a Memory" aims to explore the reciprocal relationship between this discourse of martyrdom and the construction of Christian identity. It will do so by presenting a number of test cases in which this dynamic can be seen at work. They will lead the reader through the entire history of Christianity, starting with the "Martyrdom of Lyons and Vienne" in the second century and ending in the Latin America of the 1960's. Each article will present a test case of discourse-analysis, attempting to explore the issue of how a document or coherent group of documents contributed to create a distinct Christian identity. Taken together, the essays provide an array of examples of how martyrdom impinged on the way Christian identity has been negotiated in the Christian past. In doing this, the volume at the same time illustrates the sheer importance of martyrdom and the reflection and writing about it throughout the history of Christianity until today.

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This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference on the relation between asceticism and aspirations about reaching for perfection held at the University of Leuven 21-23 October 2019 and organised in the framework of Kosmoi, an association of Leuven colleagues from various disciplines working in the field of religious studies. Contributors were asked to integrate in their essay (aspects of) one of the following four basic topics: (1) the goal and purpose of living an ascetic life; (2) the means, both material and immaterial, available for reaching this goal; (3) the place of asceticism within the whole of religious practices in a particular religious tradition; and (4) the challenges and dangers of adopting such a lifestyle. These topics are addressed in various religious traditions, with a focus on Christian tradition – Western and Eastern, and through various approaches – historical, anthropological, and more philosophical.

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Mathijs Lamberigts’ long and prolific research career started with the study of the controversy between Julian of Aeclanum and Augustine of Hippo on the issues of human free will and divine grace. This research interest rapidly came to include all aspects of the turbulent life, the massive oeuvre, and the complex ideas of the doctor gratiae, imbedded in the historical, political, socio-economic, religious, ecclesial, and intellectual context of the fourth and fifth centuries. Driven by a deep respect for the original sources, and always well informed about the established scholarship, Lamberigts deployed a rigorous historical-critical method in his publications. The first nineteen contributions of the present volume reflect this first love for Augustinian studies. As illustrated by the cover image, taken from the famous sixteenth-century Leuven edition of Augustine’s collected writings, Lamberigts’ historical-critical study of Augustine stands within a rich and enduring Leuven tradition. The same old print expresses the gradual expansion of Lamberigts’ research interests, which came to embrace Augustine’s legacy in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries. In fact at the end of the Middle Ages, Augustine and his doctrine of sin, grace, and free will found renewed interest, even becoming part of the ideological-religious foundations of Martin Luther – who was after all an Augustinian friar – and hence of the Reformation. All parties involved in the religious controversies of this period appealed to the doctor gratiae to justify their own position. Lamberigts has always shown a vivid interest in these developments, and especially in how Augustinian thinking became a doctrinal pillar of Leuven theology in the Early Modern Era. Consequently, part of Lamberigt’s scholarly work has focused on figures such as Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansenius of Ypres, on movements such as Jansenism, as well as on the Jansenists’ theological adversaries, the Jesuits. Eight essays of this volume evoke this particular period in church history. These twenty-seven papers are offered to Mathijs Lamberigts by former students and colleagues, out of gratitude for his generous personality, for his inspiring scholarship, and for his academic leadership.

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