bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten
Authors: Jenkins Philip 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
WHAT DID THEY KNOW and when did they know it? Though the documentary finds of mid-century have encouraged scholars to map the alternative vistas of early Christianity, it is striking how little truly new information emerged from those texts, or how few are the discoveries which would have surprised earlier generations. This may sound strange, given the tendency of modern New Quest scholars to assume that their predecessors simply lacked the critical sources they needed to understand the complexity of early Christianity; sometimes, too, we find the added charge that earlier scholars were too hidebound by religious preconceptions to speculate about such matters. In the Jesus Seminar’s edition of The Complete Gospels, the editors claim that until very recently, anyone interested in finding out about Jesus was confined to the New Testament texts: “Many interested in Jesus were not even aware of the existence of other gospels, or if they knew of them, did not know where to find them.”1
Hiding Jesus: The Church and the Heretics
Authors: Jenkins Philip 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
ASSERTING THE AUTHORITY of a hidden gospel has implications far beyond the strictly defined agendas of textual scholarship, as claims are also being made for the ideas contained in the documents. To argue that alternate gospels possess a value equivalent to the canonical texts is also to declare that their messages, long dismissed as heretical, are statements of Jesus’ vision just as authentic as what would become orthodoxy. In rediscovering Q and Thomas, scholars also try to portray the “Q community” and “Thomas Christianity” as varieties of heresy which actually predated orthodoxy. By rediscovering these heresies-that-were-not-heresies, such as Gnosticism, modern scholars are validating other visions of early Christianity, with countless implications for the shape of Christianity today. Generally, too, these new visions follow the prescriptions of liberal and radical reformers within the respective churches.
Daughters of Sophia
Authors: Jenkins Philip 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
FEMINIST SCHOLARS AND THEOLOGIANS have been the most ambitious in using the newly found gospels to reconstruct the early churches in their own image. This is not surprising, given that gender issues have been so central in the study of religion over the last quarter-century, the period during which the Nag Hammadi texts have come into public view. As Elaine Pagels has written, “The Nag Hammadi source, discovered at a time of contemporary social crises concerning sexual roles, challenges us to reinterpret history—and to re-evaluate the present situation.”1 The new sources seem all the more valuable because they feature women so centrally as companions and apostles of Jesus, while women are known to have played an important role in the historical Gnostic movement. The hidden gospels might preserve memories of an age when women were far more important in the Jesus movement than later writings would indicate, when women were apostles and prophets, leaders and bishops. And if that was the case in the first century, how could a similar role be denied to any succeeding generation? Mary Magdalen is sometimes portrayed in modem writing as a founding mother of Christianity with a primacy equivalent to that held by Peter in Catholic sources. For a society engaged in endemic controversy over women’s ordination and feminist revisions of liturgy and scriptural language, this is all highly relevant evidence.
The Gospels in the Media
Authors: Jenkins Philip 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
NEW FINDINGS IN JESUS SCHOLARSHIP have been made widely available through the mass media, which clearly recognize the existence of a profitable general market. The media try to fill the needs of this market by offering ample coverage, which in turn sustains popular interest in what can be quite arcane historical and textual arguments. As a result, the once-hidden gospels have very much been brought into the light of day.
The Dynamics of Islamic Identity in North America
Authors: Haddad Yvonne Yazbeck 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The immigration of Muslims to Europe and North America during this century has ushered in a new era in the relationship between Islam and the West, conditioned in part by the Muslim experience of “the West” in the form of European colonialism until mid-century and “American neo-colonialism” since the 1950s. As a result the dynamic between the two is seen by Muslims as being that between conqueror and conquered, powerful and powerless, dominant and weak. This has also influenced the ways in which Muslims have formed questions of identity as they strive to negotiate a secure place for themselves and their children in Western societies.
Striking a Balance: Islamic Legal Discourse on Muslim Minorities
Authors: Fadl Khaled Abou El 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Muslims in America, though a growing and increasingly diverse community, are nonetheless still a small minority living in an ostensibly Christian country. One of the most vexing questions for Muslims, particularly those who consider themselves religious or “practicing,” is how to live as persons of faith in a challenging and sometimes hostile environment. Muslim beliefs are generally not understood in the United States, and Muslim practices are not supported by the social, professional, and economic structures of American society.
Muslim Women in Canada: Their Role and Status as Revealed in the Hijab Controversy
Authors: Shakeri Esmail 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Canada, both within the Muslim community and between Muslims and the rest of society, the role and status of Muslim women is being debated. The growth of the Muslim population in the last two decades and continued immigration have brought a heightened sense of their “minority status” among Muslims, and raised many questions concerning religious values and expression. Muslims, particularly women, want to keep their religious identity, while adopting the other aspects of the host culture such as language, educational system, employment patterns, and civic life. For them integration means acceptance by the larger Canadian society of their separate identity, including their distinctive religious practices, patterns of family relationship, and mother tongues.
African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity: Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way
Authors: Nuruddin Yusuf 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Ali Marzrui, in his 1986 televised PBS series, “The Africans,” argued that Africans are the cultural heirs to a “triple heritage,” consisting of (1) Africanity or traditional indigenous culture, (2) Islamic culture, and (3) Western culture. This triple cultural heritage, according to Mazrui, is at the center of all of the African continent’s contemporary conflicts and predicaments.1 I intend to argue here that African-American Muslims are also heir to this “triple heritage,” but that vastly different historical circumstances between continental Africans and Africans in the diaspora (i.e., in the Americas) have resulted in entirely distinct patterns of interplay among these three cultural factors. In other words, the patterns of enculturation (socialization within the indigenous culture) and acculturation (adaptation to non-indigenous cultures) are vastly different in the African diaspora from what they are on the African continent, even though the basic cultural factors are similar, if not identical. Nevertheless, this “triple heritage” lies at the center of all of the African-American Muslim community’s contemporary conflicts and predicaments, in much the same way that the “triple heritage” is at the center of Africa’s conflicts.
Economic Security and Muslim Identity: A Study of the Immigrant Community in Durham, North Carolina
Authors: Goldwasser Elise 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The purpose of a study of Muslim immigrants in Durham, North Carolina, conducted over two years was to determine the reasons behind the decision to immigrate and see if those reasons had any correlation with the religious identity and practices of the immigrants involved. The study compared the experience of middle-class immigrants to those with little or no economic security. The findings were that the more prosperous ones were intent on retaining their Muslim way of life, while the poor were trying to transform themselves to fit into an American mold; both groups, however, adopted some aspect of the host culture and rejected others.
Approaches to Mosque Design in North America
Authors: Khalidi Omar 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In North America, unlike long-established Muslim societies, a majority of mosques are buildings originally constructed for other purposes—abandoned churches, Masonic lodges, fire stations, funeral homes, theaters, warehouses, and shops. A survey conducted in 1992–95 showed that of the nearly one thousand mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, fewer than one hundred were designed as mosques. Here, however, we will be concerned only with those structures specifically designed and erected as mosques and their relationship to the subject of identity.
“For I Could Not Find The Syllables” The Education and Training of Early Christian Scribes
Authors: Haines-Eitzen Kim 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The previous two chapters were concerned with the broad contours of scribes’ identities and status in the Graeco-Roman world. We saw that scribes in this period defy scholarly attempts to categorize scribes and to generalize about a “scribal class”; while scribes are concentrated in the slave and lower classes, they are also found in higher classes. Their tasks are not easily defined or classified, since many scribes - especially private scribes - seem to have often been multifunctional, crossing the lines of administrative and literary work with some frequency. This chapter continues the discussion of scribal identities and functions by looking closely at the education and training of scribes. Throughout, I will use the terms “education” and “training,” respectively, to designate a general course of schooling (i.e., that may have taken place in a “public” school or a private context) in contrast to a particular technical component designed to teach scribes a specialty. In the case of the copyists of early Christian literature, I will further give attention to evidence that may indicate that the scribes had a specifically Christian “education” (to the extent that they were acquainted with other Christian texts or may have been aware of liturgical or catechetical rites). What emerges from the literary and papyrological evidence corroborates the multifarious portrait in the previous chapters: the degree of education and training among scribes of this period varies from the illiterate to the well-educated, from the poorly trained copyist6 to the experienced calligrapher.
The Sacred and the Secular
Authors: Goodman Lenn E 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A falcon swoops and pinions a dove in midair. There are divine energies here, and mythic thinking marks them with its distinctive fusion of natural with magical powers. Not that mythmakers fail to see distinctions. Myths can make the keenest discriminations.1 But mythic discourse does not so willingly dis­ solve the aura cast by its sacralizing gaze. It savors the extraordinariness of the extraordinary. By cycles of ritual, story, dance, poem, and song, cultures retell and seek to relive those moments that so trap the gaze or arrest the mind-to mime the bear or deer or monkey, become the god that animates the game, paint the walls with torsos and evocations of the animal energies discovered in the field.
Being and Knowing
Authors: Goodman Lenn E 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Being in Arabic is kawn. Given the verbal force typical in Arabic nouns derived from verbs, the word develops the connotations of ‘becoming,’ in Plato’s sense of coming to be, genesis. It is used to render that term in Aristotle’s phrase ‘coming to be and passing away.’ Its Aristotelian opposite is faslid, corruption, again with verbal force, meaning rotting, wasting, decomposing. Thus Bashshar ibn Burd, the eighth-century poet of Basra, wrote: “Wa kullu shay’in li-kawnihi sababun” “Each thing must have a cause of its becoming.”‘ ‘Abd al-Jabbar, with studied deference to Arabic usage, similarly understands being dynamically: “The word ens is too to static to use it as a translation for kli’in; the Arabic verb klin expresses both the beginning and the continuation of what we call ‘to be.’ ... According to ‘Abd al-Jabbar this word when used without further determination means ‘beginning.”‘2 Jai}.
Partnering with Mennonites in Northern Ireland
Authors: Campbell Joseph 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Meeting Mennonites Was For Me an oasis in the dry and barren desert. A Presbyterian from birth and elder in my local congregation, this “new” denomination came into my frame of reference in casual conversation in 1980 with a colleague who was working with youth on urban justice issues in England. He had visited the London Mennonite Centre and counted among his friends Alan and Eleanor Kreider. He spoke of a quality of community life, worship where justice and peace issues were not on the edge but central, and a people who took Jesus’ call to peacemakers as a serious call for today. To say I was interested would be an understatement. I read John Howard Yoder’s Politics of Jesus (1972), and I knew then I had to learn more about this church.
At that point in my life, I was youth director of the Belfast YMCA, at that time a mainly Protestant and evangelical youth organization. I was responsible for running a social education and recreation program for several hundred youth in the sixteen to twenty-five age group, mostly from low-income inner city backgrounds, with a healthy mix of male and female, Catholic and Protestant. Young people with regular jobs were the exception, as the youth often came from neighborhoods where over 70 percent of the people were on welfare. Few experiences in my life had prepared me for the hopeless injustice faced by those youth. I understood in stark terms the connection between social deprivation and political violence. Many of the young people I worked with had lives outside the YMCA in the junior ranks of paramilitary organizations on both sides of our divided society.
The “Bottom-Up” Alternative in Somali Peacebuilding
Authors: Bergey Bonnie 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Small Plane Headed Right into the city of Mogadishu. With the very blue Indian Ocean to the right of the plane and the white, arabesque buildings set among sparse thorny trees and bougainvillea to the left, the plane landed on the edge of the earth. When the door opened, I felt my first blast of the heavy, wet heat that was nearly always a part of Mogadishu’s presence. Then began the tight hold on my documents and the attempt to stay calm and unhurried in the midst of seeming chaos—pushing and shoving as if my fellow travelers could not contain the joy and enthusiasm of being home again. Not knowing what would happen, or whether I was capable of doing the work I was assigned to do, I also entered Somalia enthusiastically.
I had agreed to teach English in Mogadishu for three years with Eastern Mennonite Missions. For four months in 1990, I taught English and studied the Somali language, as the Somali state quickly tumbled further into uncertainty. Little did I know that my teaching days would be so short-lived and that I would spend most of my time working at peacebuilding with and among the Somali people. Five months after my arrival, the Siad Barre regime fell.
The Religious Component of Mennonite Peacemaking and Its Global Implications
Authors: Gopin Marc 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Order to Understand The Religious foundations and unique character of Mennonite peacemaking, it is necessary to explore briefly the origins of the community and how this affects the nature of their peace work. But first, a word is in order about the definition of terms. Conflict resolution has the implication for some of a type of mediation or intervention, usually in the form of a dialogue workshop or some alternative arrangement to the courts, all within a fairly limited span of time. I mean conflict resolution in its broadest sense: the varied approaches to understanding and intervening in intractable conflicts. I also use it to refer to the entire field of conflict analysis and practice as a professional endeavor. In a Mennonite context, however, it is important to add the terms conflict transformation, peacemaking, and peace-building, which all mean something more far reaching. These are difficult to define briefly, and in a certain way, their definition is the subject of this entire volume. For purposes of this chapter, I use these terms to describe a Mennonite commitment to the creation of deep relationships over time that, with proper care, lead both oneself and those with whom one is engaged in the direction of a profound transformation of conflictual and unjust human relationships. I use these three terms interchangeably, although certain Mennonite theorists do not.
Matters of the Heart
Authors: Gilman James E 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When a woman of ill repute heard that Jesus was a guest in the house of a Pharisee, she went to the house with a vial of ointment, entered, and “weeping,... began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, ‘If this man were a pro’phet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner’” (Luke 7:31-50).
Reenfranchising the Heart
Authors: Gilman James E 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
NEWS THEPROPHET Nathan delivers to King David is not especially good. A wealthy subject of the kingdom, in order to entertain a sojourner, has taken a lamb from the flock of a poor man. King David’s feeling of anger is immediate and intense, a feeling initiated by the fact that an injustice was done, anger anyone hearing the story would probably feel. Moreover, David seems to know immediately what punishment his spiritual community will require of the man.
Love as a Christian Virtue
Authors: Gilman James E 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
THE NEWS Is UNEXPECTED. “Go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me”(Matthew 19:21). Only minutes before he was filled with confidence, certain that in keeping all of God’s commandments life eternal was assured. Now this news from Jesus, that his faith is misguided and his confidence unfounded. “Sell all, follow me?” Must Christian love be so passionate, so intimately personal, so sacrificial? Very often “we deceive ourselves about love,” says Nussbaum, “about who; and how; and whether.”
Dictionary of Nature Myths
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This engaging reference work explores our age-old desire to interpret and control natural phenomena. Without the benefit of science, our ancestors sought to explain forces--such as wind, clouds, earthquakes, and stars--in a manner they believed to be inexorably connected to the will of the gods. Mythology afforded them the means to make sense of the world’s seemingly senseless aspects. The Dictionary of Nature Myths is a unique addition to the mythological literature. It pulls information from a variety of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, religious studies, astronomy, meteorology, and geology. The book’s main subject areas concern natural forces, gods and goddesses of natural forces, terms relating to the myths of natural forces, and broad geographical areas. Within these categories Tamra Andrews groups stories from cultures around the globe, tales of an animated universe moved by supernatural power. Her volume is comprehensive and fully cross-referenced, and it contains a lengthy bibliography and an innovative guide to primary sources. Readers young and old will delight in reading about ABSU, a freshwater ocean that the Mesopotamians believed flowed beneath the earth; about IX CHEL, the Mayan moon and water goddess who controlled floods and rainbows; and about YGGDRASIL, the huge evergreen ash tree of Norse mythology that marked the center of the world. These entries and hundreds more will enchant and inform as they show how and why people from all ages and all cultures found power and magic in the natural world.
E
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Earth is the foundation of human existence, the womb that gives life and the tomb that receives the dead. Many individual gods and goddesses qualified as earth deities, and these spirits empowered trees and mountains, protected crops, and ensured the fertility of the land. But almost every ancient culture deified the earth itself as a single animating power-a power that represented the cycle of life and death and the process of cosmic renewal.
F
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Feng Po was the Chinese wind god, called the Wind Earl or Count of the Wind. The ancient Chinese perceived wind as the breath or the soul of life, so they equipped Feng Po with tremendous powers. He proved his power when as a minister on earth he walked from place to place with enormous speed. He was thus deified after death as Lord of the Wind and became an official in the Ministry of Thunder. From thenceforth, he took his orders directly from the thunder god.
H
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Hail has always posed a threat to creatures and crops exposed to the open land. Hail could devastate farmers’ fields in seconds, and early agriculturists knew all too well of its strength. When hailstorms ravage the earth, some people even today consider them a show of the Great Spirit’s wrath. The destruction upsets the balance of nature, and people find themselves humbled and at the mercy of nature’s powers.
K
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Pueblo Indian society, the Kachinas were mythical ancestors who became the spirits of rain and of rainclouds. The Pueblos are agricultural people, so they depend on the annual return of the rain to plant their corn. In a sense then, the Kachinas are the spirits, too, of corn. Corn is their gift to the people. When they leave their spirit homes on the San Francisco peaks at the winter solstice, they enter the bodies of costumed dancers and stay until midsummer, bringing rain and fertility to the land.
U
Authors: Andrews Tamra 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Ukko was a god of thunder, clouds, and rain, widely worshipped by the Finns and the most commonly evoked deity in the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala. Ukko replaced the earlier Finnish sky god Jumala as Supreme Deity and assumed a role similar to the Scandinavian Thor. Ukko, too, carried a hammer or, in some areas, a rainbow bow and a lightning arrow. With these weapons, he drove away evil spirits by sending thunder and lightning down to earth.
Developing Insight or “Wisdom: The Four Stations of Mincifulness
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the Buddhist siittas and treatises, the various methods for “stopping;’ or stilling, the mind are presented as preparatory techniques which are intended to remove gross emotional obscurations, and to help beginning practitioners concentrate their scattered minds and develop samadhi power. As methods of meditation, they are not really designed to foster liberative insight (prajfia) and enlightenment per se, although it is possible that individuals with unusually keen karmic roots may awaken quickly on the basis of these practices.