Browse

The current configuration of capitalism, in which finance plays a dominant role, has the capacity to shape people in ways that hinder the development of any critical perspective on it. This book explores the various cultural forms of finance-dominated capitalism and suggests how their pervasive force in human life might be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. In this way, the book reverses the project of the German sociologist Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, while employing much the same methods as he used for discussing the relationship between religious beliefs and economic behavior. Weber showed how Christian beliefs and practices, by way of its work ethic, could form persons in line with what capitalism required of them. This book demonstrates the capacity of Christian beliefs and practices to help people resist the dictates of capitalism in its present, finance-dominated configuration.

This book is an exploration of what the New Testament has to say about the nature of resurrected bodies. It argues that previous scholarship and tradition has been shaped by Pauline discussions of glorious bodies and has failed to appreciate the diverse and disorienting range of opinions about the nature of the resurrected body. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this book both revisits central texts – such as the resurrection of Jesus – and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.

In recent decades, organizations committed to interreligious or interfaith dialogue have proliferated, both in the Western and non-Western worlds. Why, how so, and what exactly is interreligious dialogue? These are the touchstone questions of this book, the first major history of interreligious dialogue in the modern age. The book narrates and analyzes several key turning points in the history of interfaith dialogue before examining, in the conclusion, the contemporary landscape. While many have theorized about and/or practiced interreligious dialogue, few have attended carefully to its past, connecting its emergence and spread with broader developments in modern history. Interreligious dialogue — grasped in light of careful, critical attention to its past — holds promise for helping people of diverse faith backgrounds to foster cooperation and knowledge of one another while contributing insight into contemporary, global religious pluralism.

Herbert Butterfield was an important British historian and religious thinker whose ideas, in particular his concept of a “Whig interpretation of history,” remain deeply influential. This biography focuses on the creative processes that lay behind Butterfield's intellectual accomplishments. Drawing on his investigations into Butterfield's vast and diverse output of published and unpublished work, the book explores Butterfield's ideas and methods. It describes Butterfield's lifelong devotion to his Methodist faith and shows how his Christian spirituality animated his historical work. It also traces the theme of dissent that ran through Butterfield's life and work, presenting a man who found himself at odds with prevailing convictions about history, morality, politics, religion, and teaching, a man who elevated the notion of dissent into an ethic of living in tension with any established system.

Engaging with Foucault’s ideas on sexuality, this book demonstrates how conservative organizations and the Supreme Court have misunderstood Christian beliefs on marriage and the family. It challenges the long-held assumption that American values are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms, by comparing ancient Christian discourses on marriage and sexuality with contemporary ones, maintaining that modern family values owe more to Roman Imperial beliefs than to the Bible. Ultimately, this book undermines the conservative ideology of the family, starting from the position that early Christianity, in its emphasis on celibacy and denunciation of marriage, was in opposition to procreation, the ideological norm in the Greco-Roman world.