Buenos Aires: Paidós Ibérica, S. A., 1993. — 260 p. Paidós recupera en un nuevo formato la completísima obra de Karen Armstrong, Una historia de Dios, un libro magistral y revelador que analiza las formas en que la idea y la experiencia de Dios han ido evolucionando entre los monoteístas, sean judíos, cristianos o musulmanes. Armstrong nos muestra cómo a lo largo de los siglos...
Stanford University Press, 2003. — 269 p. Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to...
University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. — 224 p. In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish Treatise collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to...
Princeton University Press, 2018. — 360 p. How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature - and why that quest often leads us astray. People have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of...
Princeton University Press, 2018. — 360 p. How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature - and why that quest often leads us astray. People have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of...
Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. — 312 p. Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World brings together scholars and researchers working on memory and religion in ancient urban environments. Chapters explore topics relating to religious traditions and memory, and the multifunctional roles of architectural and geographical sites, mythical figures and events, literary works and...
Acumen, 2013. — 456 p. "The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe" surveys the major religious currents of Europe before Christianity - the first continental religion with hegemonic ambition - wiped out most local religions. The evidence - whether archaeological or written - is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources and the...
Penguin Classics, 2018. — 304 p. From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk - a monster with a...
Bucureşti: Editura Polirom, 2004. — 319 p. Kulianu I. P. Experience of ecstasy: Ecstasy, ascension and visionary revelations from the Hellenistic era to the Middle Ages (in Romanian) Prefaţă de Mircea Eliade. Introducere. Iatromanţii. Demonizarea cosmosului şi dualismul gnostic. Războaiele cereşti şi gnoza. Ascensiunea sufletului în misterele din Spatantike. Zborul magic....
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. — 195 p. The fundamental nature of the tree as a symbol for many communities reflects the historical reality that human beings have always interacted with and depended upon trees for their survival. Trees provided one of the earliest forms of shelter, along with caves, and the bounty of trees, nuts, fruits, and berries, gave sustenance to...
New York: State University of New York Press, 2016. — 281 p. Daniel A. Dombrowski explores the history of the concept of God from the perspective of neoclassical, or process, theism. His neoclassical approach assuages the current crisis in philosophical theism, caught between a defense of classical theism and assertions of religious skepticism. Instead, the work offers Charles...
Routledge, 2000. — 390 p. European Paganism provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of ancient pagan religions throughout the European continent. Before there where Christians, the peoples of Europe were pagans. Were they bloodthirsty savages hanging human offerings from trees? Were they happy ecologists, valuing the unpolluted rivers and mountains? In European...
Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. — The University of Chicago Press, 1978. — 489 p. — ISBN: 0-226-20401-4. Originally published in French under the title Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses. Vol. 1: De l'age de la pierre aux mysteres d'Eleusis . Payot, Paris, 1976. "No one has done so much as Mr. Eliade to inform literature students in the West about...
Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. — The University of Chicago Press, 1982. — 565 p. — ISBN: 0-226-20403-0. Originally published in French under the title Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses. Vol. 2: De Gautama Bouddha au triomphe du christianisme . Payot, Paris, 1978. In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his magisterial progress...
University of Chicago Press, 2011. — 582 p. (History of Religious Ideas). In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his magisterial progress through the history of religious ideas. The religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Buddha and his contemporaries, Roman religion, Celtic and German religions, Judaism, the Hellenistic period, the Iranian...
Translated by Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. — The University of Chicago Press, 1985. — 360 p. — ISBN: 978-0-226-20405-5. Originally published in French under the title Histoire des croyances et des idees religieuses. Vol. 3: De Mahomet a l'age des Reformes . Payot, Paris, 1983. This volume completes the immensely learned three-volume A History of Religious...
Bucureşti, 2000. — 992 p. — ISBN: 973-9436-27-7. De la epoca de piatra la misterele din Eleusis La inceput comportamente magico-religioase ale paleantropilor Orientatio. Unelte de făcut unelte. „Domesticirea" focului. „Opacitatea" documentelor preistorice. Semnificaţiile simbolice ale mormintelor. Controverse în jurul depozitelor de oase. Picturile rupestre: imagini sau...
Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. — A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1959. — 256 p. — ISBN: 0-15-679201-X. In a book of great originality and scholarship, a noted historian of religion traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times, in terms of space, time, nature and the cosmos, and life itself. He shows how the total human experience of the religious man...
Stanford University Press, 2011. — 256 p. This interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses idolatry, a contested issue that has given rise to both religious accusations and heated scholarly disputes. Idol Anxiety brings together insightful new statements from scholars in religious studies, art history, philosophy, and musicology to show that idolatry is a concept that can...
Stanford University Press, 2011. — 256 p. This interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses idolatry, a contested issue that has given rise to both religious accusations and heated scholarly disputes. Idol Anxiety brings together insightful new statements from scholars in religious studies, art history, philosophy, and musicology to show that idolatry is a concept that can...
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. — 215 p. Widely regarded as one of the most profound critics of our time, René Girard has pursued a powerful line of inquiry across the fields of the humanities and the social sciences. His theories, which the French press has termed "l'hypothèse girardienne," have sparked interdisciplinary, even international, controversy. In The...
Routledge, 2016. — 346 p. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible for the first time compares the ancient law collections of the Ancient Near East, the Greeks and the Pentateuch to determine the legal antecedents for the biblical laws. Following on from his 2006 work, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, Gmirkin takes up his theory that the Pentateuch was written around...
London: Clair Press, 1967. — 77 p. I hope that the re-appearance of this work after almost thirty years, may help the younger generation to give more attention to the religious history of the whole of the Indo-European area, in contrast to previous generations, for a better knowledge of the Indo-European world will lead the West (to which North America belongs), towards...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. — 273 p. — (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion). Hasinoff brings the untold history of the World in Boston of 1911, 'America's First Great Missionary Exposition,' to light, focusing on how the material culture of missions shaped domestic interactions with evangelism, Christianity, and the consumption of ethnological knowledge.
New York: Prometheus Books, 1990. — 244 p. When you think of saints, you envision stained-glass pictures of piety. But the truth can be horribly different. Consider Saint Pius V: As Grand Inquisitor, he sent Catholic troops to kill 2,000 Waldensian Protestants in southern Italy. After becoming pope, he sent Catholic troops to kill Huguenot Protestants in France. Pius also...
Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 610 p. Ancient civilisations exercise an intense fascination for people the world over. This Handbook provides a vivid, scholarly, and eminently readable account of ancient cultures around the world, from China to India, the Middle East, Egypt, Europe, and the Americas. It examines the development of religious belief from the time of the...
13th ed. — Pearson Education, 2014. — 320 p. — ISBN: 0133852377, 9780133852370. Discover the importance of religion in the world’s cultures – yesterday and today. The histories, deep-seated beliefs, and ethical systems that make up the world’s religions are some of the most important forces at play on our incredibly diverse planet. Religions of the World, Thirteenth Edition...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2014. - 311 p. - (Jewish and Christian Perspectives 27) What is the use of a Targum in a cultural setting where Aramaic is not a common language anymore? And why would Christians be interested in a typically Jewish text in an otherwise anti-Jewish milieu? These and related questions have served as guides for Alberdina Houtman, Eveline van...
Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. — 216 p. This multi-disciplinary volume brings together the voices of biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers, theologians and political theorists to explore how ecology and theology intersected in ancient thinking, both pagan, Jewish and Christian. Ecological awareness is by no means purely a modern phenomenon. Of course, melting icecaps and...
Yale University Press, 2014. — 496 p. Britain's pagan past, with its mysterious monuments, atmospheric sites, enigmatic artifacts, bloodthirsty legends, and cryptic inscriptions, is both enthralling and perplexing to a resident of the twenty-first century. In this ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date book, Ronald Hutton reveals the long development, rapid suppression, and...
Oxford University Press, 2001. — 560 p. Comprehensive and engaging, this colourful study covers the whole sweep of ritual history from the earliest written records to the present day. From May Day revels and Midsummer fires, to Harvest Home and Hallowe'en, to the twelve days of Christmas, Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain. He...
Blackwell, 1991. — 396 p. This is the first survey of religious beliefs in the British Isles from the Old Stone Age to the coming of Christianity, one of the least familiar periods in Britain's history. Ronald Hutton draws upon a wealth of new data, much of it archaeological, that has transformed interpretation over the past decade. Giving more or less equal weight to all...
Nordic Academic Press, 2007. — 416 p. — (An international conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004). The study of Old Norse Religion is a truly multidisciplinary and international field of research. The rituals, myths and narratives of pre-Christian Scandinavia are investigated and interpreted by archaeologists, historians, art historians, historians of religion as well as...
Nordic Academic Press, 2011. — 272 p. Animals have always been an important part of the human life-world, and they stand out as significant forces in the Old Norse mythology – here they became imaginary creatures with strong characters. In Animals and Humans archaeologist Kristina Jennbert explores the relationship between animals and humans in Scandinavia from Roman Iron Age...
Cambridge - Massachusetts - London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. — 266 p. — ISBN13: 978-0-674-02548-6 Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers,...
Routledge, 2013. — 288 p. The first comprehensive study of its kind, this fully illustrated book establishes Paganism as a persistent force in European history with a profound influence on modern thinking. From the serpent goddesses of ancient Crete to modern nature-worship and the restoration of the indigenous religions of eastern Europe, this wide-ranging book offers a...
Routledge, 2018. — 198 p. This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the Slavic pagan religion made on the basis of a thorough re-examination of all reliable sources. What did Slavic pagan religion have in common with the Afro-American cult of voodoo? Why were no Slavic gods mentioned before the mid-tenth century, and why were there no Slavic gods at all between the Dnieper...
Cambridge University Press, 2019. — 374 p. Anthony Keddie investigates the changing dynamics of class and power at a critical place and time in the history of Judaism and Christianity - Palestine during its earliest phases of incorporation into the Roman Empire (63 BCE-70 CE). He identifies institutions pertaining to civic administration, taxation, agricultural tenancy, and the...
Penguin Books, 2005. — 266 p. As conflicts over religious extremism dominate our front pages, the bestselling author of The Harlot by the Side of the Road presents a work of history that could not be more timely: a surprising look back at the origins of religious intolerance during the tumultuous fourth century. This is the epic story of how classical paganism, with its...
Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books: 2005. – 220 p. – ISBN: 1564147916, 9781564147912, 9781435658943. – (Exploring Series). Exploring the Northern Tradition is an overview of the modern reconstruction of the ancient religion of the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples. This religion, called Heathenry, is one of the fastest growing polytheistic religious movements in the United...
University of California Press, 2015. — 304 p. — ISBN: 978-0520281370. Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their...
University of California Press, 2015. — 304 p. — ISBN: 978-0520281370. Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their...
Routledge, 2011. — 177 p. — (Routledge Library Editions: Witchcraft). Clues to T.C. Lethbridge’s books lie in their subtitles. Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion is no exception. In his study of the old pagan gods of Britain, Lethbridge believed that witch cults had their roots in prehistory and eventually became a religion of the suppressed classes.Similarities between...
ABC-CLIO, 2003. — 430 p. What do the world's most important religious texts have to say about one of humanity's favorite activities? Editors David W. Machacek and Melissa M. Wilcox have brought together top scholars in the field of religious studies to ask and answer these critical questions. Carefully researched, elegantly written, and respectfully presented, Sexuality and the...
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. — 369 p. — ISBN10: 0231119771; ISBN13: 978-0231119771 In this timely and sweeping exploration, one of the greatest living historians of Christian thought traces the concept of Antichrist from its Judeo-Christian origins to the present day. Rooted in Second Temple Judaism--a period of intense religious and political...
McFarland, 2016. — 284 p. The Druids and the Arthurian legends are all most of us know about early Britain, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (4500 BC-AD 43). Drawing on archaeological discoveries and medieval Welsh texts like the "Mabinogion", this book explores the religious beliefs of the ancient Britons before the coming of Christianity, beginning with the megaliths -...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2001. — 497 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman world 129). This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The essays are authored by leading scholars in the fields of Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern studies, the Hebrew Bible, Judaica, classical Greek and Roman studies,...
W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. — 128 p. A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner. How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity - a religion inextricably bound to Western thought - Jack Miles reveals how...
Leiden, Boston, Köln, Brill: 2002. — 489 p. — ISSN: 0927-7633. This series Religions in the Greeco-Roman World presents a forum for studies in the social and cultural function of religions in the Greek and the Roman world, dealing with pagan religions both in their own right and in their interaction with and influence on Christianity and Judaism during a lengthy period of...
Harvard University Press, 2009. — 394 p. The essays which follow are preliminary studies directed toward a new synthesis of the history of the religion of Israel. Each study is addressed to a special and, in my view, unsolved problem in the description of Israel's religious development. The barriers in the way of progress toward a new synthesis are many. While the burgeoning...
7th Edition — McGraw-Hill, 2006. — 558 p. This comparative reader takes an anthropological approach to the study of religious beliefs, both strange and familiar. The engaging articles on all key issues related to the anthropology of religion grab the attention of students, while giving them an excellent foundation in contemporary ideas and approaches in the field. The multiple...
De Gruyter, 2016. — 295 p. — (Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts). — ISBN: 9783110416671. The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ in reference to a tradition, heritage, ethic, civilization, faith etc. has been used in a wide variety of contexts with widely diverging meanings. Contrary to popular belief, the term was not coined in the United States in the middle of the 20th century...
Ecco, 2015. — 288 p. A provocative and contrarian religious history that charts the rise of Christianity from the point of view of "traditional" religion from the religious scholar and critically acclaimed author of Augustine . Pagans explores the rise of Christianity from a surprising and unique viewpoint: that of the people who witnessed their ways of life destroyed by what...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 204 p. In this provocative book, Oleszkiewicz-Peralba examines untamed feminine divinities from around the world. Although distant geographically, these divine figures are surprisingly similar-representing concepts of liminality, outsiderhood, and structural inferiority, embodied in the divine feminine. These strong, independent, unrestrained figures...
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. — 464 p. — ISBN: 9783110444544, 3110444542. History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of one’s situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as...
Brill, 2018. — 702 p. — (Festschrift in Honour of Armin W. Geertz). Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis comprises 41 chapters that push for a new way of conducting the study of religion, thereby, transforming the discipline into a genuine science of religion. The recent resurgence of evolutionary approaches on culture and the increasing...
Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1920. — 264 p. Pettazzoni Raffaele. History of Religions, Volume 1: The Religion of Zoroaster in the Religious History of Iran (in Italian) Sommario: Prefazione. Il problema del Zoroastrismo. Il "paganesimo" pre-zarathustrico e la riforma religiosa di Zarathustra. Le origini e i primi tempi del Zoroastrismo. Il Zoroastrismo in Persia e gli...
Bristol Classical Press, 2011. — 144 p. The conversion to Christianity was a key cultural process that saw the transformation of Europe from classical to medieval world. The growth of the Church has been closely linked with the development of other key institutions, such as the state. It has also been highlighted as a factor in changing attitudes to issues such as the body,...
AuthorHouse, 2013. — 492 p. There has never been a more important time for a study of the social, economic and political origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three important world religions that share a common root. This book adopts a Marxist, that is a materialist, view of human development so it takes as its starting point the idea that gods, angels, miracles and...
Brill, 2009. — 342 p. The central theme of this volume is to re-examine the received concepts and images of ghosts in various religious cultures ranging from the Ancient Near East and Egypt to the Old Testament, the Classical Era, Early medieval and Early Modern Europe, Early India, and Medieval China. As a religious phenomenon, the realm of ghosts has been less studied than...
Cambridge University Press, 2013. — 470 p. Divination was an important and distinctive aspect of religion in both ancient China and ancient Greece, and this book will provide the first systematic account and analysis of the two side by side. Who practised divination in these cultures and who consulted it? What kind of questions did they ask, and what methods were used to answer...
London and New York: Routledge, 2007. — 234 p. This book dispels the widely held view that paganism survived in Russia alongside Orthodox Christianity, demonstrating that ‘double belief’, dvoeverie, is in fact an academic myth. Scholars, citing the medieval origins of the term, have often portrayed Russian Christianity as uniquely muddied by paganism, with ‘double-believing’...
Cambridge University Press, 2015. — 436 p. This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome....
Cambridge University Press, 2013. — 1069 p. — ISBN10: 1107019990. — ISBN13: 978-1107019997. The Cambridge History of Religion in the Ancient World provides a comprehensive examination of the history of the religions of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. The essays in these volumes have a broad reach, covering the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, and extending...
Brill, 2018. — xii + 548 p. — (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, Vol. 15). This volume discusses crucial aspects of the period between the two revolts against Rome in Judaea that saw the rise of rabbinic Judaism and of the separation between Judaism and Christianity. Most contributors no longer support the ‘maximalist’ claim that around 100 CE, a powerful...
New York University Press, 2014. — 240 p. More than anywhere else in the Western world, religious attachments in America are quite flexible, with over 40 percent of U.S. citizens shifting their religious identification at least once in their lives. In "Changing Faith", Darren E. Sherkat draws on empirical data from large-scale national studies to provide a comprehensive...
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014. — 332 s. Rudolf Simek bietet anhand von archäologischen Funden und authentischen Quellen eine umfassende Darstellung der vielfältigen Erscheinungsformen der religiösen Welt der Germanen. Einen Schwerpunkt bilden dabei die Kultpraktiken, über die jüngere Forschungen sehr genauen Aufschluss geben können. Der Autor zeichnet nach, wie sich...
Polity, 2009. — 216 p. The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions ? Christianity, Judaism and Islam ? are shaping our world more than ever before. In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the...
Routledge, 2017. — 170 p. In recent years scholars have re-evaluated the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity, reaching new understandings of the ways shared origins gave way to two distinct and sometimes inimical religious traditions. But this has been a profoundly textual task, relying on the writings of rabbis, bishops, and other text-producing elites to...
Cambridge, 2008. — 388 p. The essays in this book consider issues of tolerance and intolerance faced by Jews and Christians between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Several essays are concerned with aspects of early Jewish-Christian relationships, several discuss ways Jews and Christians defined themselves against the pagan world, and several consider issues of tolerance that arose in rival...
New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. — 265 p. Here, archeologically documented, is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Known by many names — Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, among others — she reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East. Beyond being worshipped for fertility, she was revered as the wise creator and the one source of universal order. Under...
Oxford University Press, 2008. — 304 p. Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, Bodies of Thought provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the "Radical Enlightenment." Beginning with the debate on...
Rochester, Vermont; Toronto, Canada: Inner Traditions, 2011. — 386 p. — ISBN: 978-1-62055-340-4 (ebook) The spiritual heart of many esoteric societies, the Temple of Solomon was located atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a site venerated by the three great monotheistic religions as the intersection of Divine and human. Built by King Solomon at the peak of ancient Israel’s...
Brill, 2015. — 598 p. The Christian Reception of the Hebrew name of God has not previously been described in such detail and over such an extended period. This work places that varied reception within the context of early Jewish and Christian texts; Patristic Studies; Jewish-Christian relationships; Mediaeval thought; the Renaissance and Reformation; the History of Printing;...
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