Westar Studies

Human societies live and breathe through their myths. A myth is not a simple story; it is the complex social reasoning of a people, a way of making sense of the world. Burton Mack calls this reasoning "social logic," and as a master of ancient Rome and the rise of Christianity, he knows that the Western experience has been embedded in the Christian myth as its "big picture" narrative. But what happens when the big picture becomes fragmented and when an old myth loses its ability to function in a new world order? Mack is convinced that at the heart of contemporary political crises lies the need to create a new myth beyond the grand narratives and lingering fragments history has given us. Mack invites his reader to think historically about the present, and imaginatively about the future, in this important book about ourselves.

Civilization is often equated with the story of human advancement and progress. Yet it is also the story of human oppression, exploitation, war, and empire. In our own time, modern global civilization has brought us to the brink of planetary destruction. By offering an understanding of our past, this book aims to provide a stimulus to considering a different future. Our Shadowed World considers how we have been brought to this point. It describes how the fragmented and conflicted state of humanity has 'progressed' from the earliest city-states to the devastation of world war and holocaust--how civilization has brought its own form of savagery. What beliefs have underlain and motivated human action? How have humans tried to understand their world? Driven by the relentless quest for power, by greed, and by extreme beliefs, the human enterprise today has placed the very idea of civilization under threat, the subject of radical questioning. Despite a new ecological awareness dedicated to saving the planet from civilization's carelessness, and a preoccupation with the nature of apocalyptic thinking, a question mark looms over the very survival of humanity in its present state--a question mark that now overshadows the world.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This first volume focuses on selected historical afterlives of Jesus, including the Pantokrator of Byzantium and the Aryan Jesus of Nazi Germany. This collection is not an exercise in Christian apologetics, nor is it an interfaith project-except in the sense that many of the contributors are from a Christian context of some kind, while others are from other contexts. The contributors include scholars in relevant fields, as well as religious practitioners reflecting on Jesus in their own cultural and religious settings. While the essays are original work that is grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language so the information is accessible to intelligent nonspecialists.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice, and world religion during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This second volume focuses on the diverse interfaith afterlives of Jesus. Moving beyond the explicitly Christian afterlives traced in volume one, this set of essays explores how Jesus has significant afterlives in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Ruism and Mormonism, as well as selected secular afterlives in progressive Christianity. The contributors include religion scholars from the respective traditions, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own religious context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social just and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This third volume focuses on the diverse afterlives of Jesus within contemporary culture and the arts. Moving beyond the explicitly religious afterlives traced in the first two volumes, this set of essay traces selected afterlives of Jesus within Indigenous cultures around the Pacific, as well as in the arts and in the contested fields of gender and sexuality. The contributors include religion scholars from diverse cultural contexts, as well as faith practitioners reflecting on Jesus within their own particular context. While the essays are all grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language that is accessible to interested nonspecialists.

Over the first eight centuries CE, the religious cultures of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and many European lands transformed. Worship of "the gods" largely gave way to the worship of YHWH, the God of Israel, under Christianity and Islam, both developments of contemporary Judaism, after Rome destroyed Judaism's central shrine, the Jerusalem Temple, in 70 CE. But concomitant changes occurred within contemporary Judaism. The events of 70 wiped away well-established Judaic institutions in the Land of Israel, and over time the authority of a cadre of new "masters" of Judaic law, life, and practice, the "rabbis," took hold. What was the core, professional-like profile of members of this emerging cadre in the late second and early third centuries, when this group first attained a level of stable institutionalization (even if not yet well-established authority)? What views did they promote about the authoritative basis of their profile? What in their surrounding and antecedent sociocultural contexts lent prima facie legitimacy and currency to that profile? Geared to a nonspecialist readership, What Were the Early Rabbis? addresses these questions and consequently sheds light on eventual shifts in power that came to underpin Judaic communal life, while Christianity and Islam "Judaized" non-Jews under their expansive hegemonies.

There are many fine philosophical and theological engagements with the works of John Caputo. He is one of our most serious philosophical theologians. But he's also hilariously funny. To read Caputo is to encounter someone who wants to move you, to grasp your attention, your humor, your creativity, because what he's looking for is not another philosophical couch potato. He's looking for someone who's open to being moved to put down the book--even his book, especially his book--and risk reaching out to help another--one who is other, one at the margins of this culture. He's interested in the kind of courage that there is far too little of, and conventional religion, he suggests, has more than its share of the blame. The more familiar one becomes with his work, the more one wonders why Caputo--in all his emphasis upon hermeneutics and responsiveness to the call of the other--seemed not to see, or perhaps want to claim, the many rhetorical gifts in his possession, the many rhetorical gifts at work in his writing. Even as Caputo is a master of all things hermeneutical, he claims ignorance on all things rhetorical--viewing the word itself through an old lens of adding mere ornamentation, what he calls "rouge" to beautify the basic claim. Bringing the last forty years of work in rhetorical studies to bear on Caputo's texts, the author has written this book in hopes of convincing Caputo and his many students that he made--whether he sees it or not--what can only be called the Rhetorical Turn in philosophy and theology.

John Dominic Crossan is the most important scholar on the historical Jesus since David Fredrick Strauss in the nineteenth century. Both his scholarly The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and the more popular Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) made the bestsellers list. But the scope of his work goes well beyond the historical Jesus to studies on the death of Jesus and anti-Semitism, Christianity and empire, archaeology, the apostle Paul the Pharisee, and recently apocalyptic and the environment. He addresses both scholarly and popular audiences, ancient sources and contemporary concerns. The essays in this volume explore and access the range of his work for his various audiences. Some of the essays are scholarly in tone, while others are quite personal. A feature of this book is Crossan's complete curriculum vitae.

The psychological process of denial involves refusing to see what is in front of us, and for some time we have been struggling to shape master narratives to encompass climate breakdown. Jesus' longer parables offer insight into the possibilities that are hidden within the hierarchies of power. Through the work of understanding the experiences of all the parable actors, we are invited to practice the empathy required to face the global challenges of the twenty-first century.

Buried for more than a thousand years in the sands of Egypt, the Secret Revelation of John has stayed a secret far longer than it should have. Even now, more than seventy-five years after its discovery in 1945, it eludes easy understanding even as it shines with the message of God's loving presence amid suffering and violence. Illuminating the Secret Revelation of John is the first study written for the curious public, as well as for scholars who have not yet plumbed its depths. The ancient Secret Revelation of John unearths three gems of healing wisdom that have been encrusted in a millennium of doubt and theological limitation. This new work explores the many facets of these gems with a historical setting and background, a contemporary paraphrase, and a study section that invites pondering of and conversation about new questions to explore.