Reflections On Religious Individuality

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Reflections on Religious Individuality

Author : Jörg Rüpke,Wolfgang Spickermann
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2012-07-04
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110286786

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Reflections on Religious Individuality by Jörg Rüpke,Wolfgang Spickermann Pdf

This volume will concentrate its search for religious individuality on texts and practices related to texts from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity. Texts offer opportunities to express one’s own religious experience and shape one’s own religious personality within the boundaries of what is acceptable. Inscriptions in public or at least easily accessible spaces might substantially differ in there range of expressions and topics from letters within a sectarian religious group (which, at the same time, might put enormous pressure on conformity among its members, regarded as deviant by a majority of contemporaries). Furthermore, texts might offer and advocate new practices in reading, meditating, remembering or repeating these very texts. Such practices might contribute to the development of religious individuality, experienced or expressed in factual isolation, responsibility, competition, and finally in philosophical or theological reflections about “personhood” or “self”. The volume develops its topic in three sections, addressing personhood, representative and charismatic individuality, the interaction of individual and groups and practices of reading and writing. It explores Jewish, Christian, Greek and Latin texts.

Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity

Author : Eric Rebillard,Jorg Rupke
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780813227436

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Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity by Eric Rebillard,Jorg Rupke Pdf

To understand the past, we necessarily group people together and, consequently, frequently assume that all of its members share the same attributes. In this ground-breaking volume, Eric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke bring renowned scholars together to challenge this norm by seeking to rediscover the individual and to explore the dynamics between individuals and the groups to which they belong.

Religious Deviance in the Roman World

Author : Jörg Rüpke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107090521

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Religious Deviance in the Roman World by Jörg Rüpke Pdf

Offers a new reading of the ancient sources in order to find indications for religious deviance practices in the Roman world.

On Roman Religion

Author : Jörg Rüpke
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2016-10-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501706790

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On Roman Religion by Jörg Rüpke Pdf

Provocative reading for anyone interested in Roman culture in the late Republic and early Empire.― Religious Studies Review Was religious practice in ancient Rome cultic and hostile to individual expression? Or was there, rather, considerable latitude for individual initiative and creativity? Jörg Rüpke, one of the world’s leading authorities on Roman religion, demonstrates in his new book that it was a lived religion with individual appropriations evident at the heart of such rituals as praying, dedicating, making vows, and reading. On Roman Religion definitively dismantles previous approaches that depicted religious practice as uniform and static. Juxtaposing very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individuality with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections, Rüpke highlights the dynamic character of Rome’s religious institutions and traditions. In Rüpke’s view, lived ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright deviance as it is about attempts and failures to establish or change rules and roles and to communicate them via priesthoods, practices related to images or classified as magic, and literary practices. Rüpke analyzes observations of religious experience by contemporary authors including Propertius, Ovid, and the author of the "Shepherd of Hermas." These authors, in very different ways, reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their readership or audiences. Rüpke also concentrates on the ways in which literary texts and inscriptions informed the practice of rituals.

Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis

Author : Mattias Brand
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2022-05-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004510296

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Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis by Mattias Brand Pdf

Published in Open Access with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Winner of the Manfred Lautenschläger Award! Religion is never simply there. In Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis, Mattias Brand shows where and when ordinary individuals and families in Egypt practiced a Manichaean way of life. Rather than portraying this ancient religion as a well-structured, totalizing community, the fourth-century papyri sketch a dynamic image of lived religious practice, with all the contradictions, fuzzy boundaries, and limitations of everyday life. Following these microhistorical insights, this book demonstrates how family life, gift-giving, death rituals, communal gatherings, and book writing are connected to our larger academic debates about religious change in late antiquity.

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World

Author : Rubina Raja,Jörg Rüpke
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781444350005

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A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World by Rubina Raja,Jörg Rüpke Pdf

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World presents a comprehensive overview of a wide range of topics relating to the practices, expressions, and interactions of religion in antiquity, primarily in the Greco-Roman world. • Features readings that focus on religious experience and expression in the ancient world rather than solely on religious belief • Places a strong emphasis on domestic and individual religious practice • Represents the first time that the concept of “lived religion” is applied to the ancient history of religion and archaeology of religion • Includes cutting-edge data taken from top contemporary researchers and theorists in the field • Examines a large variety of themes and religious traditions across a wide geographical area and chronological span • Written to appeal equally to archaeologists and historians of religion

Making Amulets Christian

Author : Theodore de Bruyn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2018-01-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780191075902

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Making Amulets Christian by Theodore de Bruyn Pdf

Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice—the writing of incantations on amulets—changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians. This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.

Belief and Cult

Author : Jacob L. Mackey
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2022-08-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691233147

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Belief and Cult by Jacob L. Mackey Pdf

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions. At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things. Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

Religious Individualisation

Author : Martin Fuchs,Antje Linkenbach,Martin Mulsow,Bernd-Christian Otto,Rahul Bjørn Parson,Jörg Rüpke
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 1058 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110580938

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Religious Individualisation by Martin Fuchs,Antje Linkenbach,Martin Mulsow,Bernd-Christian Otto,Rahul Bjørn Parson,Jörg Rüpke Pdf

This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Author : Emma-Jayne Graham
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2020-11-09
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781351982443

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Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy by Emma-Jayne Graham Pdf

This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand ‘religion’ to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

Moment of Reckoning

Author : Ellen Muehlberger
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2019-03-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190459178

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Moment of Reckoning by Ellen Muehlberger Pdf

Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying, not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge's court, but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. The majority of these imagined scenarios linked the quality of the experience to the moral state of the person who died. Death was no longer the "happy ending," in Judith Perkins's words, it had been to Christians of the first three centuries, an escape from the difficult and painful world. Instead, death was most often imagined as a terrifying, desperate experience. This book is the first to trace how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one's actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. Because late ancient Christian culture valued the use of the imagination as a religious tool and because Christian teachers encouraged Christians to revisit the prospect of their deaths often, this novel description of death was more than an abstract idea. Rather, its appearance ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one's death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was, at first glance, meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one's life tends to sharpen one's scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Once established, it shifted the ethics of Christianity as a tradition. This is because death repeatedly and frequently imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas about what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian assumption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of the capacity to authorize violence against others. The thinking about death traced here thus contributed to the seemingly paradoxical situation in which Christians proclaimed their identity with a crucified person, yet were willing to use force against their ideological opponents.

Material Approaches to Roman Magic

Author : Adam Parker,Stuart McKie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2018-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781785708824

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Material Approaches to Roman Magic by Adam Parker,Stuart McKie Pdf

This second volume in the new TRAC Themes in Roman Archaeology series seeks to push the research agendas of materiality and lived experience further into the study of Roman magic, a field that has, until recently, lacked object-focused analysis. Building on the pioneering studies in Boschung and Bremmer's (2015) Materiality of Magic, the editors of the present volume have collected contributions that showcase the value of richly-detailed, context-specific explorations of the magical practices of the Roman world. By concentrating primarily on the Imperial period and the western provinces, the various contributions demonstrate very clearly the exceptional range of influences and possibilities open to individuals who sought to use magical rituals to affect their lives in these specific contexts – something that would have been largely impossible in earlier periods of antiquity. Contributions are presented from a range of museum professionals, commercial archaeologists, university academics and postgraduate students, making a compelling case for strengthening lines of communication between these related areas of expertise.

Religion and its History

Author : Jörg Rüpke
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000381122

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Religion and its History by Jörg Rüpke Pdf

Religion and its History offers a reflection of our operative concept of religion and religions, developing a set of approaches that bridge the widely assumed gulf between analysing present religion and doing history of religion. Religious Studies have adapted a wide range of methodologies from sociological tool kits to insights and concepts from disciplines of social and cultural studies. Their massive historical claims, which typically idealize and reify communities and traditions, and build normative claims thereupon, lack a critical engagement on the part of the researchers. This book radically rethinks and critically engages with these biases. It does so by offering neither an abridged global history of religion nor a small handbook of methodology. Instead, this book presents concepts and methods that allow the analysis of contemporary and past religious practices, ideas, and institutions within a shared framework.

TRAC 2015

Author : Matthew Mandich,Sergio Gonzalez Sanchez,Giacommo Savini,Eleonora Zampieri
Publisher : Oxbow Books
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2016-05-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781785702884

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TRAC 2015 by Matthew Mandich,Sergio Gonzalez Sanchez,Giacommo Savini,Eleonora Zampieri Pdf

The 2015 TRAC proceedings feature a selection of 14 papers summing up some of the key sessions presented at the conference held at the University of Leicester in March 2015, which drew over 180 delegates of 17 nationalities from a variety of universities, museums, and research institutions in the UK, Europe, and North America. As this conference marked the 25th anniversary of TRAC, the volume opens with a preface commemorating the last 25 years with an eye toward the future direction of both conference and community. The proceedings begin with Dr Andrew Gardner’s keynote paper on the topic of ‘Debating Roman Imperialism: Critique, Construct, Repeat?’. This is followed by an array of papers with topics ranging in geographic scope and period, from small finds in early Roman Britain to bathing practices Late Antique North Africa, and from the investigation of deviant burials to the application of urban scaling theory in Roman contexts. Because of this diversity the volume is not broken into specific sections, however, papers with similar themes are grouped accordingly, allowing the text to flow and be read as a whole. The range of contributing authors is also of note, as papers were submitted by PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and university faculty, all helping to make the 25th anniversary of this series one that continues to emphasis and reflect the aims of TRAC, both as a conference and as a conduit for exploring more theory-driven approaches to the Roman past.

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

Author : Jennifer Otto
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2018-04-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780192552549

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Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings by Jennifer Otto Pdf

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."