In a recent publication a scholar suggests that the Talmud preserves teachings only against astrology, and claims that astrology never obtained a foothold within Judaism, remaining only a sectarian phenomenon “at variance with normative Judaism.” The suggestion and claim should not go unchallenged. The present paper looks at the debates over astrology preserved in the Talmud, scans the major relevant sections in the Pseudepigrapha—with an introduction of a Jewish astrological document which should become a new addition to the Pseudepigrapha—reviews the astrological documents found in Cave 4 near Khirbet Qumran, and points again to the abundant evidence of zodiacal wheels and other astrological symbols in early Palestinian synagogues. The necessary breadth precludes exhaustive discussion in any area.

Several recent publications have presented collections of various types of evidence for the Egyptian cults in the Greco-Roman World. Although valuable, they do not give sufficient critical analysis of the evidence through detailed study of particular sites. The present article attempts to provide for Corinth a more substantial picture of the Egyptian cults than has previously been available.

For the diction of this Treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision (Maimonides, Introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, p. 15).

In 2.32 of The Guide of the Perplexed, at the very outset of his section on prophecy, Maimonides states: “The opinions of people concerning prophecy are like their opinions concerning the eternity of the world or its creation in time” (p. 360).

A number of scholars in this century have noticed the image of God or Jesus as mother in the spiritual writings of the high Middle Ages. The image has in general been seen as part of a “feminine” or “affective” spirituality, and neither of these adjectives is incorrect. The idea of God as mother is part of a widespread use, in twelfth-century spiritual writing, of woman, mother, characteristics agreed to be “feminine,”and the sexual union of male and female as images to express spiritual truths; the most familiar manifestation of this interest in the “female” is the new emphasis on the Virgin in doctrinal discussions and especially spirituality. And the frequency of references to “mother Jesus” is also part of a new tendency in twelfth-century writing to use human relationships (friendship, fatherhood or motherhood, erotic love) in addition to metaphysical or psychological entities to explain doctrinal positions or exhort to spiritual growth.

The late seventeenth century in England is, theologically, a critical period, a time when old forms of thought and traditional methodologies were being challenged. Two theological events of the 1690s stand out as true signs of the changing times: the appearance of a number of collections of Socinian tracts, in which, in fact, the term “Unitarian” is first used in English literature. Also, in 1696, John Toland published his short but challenging Christianity Not Mysterious. In the following essay, I an interested in showing the methodological similarities and discontinuities between the Socinians and Toland, especially in regard to their scriptural interpretation and mutual insistence on the inadmissability of the concept of mystery to Christian theology.

Abraham, born in Chaldaea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father's company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. … The same spirit which had carried Abraham away from his kin led him through his encounters with foreign peoples during the rest of his life; this was the spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition to everything—the product of his thought raised to be the unity dominant over the nature which he regarded as infinite and hostile (for the only relationship possible between hostile entities is mastery of one by the other). With his herds Abraham wandered hither and thither over a boundless territory without bringing parts of it any nearer to him by cultivating and improving them. … The groves which often gave him coolness and shade he soon left again; in them he had theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but he did not tarry in them with the love which would have made them worthy of Divinity and participant in Him. He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike.

Can the existence of God be rationally demonstrated? This question has occupied philosophers and theologians for centuries and in a particular way since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This essay will examine the question of the knowledge of God as it is met by two contemporary Catholic theologians, Bernard Lonergan and Hans Küng. These two scholars are not chosen arbitrarily for comparison. Not only is each of them on the forefront of current theological development, but I shall argue that on the question of God the ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts of the former are significantly complemented by the latter.

In the wake of Kant's critique of speculative metaphysics, many students of religion and theology have sought immediate access to the real and a foundation for doctrine and belief in religious experience. It was thought by some that a mode of experience might be discovered that was unscathed by the activity of the imagination in the construction of the forms and categories, and that would be broader than Kant's exclusively moral account of religion. It is not accidental, then, that the phrase “religious experience” has come to be reserved almost exclusively for aspects of experience that are allegedly prereflective, that transcend the verbal, or are in some way free of the structures of thought and judgment that language represents. The search has been for some channel of cognitive immediacy, whether the chosen mode of experience was volitional or affective.