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In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—this book considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. It takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. The author argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, he demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. The author delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

This book sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt. This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval/early modern Islamic society.

One of the twentieth century's most important poets, W. H. Auden stands as an eloquent example of an individual within whom thought and faith not only coexist but indeed nourish each other. This book explores in detail how Auden's religious faith helped him to come to terms with himself as an artist and as a man, despite his early disinterest in religion and his homosexuality. It shows also how Auden's Anglican faith informs, and is often the explicit subject of, his poetry and prose. The book discusses the poet's boyhood religious experience and the works he wrote before emigrating to the United States as well as his formal return to the Anglican Communion at the beginning of World War II. It then focuses on Auden's criticism and on neglected and underestimated works of the poet's later years. Through insightful readings of Auden's writings and biography, this book documents how Auden's faith and his religious doubt were the matrix of his work and life.

For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, this book shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a natural and necessary part of our world. Examining a wide array of ancient writings, the book demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, it offers an account of the emergence of the concept of religion.

Biblical Truths addresses the question, How can a thinking person of the 21st century, who accepts the conclusions of modern science, historiography, and “facts,” continue to confess the traditional orthodox creeds of Christianity? How can such Christians continue to read the New Testament as a reliable source for “truth,” faith, and knowledge? Biblical Truths uses postmodern, antifoundational theories and philosophy to offer a ways of reading the Bible that are theologically faithful but intellectually respectable.

When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. This book explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, the book traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke—Acts. The book shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped Christian thinking and writing about history.

Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Münster from 1933 until his death in 1946, is renowned for his opposition to Nazism, most notably for his public preaching in 1941 against Hitler's euthanasia project to rid the country of sick, elderly, mentally retarded, and disabled Germans. This biographical study of von Galen views him from a different perspective: as a complex figure who moved between dissent and complicity during the Nazi regime, opposing certain elements of National Socialism while choosing to remain silent on issues concerning discrimination, deportation, and the murder of Jews. The book places von Galen in the context of his times, describing how the Catholic Church reacted to various Nazi policies, how the anti-Catholic legislation of the Kulturkampf shaped the repertoire of resistance tactics of northwestern German Catholics, and how theological interpretations were used to justify resistance and/or collaboration. It discloses the reasons for von Galen's public denunciation of the euthanasia project and the ramifications of his openly defiant stance. The book reveals how the bishop portrayed Jews and what that depiction meant for Jews living in Nazi Germany. Finally, it investigates the creation of the image of von Galen as “Grand Churchman-Resister” and discusses the implications of this for the myth of Catholic conservative “resistance” constructed in post-1945 Germany.

Chinese Theology explores theological writings from mainland China in their historical, social, and textual contexts. From the dialogues of sixteenth-century scholars to the revolutionary writings of theological educators in the twentieth century or the micro-blogs of contemporary house-church pastors, the book concentrates on theologians (mostly from the liberal or intellectual wings of the churches) who question what a “Chinese” theology might mean, who engage with their environment, and who draw on Chinese culture to inform their understanding of God and the world. The book provides an overview of the evolution of Chinese theology from the Ming dynasty to the present while introducing detailed textual analysis of the writings of Xu Zongze, Zhao Zichen, Wu Leichuan, Ding Guangxun, and Yang Huilin. It argues that Chinese theologies need understanding of their textual context: Chinese theology cannot be understood without a sense of its literary form and of the social meaning of the text, as these shape the theology that emerges. In light of this argument, Chinese Theology obliquely critiques the tendency to regard Western systematic theology and its particular philosophical underpinnings and written forms as the standard for theological thinking.

The popularity of Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical movement at least 900 years old, has grown astonishingly within the context of the vast and ever-expanding social movement commonly referred to as the New Age. This book provides a broad overview of the major trends in contemporary Kabbalah together with in-depth discussions of major figures and schools. It places the “kabbalistic Renaissance” within the global context of the rise of other forms of spirituality, including Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism. The book shows how Kabbalah has been transformed by the events of the Holocaust and, following the establishment of Israel, by aliyah.

Christ Child is a book about Christian, Jewish, and Muslim memories of Jesus’ childhood. Its focus is the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a collection of stories originally entitled “The Childhood Deeds of Jesus.” In these stories, Jesus turns clay birds into live ones, curses people to death, and displays preternatural knowledge in school. Drawing on sociologies of cultural memory, the book explores how such infancy tales were transmitted and transformed by different generations of readers, how the figure of a young Jesus was “constantly reimagined … to conform to the eye and image of the beholder” (p. 197). The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–2) provides an introduction to studies on memory and childhood, and documents the infancy stories’ controversial history of interpretation from antiquity to the present day. Part 2 (chapters 3–5) investigates “sites of memory” in the Graeco-Roman world—texts and material artifacts connected with birds, cursing, and elementary education—in order to understand how ancient readers would have tried to make sense of this enigmatic young Jesus. Part 3 (chapters 6–7) focuses on the way these stories were contested and reshaped in the context of Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim religious encounters. An epilogue and three appendixes include discussions of visual art connected with Jesus’ childhood and English translations of important primary sources. The end result is a fascinating book that traces how the Christ child occupied “a unique but ever-shifting place in late ancient and early medieval cultural memory” (p. 44).