Misreading Ritual

Misreading Ritual

Author: Abby Kaplan

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-05-25

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1666799122

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Many Christians treat the first half of Leviticus with, at best, benign neglect. Bloody animal sacrifices? Rituals for skin diseases and genital discharges? Surely these things are irrelevant for a modern follower of Jesus. Our engagement with these texts often doesn’t go beyond a pious “thank God we don’t have to do that anymore!” But this isn’t enough if we want to take the world of the Bible seriously. Scripture itself testifies that plenty of ancient worshippers found beauty and meaning in these laws—that they encountered God even in those sacrificial rituals that seem so bizarre to us. This book offers a constructive interpretation of Old Testament rituals for Christians today, even for the majority of us who don’t practice them literally. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, as well as the long history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, the book explores how sacrifice was a way to experience worship, cleansing, and fellowship with God; what systems of ritual impurity teach us about embodied holy living; and how dietary regulations can train God’s people in humility and reverence for God’s good creation. It provides followers of Jesus with the tools to treat Leviticus as a valuable theological resource, not an embarrassment.


Ritual Gone Wrong

Ritual Gone Wrong

Author: Kathryn T. McClymond

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190613793

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The discipline of religious studies has historically tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes occurring in the context of individual performances as outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies; scholars have largely overlooked the extensive discussions of ritual mistakes that exist in the religious literature of indigenous traditions. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Offering a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.


The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition

The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition

Author: Jay Fisher

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-07-09

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1421411296

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"Jay Fisher argues that Ennius does not simply translate Homeric models into Latin, but blends Greek poetic models with Italic diction to produce a poetic hybrid. Fisher's investigation uncovers a poem that blends foreign and familiar cultural elements in order to generate layers of meaning for his Roman audience. Fisher combines modern linguistic methodologies with traditional philology to uncover the influence of the language of Roman ritual, kinship, and military culture on the Annals."--Page [4] of cover.


Misunderstanding Stories

Misunderstanding Stories

Author: Melinda McGarrah Sharp

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-01-24

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1610972260

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How can we work toward mutual understanding in our increasingly diverse and interconnected world? Pastoral theologian Melinda McGarrah Sharp approaches this multifaceted, interdisciplinary question by beginning with moments of intercultural misunderstanding. Using misunderstanding stories from her experience working with the Peace Corps in Suriname, Dr. McGarrah Sharp argues that we must recognize the limits of our own cultural perspectives in order to have meaningful intercultural encounters that are more mutually empowering and hopeful. Bringing together resources from pastoral theology, ethnography, and postcolonial studies, she provides a valuable resource for investigating the complexity of providing care and fostering communities of belonging across cultural differences. McGarrah Sharp illustrates a process of moving from disconnection to regard for diverse others as neighbors who share a common yearning for hopeful and meaningful connection. Leaders in faith communities, practitioners of care, and scholars will all be able to use this resource to better understand the conflicts, tensions, and uncertainties of our postcolonial twenty-first-century world. An included discussion guide facilitates classroom study, small group discussion, and personal reflection.


Transatlantic Africa

Transatlantic Africa

Author: Kwasi Konadu

Publisher: Diasporic Africa Press

Published: 2018-11-14

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1937306496

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Transatlantic Africa examines the internal workings of African and diasporic slave societies in the transatlantic era. Emphasizing a global context and the multiplicity of African experiences during that period, historian Kwasi Konadu interprets transatlantic slaving and its consequences through African and diasporic primary sources. Based on careful reading of Africans' oral histories, archival documents, and visual evidence, the book connects those experiences to local and international slaving systems. It also tackles the themes of commodification, capitalism, abolitionism, and reparations. By integrating these views with critical interpretations, Transatlantic Africa balances intellectual rigor with broad accessibility, helping readers to think anew about how transoceanic slaving made the modern world


The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature

Author: Jonathan Ullyot

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1107131480

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This book rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship.


The Ritualites

The Ritualites

Author: Michael Nardone

Publisher: Book*hug Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9781771664554

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The Ritualites is Michael Nardone's book-length poem on the sonic topography of North America. Composed over ten years at sites all across the continent--from Far Rockaway to the Olympic Peninsula, Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of California--the book documents the poet's listening amid our public exchanges, mediated ambiances, and itinerant intimacies. The Ritualites is a series of linguistic rituals that shift, page to page, through a range of forms and genres--a rhapsodic text for occasional singing and a best-selling thriller, a self-help guide and sabotage manual, a score for solo performance and a cacophony of voices.


Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China

Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China

Author: Alexander Beecroft

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-01-25

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1139484249

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In this book, Alexander Beecroft explores how the earliest poetry in Greece (Homeric epic and lyric) and China (the Canon of Songs) evolved from being local, oral, and anonymous to being textualised, interpreted, and circulated over increasingly wider areas. Beecroft re-examines representations of authorship as found in poetic biographies such as Lives of Homer and the Zuozhuan, and in the works of other philosophical and historical authors like Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Confucius, and Sima Qian. Many of these anecdotes and narratives have long been rejected as spurious or motivated by naïve biographical criticism. Beecroft argues that these texts effectively negotiated the tensions between local and pan-cultural audiences. The figure of the author thus served as a catalyst to a sense of shared cultural identity in both the Greek and Chinese worlds. It also facilitated the emergence of both cultures as the bases for cosmopolitan world orders.


Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity

Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity

Author: Jean-Pierre Mileur

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0520311434

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Literary Revisionism places Bloom, his ally Geoffrey Hartman, and their contemporary literary situation in a borad historical and theoretical context by exploring the provenance of the revisionist stance in the origins of the New Testament canon, in the works of the Sensibility Poets and the great Romantics, and in the emergence of our own secular modernity. The results is an uncanny sense of the wholeness of the tradition, ironically coupled with an awareness that we are cut off from the past by the very insistence with which we employ criticism to maintain the fiction of an isolate modernity. 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 1985.