Religion : Judaism

Archaeology has unearthed the glories of ancient Jewish buildings throughout the Mediterranean. But what has remained shrouded is what these buildings meant. Building Jewish surveys the architecture of small rural villages in Galilee in the early Roman period before examining the development of synagogues as Jewish associations. Building Jewish also explores Jerusalem's flurry of building activity under Herod the Great in the first century BCE. Richardson's careful work not only documents the culture that forms the background to any study of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, but it also succeeds in demonstrating how architecture itself, like a text, conveys meaning-thus directly illuminating daily life and religious thought in the ancient world. more...

Price: $39.95

Middle Platonism explained how a transcendent principle could relate to the material world by positing an intermediary, modeled after the Stoic active cause, that mediated the supreme principle’s influence to the world while preserving its transcendence. Having similar concerns as Middle Platonism, Hellenistic Jewish sapientialism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism appropriated this intermediary doctrine as a means for understanding their relationship to God and to the cosmos. However, these traditions vary in their adaptation of this teaching due to their distinctive understanding of creation and humanity’s place therein. The Jewish writings of Philo of Alexandria and Wisdom of Solomon espouse a holistic ontology, combining a Platonic appreciation for noetic reality with an ultimately positive view of creation and its place in human fulfillment. The early Christians texts of 1 Cor 8:6, Col 1:15-20, Heb 1:2-3, and the prologue of John provide an eschatological twist to this ontology when the intermediary figure finds final expression in Jesus Christ. Contrarily, Poimandres (CH 1) and the Apocryphon of John, both associated with the traditional rubric “Gnosticism”, draw from Platonism to describe how creation is antithetical to human nature and its transcendent source. more...

Price: $137.00

Written by twenty-four leading scholars from the fields of religious studies, history, literature, philosophy, art history, sociology, and musicology, The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism is an accessible title that adopts an inclusive perspective on Jewish religious experience for this diasporic community. more...

Price: $23.00

From the ninth to the fifteenth centuries Jewish thinkers, influenced by Islamic theological speculation, classical philosophers and Christian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, philosophized about Judaism. The essays in this comprehensive Companion present all the major Jewish thinkers of the period and the philosophical and non-philosophical contexts of their thoughts. more...

Price: $24.00

The myth of a Masonic-Jewish alliance to subvert Christian culture held considerable sway over Catholics in 1930s Poland as elsewhere. This book examines how, following Vatican policy, Polish church leaders resisted separation of church and state in the name of Catholic culture. more...

Price: $44.95