In the turmoil around the turn of the fifth century, controversy over the legacy of Origen took center stage, and questions regarding the nature of the resurrection were among the main points of contention. What was the nature of the resurrection body? In what sense will post-resurrection life represent a continuation or a break with the present…[Read more]

Top 100 books on business and mission.

A sense of an ending dominates accounts of African Christianity after the Vandal conquest of the 430s, not least as a result of the apparent disappearance of the Donatists in an Africa now ruled by Homoian Christians. In fact, the transfer from Donatist schism to new ‘Arian controversy’ more closely resembles the broader picture of Vandal Afr…[Read more]

The conditions in transit ghetto of Theresienstadt generated in the inmates’ society a phenomenon of deliberate exchange of female sexual and social favors for food, protection, and symbolic capital. Scholars who have been analyzing sexuality of the victims in the Holocaust have so far only focused on sexual violence (including forced p…[Read more]

This article provides a contextual analysis of the assassination attempt on the Timurid ruler Shahrukh’s life on 21 February 1427 in Herat. According to the contemporary Timurid chroniclers, Ahmad-i Lur, a Hurufi by profession, tried to kill Shahrukh.

This study presents the data for the text of the Philoxenian version for various Gospel passages as those texts can be reconstructed from the citations of Philoxenos. Several trends of translation technique become evident within the Philoxenian version: lexical changes for more accurate translation, attempts at more accurate and consistent…[Read more]

This study sought to investigate the formulation, ideas and representations of religious tolerance under the “Enlightened Reformism”in luso-brazilian world, with the general hypothesis that the institutional reforms touching the Inquisition, Catholic Church and regular and secular catholic clergy created, albeit indirectly, conditions for a def…[Read more]

This chapter explores the roles of narrative in the development of knowledge about, and rationalization for, conditioning the human body in the classical Indian medical system of Ayurveda.

A study of pravṛtti and nivṛtti in the Sanskrit allegory, Jīvānandanam (“The Joy of Life”).

This paper will discuss some possible results of the developing dominance of electronically mediated communication on the practice of theology, focusing on ways digital communications allow, or encourage, us to develop once again features of theologising that were more prominent in earlier times. Peter Horsfield suggested that in some respects…[Read more]

In a number of places one hears biblical scholars dream of a new kind of commentary, a commentary with hypertext links and multimedia elements. This paper, though it ends with such dreams, is based on the experience of an ongoing project, begun in 1995, to discover the opportunities and constraints on such a commentary (Postmodern Bible – Amos).…[Read more]

Chapter on the history, texts, and practices of Zoroastrianism, with a detailed discussion of the history and contemporary practices of the Zoroastrian community in India, the Parsis.

An examination of the discursive interplay about politics, religion, and medicine in a 17th-18th cent. Sanskrit allegory, Jivanandanam (“The Joy of Life”).

A philological and ethnographic study of medical and astrological positions on gemstones in Sanskrit literature and contemporary North Indian society.

A study of storytelling as an explanatory model for health and illness in the classical Sanskrit literature of Ayurveda.

Originally presented at McMaster University in May 2005.

The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek…[Read more]

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]