bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Twentieth-Century Hymn Singing As Cultural Criticism
Authors: Mcnally Michael D
Published: November 2023

Chapter 3 explored how the Anami’aajig modeled hymns into a medium for negotiating a new life within the circumstances of assimilation and missionization while maintaining the integrity of core Anishinaabe values. We turn now to the changed landscape of hymn singing in the twentieth century and to how the meanings and uses of hymn singing changed in response. The same songs and the same ritualized practice of singing them have taken on different meanings and do different kinds of cultural work as a result of the gradual loss of language, English only boarding school education, fuller integration into American society, relocation away from the reservations to the cities, and the ensuing contentiousness over the meaning and value of Ojibwe culture. Although hymn singing had declined in importance at White Earth by mid century, a group of concerned senior citizens rekindled the tradition of singing in the 1980s in what could be understood as a ritual form of cultural criticism. Sketches of their lives show how the elders’ remaking of hymn singing has effectively remade them in the process. Although the mode of ritualization changed with the historical situation, ritualized hymn singing was used to similar ends: the remembering of a dismembered community in crisis and the reconfiguration of an existence where economics, politics, and religion had become increasingly compartmentalized into an integrated Anishinaabe way of life.
Saints Criticized and Condemned
Authors: Ray Reginald A
Published: November 2023

Mahákáśyapa, Upagupta, and śariputra are preeminent saints, presented in a positive light within their respective traditions. Quite in contrast to them are other important saintly figures toward whom Indian Buddhism has a much more ambivalent attitude. This chapter contains discussion of two such masters, Pindolabháradvája and Devadatta.
Introduction
Authors: Grennan Eamon , Kitzinger Rachel
Published: November 2023

The Oedipus at Colonus, written by Sophocles in the last years of his life (he died in 406 BCE) and not produced until after his death (perhaps in 401 BCE), is a powerful exploration of what survives endingsthe ending of an individual life (Oedipus dies at the end of the play); the ending of a city (in 404 Sophocles’ native city, Athens, came to the end of its role as the primary political presence in the Mediterranean world through its defeat by Sparta and its allies after a long and costly war); and the end of the poet’s own life (Sophocles was probably ninety when he wrote the play).
Conventions Of The Ancient Greek Theater
Authors: Grennan Eamon , Kitzinger Rachel
Published: November 2023

Much of the original experience of Sophocles’ audience is lost in encountering a play like the Oedipus at Colonus in English instead of Greek and on the page instead of on the stage. Not only is a great deal communicated by the spatial relationships, the physical gestures, the vocal intonations of the actors and the chorus, and the subtleties par¬ticular to the Greek language that are so different from those of En¬glish, but the conventions of the ancient theater are so different from our own that we cann9t even be confident of the way our imaginations may provide the missing aspects of performance as we read.
Characters
Authors: Grennan Eamon , Kitzinger Rachel
Published: November 2023

A grove near Athens, in the district of Colonus. Entrance, stage left, leads to Athens, entrance stage right to Thebes. The grove stretches across the back of the stage. A large unhewn rock lies just inside the grove. Toward the front of the stage there is a rock ledge. On one side stands an equestrian statue. From the direction of Thebes, enter OEDIPUS slowly, leaning on ANTIGONE, both in ragged clothing. They stop at the unhewn rock in the grove.
Hiding and Seeking
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

I know a certain gospel which is called The Gospel according to Thomas, and a Gospel according to Matthias, and many others have we read—lest we should in any way be considered ignorant.… Nevertheless, among all these, we have approved solely what the church has recognized, which is that only the four gospels should be accepted.
Into the Mainstream
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

IN AN EMOTIONALLY CHARGED FIELD such as Biblical study, there is nothing novel about the assertion that scholarship is ideologically motivated, and the critical study of the Bible has long been driven by the desire to establish particular positions, conservative or radical, Catholic or Protestant. Often, too, the political concerns of a given period determine the texts and passages that will become the main intellectual battlefronts in that era. Some contemporary theorists would deny that truly objective or value-free scholarship is even a possibility. What has changed fundamentally in recent years is the nature of the prevailing ideology, which asks quite novel questions about, for instance, gender and sexuality, canon and authority. The liberal and feminist tone of contemporary writing on the lost gospels is what we might expect from the academic and religious culture of the late twentieth-century West.
Beyond Hindu And Muslim
Authors: Gottschalk Peter
Published: November 2023

Questioning the conventional depiction of India as a nation divided between religious communities, Gottschalk shows that individuals living in India have multiple identities, some of which cut across religious boundaries. The stories narrated by villagers living in the northern state of Bihar depict everyday social interactions that transcend the simple divide of Hindu and Muslim.
Muslims and Identity Politics in America
Authors: Muqtedar Khan Mohommed A
Published: November 2023

Identity may be an imaginary property of humans, but its effects on society are real, both on the individual level and collectively in the form of communities, nations, ethnicities, and civilizations. Identity connects the individual to the collective; it establishes relations whose nature is political and which is known as “identity politics.” Through the shaping and reshaping of the “I” and the “we” the individual and the community shape and re-shape each other.
Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam
Authors: Allen Ernest
Published: November 2023

Since whiteness is a mark of degeneracy in many animals near the pole, the negro has as much right to term his savage robbers albinos and white devils, degenerated through the weakness of nature, as we have to deem him the emblem of evil, and a descendant of Ham, branded by his father’s curse. I, might he say, I, the black, am the original man. I have taken the deepest draughts from the source of life, the Sun: on me, and on everything around me, it has acted with the greatest energy and vivacity.
Introduction
Authors: Derber Charles
Published: November 2023

Without attention being exchanged and distributed, there is no social life. A unique social resource, attention is created anew in each encounter and allocated in ways deeply affecting human interactions. The quality of any interaction depends on the tendencies of those involved to seek and share attention. Competition develops when people seek to focus attention mainly on themselves; co­ operation occurs when the participants are willing and able to give it. In cooperative interactions attention is distributed to each person according to his or her needs, while in competitive interactions attention is typically dominated by those most powerful. In extreme instances, certain people monopolize attention while others do not receive even the minimum allowing them to feel included or visible.
Introduction
Authors: Derber Charles
Published: November 2023

In Part I we have seen that informal attention-dynamics in America are individualistic, with people tending to seek attention for themselves. There are, however, systematic differences be­ tween the sexes and among social classes that are aspects of “for­ mal” behavior.1 Of prime interest is the behavior of women and subordinate class members involving self-effacement and the giving of attention to others. In Part II, focusing mainly on formal rather than informal interactions, we examine sex roles and social class prescriptions which restrict “self-orientation” among lower-status groups and dictate a distribution of attention consistent with dominant social hierarchies.
Building Peace in South Africa
Authors: Herr Robert , Herr Judy Zimmerman
Published: November 2023

It was 1983, the beginning of what would later be known as a decade of decisive and bitter struggle in South Africa. We were visiting a rural African, Presbyterian church. Representing a North American church agency to people in a rural homeland of the then-pariah South Africa was a dicey task. Mennonites in North America were sometimes unsure about our being there. International friends noted the ethical dilemma our presence posed. “We are hurt by the ostracism of the world,” said a South African friend, in contrast, “especially by the churches. We didn’t ask for this oppression; it was thrust upon us. It’s as if we find ourselves on the cross. Please do not say, as did Jesus’ tormentors, ‘save yourself.’ Rather, come and suffer and agonize with us” (Mcoteli, 1983).
Trauma-Healing and Reconciliation Workshops during Liberia’s Civil Crisis
Authors: Hart Barry
Published: November 2023

“Tribal Liberians Lived with oneanother very understandably before the war.”

This statement, made by a Liberian ninth grader, reflects a widely held perception among Liberians about their personal and intergroup relations before the war that began on December 24, 1989. Prior to that time, most members of Liberia’s seventeen ethnic groups did live, work, and trade with one another peacefully, and they often married across ethnic lines. Even those from the America-Liberian minority community who stayed after the 1980 coup, which ended 133 years of America-Liberian rule, experienced a certain tolerance and sense of peace before the war. But, as another ninth grader, a member of the Krahn ethnic group, stated:

Generally the civil war has created some gigantic impact on the lives of the Liberian people. The war has caused some great changes in the minds of the typical Liberian. The Krahn, Mandingo, Gio, and Mano [ethnic groups], who are the major perpetrators of this war, once lived together very happily and inter-married. [Now] the Gio and Mano from Nimba County have become enemies to the Mandingo and Krahn. . . . They look at each other like two different people.
From Haiti to Hebron with a Brief Stop in Washington, D.C.
Authors: Kern Kathleen
Published: November 2023

In 1984, Ron Sider Gave The keynote address at the Mennonite World Conference, calling for the Christians of the world to band together and form a Christian peacemaking army that would intervene nonviolently in situations of conflict. He later expanded on this theme:

Nonviolent resistance to tyrants, oppressors and brutal invaders is not for fools or cowards. It demands courage and daring of the highest order. It requires discipline, training and a willingness to face death. It produces collective pride in the group or society that successfully . . . stands together and overcomes a brutal enemy.

Are there tough, brave volunteers for that kind of costly, demanding battle? Would the people be there if the Christian church—and people of other faiths as well—called for a vast multiplication of our efforts in nonviolent alternatives to war? Would the scholars and trainees emerge if we doubled and then quadrupled our study and training centers on nonviolence? Would the nonviolent troops be available to be trained by the thousands and then tens of thousands to form disciplined Christian Peacemaker Teams ready to walk into the face of danger and death in loving confrontation of injustice and oppression? (1989, pp. 93–94)
Local Assessments of Mennonite Peacebuilding
Authors: Sampson Cynthia
Published: November 2023

We Have Before Us Accounts of peacebuilding told by Mennonite practitioners and analyses of their work by scholars writing from the perspectives of their respective disciplines. What remains for this chapter is to provide some local assessment of Mennonite peacebuilding from those who have had direct experience of some of those initiatives.

This will not be an exhaustive undertaking. It has not been possible to dispatch independent researchers to four continents to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the efficacy and impact of Mennonite peacebuilding. Nor has it been possible to provide equal coverage in this chapter for all of the volume’s case studies. We were able to select but two locations, Colombia and Northern Ireland, for site visits, which were made in October and November 1996. We felt these cases offered a contrast: Colombia presents the work of Justapaz, an initiative of the Colombian Mennonite church, whereas Northern Ireland, more typical of the other case studies in the book, presents the work of North American Mennonites who have served as resources in the development of indigenous peacebuilding capacities. A list of all individuals formally interviewed is included at the conclusion of the chapter.
Peace as a Christian Virtue
Authors: Gilman James E
Published: November 2023

COMMOTION ON THE STREET attracted Jesus’ attention. A woman, an adulteress, was in the custody of authorities, and they were bringing her to Jesus, a rabbi of recent and dubious reputation. Teacher, they said, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say? Jesus faced a dilemma. He knew the law well, and it was clear and unambiguous on this point. The woman legally and justly de served death. Yet Jesus was rapidly gaining a reputation as a teacher for whom love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness constituted the true meaning of faith. What was Jesus to do? The woman heard Jesus say to her accusers, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
D
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

When the people of the Peruvian highlands look into the night sky, they see clusters of dark shadows in the southern portion of the Milky Way that scholars have labeled dark cloud constellations. These dense star clusters appear as silhouettes against the brighter band of light, and people throughout the southern hemisphere recognized them. The Quechua of Peru saw animals in these dark cloud formations, and they wove many fanciful myths about these animals rising to the sky and dwelling in the clouds. These animal myths left vital clues to ancient beliefs about the cosmos.
I
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

Thunder held a high place in the pantheon of the Inca, and Illapa was the god responsible for causing it. Although he was sometimes labeled more generally a weather god, Illapa was best known for carrying a slingshot that he cracked from the sky to cause the thundering noise. Some say Illapa used his sling to shatter a rain jug carried by his sister, thus releasing the rains she gathered from the Milky Way, which was believed to be a celestial river. Illapa used his sling just as thunder gods from Indo-European myths used their hammers-as a mighty weapon that delivered storms the ancients considered supernatural manifestations of sky power.
P
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

Although the ancient Peruvians revered the earth as female, they considered Pachacamac the god who animated the earth. He was the spirit of plants and animals and all things that emerged from the earth, even human beings. In some traditions, Pachacamac married Pachamama, the spirit of mountains, plains, and rocks. Pachacamac created the earth and the earthquakes, and Pachamama manifested herself in lightning that flashed upward, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic fire.
Mexican Texas, 1821–1835
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

“To govern is to populate.” If this aphorism from Juan Bautista Alberdi, a mid-nineteenth-century Argentine political theorist, is true, then Spain never governed Texas, and Mexico as an independent republic in 1821 inherited the results of that failure. Independence in itself was not likely to convince more people from the interior of Mexico to move to Texas. So Mexican leaders faced a problem: How could an infant nation populate its far northern frontier province when a great colonial power had failed for so many years to accomplish that objective? An obvious answer lay with the Anglo-Americans who were already beginning to settle around San Augustine in East Texas and on the south side of the Red River. Mexico needed only to open Texas to immigrants from the United States, with certain stipulations, sit back, and watch the population grow.
Frontier Texas, 1846–1861
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

Annexation brought greater security and stability than white Texans ever experienced under the Republic, thanks above all to the presence of the United States Army. Also, statehood meant that Americans who joined the continuing stream of immigrants going to Texas could do so without leaving their home country. The new state’s population, excluding Indians, increased by more than seventy thousand during its first five years in the Union. In spite of greater security and rapid growth, however, Texas’s position on the frontier guaranteed continuing conflict and disorder for many of its people. In fact, the state had two frontiers—one with Mexico in the south and another with Indian-controlled lands in the west—and both presented threats to peace. Disagreement over the boundary with Mexico soon led to a major war that had a decisive impact on the future of all Texans, especially those of Mexican descent in South Texas. Conflict on the Indian frontier showed that ultimately the Comanches and their allies would be outnumbered and outgunned but proved indecisive during the early years of statehood.
The Civil War, 1861–1865
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

Southern Democrats, including most Texas politicians, entered the presidential campaign of 1860 in a “rule or ruin” mood. Either their party’s convention would write a platform guaranteeing protection of slavery in all the territories of the United States, or they would walk out and prevent the nomination of a candidate. And they proved true to their word. When the convention, which assembled in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860, re- fused to include the plank protecting slavery, delegates from seven Deep South states walked out, breaking up the meeting. The Texas delegation un- der the leadership of former governor Runnels, Guy M. Bryan (a nephew of Stephen F. Austin), and Francis R. Lubbock joined in the withdrawal. Eventually, after another failed national convention in Baltimore, Texas delegates participated in a meeting in Richmond, Virginia, that nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and wrote the platform desired by southerners. The remnant of the Democratic Party (primarily northerners, of course) nominated Stephen A. Douglas and endorsed his version of popular sovereignty, which by that time was unacceptable to ultra-southerners.
The “prosperity decade” and the great Depression, 1921–1941
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

The words prosperity decade summarize the United States during the 1920s. Across the nation, basic economic activities such as residential and commercial construction boomed, and new industries—the manufacture of automobiles, radios, and synthetics, for example—grew with unimaginable speed. Businessmen and politicians called the twenties a “New Era” and spoke confidently of ending poverty in America, all the while paying little attention to weaknesses in agriculture and several other key industries and ignoring the overconcentration of income and wealth in the hands of a relatively few people. In 1929, it all came crashing down in the worst financial panic and economic depression in the history of the United States. Republican President Herbert Hoover, the chief architect of the “New Era,” fell with the economy, and Americans turned in 1932 to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his promise of a “New Deal.” Under Roosevelt’s leadership during the thirties the United States survived but did not escape the Great Depression. Full economic recovery came only with World War II.
Modern Texas, 1971–2001
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

Few, if any, major historical changes occur decisively in a clearly limited period of time. Even a political revolution that on a particular day brings down one government and replaces it with another takes years to develop and even longer to run its course. Thus, historians always have room to debate exactly when great changes begin and end. The modernization of Texas is no exception. When did the state move from “old” to “modern,” not just chronologically, but in terms of its economy, society, and political life as well? “Old” Texas had a semi colonial economy that depended on the production of a few raw materials—cotton, cattle, and oil—and left the control of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and services largely to outside interests. Southern-born Anglo males, especially those living in rural and small-town settings, dominated socially. Their ideas and beliefs set the state’s cultural standards. Politically, Democrats controlled the state, generally providing a conservative government that kept taxes low, gave business some help and little regulation, and offered only minimal social services. “Modern” Texas is far more diversified than “old” Texas in every way. The economy
The Church as Battleground
Authors: Hasan S S
Published: November 2023

Under Pope Shenuda the church is a rallying place for Copts, where they can reaffirm their collective identity. The mass has become for them what it was in the early Christian era, a kind of communal affirmation of survival in the face of persecution. Its strength derives from the awareness of every single individual Copt hurrying to his local church on his day off that millions of Copts throughout the country are doing the same thing. A feeling of power results from the knowledge of this simultaneity, one that is reinforced at the end of the Mass when each member of the congregation clasps the hand of his neighbor to the right and the left, in front of him and behind him in a symbolic gesture of communal unity. Similarily, the common practice of baptizing large groups of babies together on auspicious days, such as the feasts of the saints, is an act of affirmation by a community ever conscious of its minority status. As the babies are carried in their white baptismal gowns by their mothers in procession around the church, the communal rejoicing at this visible blessing of fertility resembles the pride ultra-Orthodox Jews take in their large clutches, which they look upon as a triumph over the Holocaust.
Straightening the Warped Wood: Wu-wei in the Xunzi
Authors: Slingerland Edward
Published: November 2023

Certainly there are many aspects of Xunzi’s thought that might strike us as rather “un-Confucian”: his detailed discussions of methods for strengthening or enriching the state; his advocation of controlling the populace through the use of carefully promulgated laws and consistently applied punishments; and his discussion of military strategy (Kil:108-9). One way to view these features of the Xunzi’s thought, however, is to see them as a response to the challenge of defending the Confucian vision not only against the opponents Mencius faced (the Mohists and Yangists) but against an entire range of relatively new and attractive ways of thought that were flourishing in his age. The impressive success of the state of Qin-which was organized along Legalist principles-and the popularity of the new theories of military strategy and statecraft made it impossible for Xunzi to defend the Confucian Way except by showing its relevance to the concerns of his age. To this end, he adopted many ideas that can be traced to Mohism, Legalism, and even Zhuangzi and Laozi. Yet to the end he remained staunchly Confucian, and perhaps one of his greatest achievements was his successful absorption of Legalist, Mohist, and Daoist ideas into a Confucian framework, which involved defending certain core Confucian beliefs such as the efficacy of Virtue, the relevance of the rites and classics, and the viability of the wu-wei ideal while adapting these ideas to the concerns and temperament of his age.
The High Road
Authors: Dyson Freeman J
Published: November 2023

In 1985 I was visiting the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston and climbing around in the space shuttle that they keep there for visitors to examine. That was before the Challenger disaster, when the shuttle was advertised as a safe ride for congressmen and schoolteachers. What impressed me about the shuttle was the immense quantity of §ruff that they had on board for the care and comfort of human passengers. It felt more like a hotd or a hospital than a rocketship. I made rough calculations of how many tons of §ruff they were flying to keep seven passengers alive and well for a couple of weeks. I was thinking, why don’t they rip out all this §ruff and fly the shuttle by remote control from the ground? The shuttle take-off and flight into orbit were already ground-controlled.
Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South, II: From Slaveholder Treatment and the Nature of Labor to Slave Culture, Sex and Religion, and Free Blacks
Authors: Davis David Brion
Published: November 2023

In theory, the Southern slaveholder possessed all the power of any owner of living chattel property, such as horses, sheep, cows, or oxen. We have seen that Aristotle referred to the ox “as the poor man’s slave”; “the chattel principle” was probably best defined by the American fugitive slave James W. C. Pennington: The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences.
The Foundational Role of Epistemology in a General Theory of Rationality
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2023

An unfortunate methodological assumption of much recent epistemology is that the properties that make a belief rational are by definition such that when a true belief has these properties, it is a good candidate for knowledge, with some other condition added to handle Gettier-style counterexamples. This assumption has the effect of detaching the theory of rational belief from a general theory of rationality and placing it instead in service to the theory of knowledge. If it is stipulated that the properties that make a belief rational must also be properties that turn true belief into a good candidate for knowledge, then an account of rational belief can be regarded as adequate only if it contributes to a successful account of knowledge. The theory of rational belief is thus divorced from everyday assessments of the rationality of decisions, plans, actions, and strategies, and it is even divorced from everyday assessments of the rationality of opinions, which tend to focus on whether individuals have been responsible in forming their opinions rather than on whether they have satisfied the prerequisites of knowledge.
Craft and Science: Partners in Process Invention
Authors: Graham Margaret B W , Shuldiner Alec T
Published: November 2023

In the speech Day gave in 1923 to Corning’s newly organized Production Club, a group of plant foremen and managers, he elaborated on this thining. Unlike large cities such as Pittsburgh with their crowds of recent European immigrants, Corning inhabited several small towns containing proud workforces with a strong craft tradition. Its 2,000 workers were open to trying new things, and what they needed were the right “purpose-built” machines.
Reinstitutionalizing R&D: Tv, Corning Ware, and the Search for Breakthroughs
Authors: Graham Margaret B W , Shuldiner Alec T
Published: November 2023

The experience of World War II changed Corning in many ways-its place on the national stage, the range of businesses it would engage in, and the kinds of problems it was capable of solving. It also paved the way for its major new business, television. Corning’s president, Bill Decker, realized that television required an unprecedented concentration of technical resources and an immediate emphasis on achieving advanced production techniques. But he and other managers soon understood that longer-term technical efforts needed to be directed at more ambitious projects to provide other big business opportunities for Corning, repeatedly and on demand. This implied a new model of innovation appropriate to a larger, more visible, and more diversified company, and consistent with the most up-to-date thinking of the time. Recent wartime experiences offered such a model based on the atomic bomb and radar, which demonstrated what could be accomplished if massive resources were concentrated and mobilized.
The Forgery of an Ancient Discovery? Morton Smith and the Secret Cjospel of Mark
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

Undoubtedly the best known forgeries of recent memory are the infamous Hitler Diaries.1 Headline news in April 1983, both before and after their exposure as fabrications, the Hitler Diaries were significant for showing that the art of forgery is still alive and well among us, that some people will go to extraordinary lengths to perpetrate a fraud, and that even experts can be fooled. In this case there is little doubt about the motivation. The West German swindler who wrote the diaries, Konrad Kujau, was paid $4.8 million for his sixty volumes of work, which he produced over the course of three years. Eventually convicted of the fraud and sentenced to prison, he emerged penniless but not broken; he went into the business of producing “genuine forgeries” of great masterpiece painters Monet, Rembrandt, and van Gogh, signing them with both his and their names, and selling them as curiosities for tidy sums. Eventually, in what appeared for a time to be a never-ending story, a counterfeit submarket was established in which Kujau imitators sold fakes of his forged paintings. To cap it all off, Kujau wrote an autobiographical account of his exploits which was to appear in 1998; instead, a different book was published in his name, entitled Die Originalität der Fälschung (“The Originality of Forgery”). Somewhat appropriately, he claimed, evidently truthfully, not to have written a word of it.
Christians “In the Know” The Worlds of Early Christian Gnosticism
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

No form of lost Christianity has so intrigued modern readers and befuddled modern scholars as early Christian Gnosticism. The intrigue is easy to understand, especially in view of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library (see pp. 51–55). When that group of fieldhands headed by Mohammed Ali uncovered this cache of books in Upper Egypt, the world was suddenly presented with hard evidence of other Christian groups in the ancient world that stood in sharp contrast with any kind of Christianity familiar to us today. There was no Jesus of the stained glass window here, nor a Jesus of the creeds—not even a Jesus of the New Testament. These books were fundamentally different from anything in our experience, and almost nothing could have prepared us for them.
On the Road to Nicaea: The Broad Swath of Proto-orthodox Christianity
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

In America today, Christians new in town sometimes find it difficult to choose the right church. If they are Episcopalian, do they prefer high church or low church? If Methodist, socially liberal or ethically conservative? If evangelical, large and technologically sophisticated or small and intimate? Should it be a Bible-preaching church or a liturgically oriented church? Politically active or spiritually focused? Strong music program or thoughtful sermons? Should it have a solid social ministry? Active youth group? Vibrant outreach program? The questions go on and on for those concerned about such things.
The Quest for Orthodoxy
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

There was a time, not so long ago, when orthodoxy and heresy were not problematic terms and the relationship between them was uncomplicated. Orthodoxy was the right belief, taught by Jesus to his disciples and handed down by them to the leaders of the Christian churches. In its most basic form, this orthodoxy came to expression in the words of the famous creeds of the Church, for example, the Nicene Creed, as it emerged from the great church councils of the fourth century and was later refined into words familiar to many Christians today: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
Introduction
Authors: Mchugh Heather , Konstan David
Published: November 2023

When tragedy was performed in classical Athens (we are speaking here of the fifth century B.C.), each of three competing playwrights staged, on successive days, a set of four plays, called a tetralogy, at the major dramatic festival of the year. The first three were proper tragedies: they might make up a continuous story, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or else be unrelated in plot, like the Bacchae, the Iphigenia in Au/is, and the (lost) Alcmaeon of Euripides, mounted together in a single (posthumous) performance. The fourth play in the series, however, was something different: This was the satyr play, a burlesque version of a traditional myth, named for the chorus of satyrs or half-human figures - they are goats or horses from the waist down-that was specific to the genre (it is possible that some satyr plays lacked satyrs, but if so, these exceptions were few).
Creating Social Change: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement
Authors: Andrews Kenneth T
Published: November 2023

The civil rights movement has had a lasting impact in the United States through its influence on social policies, political alignments, public opinion, and other social movements. Even though many of its fundamental goals were never realized and other gains have been rolled back, the civil rights movement is still viewed as one of the most influential social movements in U.S. history. For example, Aldon Morris, in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, argues that the civil rights movement had “a profound impact on American society” (1984: 266). Similarly, Dennis Chong points to the movement as “the quintessential example of public-spirited collective action in our time” that “spark[ed] radical changes in American society” (1991: 1). Nevertheless, our understanding of how the civil rights movement (and movements more generally) brought about change is limited.

I use the civil rights movement to demonstrate the theoretical insights that emerge from a closer analysis of the process by which movements generate change. In short, I argue that our understanding of the cause and form of movement impact is underdeveloped. In this chapter, I will compare explanatory strategies that focus on the organizations and the public activity (e.g., demonstrations, boycotts) of movements and propose that organizations and movement activity may work together to bring change. I begin by addressing general questions about movement outcomes. Then, I describe causal mechanisms through which movement organizations and events can produce broader changes. I illustrate these dynamics using examples from the civil rights movement from my own research on the Mississippi movement and from the broader scholarship on this influential case.
Strategizing and the Sense of Context: Reflections on the First Two Weeks of the Liverpool Docks Lockout, September-October 1995
Authors: Barker Colin , Lavalette Michael
Published: November 2023

Late on the afternoon of Monday September 25, 1995, a group of young Liverpool dockers were told to work an extra hour at the end of their shift. Their company, Torside, subcontracted their labor to the main docks employer, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC). The instruction breached existing union agreements. Men required to work overtime were supposed to be given notice two hours before the end of a shift and to be paid in two-hour blocks. But that afternoon the young Torside dockers were given just half an hour’s notice and told they would receive only one hour’s pay. Five men refused, stating that they had already made arrangements for the evening (one, for example, had to pick up his children). In any case, they argued, agreements were being breached. At the end of the shift, these five walked off the ship they were working. They were met by James Bradley, Torside’s managing director, who immediately sacked them. The other fifteen workers on their team left the ship to find out what was happening. They were told to return to work immediately. When they refused, Bradley sacked them as well.

The Torside stewards’ committee called a workforce meeting in the canteen for 8 A.M. on Tuesday. Five Torside dockers, working elsewhere in the port, were given permission by their foreman to leave their ship to attend. At the meeting, the stewards advised that the matter could be negotiated and that the remaining Torsiders, sixty of them, should go to work while talks proceeded.
Sophocles Antigone
Authors: Gibbons Reginald , Segal Charles
Published: November 2023

Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky. Echoing through western culture for more than two millennia, Sophocles’ Antigone has been a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destiny. This exciting new translation of the play is extremely faithful to the Greek, eminently playable, and poetically powerful. For readers, actors, students, teachers, and theatrical directors, this new translation of one of the greatest plays in the history of the western world provides the best combination of contemporary, powerful language, along with superb background and notes on meaning, interpretation, and ancient beliefs, attitudes, and contexts.
Theology and the Turn to Cultural Analysis
Authors: Davaney Sheila Greeve
Published: November 2023

As advocates of various intellectual disciplines, methodologies, and institutional locations, scholars often seek to identify and to stress the differences that divide our work or perspective from other orientations. It is by exploiting those differences and arguing that what divides us matters the most that we are able to establish the purported superiority of our own field or position over that of our rivals. There are indeed differences that, as Richard Bernstein has argued, “make a difference.” There are conflicting assumptions and commitments that divide us, and even where we seem to agree on matters, we often interpret their implications in incompatible ways.
Creating a Liberating Culture: Latinas’ Subversive Narratives
Authors: Isasi-Díaz Ada María
Published: November 2023

The conviction underlying mujerista theology is that the religious understandings and practices of Latinas living in the United States have liberative value. Once again I have gathered the stories of these women and collected their insights, this time on issues of embodiment and sexuality. These are women who struggle for survival and “un poquito de justicia,” a little bit of justice.Out of a sense of justice to Latinas whose voices, whose lives, are hardly ever taken into consideration by academics or by society at large, we have not wavered in our commitment to provide a platform for them in mujerista theology. Our faith-fulness to their stories, to their understandings and insights, and our ongoing commitment to privilege their preferred future is also grounded in a firm conviction that it is precisely their vision of the future that will bring us closer to the kin-dom of God. It is not that Latinas are morally superior. It is because they benefit so little from the present structures and arrangements, because they have so little to protect in the present, that they can really look for and see a radically different future. a liberating future. We have included the voices of Latinas in our theological elaborations in mujerista theology because we believe in the ongoing revelation of the divine in the lives of the poor and the oppressed and because we believe that Latinas are capable of knowing and explaining what they believe and the role those beliefs play in their lives.
Votán-Zapata: Theological Discourse in Zapatista Political Struggle
Authors: Taylor Mark
Published: November 2023

With these words, Marcos, the major spokesman for the Zapatista guerilla movement, showed his profound respect for discourse and language. His quote from Foucault came at the beginning of his 1980 licenciatura thesis in the School of Philosophy and Letters (UNAM—National Autonomous University of Mexico), when he was known as Rafael Sebastién Guillén Vicente. Fifteen years later, after some years in the classroom and ten more in the jungle learning the ways of social transformation from poor indigenous communities, he emerged as an active guerilla leader. His awareness of the power of discourse, though, remained very much in evidence. In fact, it may be his power of the pen—writing stories for children, creating narratives of self-parody, retelling Maya mythology, issuing communiques over the Internet—which has presented a new vision of leftist struggle that has captured the imagination of much of Mexico and the world. Marcos has been described as “the other ladino,” the person of Spanish descent in Mexico who, unlike the Spanish conquerors who stole and burned early Maya’s written words, now restores the word, the discourse, to the Maya, and in a way that enables Maya political struggle.1
Inside and Outside the Traditions: The Changing Shapes of Feminist Spiritualities
Authors: Devlin-Glass Frances , McCredden Lyn
Published: November 2023

For many contemporary women, their relationships to the institutions and traditions of religious faith are constructed on shifting ground. While some place themselves “outside” the institution, and often outside any orthodox understandings of their faith, others identify themselves to varying degrees as “inside.” This metaphor—inside/outside—may be used as a means of self-definition that begins from a critical, discriminating acknowledgment of the power of religion and its institutions; conversely, the metaphor may be used by those in power within the religious establishments to marginalise such women. For the writers in this book, metaphors are never “mere” language but are sources of both creativity and suspicion. It may be helpful to think of oneself “outside” orthodoxy when the consequent insights and experiences yield new and challenging possibilities, even when such gains may be experienced through a great deal of pain. But when such metaphors are wielded as categorizing truths, with no sense of their transience on the one hand and of their tendency to rigidify on the other, they become weapons.
Black Truth, White Fiction: The Recognition of Aboriginal Women’s Rites
Authors: Pattel-Gray Anne
Published: November 2023

As an Aboriginal woman living within contemporary Australian society, being engulfed in the growing trend of gender concerns and awareness, and as a womanist scholar, I cannot overlook the enormous void in academic literature regarding the role of Aboriginal women in the many recordings of history, anthropology, and religious studies. This male-dominated world of scholarship has presented a very unbalanced view of Aboriginal society. Further, when Aboriginal women happen to be given a mention, it is usually in the form of a racist and sexist stereotype, sustaining white ideology of racial supremacy and male domination. Nancy Williams and Lesley Jolly have acknowledged that, unfortunately, many of their predecessors believed that the white race had a superior culture and religion and was at a far higher stage of evolution than the black race, whom they often viewed as curious living fossils akin to the marsupials (Spencer and Gillen 1927), doomed to extinction in the march of evolutionary progress. Yet for present purposes, it is the gender bias of the recorders that creates the most difficulty. To begin with, most of the writers were men, a fact that reflects not only the greater numbers of white men than white women in contact with Aboriginal society but also the greater opportunities for European males to publicize their opinions. (1992:10-11)
The Sovereignty as Co-Lordship: A Contemporary Feminist Rereading of the Female Sacred in the Ulster Cycle
Authors: Devlin-Glass Frances
Published: November 2023

In a postbiblical age, pre-Christian narratives are finding new auditors/readers, among them those interested in a post-Christian theology and spirituality. It is necessary at the outset to distance my approach from others that search for an empowering past and for compensatory woman-centered myths as antidotes for patriarchal ones. Such searches have often taken a separatist, romantic, and nostalgic form and have been marked by serious ahistoricity (Hutton 1991), especially in the hands of New Age reconstructionists of spirituality. My intention is this paper is to offer a gynocritical recuperation of archaic Irish narratives and to read a small selection of this material through the deconstructing lens of feminism, with a view to exposing the androcentric process at work reshaping and resignifying a body of material in which, I argue, traces of a different ideological focus may be discerned. Archaic Irish narratives have a translation and reception history that has seen them serve a variety of ideological agendas, possibly even at the point of their earliest transmission in written form (Aitchison 1987). Modern translations (notably Kinsella 1969) reveal a body of narratives that are surprisingly rich for feminist deconstructive purposes and indeed have gender-political implications not just for women but for men’s and women’s understandings of how the sexual contract might be refigured.2 The notion of an interdependency of power between women and men, which assumes a particular view of the body of woman, and its sacredness,3 is at the center of what I shall be arguing that these myths offer. My project takes the view that to be aware that patriarchal understandings are not natural, universal, and trans- historical is emancipatory.
The Generation Gap in Antiquity
Authors: Reinhold Meyer
Published: November 2023

younger generation in all past societies in a state of tension with the older generation because of Oedipal hostility of sons against fathers, or political and socioeconomic ambitions of the rising youth against gerontocracy power structures? Dare we say even of the Greeks on historical grounds that ‘to the ancients the primacy of generational struggle in history was entirely familiar and obvious. Every form of government seemed to breed its own distinctive form of generational contra diction.
Historian of the Classic World: A Critique of Rostovtzeff
Authors: Reinhold Meyer
Published: November 2023

Asystematic Analysis and Chitical Appraisal of Tiie Historical methodology of Michael Rostovtzeff, the foremost ancient historian of the past generation, has long been wanting.1 For the range of ‘the most prolific career in the study of ancient history since Mommsen’s’ has been so vast that few serious scholars in the field of ancient studies have not been influenced by Rostovtzeff’s writings; and many future authors and students are likely to absorb his views and to solicit credence for them under warrant of his authority, even as