bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Twentieth-Century Religious Interpretations
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The very impulse to philosophy, metaphysics, and religious thought seems often to be motivated by a desire to explicate the common ground among human beings. The Hindu identification of the spiritual self of the agent with the spiritual self of the recipient of the agent’s action provides a basis for golden rule thinking. Buddhism analogously emphasizes the equal emptiness of agent and recipient, each one arising as code pendent phenomena of body and mind, each one lacking independent, substantial reality; after such a deconstruction of self-love, a new quality of compassion is to emerge, expressing the Buddha nature within.
The last of the histories presented in this book reviews efforts in religious philosophy and theology to articulate a spiritual interpretation of the golden rule. Marginalized in contemporary secular discourse, religious writing on the golden rule is scanty; in addition, the authors build so little on one another’s work that this history is more a narrative of the absence of a tradition. Christian scholarship has focused less on the golden rule and more on scriptural interpretation, theologies of love, and specific ethical issues. Since the “humanism” of the golden rule has seemed disconnected from the high moral standards of the Sermon on the Mount and from the teachings that have made Christianity unique among religions, the evangelical Christian revival following World War I has given little emphasis to the golden rule and has scarcely viewed the rule as a principle of harmony among religions. This remains the case, despite the fact that Karl Barth, the period’s leading evangelical theologian, who had argued against Harnack that world war demonstrated the abyss of human sinfulness and the naivete of theological optimism, finally turned to embrace the concept of the brotherhood of man.
Religious Dimensions of the Golden Rule
Authors: Wattles Jeffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The children’s game of leapfrog provides a metaphor of the relation between philosophical and spiritual progress. The first child goes forward by leaping over the child just in front of him. Then the first child kneels down, and the second one leaps over him. Every philosophic advance prepares a new spirititual advance, and vice versa.
There are many reasons to seek a level of meaning in the golden rule beyond the level of moral reason. Sometimes even the most exhaustive study of circumstances and principles and patterns does not suffice to indicate what is to be done, and the mind seeks for wisdom from beyond itself Moral reason points beyond itself, since it is committed to choosing the best course of action, all things considered. In attempting to take an ideal perspective in a complex situation, it is natural for the human mind to reach for an actual ideal, for God. Moreover, even when what is to be done is clear, the graciously spontaneous way to act may remain beyond one’s powers. If moral decision and action is to be wholehearted, it must draw on the full range of the personality, not only the mind, and it must respond to the fullness of the other person, including the spiritual dimension. In addition, many people need religious motivation to fuel the engine of moral conduct. Indeed, a reasonable, do-your-best ethic is misleading if grace is needed to do your best. Finally, it may be that without a religiously based sense of human kinship, the drive to assert and actualize equality on other grounds runs aground. In a world where nationalism and racism and domestic violence are so widespread, given the logical and practical fragility of the affirmation of human dignity, it is worth exploring resources for an acceptable religious ethics.
Corpses
Authors: Booth Allyson 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Trench soldiers in the Great War inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses. Dead men at the front blended with the mud and duckboard landscape, emerging through the surface of the ground and through the dirt floors of dugouts: “In the ground here there are several strata of dead, and in marry places the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out in display on the top of the new ones” (Barbusse 2 78). Live soldiers found themselves buried in falling dirt while shells disinterred their dead companions from shallow graves. Casualty lists that wound around buildings or spilled into extra newspaper columns shocked a civilian population confronted with statistics documenting the erasure of a generation; the corps escapes of trench warfare embodied that erasure. As one witness described it: “You walk on the ground of Verdun as though on the face of the Country” (Henry de Motherland qtd. in Meyer 64).Elaine Scary has pointed out that injured bodies bear no relation to the issues that are being contested in war: “Does this dead boy’s body ‘belong’ to his side, the side ‘for which’ he died, or does it ‘belong’ to the side ‘for which’ someone killed him, the side that ‘took’ him? That it belongs to both or neither makes manifest the nonreferential character of the dead body” (rr9). Intuitive responses of soldiers to enemy corpses confirm this nonreferentiality: the “belligerence” that we describe as characterizing the relationship between nations at war collapses when a French soldier comes across a German corpse or when a German soldier happens upon a British one.
Forgetful Objects
Authors: Booth Allyson 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s story “Solid Objects” (1920) marvels at the ability of objects to evoke astonishingly different worlds while standing in close proximity to one another and juxtaposes that ability against the human intolerance for such proximities. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is so far away from two friends that their bodies do not seem to be bodies at all, but are perceived instead as “one small black spot” (79) on a beach. By the end of the story, large psychological distances separate the previously indistinguishable bodies: John and Charles still speak the same language yet seem suddenly to be “talking about different things” (86). Their friendship ends, the possibility of relationship cancelled by differences in their perceptions of the potential meaning of the “solid objects” of the story’s title. John’s preoccupation with objects begins at the beach when, as he is digging absentmindedly in the sand, he happens upon “a full drop of solid matter.” The “smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass” (80). Whereas, to the narrator, two pages previously, nothing had seemed “so solid” as the bodies of the two men, the lump of glass almost immediately usurps visually the apparent solidity of Charles: John holds it up “so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend.”
Introduction: Giving and Thinking
Authors: Webb Stephen H 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Everybody in the United States seems to be involved in a great debate about gift giving that has inestimable political ramifications. Now more than ever before, we need theological clarification about what generosity is and how giving should be formulated and practiced. Although private acts of donation are widely lauded as crucial for the health of our country, public acts of giving are coming under increasing scrutiny. On one side of the current debate, giving is the problem, and the solution demands an honest reconceptualization of generosity. To simplify an ongoing conversation, conservatives are arguing that giving must be connected to merit, that gifts should be earned. Generosity should be careful, calculated, measured by what it produces. The language of giving, in other words, should reflect the language of business and economics. A gift should be an investment. Otherwise, gifts are wasted, squandered; they create disorder and dependence, and thus giving threatens to become, ironically, immoral.
Squandering
Authors: Webb Stephen H 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Gratuitous means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “free, spontaneous, voluntary”–something freely granted or given without claim or merit, without, that is, the possibility of exact compensation or direct repayment. It derives from the Latin gratia, meaning favor, and gratus, meaning pleasing. Gratuitous is also related to gratitude, the act of being thankful (as well as to other words like gratify, gratulate, and even agree). The gratuitous begets or summons gratitude: we are grateful for something that is given uncaused, for no reason-or at least for reasons internal to our benefit and external to the interests of the giver. The gratuitous act occupies a difficult temporality: it is not motivated by the expectation of a return (the future), by the requirements of the situation (the present), or by a prior obligation (the past). The gratuitous is occasional, both in the sense of happening now and then and in the sense of causing a special occasion (the reception of a gift calls for a party, just as most parties involve gift giving), and this lack of regularity or predictability makes it appear almost without motivation.
How Giving Works
Authors: Webb Stephen H 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
All of the theologians discussed in chapter 3 have wrestled with the problem of relating God’s overwhelming generosity to human affairs and concerns. I have argued that a correlation needs to be drawn between God’s practice of generosity and our own. The most difficult aspect of making this correlation is to relate the divine excess to human preoccupations with reciprocity. The goal is to portray the power of God’s giving as sovereign but not dominating, free but involved. Pushing divine excess too far leaves little or no room for a human countergift, yet subjecting God to the logic of reciprocity diminishes the gratuity of God’s grace. God either monopolizes giving or gives only in the form of exchange. None of these theologians satisfactorily accounts for a divine giving that both exceeds and maintains our own, initiating but also entering into acts that involve an extravagant outpouring and a cooperative return.
Examination of the Tathāgata
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Neither the aggregates, nor different from the aggregates, The aggregates are not in him, nor is he in the aggregates. The Tathāgata does not possess the aggregates. What is the Tathāgata? If the Buddha depended on the aggregates, He would not exist through an essence. Not existing through an essence, How could he exist through otherness-essence? Whatever is dependent on another entity, Its selfhood is not appropriate. It is not tenable that what lacks a self Could be a Tathāgata.
Examination of Fire and Fuel
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This chapter, the only one in this set of chapters ostensibly addressing an external phenomenon, is in fact concerned entirely with a standard counterexample to the kind of arguments Nāgārjuna’ offered in the two previous chapters on subjectivity in action and in perception. Recall that in those discussions Nāgārjuna’ argues that subject and object cannot be intrinsically and distinctly identified as entities because of their mutual dependence. Buddhist schools asserting substantial identity in the context of dependent coorigination, such as Vaibhā śika and Sautriintika schools, used the example of fire and fuel to demonstrate the compossibility of substantial independent identity and dependent origination, as well as the possibility of the one-way dependence relation that these schools assert that actions and perception bear to the self. Just as fire depends on fuel but not vice versa, they would argue, and just as fire and fuel have distinct identities despite the fact that the former depends for its existence on the latter, action and perception can depend on the subject but not vice versa.
Examination of the Initial and Final Limits
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
But suppose that one could see that the self, considered as agent or as subject, lacks inherent existence, and still one argued that nonethe less it must do so in virtue of its impermanence and being subject to change. Then, one might argue, birth, aging, and death must be real as the conditions of the self’s unreality.
Examination of Combination
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This chapter examines the possibility that, while no effect could be inherently dependent upon any single cause, it might be that the correct understanding of dependent arising and the thoroughgoing interdependence of phenomena that Nāgārjuna’ urges involves the inherent dependence of any phenomenon on the combination of all of its conditions. Thus, while every phenomenon would, as Nāgārjuna’ has been arguing, be completely dependent on all others, this dependence itself would be inherently existent. Much of the argument is a reprise of arguments that we have seen already, particularly in Chapters I and VII. But the temporal analysis of Chapter XIX is also in evidence.
Examination of the Twelve Links
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Given an analysis of the nature of nirva1,1a, one might well ask how to achieve it. In this chapter, Nāgārjuna’ provides a straightforward answer. The twelve links of dependent origination are regarded by all Buddhist schools as providing an analysis of the nature of interdependence in the context of human existence. The tone of this chapter is decidedly positive, marking the turning of a dialectical corner in the preceding two chapters. Having elucidated the Madhyamika account of the nature of conventional and ultimate reality, Nāgārjuna’ does not need at this point so much to emphasize the emptiness of the twelve links. Rather he can assume that to provide an account of them as dependently arisen is, ipso facto, to demonstrate that fact. Their emptiness is therefore simply presupposed. This chapter is thus a straightforward exposition of how, in light of the interdependence of the twelve links, to enter into and to exploit the cycle in the service of liberation.
Examination of Views
Authors: Garfield Jay L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The final chapter of the text, like the previous chapter, applies the results of the climactic analyses of Chapters XXIV and XXV. It is noteworthy that all of the classic erroneous views discussed and refuted in this chapter are refuted earlier in the text. Indeed, Chapters XXIV and XXV are immediately preceded by a chapter on errors. One might therefore think that this chapter is otiose, or at least misplaced. For here Nāgārjuna’ considers a range of alternative metaphysical views conflicting with Nāgārjuna’analysis in terms of emptiness.
Sacred Lands and Religious Assemblies in America
Authors: Everett William Johnson 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Germans and Indians have struggled for a more adequate federal formation of their public life within an ancient heritage of monarchy and traditional order. Their experiences have lifted up for us the importance of independent ecclesial forms for generating the dynamic of publicity, the need for reconciliation of past injustice in order to cultivate trust and participation, and the power of deep images of divine agency and order for shaping the cultural basis for constitutional order. The constitutional forms and the implicit covenants underlying them are laced by geography and gender. Relationships of peoples to their lands and of men with women powerfully shape the kinds of publics and covenants that can emerge beyond the boundaries of household and parentage.
Jewish Women and Christian Origins
Authors: Kraemer Ross S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If writing women’s lives is never simple, to write about Jewish women’s lives during the years and in the regions where Christianity first emerged is fraught with distinctive perils. In recent years, Christian scholars (especially, though by no means exclusively, some feminist Christian scholars) have had considerable interest in painting a particularly gloomy portrait of Jewish women’s participation in Jewish life at the time of Jesus, so that Jesus himself can be seen as a first-century liberator of women. In service both to contemporary Christian the ology and to modern debates about issues such as women’s ordination to Christian ministerial office, extravagant and derogatory claims have sometimes been made about women in first-century Judaism.
Women’s Religions and Religious Lives In The Greco-Roman City
Authors: LiDonnici Lynn R 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The religious landscape of the Greco-Roman city was rich, varied, and exciting. Almost every aspect of life, from sports to shopping to taking a bath, from eating to cleaning the house, was made part of a whole system of hopes, practices, and beliefs that involved divine forces (the gods and goddesses) with the minute details of everyday activity. Religion was a fully functional dimension of public life (reflected by rites that all city members were expected to share), as well as an intellectual space for reflection on the most deeply held personal concerns (reflected by private, voluntary worships of a staggering variety). Many of these activities were shared by women and men, but there were some very important worships that both genders felt it was important to separate.
Women In The Q Communit(IES) And Traditions
Authors: Levine Amy-Jill 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
As the parentheses in the title suggest, any discussion of Q must be qualified, queried, and questioned. Indeed, to discuss women in the Q communit(ies) and traditions requires several leaps of faith: Q is a hypothetical source, divided into hypothetical literary strata representing equally hypothetical social settings; efforts to reconstruct women’s history are hampered by Q’s androcentric language, the difficulties of moving from single examples to collective experience, and the frequent silence of the source regarding explicit mention of women.
(RE) presentations of Women in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke-Acts
Authors: D’Angelo Mary Rose 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Re-presentations is a particularly apt description of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; these works in some sense present Jesus again by rethinking Mark’s narrative so as to integrate the sayings of Q. Both provide (independent) stories about the birth and childhood of Jesus that supply Jesus with the father he lacks in Mark (6:3-4) and bring the narratives closer to ancient biographies. Both aim at cleaner narrative and more elegant diction. Both texts use language and forms that associate them with the Bible, offering themselves as an extension or completion of the sacred writings.
Reading Real Women Through The Undisputed Letters of Paul
Authors: MacDonald Margaret Y 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In a programmatic essay published in 1985, Bernadette Brooten called for an approach to the history of early Christian women that seeks to bring women to the center. Instead of concentrating primarily on male attitudes toward women as has been done in the past, the focus should shift to reconstructing the lives of the women themselves. Every effort should be made to hear their voices, to witness their behavior. In essence, early Christian women need to be brought back to life. Perhaps nowhere have Brooten’s insights yielded more promising results than in the reconstruction of women in the Pauline mission.
Paul On Women and Gender
Authors: Castelli Elizabeth A 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the more remarkable survivals from early Christianity is the collection of letters written by a first-century hellenized Jewish man turned Christian missionary and leader, the “apostle” Paul. The seven letters whose authorship is undisputed by scholars–Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon–offer historians an unparalleled body of literature produced by a first-century Christian hand. These same letters offer contemporary readers of the text a complex and often confounding set of interpretive challenges. No challenge is more trenchant than the one raised by the claims made about women and gender in these texts, as Virginia Woolf’s provocative characterization makes clear.
Designing a successful presentation
Authors: Bailey Edward P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Most presentations succeed or fail long before you ever stand up to deliver them. Now let’s turn to the second half of this book: giving presentations in plain English. As with writing in plain English, you should find that speaking in plain English is clearer for your audience and easier on you, too. With a few simple techniques, you can be on your way to being a more effective speaker.
Involving your audience and using humor
Authors: Bailey Edward P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Too many presentations seem to have an invisible separator between speakers and audiences. It’s like a glass wall: the speakers stay on their side and do the talking; the audiences stay on their side and do the listening. (Theater people call that the “fourth wall.”) Good speakers usually try to eliminate that wall. One way is to let the audience participate during the presentation­ people love to be part of the action. Another is to get them to laugh so they will feel greater rapport with the speaker. Either way breaks down the artificial separation that usu­ ally does more harm than good.
Using effective techniques of delivery
Authors: Bailey Edward P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This is when speakers get nervous. Even though I’ve spoken many times, I occasionally feel the butterflies before an important presentation in front of a lot of people. That’s natural. To calm myself down, I don’t do yoga or deep breathing exercises. I simply look over my visual aids and review what I’m going to say for each one. Quickly I realize: “Oh, this is easy! I can do this!” I know my material, and the design and rehearsal have prepared me to present it.
Introduction
Authors: Ross Ellen M 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The gaze of late medieval England was fixed on the broken body of a wounded and bloody Jesus surrounded by weeping bystanders. Church wall paintings, manuscript illuminations, rood screens, roof bosses, reliquaries, and carvings graphically depict the anguish and pain of the tortured Christ. Sermons recount the agony, dramas reenact it, and spiritual guides counsel their disciples to meditate on the torments of the dying Jesus. In this book, I investigate the graphic Passion images that pervade late medieval English sermons, drama, art, and devotional literature.
Body Power; and Mimesis
Authors: Ross Ellen M 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Previous chapters have considered portrayals of the suffering Jesus in public forums including sermons, Books of Hours, church wall paintings, and liturgical drama. In this chapter, I explore the frequent association between suffering and spiritual authority in writings by and about women in texts available in England during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. In the first section, I address the extravagant suffering of hagiographical narratives by considering two examples popular in Middle English literature: the lives of the fourth-century martyrs Margaret of Antioch and Katherine of Alexandria.