2023 College Theology Society Best Book Award 2023 Catholic Media Association Third Place Award, Theology – Morality, Ethics, Christology, Mariology, and Redemption 2023 Association of Catholic Publishers Second Place Award, Theology Dust in the Blood considers the harrowing realities of life with depression from a Christian theological perspective. In conversation with popular Christian theologies of depression that justify why this suffering exists and prescribe how people ought to relate to it, Jessica Coblentz offers another Christian approach to this condition: she reflects on depression as a wilderness experience. Weaving first-person narratives of depression, contemporary theologies of suffering, and ancient biblical tales of the wilderness, especially the story of Hagar, Coblentz argues for and contributes to an expansion of Christian ideas about what depression is, how God relates to it, and how Christians should understand and respond to depression in turn.
The unsettling language of blood has been invoked throughout the history of Christianity. But until now there has been no truly sustained treatment of how Christians use blood to think with. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. discusses in his much-anticipated new book the sheer, surprising strangeness of Christian blood-talk, exploring the many and varied ways in which it offers a language where Christians cooperate, sacrifice, grow and disagree. He asks too how it is that blood-talk dominates when other explanations would do, and how blood seeps into places where it seems hardly to belong. Reaching beyond academic disputes, to consider how religious debates fuel civil ones, he shows that it is not only theologians or clergy who engage in blood-talk, but also lawmakers, judges, generals, doctors and voters at large. Religious arguments have significant societal consequences, Rogers contends; and for that reason secular citizens must do their best to understand them.
Bynum argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, and religious life. As cult object, blood provided a focus of theological debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a central symbol in popular devotion.
Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.
This book considers how homes, households, and domestic life are related to the Church. Early theologies glorified the monastic lifestyle as a way to transcend earthly attachments in favor of supernatural goods. Contemporary thinkers have seen that functioning marriages and families themselves can lead us toward a more righteous society. Jana Bennett insists that both marriage and singleness must be placed in the context of the Christian story of redemption for the questions and problems at stake to be fully understood. She finds that Augustine of Hippo, maligned by modern theologians, is the source of very fruitful reflection on these topics. Most scholars today would agree that Augustine's works have exerted great influence on Western views of marriage, family, and sex. But many would argue that this influence has been detrimental to a healthy understanding of these topics. However, using Augustine's writing, Bennett shows that marriage and singleness cannot be considered separately, that gender issues are important to considering these states correctly and, most important, that the marriage between Christ and the Church is the first consideration in understanding and living these states of life. The water of baptism, Christians' first birth and initiation into the life of Christ, is the primary standard for relationships, rather than familial ties.
In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted classrooms around the world, teachers scrambled to convert their lectures and presentations into a format more conducive to online and distance learning. For Eugene Rogers, this meant transcribing as closely as possible the spoken lectures that have made his Introduction to Christian Thought course at UNC Greensboro, a course he has taught some forty times, justly famous. The result is this book: an insightful, winsome, and engaging introduction to the history of Christian thought by a teacher at the height of his craft. For Rogers, the history of Christian thought is the story of a language--it's "Christianese," if you will--that participants use to frame their agreements and their disagreements alike. From Anselm to Wyschogrod, Rogers introduces us to the most interesting speakers of Christianese and their importance, enabling us to both listen in on and take part in the living conversation about God's activity in and for our world.
Blood, in Gil AnidjarÕs argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. A category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining, Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought, from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.
What does the Bible say about periods? The average woman has 500 periods in her lifetime. And whether yours are mildly annoying, utterly debilitating or emotionally complicated, most of us have at one time or another asked: Why?! This warm, light-hearted, real, honest and at times surprising book gives a biblical perspective on menstruation, as well as a whole lot more. Beginning with periods, Rachel Jones takes readers on an adventure in theology, weaving together wide-ranging reflections on the nature of our bodies, the passing of time, the purpose of pain, and the meaning of life. One thing is for sure: you’ve never read a Christian book quite like this one. Whether you’re in need of hope and help, or are just downright curious, you’ll be refreshed and encouraged by this book. As Rachel puts it, “Whoever you are, my aim is that you reach the end of this book celebrating who God has made you, how God has saved you, and the fact that he speaks liberating and positive truth into all of life’s experiences (even periods)”.
The question of whether Paul teaches that Christ's righteousness is imputed to the believer has been debated for roughly four hundred years. Some of the questions that arise are: What is the connection between Adam and the rest of the human race? How did Christ fulfill the role of the second or new Adam? How can the "ungodly" stand before a righteous God? In Jesus' Blood and Righteousness, Brian Vickers investigates the key Pauline texts linked historically to the topic of imputation. Though Vickers spends a good deal of time on the particulars of each text, he keeps one eye on the broader biblical horizon; like any doctrine, imputation must be investigated exegetically and synthetically. This book, and its conclusion that the imputation of Christ's righteousness is a legitimate and necessary synthesis of Paul's teaching, is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on imputation.
A sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence—from the New York Times bestselling author of The History of God • “Elegant and powerful.... Both erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail.” —The Washington Post In these times of rising geopolitical chaos, the need for mutual understanding between cultures has never been more urgent. Religious differences are seen as fuel for violence and warfare. In these pages, one of our greatest writers on religion, Karen Armstrong, amasses a sweeping history of humankind to explore the perceived connection between war and the world’s great creeds—and to issue a passionate defense of the peaceful nature of faith. With unprecedented scope, Armstrong looks at the whole history of each tradition—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Religions, in their earliest days, endowed every aspect of life with meaning, and warfare became bound up with observances of the sacred. Modernity has ushered in an epoch of spectacular violence, although, as Armstrong shows, little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different faiths in our time.
