This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
This third volume of completes the Zohar's commentary on the book of Genesis. Throughout, the Zohar probes the biblical text and seeks deeper meaning--for example, the divine intention behind Joseph's disappearance, or the profound significance of human sexuality.
The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.
Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? Creation and Covenant analyzes latent but under-examined beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant for centuries in the Christian west. The book opens by studying patristic theologies of marriage, which rested on mostly implicit and often incompatible beliefs about sexual difference. However, Roberts argues that Augustine developed a coherent theology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Roberts traces how Augustine's theology influenced and was developed by subsequent theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II. Finally, Roberts engages today's debates about gay marriage. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Roberts was a journalist. On behalf of PBS television, he covered both the Lambeth Conference in England and the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. During those years, he was disappointed by both the liberal and conservative arguments on homosexuality. Left-wingers seemed more interested in privacy, autonomy, and experience than in theology, and right-wingers seemed to have lots of prohibitions but little good news. In the final chapters, this book tries to do better, inviting liberals to improve the standard of their arguments, and explaining what is beautiful and persuasive about the traditional case.
The Voice of Spiritual Chronicles is an odyssey of spiritual quests and sagacity concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ expressed in poetic form, which to a greater extent alludes to the spiritual and material existence of life. The Voice of Spiritual Chronicles is characterized and influenced by biblical events and prophecies while actively enveloped by the word of God as the source of inspiration to finding the deepest relationship with God and self. The Voice of Spiritual Chronicles involves but not limited to characterizing the elements of love, trust, faith, and hope in God, and grandest of all things is the unbreakable, unbounded, and everlasting love of Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
Reshit Chochmah, one of the classics of East European and Sephardic Jewry, has appeared in numerous editions. A combination of spiritual and moral advice in a deeply kabbalistic framework, it provides an irresistible model of personal redemption that is integral to the process of cosmic redemption. By improving oneself, one redeems the world. The popularity of Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas's work has continued into modern times, and it was one of the first Hebrew books reprinted after the Holocaust. The current translation from the original Hebrew of one of its most significant parts, The Gate of Love, now appears together with an extended introduction. This introduction defines vital kabbalistic terms and concepts, and sets the entire work within its kabbalistic context. With these aids, this classic of Jewish spiritual guidance will be accessible to the modern reader who might otherwise find Rabbi de Vidas's exposition very difficult to follow.
Heaven: it's everything we're made for, the answer to our inmost longings, our true Home whose depths of joy we can only imagine. And who can tell us more about this blessed realm than the saints — the souls closest to God while here on earth who now dwell beside His royal throne? What they say about Heaven has the fragrant anointing of the Holy Spirit who authored the Scriptures and from whom they draw their wisdom. Open these pages, then, and enter the Celestial Kingdom. Ponder all the rapturous beauty that the saints describe. Bask in the consoling warmth of their tender love for us and grow ever stronger in the desire to share in their heavenly delight. Here you'll come to know the very heart of Heaven: our sharing in the ecstatic love and life of the Trinity. You'll taste the joy of the saints triumphant, ponder the mysteries of our glorious resurrection, and come to understand death as the beautiful gateway to Heaven that it is. Best of all, you'll learn how to begin to live in Heaven even now — by adoring the Blessed Trinity dwelling in your soul, by receiving the precious Body and Blood of the Lord in the Eucharist, and by growing in the heavenly virtue of charity. The wisdom of the saints in these sublimely beautiful pages will quench your fear of death and awaken in you a blessed hunger to join your departed loved ones and to delight with them in the Three Divine Persons who are the very heart of Heaven's splendor.
This book seeks to answer the question, “What is holiness?” What do we talk about when we talk about holiness? We might describe many things as holy, but as Socrates says, what is “the essential aspect, by which all holy acts are holy?” Sanctum Sanctorum gives an account of the holy from within the Christian participatory tradition, and argues that holiness is included in a special category of divine names that Christian metaphysics calls “transcendentals” (which are five: being, one, truth, goodness, and beauty). Moreover, holiness stands in a hierarchical relationship to the other five transcendentals, as the culmination or concentration of the rest. Only by understanding holiness as the “head” of the transcendentals, as “the” transcendental, can one account for all the complexity the idea of the holy conjures. Therefore, holiness is the transcendental of the transcendentals. It adds the aspect of reverence to existence and, as such, it is constituted by the formula sanctum sanctorum (Holy-of-holies) which extends from the divine nature through the triune life to all creation.
In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss—Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination—Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population. Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion. Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.
