Религиоведение
Различные книги в жанре РелигиоведениеThe Virgin in Song
According to legend, the Virgin appeared one Christmas Eve to an artless young man standing in one of Constantinople's most famous Marian shrines. She offered him a scroll of papyrus with the injunction that he swallow it, and following the Virgin's command, he did so. Immediately his voice turned sweet and gentle as he spontaneously intoned his hymn «The Virgin today gives birth.» So was born the career of Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485-560), one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium, author of at least sixty long hymns, or kontakia , that were chanted during the night vigils preceding major feasts and festivals. In The Virgin in Song , Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in these kontakia and the ways in which the kontakia echoed the cult of the Virgin. He focuses on three key moments in her story as marked in the liturgical calendar: her encounter with Gabriel at the Annunciation, her child's birth at Christmas, and the death of her son on Good Friday. Consistently, Arentzen contends, Romanos counters expectations by shifting emphasis away from Christ himself to focus on Mary—as the subject of the erotic gaze, as a breastfeeding figure of abundance and fertility, and finally as an authoritatively vocal woman who conveys the secrets of her son and the joys of the resurrection. Through his hymns, Romanos inspired an affective relationship between Mary and his audience, bringing the human and the holy into dialogue. By plumbing her emotional depths, the poet traces her process of understanding as she apprehends the mysteries that she embodies. By giving her a powerful voice, he grants subjectivity to a maiden who becomes a mediator. Romanos shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.
Apocalypse of the Alien God
In the second century, Platonist and Judeo-Christian thought were sufficiently friendly that a Greek philosopher could declare, «What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?» Four hundred years later, a Christian emperor had ended the public teaching of subversive Platonic thought. When and how did this philosophical rupture occur? Dylan M. Burns argues that the fundamental break occurred in Rome, ca. 263, in the circle of the great mystic Plotinus, author of the Enneads . Groups of controversial Christian metaphysicians called Gnostics («knowers») frequented his seminars, disputed his views, and then disappeared from the history of philosophy—until the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of codices containing Gnostic literature, including versions of the books circulated by Plotinus's Christian opponents. Blending state-of-the-art Greek metaphysics and ecstatic Jewish mysticism, these texts describe techniques for entering celestial realms, participating in the angelic liturgy, confronting the transcendent God, and even becoming a divine being oneself. They also describe the revelation of an alien God to his elect, a race of «foreigners» under the protection of the patriarch Seth, whose interventions will ultimately culminate in the end of the world. Apocalypse of the Alien God proposes a radical interpretation of these long-lost apocalypses, placing them firmly in the context of Judeo-Christian authorship rather than ascribing them to a pagan offshoot of Gnosticism. According to Burns, this Sethian literature emerged along the fault lines between Judaism and Christianity, drew on traditions known to scholars from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enochic texts, and ultimately catalyzed the rivalry of Platonism with Christianity. Plunging the reader into the culture wars and classrooms of the high Empire, Apocalypse of the Alien God offers the most concrete social and historical description available of any group of Gnostic Christians as it explores the intersections of ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, myth, and philosophy.
Смирение угодно Богу. По творениям преподобного Ефрема Сирина
Данная работа представляет собой сборник изречений преподобного отца нашего Ефрема Сирина о важнейшей христианской добродетели – смирении, взятых из его творений. В своих творениях преподобный Ефрем учит нас важности стяжания смирения для спасения человека, отмечает те условия, которые содействуют обретению этого качества. Те советы, поучения, наставления, которые святой отец давал своим современникам, важны и актуальны и в наши дни. Издание рассчитано на широкий круг православных читателей.
Детский патерик
Собранные в этой книге небольшие иллюстрированные рассказы, описывающие доблестные и славные деяния, примеры из жизни христианских подвижников и их душеполезные изречения, призваны помочь родителям в нелегком, но совершенно необходимом деле православного воспитания детей. Богоугодные поступки и назидания святых людей дадут детям наглядные примеры для подражания, помогут им идти путем, ведущим в Царство Небесное.
Без смирения нет спасения. По творениям cвятого праведного Иоанна Кронштадтского
Смирение – главная основа всех добродетелей в христианской жизни. Без него невозможно достичь святости и спасения. Примером истинного смирения для нас была жизнь святого праведного Иоанна Кронштадтского. В предлагаемой книге приведены его простые и искренние советы о том, как достичь этой высоты духовной жизни, как научиться распознавать истинное смирение от ложного, и как, наконец, научиться жить настоящей христианской жизнью. В книгу вошли дневниковые записи святого разных лет, в том числе, отрывки из его знаменитого письменного творения «Моя жизнь во Христе». Издание рассчитано на широкий круг православных читателей.
Religion in Republican Rome
Roman religion as we know it is largely the product of the middle and late republic, the period falling roughly between the victory of Rome over its Latin allies in 338 B.C.E. and the attempt of the Italian peoples in the Social War to stop Roman domination, resulting in the victory of Rome over all of Italy in 89 B.C.E. This period witnessed the expansion and elaboration of large public rituals such as the games and the triumph as well as significant changes to Roman intellectual life, including the emergence of new media like the written calendar and new genres such as law, antiquarian writing, and philosophical discourse. In Religion in Republican Rome Jörg Rüpke argues that religious change in the period is best understood as a process of rationalization: rules and principles were abstracted from practice, then made the object of a specialized discourse with its own rules of argument and institutional loci. Thus codified and elaborated, these then guided future conduct and elaboration. Rüpke concentrates on figures both famous and less well known, including Gnaeus Flavius, Ennius, Accius, Varro, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. He contextualizes the development of rational argument about religion and antiquarian systematization of religious practices with respect to two complex processes: Roman expansion in its manifold dimensions on the one hand and cultural exchange between Greece and Rome on the other.
Christ Circumcised
In the first full-length study of the circumcision of Jesus, Andrew S. Jacobs turns to an unexpected symbol—the stereotypical mark of the Jewish covenant on the body of the Christian savior—to explore how and why we think about difference and identity in early Christianity. Jacobs explores the subject of Christ's circumcision in texts dating from the first through seventh centuries of the Common Era. Using a diverse toolkit of approaches, including the psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist, he posits that while seeming to desire fixed borders and a clear distinction between self (Christian) and other (Jew, pagan, and heretic), early Christians consistently blurred and destabilized their own religious boundaries. He further argues that in this doubled approach to others, Christians mimicked the imperial discourse of the Roman Empire, which exerted its power through the management, not the erasure, of difference. For Jacobs, the circumcision of Christ vividly illustrates a deep-seated Christian duality: the fear of and longing for an other, at once reviled and internalized. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the full-blown Feast of the Divine Circumcision in the medieval period, Christ circumcised represents a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.
