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Author: J. Edward Wright
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195348494
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
When we think of "heaven," we generally conjure up positive, blissful images. Heaven is, after all, where God is and where good people go after death to receive their reward. But how and why did Western cultures come to imagine the heavenly realm in such terms? Why is heaven usually thought to be "up there," far beyond the visible sky? And what is the source of the idea that the post mortem abode of the righteous is in this heavenly realm with God? Seeking to discover the roots of these familiar notions, this volume traces the backgrounds, origin, and development of early Jewish and Christian speculation about the heavenly realm -- where it is, what it looks like, and who its inhabitants are. Wright begins his study with an examination of the beliefs of ancient Israel's neighbors Egypt and Mesopotamia, reconstructing the intellectual context in which the earliest biblical images of heaven arose. A detailed analysis of the Hebrew biblical texts themselves then reveals that the Israelites were deeply influenced by images drawn from the surrounding cultures. Wright goes on to examine Persian and Greco-Roman beliefs, thus setting the stage for his consideration of early Jewish and Christian images, which he shows to have been formed in the struggle to integrate traditional biblical imagery with the newer Hellenistic ideas about the cosmos. In a final chapter Wright offers a brief survey of how later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions envisioned the heavenly realms. Accessible to a wide range of readers, this provocative book will interest anyone who is curious about the origins of this extraordinarily pervasive and influential idea.
Author: J. Edward Wright
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195348494
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book
Book Description
When we think of "heaven," we generally conjure up positive, blissful images. Heaven is, after all, where God is and where good people go after death to receive their reward. But how and why did Western cultures come to imagine the heavenly realm in such terms? Why is heaven usually thought to be "up there," far beyond the visible sky? And what is the source of the idea that the post mortem abode of the righteous is in this heavenly realm with God? Seeking to discover the roots of these familiar notions, this volume traces the backgrounds, origin, and development of early Jewish and Christian speculation about the heavenly realm -- where it is, what it looks like, and who its inhabitants are. Wright begins his study with an examination of the beliefs of ancient Israel's neighbors Egypt and Mesopotamia, reconstructing the intellectual context in which the earliest biblical images of heaven arose. A detailed analysis of the Hebrew biblical texts themselves then reveals that the Israelites were deeply influenced by images drawn from the surrounding cultures. Wright goes on to examine Persian and Greco-Roman beliefs, thus setting the stage for his consideration of early Jewish and Christian images, which he shows to have been formed in the struggle to integrate traditional biblical imagery with the newer Hellenistic ideas about the cosmos. In a final chapter Wright offers a brief survey of how later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions envisioned the heavenly realms. Accessible to a wide range of readers, this provocative book will interest anyone who is curious about the origins of this extraordinarily pervasive and influential idea.
Author: Jasper Becker
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 1783017856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
A startling, eye-opening account of a fascinating and decisive moment in Chinese history, packed with evocative stories. Jasper Becker tells the story of why and how China's leaders set about to destroy and rebuild one of the world's greatest cities and how many of the residents tried to stop it and protect their great architectural legacy.
Author: Neil Asher Silberman
Publisher: Booksales
ISBN: 9780785813248
Category : Cabala
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
The ancient Jewish spiritual tradition of Kabbalah is shown to be far more than an otherworldly, occult way of knowledge -- it is a direct, often revolutionary response to the tyranny of earthly potentates and kings.
Author: Joshua Gilder
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1400031761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Heavenly Intrigue is the fascinating, true account of the seventeenth-century collaboration between Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe that revolutionized our understanding of the universe–and ended in murder.One of history’s greatest geniuses, Kepler laid the foundations of modern physics with his revolutionary laws of planetary motion. But his beautiful mind was beset by demons. Born into poverty and abuse, half-blinded by smallpox, he festered with rage, resentment, and a longing for worldly fame. Brahe, his mentor, was a flamboyant aristocrat who had spent forty years mapping the heavens with unprecedented accuracy–but he refused to share his data with Kepler. With Brahe’s untimely death in Prague in 1601, rumors flew across Europe that he had been murdered. But it took twentieth-century forensics to uncover the poison in his remains, and the detective work of Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder to identify the prime suspect–the ambitious, envy-ridden Kepler himself. A fast-paced, true-life account that reads like a thriller, Heavenly Intrigue is a remarkable feat of historical re-creation.
Author: Emma Moody Powell
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 0802491456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This volume is the only biography of the life associate of the great evangelist, D. L. Moody. The sweet strength of Mrs. Moody’s life is portrayed here by her granddaughter, whose access to letters and records of family and intimate friends gives the book its human interest. This book reveals Mrs. Moody’s share in the destiny of her era, describing a period that “belongs to any history of the social and religious life of the Western world.”
Author: William Wayne Farris
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684172977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
“In a government, military matters are the essential thing,” said Japan’s “Heavenly Warrior,” the Emperor Temmu, in 684. Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan’s early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai. Enhanced by illustrations and maps, and with a new preface by the author, this book will be indispensable for students of military history and Japanese political history.
Author: Bart D. Ehrman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501136747
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Over half of Americans believe in a literal heaven, in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. Ehrman shows that eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament, and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught. He recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. Ehrman shows that competing views were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. -- adapted from jacket
Author: Abbas-Kuli-aga Bakikhanov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The Heavenly Rose-Garden is a fascinating portrait of the Caucasus at the dawn of the modern era. Written in Persian and completed in 1845, it offered the first look at the region by a native son, 'Abbas Qoli Aqa Bakikhanov. It remains the only dedicated history of Shirvan and Daghestan to this day and also contains a great deal of interesting information about the Caucasus in general during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bakikhanov demonstrates that despite differences in language, religion, and ethnicity, all the peoples of the Caucasus traveled a similar historical road and, to some extent, shared an identity distinct from the Ottoman Turks and Persians of adjacent, larger states. Translated for the first time into English by two eminent historians, The Heavenly Rose-Garden is a mine of information for scholars studying the region and an engrossing read for anyone else. 'Abbas Qoli Aqa Bakikhanov was an Azerbaijani journalist, linguist, poet and philosopher. A scion of the Khan of Baku, he was born there in 1794. From 1820 to 1845 he served as a secretary and translator in the Russian army, which had taken over most of the Caucasus in previous decades. Throughout this time he traveled widely, carried out ethnographic studies and kept his ties with the literary establishment of the Caucasus, centered in Tiflis in present-day Georgia. He died in 1847. Willem Floor has published numerous works of history as well as translations. Among them: Public Health in Qajar Iran; Agriculture in Qajar Iran; The History of Theater in Iran; The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities; The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs; Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin's Travels Through Northern Persia 1770-1774, and his most recent book, A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran. Hasan Javadi is the author or translator of many books, including Satire in Persian Literature; Persian Literary Influence on English Literature; Forough Farrokzad's Another Birth and Other Poems; and in Persian, European Travelers in Iran. Retired from Cambridge and Berkeley, Dr. Javadi has recently published a translation of the work of Obeyd-e Zakani, Ethics of Aristocrats and other Satirical Stories, and edited Letters from Tabriz by E. G. Browne.
Author: Fulvio Tomizza
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226807898
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
It is a winter morning in Venice, in 1622. Muted voices drift through a thin wall next door. Her curiosity aroused, a young woman peers through a crack in the door, only to witness a strange and disturbing sight: a woman and a priest secretly celebrating communion. Troubled by what she sees, she reports the incident at confession. Her revelation leads to the arrest, jailing, and arraignment of the two for heresy before the Venetian Holy Office of the Inquisition. So begins Fulvio Tomizza's absorbing account of the true story of Maria Janis, a devout peasant woman from the mountains north of Bergamo. Too poor to enter a convent, Maria had set out to serve God by relinquishing the little she had, through renunciation of all food but the bread and wine of communion. Encouraged by the restless village priest Pietro Morali, Maria claimed to have existed in this sanctified state for five years. During this time, she, Morali, and the weaver Pietro Palazzi travel from a little village in the Alps to Rome and then to Venice, where their alleged sacrilege is discovered and they are brought to trial. Both revered as a saint and reviled as a fraud, Maria with her "privilege" inspires and threatens believers within the Church. Combining the historian's precision with the novelist's imagination, Tomizza painstakingly reconstructs her story, crafting a fascinating portrait of sublimated love, ambition, and jealousy. Heavenly Supper alternates a chronological account of the trial with analyses of each protagonist's life history. Along the way, Tomizza gives voice to the minds and hearts of his characters, allowing them to speak for themselves in their own words. The world he recreates resonates with the fervor of the Counter Reformation when faith and its consequences were rigidly controlled by the Church. As suspenseful as a detective novel, Tomizza's story goes beyond the trial to evoke a panoramic view of seventeenth-century Italian culture.
Author: Thomas H. Reilly
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Occupying much of imperial China’s Yangzi River heartland and costing more than twenty million lives, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was no ordinary peasant revolt. What most distinguished this dramatic upheaval from earlier rebellions were the spiritual beliefs of the rebels. The core of the Taiping faith focused on the belief that Shangdi, the high God of classical China, had chosen the Taiping leader, Hong Xiuquan, to establish his Heavenly Kingdom on Earth. How were the Taiping rebels, professing this new creed, able to mount their rebellion and recruit multitudes of followers in their sweep through the empire? Thomas Reilly argues that the Taiping faith, although kindled by Protestant sources, developed into a dynamic new Chinese religion whose conception of its sovereign deity challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese empire. The Taiping rebels denounced the divine pretensions of the imperial title and the sacred character of the imperial office as blasphemous usurpations of Shangdi’s title and position. In place of the imperial institution, the rebels called for restoration of the classical system of kingship. Previous rebellions had declared their contemporary dynasties corrupt and therefore in need of revival; the Taiping, by contrast, branded the entire imperial order blasphemous and in need of replacement. In this study, Reilly emphasizes the Christian elements of the Taiping faith, showing how Protestant missionaries built on earlier Catholic efforts to translate Christianity into a Chinese idiom. Prior studies of the rebellion have failed to appreciate how Hong Xiuquan’s interpretation of Christianity connected the Taiping faith to an imperial Chinese cultural and religious context. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom shows how the Bible--in particular, a Chinese translation of the Old Testament--profoundly influenced Hong and his followers, leading them to understand the first three of the Ten Commandments as an indictment of the imperial order. The rebels thus sought to destroy imperial culture along with its institutions and Confucian underpinnings, all of which they regarded as blasphemous. Strongly iconoclastic, the Taiping followers smashed religious statues and imperially approved icons throughout the lands they conquered. By such actions the Taiping Rebellion transformed--at least for its followers but to some extent for all Chinese--how Chinese people thought about religion, the imperial title and office, and the entire traditional imperial and Confucian order. This book makes a major contribution to the study of the Taiping Rebellion and to our understanding of the ideology of both the rebels and the traditional imperial order they opposed. It will appeal to scholars in the fields of Chinese history, religion, and culture and of Christian theology and church history.
