A Threat to Public Piety

A Threat to Public Piety PDF Author: Elizabeth DePalma Digeser
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In A Threat to Public Piety, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser reexamines the origins of the Great Persecution (AD 303–313), the last eruption of pagan violence against Christians before Constantine enforced the toleration of Christianity within the Empire. Challenging the widely accepted view that the persecution enacted by Emperor Diocletian was largely inevitable, she points out that in the forty years leading up to the Great Persecution Christians lived largely in peace with their fellow Roman citizens. Why, Digeser asks, did pagans and Christians, who had intermingled cordially and productively for decades, become so sharply divided by the turn of the century? Making use of evidence that has only recently been dated to this period, Digeser shows that a falling out between Neoplatonist philosophers, specifically Iamblichus and Porphyry, lit the spark that fueled the Great Persecution. In the aftermath of this falling out, a group of influential pagan priests and philosophers began writing and speaking against Christians, urging them to forsake Jesus-worship and to rejoin traditional cults while Porphyry used his access to Diocletian to advocate persecution of Christians on the grounds that they were a source of impurity and impiety within the empire. The first book to explore in depth the intellectual social milieu of the late third century, A Threat to Public Piety revises our understanding of the period by revealing the extent to which Platonist philosophers (Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus) and Christian theologians (Origen, Eusebius) came from a common educational tradition, often studying and teaching side by side in heterogeneous groups.

A Threat to Public Piety

A Threat to Public Piety PDF Author: Elizabeth DePalma Digeser
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
In A Threat to Public Piety, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser reexamines the origins of the Great Persecution (AD 303–313), the last eruption of pagan violence against Christians before Constantine enforced the toleration of Christianity within the Empire. Challenging the widely accepted view that the persecution enacted by Emperor Diocletian was largely inevitable, she points out that in the forty years leading up to the Great Persecution Christians lived largely in peace with their fellow Roman citizens. Why, Digeser asks, did pagans and Christians, who had intermingled cordially and productively for decades, become so sharply divided by the turn of the century? Making use of evidence that has only recently been dated to this period, Digeser shows that a falling out between Neoplatonist philosophers, specifically Iamblichus and Porphyry, lit the spark that fueled the Great Persecution. In the aftermath of this falling out, a group of influential pagan priests and philosophers began writing and speaking against Christians, urging them to forsake Jesus-worship and to rejoin traditional cults while Porphyry used his access to Diocletian to advocate persecution of Christians on the grounds that they were a source of impurity and impiety within the empire. The first book to explore in depth the intellectual social milieu of the late third century, A Threat to Public Piety revises our understanding of the period by revealing the extent to which Platonist philosophers (Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus) and Christian theologians (Origen, Eusebius) came from a common educational tradition, often studying and teaching side by side in heterogeneous groups.

Piety and Public Funding

Piety and Public Funding PDF Author: Axel R. Schäfer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? In Piety and Public Funding historian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility to the state with federal support. Though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid, health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt, where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and renewed by the Great Society, hastened—not hindered—the ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that helped create it. By showing that the liberal state's dependence on private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to assaults from the right, Piety and Public Funding brings a much needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic administrations to channel federal money to "faith-based" organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a message of free enterprise and moral awakening.

The Promise of Piety

The Promise of Piety PDF Author: Arsalan Khan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501773569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. Khan explores both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.

Piety and Public Opinion

Piety and Public Opinion PDF Author: Thomas B. Pepinsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190697806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Across the Muslim world, religion plays an increasingly prominent role in both the private and public lives of over a billion people. Will democratic political participation by an increasingly religious population lead to victories by Islamists at the ballot box? Will more conspicuously pious Muslims participate in politics and markets in a fundamentally different way than they had previously? Against the common assumption that piety would naturally inhibit any tendencies towards modernity, democracy, or cosmopolitanism, Piety and Public Opinion reveals the complex and subtle links between religion and political beliefs in a critically important Muslim democracy.

Brandishing the First Amendment

Brandishing the First Amendment PDF Author: Tamara Piety
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117920
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Tamara R. Piety argues that increasingly expansive First Amendment protections for commercial speech imperil public health, safety, and welfare; the reliability of commercial and consumer information; the stability of financial markets; and the global environment. Using evidence from public relations and marketing, behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive studies, she shows how overly permissive extensions of protections to commercial expression limit governmental power to address a broad range of public policy issues.

Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings

Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings PDF Author: Jennifer Otto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192552554
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings investigates portrayals of the first-century philosopher and exegete Philo of Alexandria, in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius. It argues that early Christian invocations of Philo are best understood not as attempts simply to claim an illustrious Jew for the Christian fold, but as examples of ongoing efforts to define the continuities and distinctive features of Christian beliefs and practices in relation to those of the Jews. This study takes as its starting point the curious fact that none of the first three Christians to mention Philo refer to him unambiguously as a Jew. Clement, the first in the Christian tradition to openly cite Philo's works, refers to him twice as a Pythagorean. Origen, who mentions Philo by name only three times, makes far more frequent reference to him in the guise of an anonymous "one who came before us." Eusebius, who invokes Philo on many more occasions than does Clement or Origen, most often refers to Philo as a Hebrew. These epithets construct Philo as an alternative "near-other" to both Christians and Jews, through whom ideas and practices may be imported to the former from the latter, all the while establishing boundaries between the "Christian" and "Jewish" ways of life. The portraits of Philo offered by each author reveal ongoing processes of difference-making and difference-effacing that constituted not only the construction of the Jewish "other," but also the Christian "self."

Realist Ethics

Realist Ethics PDF Author: Valerie Morkevičius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108245994
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Just war thinking and realism are commonly presumed to be in opposition. If realists are seen as war-mongering pragmatists, just war thinkers are seen as naïve at best and pacifistic at worst. Just war thought is imagined as speaking truth to power - forcing realist decision-makers to abide by moral limits governing the ends and means of the use of force. Realist Ethics argues that this oversimplification is not only wrong, but dangerous. Casting just war thought to be the alternative to realism makes just war thinking out to be what it is not - and cannot be: a mechanism for avoiding war. A careful examination of the evolution of just war thinking in the Christian, Islamic, and Hindu traditions shows that it is no stranger to pragmatic politics. From its origins, just war thought has not aimed to curtail violence, but rather to shape the morally imaginable uses of force, deeming some of them necessary and even obligatory. Morkevičius proposes here a radical recasting of the relationship between just war thinking and realism.

Diocletian and the Military Restoration of Rome

Diocletian and the Military Restoration of Rome PDF Author: Lee Fratantuono
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526771861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The third century AD was one of unprecedented crisis and chaos for the Roman Empire. Nightmares both internal and external threatened to spell the end of Rome’s thousand-year history. Diocletian was born either a slave or a freedman, and he grew up to become the savior of Rome in her hour of crisis, a powerful military and political leader who transformed the Roman Empire from a hotbed of unceasing strife and turmoil into a renewed, restored, revivified and stable polity. His more than twenty years of power were marked by the ill-fated Great Persecution of the Christians, an undertaking that would prove to be one of the less successful initiatives of his reign, even as in its own way it helped to pave the way for the coming of an equally famous, successful emperor in the person of Constantine the Great. The present study seeks to provide an introduction to the life and times of Diocletian for the general reader, offering a balanced portrait of an immensely talented man in a time of trial and tumult, an accomplished emperor who knew when it was time to retire to his gardens.

The Era of the Martyrs

The Era of the Martyrs PDF Author: Aaltje Hidding
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110689685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
One of the most traumatic experiences of Late Antique Christians was the Great Persecution, begun by Emperor Diocletian and his Tetrarchic colleagues in 303 CE. Here Aaltje Hidding unites research of traditional memory studies with work done by cognitive scientists to examine how they remembered the Persecution. The resulting methodological framework, the ‘cognitive ecology’, systemically studies all what can be covered by this term - social surroundings, cognitive artefacts and the physical environment - and bridges the gap between individual and collective memory. The author analyses the remembrance of the Persecution in three different regions along the Nile river. In Oxyrhynchus, the thousands of papyrus fragments found at the city’s rubbish dump give a vivid image of the martyrs in the daily lives of the Oxyrhynchites. In Antinoopolis, known for the cult of the physician saint Colluthus, she zooms in on the rituals and practices at a martyr’s sanctuary. Finally, in Dandara, the rich hagiographical dossier of the anchorite Paphnutius shows how old memories of the Persecution became mixed with new monastic experiences. The Bohairic and Greek Passion of Paphnutius appear in their first complete English translations.

Posthuman Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Thought

Posthuman Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Thought PDF Author: M. David Litwa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843999
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Ancient theories of posthuman transformation can shape, chasten, and reform modern (biotechnical) theories of posthuman enhancement.