This volume explores the ubiquity of animals and the remarkable density of animal language in the New Testament and its contemporary world. By situating the New Testament amid ancient discourses and incorporating understanding from the emerging field of Animal Studies, the contributors explorethe insights that emerge when non-human animals and notions of animality take centre stage.By analysing the Classical contexts of the New Testament, the gospe...

This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between re...

China has bulked large in the imagination of the Catholic Church for 500 years. It had been central to the missionary dream of the Jesuits for almost as long. However, only with this book's appearance has the detailed focus of attention shifted to the substantial and neglected period of catholic and Jesuit engagement with china - the almost 120 years from the second arrival of the Jesuits. Matteo Ricci the polymath, Ferdinand Verbeist and Adam Schall von Bell the astronomers and the exquis...

China has bulked large in the imagination of the Catholic Church for 500 years. It had been central to the missionary dream of the Jesuits for almost as long. However, only with this book's appearance has the detailed focus of attention shifted to the substantial and neglected period of catholic and Jesuit engagement with china - the almost 120 years from the second arrival of the Jesuits. Matteo Ricci the polymath, Ferdinand Verbeist and Adam Schall von Bell the astronomers and the exquis...

When we're trapped in the darkness, despair takes control. We desperately need the light. Margaret's nightmarish personal darkness started with the horrors of childhood trauma, were exacerbated by appalling medical abuse but finally, totally, overcome. A loving husband and a simple faith longed for a miracle. In Light Overcoming Darkness, Jason Summers authentically shares his mum's incredible journey and gives us a gentle and kind compass to navigate the storms of emotional hurt and perso...

The New York Times bestseller and definitive history of Christianity for our time—from the award-winning author of The Reformation and SilenceA product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill, Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity goes back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and encompasses the globe. It captures the major turning points in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox history and fills in often neglected ac...

For the Chinese, the drive toward growing political and economic power is part of an ongoing effort to restore China's past greatness and remove the lingering memories of history's humiliations. This widely praised book explores the 1500–1800 period before China's decline, when the country was viewed as a leading world culture and power. Europe, by contrast, was in the early stages of emerging from provincial to international status while the United States was still an uncharted wilderness...

The Chinese Catholic Church traces its living roots back to the late sixteenth century and its historical roots back even further, to the Yuan dynasty. This book explores paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the communities that produced them over several centuries. It argues for the emergence of distinctly Chinese Catholic identities as artistic representations of the Virgin Mary, at different times and in different places, absorbed and in turn influenced representations of Chi...

An overriding assumption has directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus’ was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Raffensperger refutes this, and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, in which Rus’ is understood as part of medieval Europe, and East is not so neatly divided from West.

By 1952 the Chinese Communist Party had suppressed all organized resistance to its regime and stood unopposed, or so it has been believed. Internal party documents—declassified just long enough for historian Paul Mariani to send copies out of China—disclose that one group deemed an enemy of the state held out after the others had fallen. A party report from Shanghai marked “top-secret” reveals a determined, often courageous resistance by the local Catholic Church. Drawing on centuries of e...

The Zondervan Essential Companion to Christian History gives you what it promises: the essentials.Following a brief introduction that outlines the key events of the New Testament era, there is a chapter devoted to each century of Christian history beginning with the year 100 and ending roughly at the year 2000. Each chapter flows chronologically featuring:A brief overview, highlighting the main threads and issues running through the relevant ...

While previous works on the history of Christianity in China have largely centered on the scientific and philosophical areas of Catholic missions in the Middle Kingdom, China's Saints recounts the history of Christian martyrdom, precipitated as it was by cultural antagonisms and misunderstanding. Anthony Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those during the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successfu...