The Christian community characteristically confesses the constancy of God. But historians of religion know by contrast that the deity Yhwh evolved over time. How might scholars who belong to both these camps negotiate the disconnect? This essay seeks an answer by staging a moment of complementarity between Religionsgeschichte and OT theology.…[Read more]

A revisitation of the Yeb archives with an eye to the question of cult statuary. The present article inventories the state of the question and makes several constructive suggestions. Its primary contributions are: to address the Yeb evidence, even preliminarily, to the debate over Yhwh statuary in the Jerusalem temple; to make a fresh…[Read more]

A review of Gard Granerød’s title, Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period.

In this chapter I will, first, discuss the marriage of Christian theology and Neoplatonism which takes place in the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and some of the problems which arise from this remarkably fruitful liaison. Then, second, I will trace the line of descent which leads from Dionysius to Žižek, who takes this i…[Read more]

In the original arrangement of the since-dismembered tomb, the costly life-size bronze panel of Roccabonella seated in his study faced the life-size bronze panel of the Virgin and Child adored by St. Francis and St. Peter; the two panels and their arrangement present Roccabonella’s erudition as well as his devotion to the holy figures depicted i…[Read more]

This paper studies the interaction between clerical and lay English Catholics on the Continent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In contrast with Protestant exiles, who established separate exile churches, Catholic expatriates did not create churches specifically for the exiled laity. Catholics abroad did nonetheless get support…[Read more]

This paper proposes a Catholic case study in a field dominated by studies on Protestant migrants. One of the main differences between the confessions was the institutional provision for the liturgical and devotional lives of laity abroad. Catholics did not found separate institutions similar to Protestant exile churches which channelled the sense…[Read more]

This article uses the World Bank’s engagement with religious actors to analyse their differentiated role in setting the development agenda raising three key issues. First, engagements between international financial institutions (IFIs) and religious actors are formalised thus excluding many of the actors embedded within communities in the South.…[Read more]

A capital with an unusual scene of the Baptism of Jesus has recently been excavated in the late twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de la Peña (Huesca). Remarkable for its depiction of a youthful Saviour seated in a footed baptismal font, the image deviates significantly from the traditional Romanesque formula of an adult Jesus baptized in the…[Read more]

Hardly a Passus of Piers Plowman goes by without one reference to a Jewish individual, practice, or belief — that is, a Jewish individual, practice or belief as perceived or believed by a Christian observer. Whereas a multitude of these references abound in Piers Plowman, it contains, essentially, only a pair of conventional medieval approaches f…[Read more]

Hardly a Passus of Piers Plowman goes by without one reference to a Jewish individual, practice, or belief — that is, a Jewish individual, practice or belief as perceived or believed by a Christian observer. Whereas a multitude of these references abound in Piers Plowman, it contains, essentially, only a pair of conventional medieval approaches f…[Read more]

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

Death drives the contemporary American novel and its market in the late-20th and early 21st-century. To help illustrate this, we consider Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985 and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from 2006 for something that Walter Benjamin — famously quoted as saying “Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell” — ma…[Read more]

This brief presentation gives a basic overview of the Islamic afterlife, focusing both on its variations from Judeo-Christian concepts and its varied understandings within the faith.

This brief presentation gives a basic overview of the Islamic afterlife, focusing both on its variations from Judeo-Christian concepts and its varied understandings within the faith.

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

The historical novel Waking the Dead is now available at ResearchGate. This data file (there are 20) introduces Jane Addams

This article defends the disputed label “private creeds” as a useful one for describing a number of fourth century texts. Offering such a confession was the normal method for clearing one’s name on charges of heterodoxy in fourth-century Greek Christianity, though writing such a creed made the author susceptible to charges of innovation. A numbe…[Read more]