History of Religion Commons^™

The Successful Integration Of Buddhism With Chinese Culture: A Summary, Xinyi Ou

Grand Valley Journal of History

Buddhism has commonly been credited as the sole foreign religion to truly gain access to the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were likewise spread along the Silk Roads to China, yet these religions did not take root. What culminating factors played a role in the acceptance of Buddhism into Chinese culture? Is it possible that Buddhism should not be regarded as a foreign religion, but as a seed of thought that was nurtured by the missionary monks and the Chinese into a form almost unrecognizable from it's initial origins? Through a survey …

Pure Land And The Social Order In Twelfth-Century China: An Investigation Of "Longshu’S Treatise On Pure Land", Trevor Davis

Student Work

A 2012-2013 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Trevor Davis (Saybrook College '13) for his essay submitted to the History Department, “Pure Land and the Social Order in Twelfth-Century China: An Investigation of Longshu’s Treatise on Pure Land.” (Valerie Hansen, Professor of History, advisor.)

Davis' essay makes a powerful argument about the Pure Land Buddhist Wang Rixiu's understanding of Southern Song (1127-1279) society. Although Pure Land Buddhism is often thought to be egalitarian - or at least to challenge traditional hierarchies - Trevor shows that for Wang Rixiu, an egalitarian Pure Land coexists …

Peter Dubovsky, Hezekiah And The Assyrian Spies: Reconstruction Of The Neo-Assyrian Intelligence Services And Its Significance For 2 Kings 18–19, Alan Lenzi

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

A review of the book "Hezekiah and the Assyrian Spies: Reconstruction of the Neo-Assyrian Intelligence Services and Its Significance for 2 Kings 18-19," which is part of the Biblica et Orientalia series 49, by Peter Dubovský is presented.

Ontological Subordination In Novatian Of Rome's Theology Of The Son, Daniel Lloyd

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation evaluates Novatian of Rome's theology of the Son in his De Trinitate. It argues that Novatian presents the Son as ontologically subordinate to the Father, which is not a conclusion shared by a majority of recent scholars. This conclusion is reached by comparing Novatian's presentation of the Father's divinity with that of the Son. The first half of this work, therefore, demonstrates the manner by which Novatian affirms that the Father is transcendent, supreme, and unique in His attributes. Novatian employs a range of concepts and terms found in Christian and non-Christian sources. Specifically, I present and analyze …

Christian Mysticism As A Threat To Papal Traditions, Hayley E. Pangle

Grand Valley Journal of History

A human universal found across many of the world's cultures is the mystical aspect of a religion that serves, in many ways, as a reaction against the dogmatic, ritualistic tradition of the same religion. Christian mystics of medieval Europe presented a direct confrontation to papal traditions in that they challenged the church through their theological interpretations of scripture, their graphic visions, and their threat to established gender roles.

Keen Collection (Sc 375), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 375. Letters (2) to Thomas G. Keen, a Baptist minister, Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Includes an 1868 letter notifying him of the award of an honorary doctorate from Bethel College in Russellville, Kentucky. Also includes a 1904 letter to his daughter, Fannie K. Roach, regarding Keen’s work in Maysville, Kentucky; and a dismissal letter given by the Baptist Church, Smithfield, Virginia, to J. R. Bell in 1860.

Cultural Transmission And Assimilation In A Quotidian Key: The Conversion Of Two Jews In Spain, 1790- 1792, David Graizbord

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts …

The Early Modern Inn As A Space For Religious And Cultural Exchange, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

While it is relatively easy to map out mutual cultural influences between Jews and non‐Jews, it is much more difficult to map out the mechanisms of this cultural exchange. Such instances of cultural exchange may have happened indirectly, for example, through books, as Joanna Weinberg termed it, through “virtual contact”; or, directly, through “real” human interaction. The texts presented here deal with the latter. One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth‐century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra‐communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in …

Emw 2012: Cross-Cultural Connections In The Early Modern Jewish World, Emw 2012

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Understanding the processes of cultural change in early modern history as a process of creating and negotiating social, cultural, and religious borders has become a commonplace in the last generation of research. This perspective has great validity for Jewish history, too: early modern Jews also found themselves in a range of new settings, which allowed a considerably greater range of interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors than had previously been the case. It was not only geographical dispersion that broadened their social, economic, cultural and religious contacts with their non-Jewish surroundings: new ideas and ideologies deriving from the thought of the …

Jailhouse Encounter: A Sixteenth-Century Jewish-Christian Tale And Its Historiographical Ramifications, Daniel Jütte

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621).1 Krafft was born into one of the most respected families in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. In the 1570s, he served as a factor for the Augsburg-based Manlich trade company in the Levant. 2 In the summer of 1574, however, the Manlich Trade Company went bankrupt, and Krafft, who did not have the means to pay off the debts he had guaranteed on behalf of his employers, was arrested and imprisoned in Tripoli (now in Lebanon). …

A Jewish Merchant Family And A Moroccan Ruler, Daniel Schroeter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

These three documents are from the Lévy-Corcos archives, a private collection of family documents in Paris, which I photographed in 1985. A few comments on what Jewish family archives reveal about Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco: It was not uncommon for elite Jewish families to pass down from generation to generation various kinds of Muslim and Jewish legal documents, including Arabic decrees of rulers (dahirs) and letters from Muslim governmental officials. Such documents were kept as records of property, debts, or special privileges. Significantly, literate Jews did not read or write in the Arabic script, and thus could not read the …

A Jewish-Christian Commentary On Luke, Yaacov Deutsch

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 1735, Immanuel Frommann, a converted Jew who was working at the Institutum Judaicum in Halle translated the book of Luke and wrote a commentary on the text. This text is probably the first printed Hebrew commentary on the New Testament. In his commentary, Frommann uses a wide range of Hebrew sources. He quotes regularly from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, biblical commentaries, midrashim, legal treatises, philosophical texts and historical works. He also makes use of mystical and kabbalistic works. The commentary has several layers of interpretation: relatively short lexical or grammatical explanations of words or phrases; literary explanations of …

Medicine As A Cultural Connection Between Jews And Christians In Early Modern Italy, Berns Andrew

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.

It discusses the following texts:

1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, [sent] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi …

Finding Common Ground: The Metz Beit Din And The French Judicial System, Jay R. Berkovitz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the two decades preceding the French Revolution, the rabbinic court of Metz functioned within a complex world of overlapping legal jurisdictions. The extant records of the beit din in the years 1771-1790 contain evidence of familiarity with French law and even an interest in taking that law into consideration in its own deliberations. From time to time, the beit din instructed litigants to consult French avocats in order to clarify a legal question, and in some cases the beit din itself initiated the consultation. There were also, certainly, instances when individuals sought the opinion of French lawyers on their …

Real Or Virtual Contact? Johannes Buxtorf's Reading Of Jewish Literature, Joanna Weinberg

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation attempts to analyse how Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564-1629), long-time professor of Hebrew at Basel, ethnographer, lexicographer, and textual critic,read Jewish books by examining one passage from the Sefer ha-Hayyim written by Hayyim ben Bezalel (Cracow, 1593), which Buxtorf chose to integrate into his polemical critique of Jewish allegiance to the Talmud in this opening chapter of the Juden—Schul. Hayyim ben Bezalel, fated to remain second fiddle to his brother, the Maharal of Prague, had his own battles to fight against both Jews and Christians. In the selected passage, Hayyim ben Bezalel defends the Talmud as a unique …

Shakers - South Union, Kentucky (Sc 359), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 359. Holographic letters, 10 and 15 November 1818, of two Shaker elders in West Union, Indiana, to elder Benjamin Seth Young, South Union, Kentucky, concerning affairs at West Union.

Shakers (Sc 358), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 358. Typed copy of letter written by Urban E. Johns, South Union, Kentucky, to Honorable McLean, Washington, D.C., regarding sheep husbandry in Logan County and South Union; a hymn (with words and music); reward certificates given to deserving pupils by teachers; and a list of members of the Brick House and the Square House, Union Village, Ohio, during the 1837-1867 period.

Perichoresis In Gregory Nazianzen And Maximus The Confessor, Brian T. Scalise

Liberty Theological Review

The doctrine of perichoresis applied to Trinity is the mutual coinherence or interpentration of the Persons of the Godhead. Applied to Christology, perichoreo is, first, the reciprocal passing of characteristics and titles between the divine and human natures hypostatically united in Yeshua. Secondly, it also describes the distinct but intimate union between Christ's natures. Historically, the Trinitarian use of perichoresis grew out of the christological use of perichoreo first developed by Gregory Nazianzen (A.D. 4th century) and then, subsuquently, explained by Maximus the Confessor (A.D 7th century). Maximus, often directly commenting on Gregory's use of perichoreo, seeks to expound …

“Under The Very Windows Of The Pope”: Confronting Anti-Semitism In Catholic Theology After The Holocaust, Carolyn Wesnousky

History Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Menorah Review (No. 76, Winter/Spring, 2012)

Menorah Review

A Neo-Zionist Vison -- An Idiosyncratic Journey to God -- An Open Letter to Tarek Fatah -- Books in Brief: New and Notable -- Changing the Course of a River -- Leaves without Trees -- Moreshet: From the Classics - The Ethical Will of Eleazar of Mayence -- Zachor: John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration