The Bible: A Very Short Introduction

Author(s):  
John Riches

The Bible: A Very Short Introduction explore the material, cultural, and religious history of the Bible. The Bible is both one of the most read and the most influential books in the world. Its stories form the heart of Western civilization, while biblical language is interwoven into literature and everyday speech. As a source of shared Abrahamic beliefs, it has both drawn communities together and given them new life and fuelled bitter disputes. This VSI examines how the books of the Bible have been read and interpreted by different communities across the centuries, including post-colonial and feminist readings of the Bible. It also surveys the Bible’s role in art, music, poetry, and politics.

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-175
Author(s):  
Warseto Freddy Sihombing

AbstractNo one can be justified before God for doing good deeds. No matter how good a man is, if he does not believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, he will not be saved from the wrath of God to come. There is no human being who is right before God, and no sinful man can save himself in any way. The only way out is in the way that God has given to the problem of all sinners, by sending Jesus Christ to the world to die for sinners. "And for this he came, so that every man believed in him, who was sent by God" (John 6:29). The Bible teaches that salvation is only obtained because of faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the object of that faith. This salvation is known as the statement "Justified by faith. Paul explained this teaching in each of his writings. This teaching of justification by faith has been repeatedly denied by some people who disagree with Paul's opinion. The history of the church from the early centuries to the present has proven the variety of understandings that have emerged from this teaching, but one important thing is that sinful humans are justified by their faith in Jesus Christ before God.Keywords: Paul;history; justified by faith.AbstrakTidak ada seorang pun yang dapat dibenarkan di hadapan Allah karena telah melakukan perbuatan baik. Sebaik apa pun manusia, jika dia tidak percaya kepada Yesus Kristus, Anak Allah maka ia tidak akan selamat dari murka Allah yang akan datang. Tidak ada seorang pun manusia yang benar di hadapan Allah, dan tidak ada seorang manusia berdosa yang dapat menyelematkan dirinya sendiri dengan cara apa pun. Satu-satunya jalan keluar adalah dengan cara yang Allah telah berikan untuk masalah semua orang berdosa, yaitu dengan mengutus Yesus Kristus ke dunia untuk mati bagi orang berdosa. “Dan untuk itulah Dia datang, yaitu supaya setiap orang percaya kepada Dia, yang telah diutus oleh Allah” (Yohanes 6:29). Alkitab mengajarkan bahwa keselamatan hanya diperoleh karena iman kepada Yesus Kristus. Yesus Kristus adalah obyek iman tersebut. Keselamatan ini dikenal dengan pernyataan “Dibenarkan karena iman. Paulus menjelaskan ajaran ini dalam setiap tulisannya. Ajaran pembenaran oleh iman ini telah berulang kali disangkal oleh beberap orang yang tidak setuju dengan pendapat Paulus. Sejarah gereja mulai dari abad permulaan sampai pada masa sekarang ini telah membuktikan beragamnya pemahaman yang muncul terhadap ajaran ini, namun satu hal yang terpenting adalah bahwa manusia berdosa dibenarkan oleh iman mereka kepada Yesus Kristus di hadapan Allah.Kata Kunci: Paulus; sejarah; iman; dibenarkan oleh iman.


2021 ◽  

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions – from plastics to the digital to biotechnology – have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th Century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st Century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds.


Author(s):  
Seth Perry

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.


Author(s):  
Ellen Lockhart

This book considers the history of aesthetics by taking into account not only theories of the arts but also the rich fabric of practices relating to the world of performing bodies onstage and the music that sounded alongside them and was made by them—the works of art, music, and theater that were conspicuously about art-objecthood. The introduction sketches the broader fashion for animated statues described in the book, asking what readers can hope to gain from a detailed account of this historical phenomenon that was situated at (or near) the emergence of modern aesthetic thought, as well as the birth of a musical canon.


2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.


Author(s):  
Janny H.C. Leung

Having explored how official multilingualism has emerged as a product of historical and sociopolitical development, this chapter moves on to survey the extent of the phenomenon in the contemporary world. The data set offers a panoramic view of jurisdictions around the world that are officially bilingual or multilingual. Although there is not enough room to provide a detailed history of any particular jurisdiction, the chapter annotates the data and makes a number of generalized observations. The global data provide a sense of scale that speaks for itself and allow one to observe patterns and trends that help make sense of the phenomenon. Although linguistic demographics and the ideology of linguistic nationalism have a role to play, they are insufficient to explain the data. Official multilingualism is largely a post-colonial legacy, but there is also an emergent trend that official language policy responds to market forces under late capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 233-246
Author(s):  
Alain Bresson

Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome marks the thunderous entry of Nature into the world of ancient history of the twenty-first century. This is not the first book devoted to questions of climate and diseases in the ancient world, but its publication nonetheless represents a turning point. From now on, whether they work on political, social, economic, or even religious history, ancient historians will no longer be able to ignore these factors in their own writings. That is not to say that all the theses of the book, especially its natural determinism, should be accepted uncritically.


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