In his groundbreaking study of the literary ramifications of the experience of western imperialism for both conquerors and the conquered, Edward Said remarks:

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past.

On the Ides of March of the year 44 BCE, the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar, was assassinated. Nobody knew whether this would reconstitute the Roman Republic of old or would only usher in a new period of civil war like the one that had devastated not only Rome and Italy but also the provinces for many decades before Caesar's ascendancy to sole power.

It has become quite common in scholarship to consider the community described by Philo in De vita contemplativa as a specific Jewish group comprising contemplative Essenes or people somehow related to the Essenes. In this study, we shall explore the meaning of Philo's masculine and feminine designations, θεραπευταί and θεραπευτρίδες, and consider the possibility that these words referred not to the male and female members of one group that was part of a Therapeutae sect, but to individuals whom Philo understood as exemplary devotees of God. We shall also consider a few matters concerning the character of the group. Overall, this study seeks to call into question the assumption that, in his De vita contemplativa, Philo is describing an Essene community in Egypt.

William Robertson Smith wrote in 1885 that the biblical convention whereby aman is said to “go in” to his bride represents a linguistic trace ofonce widespread “beena marriage,” in which men joined the natal households of the women who took them as husbands. It was an error of literalist reductionism, but one that lent support to an imposing infrastructure of systematic kinship theory and evolutionism that continues to excercise an influenceon some contemporary scholars. Another way of saying this is that Robertson Smith failed to recognize a significant biblical metaphor—that of men enteringwomen's tents—when he saw one. This misapprehension of biblical poetics has had important consequences for the way in which he and his successors have interpreted the Hebrew Bible.

When Peri Pascha 96–97 proclaims, “The God has been murdered; the King of Israel has been put to death by an Israelite right hand” ( θες πεϕόνευταιׁ βασιλεὺςτο ᾽Ισραλ νῄρηται ὑπ δεξις ᾽Ισραηλίτιδος), along with similar accusations, the author is said to reflect the very worst in early Christian reactions to, or jealousy of, contemporary Jews. Moreover, because this homily is commonly attributed to Melito, a second-century Quartodeciman bishop of Sardis, its anti-Jewish remarks are also frequently discussed from this perspective. In this article, I call both of these lines of interpretation into question and offer an alternative.

In the Hellenica, Xenophon prefaces his account of the liberation of Thebes from Spartan occupation by making the following gnomic observation:

One could tell also of many other incidents, both Greek and barbarian, showing that the gods are not unmindful either of those who are impious or of those who commit unholy acts. Now, at any rate, I shall tell only of the events at hand.

In the essay “Creed or Chaos?” written in the midst of the turmoil of World War II, British mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers defended the relevance of the creeds produced during the doctrinal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries to the lives of modern Christians. The theological dogmas contained in such documents as the Nicene Creed (325) or the Chalcedonian Definition (451) are not, she notes wittily, “a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling,” but were “hammered out under pressure of urgent practical necessity” to resolve theological controversies that had real impact on the discipleship of ordinary Christians. To put matters at their simplest, the trinitarian controversies revolved around the question of whether Christ was divine, and so capable of saving humankind from sin and death. The christological controversies, at least in their earliest stage, debated whether Christ was really human, truly the God-made-man capable of healing wounded humanity and providing aviable role model for Christians to follow in the living of a redeemed life. At stake in both controversies was a convincing explanation of the central Christian tenet that “Jesus saves” for those who profess to be his followers.

Until fairly recently, the usual view of Maimonides' position on freedom of the will was that he was a strict libertarian. This is because he appears to assert unequivocally in several places in this Commentary to the Mishna, most notably in Shemonah Perakim 8 and in Mishneh Torah (Teshuva 5), that human choice is undetermined. Alexander Altman and Shlomo Pines challenged this view in recent years by arguing, mostly on the basis of Guide of the Perplexed 2.48, that Maimonides maintained an esoteric view according to which human choice is determined by the natural order, which is itself determined by God.

Sigmund Freud speaks of three offenses against the human love of self. The first blow is “cosmological” and is associated with the name Copernicus. The second blow is “biological” and conjures up the name Darwin. Freud himself performs the “psychological blow,” which is directed at human narcissism. This “psychological blow” follows from the fact that “mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions.” These discoveries “amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house.”

The Hasidic movement started in the latter part of the eighteenth century in the Podolia section of Ukraine, under the influence of Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760). By the middle of the nineteenth century Hasidism came to dominate the religious sensibilities of Eastern European Jewry. As it changed from a marginal, nascent revivalist curiosity to an establishment fixture, it attracted magnetic leaders of great pneumatic powers and created a rich homiletical literature. Its combination of direct religious engagement and a message of joy in the worship of God appealed both to spiritually inclined rabbinic figures and to the masses of the undereducated.

Vincent Ferrer was born in Valencia on January 23, 1350 and died at Vannes (Brittany) on April 5, 1419. He grew up in a devout family, and by 1367 had joined the Order of Preachers in Valencia. As a member of the Dominican Order, Vincent Ferrer underwent extensive academic and pastoral training from 1370 to 1378 in preparation for a life of scholarly teaching and preaching. He was a teacher of logic at Lleida (1370–71), philosophy at Barcelona (1375), and he completed his formal training at Toulouse (1376–78). These academic activities reflect only one aspect of his intellectual background.

This is a study of the emotional context of certain medieval anti-Jewish legends. It examines how the stories redefined the composition of society, the relation of this to popular devotion, and the paradox between a religious intention and its effect. After a brief survey of the phenomenon, I suggest that recent views of the psychological sources of the legends do not adequately account for the religious experience that they promote, nor do these explanations sufficiently account for the way the legends encouraged and reinforced social habits—“ruts in the pathways of the mind” that encouraged the maintenance of conformity among members of society. Part one will examine how the libels could help people imagine more specifically the general hostility against Jews widely propagated after the First Crusade and how this superimposed a social uniformity on the town. Part two describes the emotional context of that violence in devotion to the passion of Christ. Part three considers the moral dilemma posed by the function of these legends in popular devotion. My goal is to account for the religious content of anti-Jewish legend and an ethical problem within medieval piety, for which reason it will be necessary to draw on the diverse literature that shaped medieval Christian culture, both learned and popular, from the twelfth century, when the legends first appeared in Europe, to the eve of the Reformation.

Suspicion raised by the Neo-orthodox movement concerning Schleiermacher's theological enterprise continues to cast its shadow. Karl Barth framed this suspicion perspicaciously in terms of an “either/or” in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher”:

Is Schleiermacher's enterprise concerned (a) necessarily, intrinsically, and authentically with a Christian theology oriented toward worship, preaching, instruction, and pastoral care? Does it only accidentally, extrinsically, and inauthentically wear the dress of a philosophy accommodated to the person of his time…? Or is his enterprise concerned (b) primarily, intrinsically, and authentically with a philosophy…indifferent as to Christianity and which would have wrapped itself only accidentally, extrinsically, and inauthentically in the garments of a particular theology, which here happens to be Christian?

Tal Ilan, in her recent “Notes and Observations On a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judaean Desert,” attempts to turn the “old view of Jewish divorce on its head.” She suggest that, “Perhaps in ancient Jewish practice women could divorce their husbands, and it is an accident of our transmission history that this fact is not amply illustrated.” This suggestion rests on her reading of Papyrus Se'elim 13, published and identified by Jonas C. Greenfield and Ada Yardeni as a receipt for the payment of the requisite money (“kethuba money”) promised at the time of marriage to be paid in the event of divorce. Ilan argues that this document is in fact a bill of divorce, and that it was given by a woman to her husband.

The importance of William Law has never been in doubt. Scholars have regarded him as an extremely effective High Church apologist by virtue of his replies to Bishop Benjamin Hoadly on ecclesiology and eucharistic theology, and as an influential pastoral guide by virtue of the success of his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. He is also considered the most notable post-Reformation English mystic by virtue of his later works, written under the influence of the early seventeenth-century Silesian theosophist, Jacob Bohme. This Behmenism, however, has served to reduce the admiration expressed for him. Even sympathetic contemporaries regarded Law's enthusiasm for Böhme as certainly eccentric, and perhaps even more objectionable than that. Retrospection did not blunt eighteenth-century disapproval. Dean (later Bishop) George Home, who was an ardent admirer and indeed disciple of the pre-Behmenist Law, lamented the descent of “one of the brightest stars in the firmament of the church…into the sink and complication of Paganism, Quakerism, and Socinianism, mixed up with chemistry and astrology by a possessed cobbler.” The writers of the Romantic era were far more disposed to acknowledge the value of that from which the eighteenth-century had recoiled as “enthusiasm.”

The preponderance of pain in human life ranks among the central problems for religious thought around the world. The problem of suffering, as it is often called, has been a compelling reason for abandoning faith. Given the depth of the dilemma that raw and inexplicable pain poses, it is surprising how pervasive voluntary pain has been among the religions of the world. Ascetics, mystics, and martyrs have sought and applied pain—in rites of passage (ordeals) and other forms of initiation—in the service of religious inquisitions (including trials by ordeal), execution of heretics and witches, and others. And of course, none of these has been limited by geographic location or historic time. What is the role of voluntary (“sacred”) pain in human religious life? Is there a single theory that can explain, for instance, the initiatory ordeals of new shamans and Sufi mystics?

Judging by the proliferation of a new body of theological works that have encouraged a deliberate rethinking of the intellectual premises of Christian theology, scholarly discussion appears to have come to the juncture of an exciting though unpredictable stage in theology. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in the realm of the ongoing dialogue on the theological relevance of communication theory associated with the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Contrary to what has become an article of faith in recent theological forays into social theory, I contend: (a) that Habermasian theory has little to contribute to theological thought and is more valuable as an indirect aid in critiquing various deficient theological discourses; (b) that the current Habermas-sympathetic attempts at a communicative theology are, by and large, open to criticism for the same shortcomings and problems found in Habermas's own works; and (c) that the need to address these problems necessarily points us toward an alternative postcommunication theology.