Strangers in the Land: Traveling Texts, Imagined Others, and Captured Souls in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions in Late Antique and Mediaeval Times PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004693319
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume explores the ways in which representatives of different monotheistic traditions experienced themselves as “the other” or were perceived and described as such by their contemporaries. This central category – which includes not only those of different religions, but also converts, foreigners, sectarians, and women – is studied from various perspectives in a range of texts composed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors during late antique and mediaeval times. Conceptualizations of such “others” are often intrinsically related to the idea of exile, another important category that is analysed in this work.

Author: Charles L. Tieszen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004192298
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain Charles L. Tieszen explores a small corpus of texts from medieval Spain in an effort to deduce how their authors defined their religious identity in light of Islam, and in turn, how they hoped their readers would distinguish themselves from the Muslims in their midst. It is argued that the use of reflected self-image as a tool for interpreting Christian anti-Muslim polemic allows such texts to be read for the self-image of their authors instead of the image of just those they attacked. As such, polemic becomes a set of borders authors offered to their communities, helping them to successfully navigate inter-religious living.

Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844679462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

Author: John Koessler
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310864216
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith

Author: Richard Tarnas
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307804526
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168362X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

Author: Laura E. Donaldson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469639424
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Donaldson presents new paradigms of interpretation that help to bring the often oppositional stances of First versus Third World and traditional versus postmodern feminism into a more constructive relationship. She situates contemporary theoretical debates about reading, writing, and the politics of identity within the context of historical colonialism--primarily under the English in the nineteenth century.

Author: Malachi Haim Hacohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108245498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 757

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Book Description
Jacob and Esau is a profound new account of two millennia of Jewish European history that, for the first time, integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with that of traditional Jews and Jewish culture. Malachi Haim Hacohen uses the biblical story of the rival twins, Jacob and Esau, and its subsequent retelling by Christians and Jews throughout the ages as a lens through which to illuminate changing Jewish-Christian relations and the opening and closing of opportunities for Jewish life in Europe. Jacob and Esau tells a new history of a people accustomed for over two-and-a-half millennia to forming relationships, real and imagined, with successive empires but eagerly adapting, in modernity, to the nation-state, and experimenting with both assimilation and Jewish nationalism. In rewriting this history via Jacob and Esau, the book charts two divergent but intersecting Jewish histories that together represent the plurality of Jewish European cultures.

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Author: Brent Nongbri
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.