Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity

Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Jeremy M. Schott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.

Empires of Religion

Empires of Religion PDF Author: H. Carey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230228720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A sparkling new collection on religion and imperialism, covering Ireland and Britain, Australia, Canada, the Cape Colony and New Zealand, Botswana and Madagascar. Bursting with accounts of lively characters and incidents from around the British world, this collection is essential reading for all students of religious and imperial history.

Religion and Empire

Religion and Empire PDF Author: Geoffrey W. Conrad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521318969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A provocative, comparative study of the formation and expansion of the Aztec and Inca empires. Argues that prehistoric cultural development is largely determined by continual changes in traditional religion.

God's Empire

God's Empire PDF Author: Hilary M. Carey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
In God's Empire, Hilary M. Carey charts Britain's nineteenth-century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant settler Christianity in British domains. Based on extensive use of original archival and rare published sources, the author explores major debates such as the relationship between religion and colonization, church-state relations, Irish Catholics in the empire, the impact of the Scottish Disruption on colonial Presbyterianism, competition between Evangelicals and other Anglicans in the colonies, and between British and American strands of Methodism in British North America.

Religion, Empire, and Torture

Religion, Empire, and Torture PDF Author: Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226481913
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
How does religion stimulate and feed imperial ambitions and violence? Recently this question has acquired new urgency, and in Religion, Empire, and Torture, Bruce Lincoln approaches the problem via a classic but little-studied case: Achaemenian Persia. Lincoln identifies three core components of an imperial theology that have transhistorical and contemporary relevance: dualistic ethics, a theory of divine election, and a sense of salvific mission. Beyond this, he asks, how did the Achaemenians understand their place in the cosmos and their moral status in relation to others? Why did they feel called to intervene in the struggle between good and evil? What was their sense of historic purpose, especially their desire to restore paradise lost? And how did this lead them to deal with enemies and critics as imperial power ran its course? Lincoln shows how these religious ideas shaped Achaemenian practice and brought the Persians unprecedented wealth, power, and territory, but also produced unmanageable contradictions, as in a gruesome case of torture discussed in the book’s final chapter. Close study of that episode leads Lincoln back to the present with a postscript that provides a searing and utterly novel perspective on the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800

Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800 PDF Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438474350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman, and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography. Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of “connected histories” to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch. “Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the preeminent practitioner of ‘connected histories,’ offers yet another set of fascinating encounters of peoples, objects, ideas, and practices between the Ottoman, Mughal, and British empires. As always, he stays close to the archive, but is nonetheless able to spin a wonderfully imaginative web of pictures and stories. A delightful read.” — Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

Faith in Empire

Faith in Empire PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Foster
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Faith in Empire is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. Elizabeth Foster examines the relationships among French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so she illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India PDF Author: Ângela Barreto Xavier
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438489137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India, Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges—in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.

Muhammad and the Empires of Faith

Muhammad and the Empires of Faith PDF Author: Sean W. Anthony
Publisher:
ISBN: 0520340418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Introduction : the making of the historical Muḥammad -- The earliest evidence -- Muḥammad the Arabian merchant -- The Beginnings of the corpus -- The letters of 'Urwah ibn al-Zubayr -- The court impulse -- Prophecy and empires of faith -- Muḥammad and Cædmon -- Epilogue : The future of the historical Muḥammad.

War, Religion and Empire

War, Religion and Empire PDF Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494015
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
What are international orders, how are they destroyed, and how can they be defended in the face of violent challenges? Advancing an innovative realist-constructivist account of international order, Andrew Phillips addresses each of these questions in War, Religion and Empire. Phillips argues that international orders rely equally on shared visions of the good and accepted practices of organized violence to cultivate cooperation and manage conflict between political communities. Considering medieval Christendom's collapse and the East Asian Sinosphere's destruction as primary cases, he further argues that international orders are destroyed as a result of legitimation crises punctuated by the disintegration of prevailing social imaginaries, the break-up of empires, and the rise of disruptive military innovations. He concludes by considering contemporary threats to world order, and the responses that must be taken in the coming decades if a broadly liberal international order is to survive.

An Empire Divided

An Empire Divided PDF Author: James Patrick Daughton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195374010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
An award-winning book, An Empire Divided tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the tumultuous decades before the First World War.