Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: a survey
Moshe Idel
Yale, 2011
296.1609 I19k
"This sweeping survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. The first to focus attention on a specific center of Kabbalah, Moshe Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.
Idel analyzes the work of three major Kabbalists—Abraham Abulafia, Menahem Recanati, and Yohanan Alemanno—who represent diverse schools of thought: the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the astromagical. Directing special attention to the interactions and tensions among these forms of Jewish Kabbalah and the nascent Christian Kabbalah, Idel brings to light the rich history of Kabbalah in Italy and the powerful influence of this important center on the emergence of Christian Kabbalah and European occultism in general." -pulisher
Idel analyzes the work of three major Kabbalists—Abraham Abulafia, Menahem Recanati, and Yohanan Alemanno—who represent diverse schools of thought: the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the astromagical. Directing special attention to the interactions and tensions among these forms of Jewish Kabbalah and the nascent Christian Kabbalah, Idel brings to light the rich history of Kabbalah in Italy and the powerful influence of this important center on the emergence of Christian Kabbalah and European occultism in general." -pulisher
contents
Kabbalah : introductory remarks -- Abraham Abulafia and ecstatic kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia's activity in Italy -- Ecstatic kabbalah as an experiential lore -- Abraham Abulafia's hermeneutics -- Eschatological themes and divine names in Abulafia's kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia and R. Menahem ben Benjamin : thirteenth-century kabbalistic and Ashkenazi manuscripts in italy -- R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati -- Menahem Recanati as a theosophical-theurgical kabbalist -- Menahem Recanati's hermeneutics -- Ecstatic kabbalah from the fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries -- The kabbalistic-philosophical-magical exchanges in Italy -- Prisca theologia : R. Isaac Abravanel, Leone Ebreo, and R. Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano -- R. Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno -- Jewish mystical thought in Lorenzo il Magnifico's Florence -- Other mystical and magical literatures in Renaissance Florence -- Spanish kabbalists in Italy after the expulsion -- Diverging types of kabbalah in late-fifteenth-century Italy -- Jewish kabbalah in Christian garb -- Anthropoids from the Middle Ages to Renaissance Italy -- Astromagical pneumatic anthropoids from medieval Spain to Renaissance Italy -- The trajectory of eastern kabbalah and its reverberations in Italy -- Concluding remarks.
Kabbalah : introductory remarks -- Abraham Abulafia and ecstatic kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia's activity in Italy -- Ecstatic kabbalah as an experiential lore -- Abraham Abulafia's hermeneutics -- Eschatological themes and divine names in Abulafia's kabbalah -- Abraham Abulafia and R. Menahem ben Benjamin : thirteenth-century kabbalistic and Ashkenazi manuscripts in italy -- R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati -- Menahem Recanati as a theosophical-theurgical kabbalist -- Menahem Recanati's hermeneutics -- Ecstatic kabbalah from the fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries -- The kabbalistic-philosophical-magical exchanges in Italy -- Prisca theologia : R. Isaac Abravanel, Leone Ebreo, and R. Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano -- R. Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno -- Jewish mystical thought in Lorenzo il Magnifico's Florence -- Other mystical and magical literatures in Renaissance Florence -- Spanish kabbalists in Italy after the expulsion -- Diverging types of kabbalah in late-fifteenth-century Italy -- Jewish kabbalah in Christian garb -- Anthropoids from the Middle Ages to Renaissance Italy -- Astromagical pneumatic anthropoids from medieval Spain to Renaissance Italy -- The trajectory of eastern kabbalah and its reverberations in Italy -- Concluding remarks.
Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and senior researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He has received many awards, including the National Jewish Book Award, for his previous books on Kabbalah. He lives in Jerusalem.
All Things Shining: reading the Western Classics
to find meaning in a secular age
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance KIelly
Free Press, 2011
200 D778a
“What constitutes human excellence?” and “What is the best way to live a life?” These are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. In their critically acclaimed book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that our search for meaning was once fulfilled by our responsiveness to forces greater than ourselves, whether one God or many. These forces drew us in and imbued the ordinary moments of life with wonder and gratitude. Dreyfus and Kelly argue in this thought-provoking work that as we began to rely on the power of our own independent will we lost our skill for encountering the sacred..." -publisher
The New Orleans Voodoo Handbook
Kenaz Filan
Destiny, 2011
299.675 F478n
“Kenaz Filan’s new book is quite simply the best book on New Orleans Voodoo I have ever read. It is extremely well researched, detailing spirits, practitioners, and rituals that are well known in the Crescent City but which have never been covered in a book like this before. Kenaz takes great pains to show that the Voodoo of New Orleans is a unique system of magic distinct from, but with relations to, both Haitian Vodou and Hoodoo. In this very readable book he manages to capture the spirit of New Orleans Voodoo and provide a much needed window into the ever evolving magic of America’s most occult city.”
--Jason Miller, author of Protection & Reversal Magick: A Witch’s Defense Manual and The Sorcerer’s Secrets
The End of Work: theological critiques of capitalism
John Hughes
Blackwell, 2007
261.85 H893e
"Theology and Work explores the 'problem of labor' from a theological perspective. Addressing both theologians concerned with how Christianity might engage in social criticism, as well as secular philosophers and political theorists, this book explores the connection between Marxist and Christian traditions. Surveying 20th century theologies of work and contrasting various approaches to the topic, this book looks at the relationship between divine and human work, explores debates about labor under capitalism, and, through a thorough reading of Weber's Protestant Work Ethic, argues that the triumph of the 'spirit of unity' is crucial to understanding modern notions of work." -publisher
CONTENTS
Preface.
INTRODUCTION:
Work in the Christian Tradition.
I. TWENTIETH CENTURY THEOLOGIES OF WORK:
Karl Barth, Marie-Dominique Chenu, John Paul II, and Miroslav Volf.
II. UTILITY AS THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM:
Max Weber¿s Diagnosis of Modern Work
III. LABOUR, EXCESS AND UTILITY IN KARL MARX:
The Problem of Materialism and the Aesthetic
IV. JOHN RUSKIN AND WILLIAM MORRIS:
An Alternative Tradition: Labour and the Theo-aesthetic in English Romantic Critiques of Capitalism.
V. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL:
The Critique of Instrumental Reason and Hints of Return to the Theo-Aesthetic within Marxism.
VI. THE END OF WORK: REST, BEAUTY, AND LITURGY.
The Catholic Metaphysical Critique of the Culture of Work and its incorporation into the English Romantic Tradition:
Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Eric Gill, and David Jones.
VII. CONCLUDING REMARKS:
Labour, Utility, and Theology.
Bibliography.John Hughes is Curate of St David's with St. Michael's Exeter, england and PhD., Cambridge.
Christian Materiality: an essay on religion in Late Medieval Europe
Caroline Walker Bynum
Zone Books, 2011
231.7309 B994c
"In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects—among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers—allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounter with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond cultural study of "the body"—a field she helped to establish—Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice." -publisher
Caroline Walker Bynum is Professor of Medieval European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and University Professor emerita at Columbia University. She is the author of Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1990, 1992) and Metamorphosis and Identity (Zone Books, 2001, 2005).
link to table of contents
"This is one of those rare books that can make one look at the world in a new way... An extraordinary, moving and thought-provoking evocation of late medieval devotion in all its contradictions, paradoxes and multiplicities." -Helen Castor, Times Higher Education
God is Red: the secret story of how Christianity survived and flourished in Communist China
Liao Yiwu
Harper, 2011
275.1082 L693g
"When journalist Liao Yiwu first stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community in the officially secular China, he knew little about Christianity. In fact, he’d been taught that religion was evil, and that those who believed in it were deluded, cultists, or imperialist spies. But as a writer whose work has been banned in China and has even landed him in jail, Liao felt a kinship with Chinese Christians in their unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and to finding meaning in a tumultuous society.
Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:
Black Megachurch Culture:
models for education and empowerment
Sandra Barnes
Peter Lang, 2010
277.3008 B261b
"This book identifies how church cultural components are created, developed, and used to educate and empower adherents, and whether and how these tools are associated with the historic Black Church. The book is particularly interested in how large Black congregations—megachurches—use rituals found in worship, theology, racial beliefs, programmatic efforts, and other tools from their cultural repertoire to instruct congregants to model success in word and deed. The books findings illustrate that Black megachurches strive to model success on various fronts by tapping into effective historic Black Church tools and creating cultural kits that foster excitement, expectation, and entitlement." -publisher
Al Ghazali's Philosophical Theology
Frank Griffel
Oxford Univ., 2009
181.5 G849a
"The Muslim thinker al-Ghazali (d. 1111) was one of the most influential theologians and philosophers of Islam and has been considered an authority in both Western and Islamic philosophical traditions. Born in northeastern Iran, he held the most prestigious academic post in Islamic theology in Baghdad, only to renounce the position and teach at small schools in the provinces for no money.
His contributions to Islamic scholarship range from responding to the challenges of Aristotelian philosophy to creating a new type of Islamic mysticism and integrating both these traditions-falsafa and Sufism-into the Sunni mainstream.
This book offers a comprehensive study of al-Ghazali's life and his understanding of cosmology-how God creates things and events in the world, how human acts relate to God's power, and how the universe is structured. Frank Griffel presents a serious revision of traditional views on al-Ghazali, showing that his most important achievement was the creation of a new rationalist theology in which he transformed the Aristotelian views of thinkers such as Avicenna to accord with intellectual currents that were well-established within Muslim theological discourse. Using the most authoritative sources, including reports from al-Ghazali's students, his contemporaries, and his own letters, Griffel reconstructs every stage in a turbulent career."
-publisher
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam
Tariq Ramadan
Oxford Univ., 2004
297.0918 R165w
"In a Western world suddenly acutely interested in Islam, one question has been repeatedly heard above the din: where are the Muslim reformers? With this ambitious volume, Tariq Ramadan firmly establishes himself as one of Europe's leading thinkers and one of Islam's most innovative and important voices.
As the number of Muslims living in the West grows, the question of what it means to be a Western Muslim becomes increasingly important to the futures of both Islam and the West. While the media are focused on radical Islam, Ramadan claims, a silent revolution is sweeping Islamic communities in the West, as Muslims actively seek ways to live in harmony with their faith within a Western context.
French, English, German, and American Muslims--women as well as men--are reshaping their religion into one that is faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies.
Ramadan's goal is to create an independent Western Islam, anchored not in the traditions of Islamic countries but in the cultural reality of the West..." -publisher
Muhammad: His Life based on the earliest sources
Martin Lings
Inner Traditions, 2006
297.63 M952L
"A revised edition of the internationally acclaimed biography of the prophet
• Includes important additions about the prophet’s spread of Islam into Syria and its neighboring states
• Contains original English translations from 8th and 9th century biographies, presented in authoritative language
• Represents the final updates made on the text before the author’s death in 2005
Martin Lings’ biography of Muhammad is an internationally acclaimed, comprehensive, and authoritative account of the life of the prophet. Based on the sira, the eighth- and ninth-century Arabic biographies that recount numerous events in the prophet’s life, it contains original English translations of many important passages that reveal the words of men and women who heard Muhammad speak and witnessed the events of his life." -publisher
Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:
- The over-100-year-old nun who persevered in spite of beatings, famine, and decades of physical labor, and still fights for the rightful return of church land seized by the government
- The surgeon who gave up a lucrative Communist hospital administrator position to treat villagers for free in the remote, mountainous regions of southwestern China
- The Protestant minister, now memorialized in London’s Westminster Abbey, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as “an incorrigible counterrevolutionary”
Black Megachurch Culture:
models for education and empowerment
Sandra Barnes
Peter Lang, 2010
277.3008 B261b
"This book identifies how church cultural components are created, developed, and used to educate and empower adherents, and whether and how these tools are associated with the historic Black Church. The book is particularly interested in how large Black congregations—megachurches—use rituals found in worship, theology, racial beliefs, programmatic efforts, and other tools from their cultural repertoire to instruct congregants to model success in word and deed. The books findings illustrate that Black megachurches strive to model success on various fronts by tapping into effective historic Black Church tools and creating cultural kits that foster excitement, expectation, and entitlement." -publisher
Al Ghazali's Philosophical Theology
Frank Griffel
Oxford Univ., 2009
181.5 G849a
"The Muslim thinker al-Ghazali (d. 1111) was one of the most influential theologians and philosophers of Islam and has been considered an authority in both Western and Islamic philosophical traditions. Born in northeastern Iran, he held the most prestigious academic post in Islamic theology in Baghdad, only to renounce the position and teach at small schools in the provinces for no money.
His contributions to Islamic scholarship range from responding to the challenges of Aristotelian philosophy to creating a new type of Islamic mysticism and integrating both these traditions-falsafa and Sufism-into the Sunni mainstream.
This book offers a comprehensive study of al-Ghazali's life and his understanding of cosmology-how God creates things and events in the world, how human acts relate to God's power, and how the universe is structured. Frank Griffel presents a serious revision of traditional views on al-Ghazali, showing that his most important achievement was the creation of a new rationalist theology in which he transformed the Aristotelian views of thinkers such as Avicenna to accord with intellectual currents that were well-established within Muslim theological discourse. Using the most authoritative sources, including reports from al-Ghazali's students, his contemporaries, and his own letters, Griffel reconstructs every stage in a turbulent career."
-publisher
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam
Tariq Ramadan
Oxford Univ., 2004
297.0918 R165w
"In a Western world suddenly acutely interested in Islam, one question has been repeatedly heard above the din: where are the Muslim reformers? With this ambitious volume, Tariq Ramadan firmly establishes himself as one of Europe's leading thinkers and one of Islam's most innovative and important voices.
As the number of Muslims living in the West grows, the question of what it means to be a Western Muslim becomes increasingly important to the futures of both Islam and the West. While the media are focused on radical Islam, Ramadan claims, a silent revolution is sweeping Islamic communities in the West, as Muslims actively seek ways to live in harmony with their faith within a Western context.
French, English, German, and American Muslims--women as well as men--are reshaping their religion into one that is faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies.
Ramadan's goal is to create an independent Western Islam, anchored not in the traditions of Islamic countries but in the cultural reality of the West..." -publisher
Muhammad: His Life based on the earliest sources
Martin Lings
Inner Traditions, 2006
297.63 M952L
"A revised edition of the internationally acclaimed biography of the prophet
• Includes important additions about the prophet’s spread of Islam into Syria and its neighboring states
• Contains original English translations from 8th and 9th century biographies, presented in authoritative language
• Represents the final updates made on the text before the author’s death in 2005
Martin Lings’ biography of Muhammad is an internationally acclaimed, comprehensive, and authoritative account of the life of the prophet. Based on the sira, the eighth- and ninth-century Arabic biographies that recount numerous events in the prophet’s life, it contains original English translations of many important passages that reveal the words of men and women who heard Muhammad speak and witnessed the events of his life." -publisher