On a misty morning in eastern Kentucky, cross-bearing Christians gather for a service on a surface-mined mountain. They pray for the health and renewal of the land and for their communities, lamenting the corporate greed of the mining companies. On another day, in southern West Virginia, Andrew Jordon hosts Bible study in a small cabin overlooking a disused 1,400-acre surface mine. He believes his efforts to reclaim sites like these represent responsible environmental stewardship.In Sacred Mountains, Andrew R. H. Thompson highlights scenes such as these in order to propose a Christian ethical analysis of the controversial mining practice that has increasingly divided the nation and has often led to fierce and even violent confrontations. Thompson draws from the arguments of H. Richard Niebuhr, whose work establishes an ideal foundation for understanding Appalachia. Thompson provides a thorough introduction to the issues surrounding surface mining, including the environmental consequences and the resultant religious debates, and highlights the discussions being carried out in the media and by scholarly works. He also considers five popular perspectives (ecofeminism, liberation theology, environmental justice, environmental pragmatism, and political ecology) and offers his own framework and guidelines for moral engagement with the subject.Thompson's arguments add to the work of other ethicists and theologians by examining the implications of culture in a variety of social, historical, and religious contexts. A groundbreaking and nuanced study that looks past the traditionally conflicting stereotypes about religion and environmental consciousness in Appalachia, Sacred Mountains offers a new approach that unifies all communities, regardless of their beliefs.

In the last fifty years, the Appalachian Mountains have suffered permanent and profound change due to the expansion of surface coal mining. The irrevocable devastation caused by this practice has forced local citizens to redefine their identities, their connections to global economic forces, their pasts, and their futures. Religion is a key factor in the fierce debate over mountaintop removal; some argue that it violates a divine mandate to protect the earth, while others contend that coal mining is a God-given gift to ensure human prosperity and comfort. In Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Joseph D. Witt examines how religious and environmental ethics foster resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, teachers, preachers, and community leaders, Witt's research offers a fresh analysis of an important and dynamic topic. His study reflects a diversity of denominational perspectives, exploring Catholic and mainline Protestant views of social and environmental justice, evangelical Christian readings of biblical ethics, and Native and nontraditional spiritual traditions. By placing Appalachian resistance to mountaintop removal in a comparative international context, Witt's work also provides new outlooks on the future of the region and its inhabitants. His timely study enhances, challenges, and advances conversations not only about the region, but also about the relationship between religion and environmental activism.

Islam is not homogeneous. Its complexity, however, is bewildering for non-Muslims, most of whom know little or nothing of Islam, and generally – like Pope Francis – see it as a peace-loving religion. Others find this claim difficult to accept in the light of the violence and cruelty perpetrated in the name of Allah by Muslim fighters against innocent fellow citizens who are not Muslims, and also against many fellow Muslims. Paul Stenhouse’s deep scholarly interest in Samaritan history and traditions has taken him on intellectual and literary paths ‘continually crisscrossed by Islam and its Qur’ān, Islamic Law and Islamic history’. Here, he seeks to offer some light on the background to tragic events unfolding throughout the Middle East, Africa, Pakistan, and Central and Southeast Asia, as well as in the USA, Europe, the UK and Oceania.

This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars. Craig E. Morrison has translated the text with the assistance of Claudio Balzaretti and Mirko Pozzobon, while Kiraz has prepared the Syriac text in the west Syriac script, fully vocalized and pointed. The translation and the Syriac text are presented on facing pages so that both can be studied together. All readers are catered for: those wanting to read the text in English, those wanting to improve their grasp of Syriac by reading the original language along with a translation, and those wanting to focus on a fully vocalized Syriac text.

While scholarship on nonverbal communication in the Hebrew Bible has traditionally focused on ritual dress, postures of worship, and related topics, there exist a number of non-ritual gestures in the text for which we have little understanding, such as occur in the book of Proverbs. As the premier source for moral pedagogy in the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs contains a number of gestures that, when properly interpreted, enhance an understanding of social values in ancient Israel. To aid in the process of decoding these literary features, Jones examines Ugaritic, Akkadian, Egyptian, and Sumerian texts, identifying similar gestures and anatomical idioms and how they are variously interpreted in their respective contexts. Though the particular religious and cultural systems of these neighboring entities are distinct, their ideology of social values—values imbedded in the fabric of daily life and indicative of the universally shared experience of all communities—comes to the fore through the medium of gesture.

In contemporary Ireland, the seeds of dialogue grow and flourish in communities that accept difference and work positively to promote each other’s rights and well-being. These are communities that gather together to engage in open-ended, respectful encounters with people from a range of belief and religious traditions. Interbelief dialogue involves positive communication, cooperation and energetic collaboration among people of religious faiths and secular, humanist, agnostic and atheist stances. Though not a panacea for all society’s ills, and often profoundly challenging, inter-belief dialogue offers the opportunity for constructive engagement, cooperation and peace-building. Connecting Lives is a wide-ranging and informative introduction to interbelief dialogue in contemporary Ireland. Divided into three sections, the volume first considers the nature and relevance of interbelief dialogue in education and in the public square, underscoring the importance of respectful dialogue in building a healthy intercultural society. The book then gives voice to members of various belief and faith communities as they live out their beliefs in contemporary Ireland, before exploring key challenges and opportunities in interbelief dialogue in a world often marred by intolerance.

This handbook explores beliefs of ancient Jews and Christians surrounding death and the afterlife through the lens of texts ranging from the Old Testament and New Testament, to Second Temple period and rabbinic literature, to early Christian writings. Figueras further brings together eschatological texts from Iran, Egypt, Greece, and Rome as comparanda, and provides context and bibliography to guide readers in their study of ancient Jewish and Christian views of death and the afterlife.

For four days in February 2019, Church leaders from across the globe convened in Rome for a landmark meeting on ‘the Protection of Minors in the Church’ called by Pope Francis. This event was a moment of untold importance for the Church in addressing the heinous crime of the abuse of minors by clergy, as well as the mishandling of these cases by Church authorities.This publication brings together the keynote addresses from that meeting, alongside the heartrending testimonies of survivors of clerical sex abuse whose suffering was compounded by the rejection they faced after approaching the Church hierarchy for help. The presentations from this meeting, including Pope Francis’ widely discussed concluding speech, are collected in this essential document which will be central to the development and implementation of standards to eliminate the scourge of sexual abuse from the Church.

Beginning. It offers a large enough canvas: the beginning of wisdom, of love, of learning, of memory; the seed of an idea; the foundation of a career; the root of a dream; choices made; roads taken – and not taken; and lessons learned. A Book of Beginnings explores the theme of commencement through encounters with an array of intriguing people. Maeve Binchy shares a typically warm and good-humoured account of a first date. We hear of a profound life-changing experience from the writer and social philosopher Charles Handy. Henry Ford’s dream of ‘a motor car for the great multitude’ and Martin Luther King’s dream of freedom and justice for his people are pondered as the reader is taken on a journey of threshold moments that invigorate and inspire.

Advent is a period of grateful anticipation and an invitation for Christians everywhere to spend time contemplating the profound gift of the Incarnation. It offers us the opportunity to develop our spiritual lives and to listen to our deepest longings. Advent should not, as Anna Burke explains in the introduction to Candles in the Night, be spent impatiently ‘counting down the days on the calendar’, but embraced for what it is: a unique period in the Church year to prepare for the arrival of Christ. The reflections in this book – which explore themes such as ‘waiting’, ‘giving’, ‘announcing’ and ‘transforming’ – are offered as a resource to be used during Advent, be it for personal use, prayer groups or otherwise. Each advent word invites us to behold the presence of God-with-us and to breathe in the holy breath. We will not ‘skip’ Advent. We will wait and watch as the rising sun comes to visit us.

In this fifth installment of the long Homily 71, On the Six Days of Creation, Jacob treats of the events of the fifth day, the creation from the waters of the various species of fish and reptiles, as well as the assorted types of birds and other winged creatures. God created them all in wisdom and in love, prepared everything that they would need and endowed them with the natural characteristics required for their particular type of life. Jacob highlights the fact that the creation of these animals on the fifth day to inhabit the land and water separated on the third day is a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ.

This work is a study of Jewish cultural memory as exemplified by rabbinic midrash of the Amoraic period, the second through fifth centuries of the Common Era, and especially midrash on the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19). The Akedah is proposed and analyzed as a model for submission to the divine will through the act of interpretation. Rabbinic sages constructed a framework for cultural memory that relies on mimetic acts of interpretive substitution that are employed to confront, interpret, and remember ruptures as evidence of divine care, and they found, in the Akedah, a model for this interpretive stance. The form of memory they devised, termed midrashic memory, is proposed as inherent to rabbinic textual interpretation and whose origins are traced to the Akedah narrative itself. Midrashic memory is analyzed in selections from Amoraic midrash, in Shalom Spiegel’s twentieth-century masterwork on the Akedah, The Last Trial, and is proposed as the crux of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish memory. Second Slayings analyzes the Akedah as a metonym for cultural reorientation through the reharmonization of the lived (‘temporal’) and the covenanted ( ‘anamnestic’) planes of experience.

Volume 13 of Melilah, an interdisciplinary electronic journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras.

This book serves to correct the now accepted understanding of Irenaeus’s theodicy. This assumption of Hick’s theodicy as legitimately “Irenaean” remains due the gulf between Irenaean scholarship and discussion of the problem of evil. The present work offers a bridge between the two to allow for the continued discussion of both theologian’s distinct views.

The Apostle Paul commands his disciple Timothy to “be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” This exhortation encapsulates the Orthodox Church’s expectations from her clergy and forms the basis of her Pastoral Theology. The aim of the present work is to guide the contemporary Orthodox priest in his application of the Apostle’s words to his everyday life as a conduit of Divine Grace and shepherd of Christ’s flock. At the same time, its focus on the proper formation of the soul will benefit every Christian, whether ordained or not. Compiled from recent and historical sources reflecting the rich heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church.

This book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt, focusing primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically, the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic.