The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

Audio & slides of a paper given at the Colloquium on Avicenna and Avicennisms held at SOAS, University of London, 6–7 June 2014. http://meti.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/home/meti-info/2014-avicenna/ © Gregor Schwarb, 7 June 2014

“Luke’s complex portrayal of ‘the Jews’ in general, and of the Pharisees in particular, reflects a situation in which the lines between Judaism and Christianity were not yet clearly drawn.”

Pre-publication draft (not intended for circulation or citation) of a contribution to a forthcoming edited volume on Narsai of Nisibis. Any comments, suggestions, or corrections are welcome (email to jwalters@rc.edu).

This dissertation considers how Tantrism, a ritual tradition vanished in India and in China, but preserved in modern Japan and Tibet, became a component of the revival of Chinese Buddhism between the two World Wars. Tantrism became appealing to revivalists who, in China’s time of internal war and foreign invasion, sought to recover this lost t…[Read more]

Between January 1969 and the summer of 1975, NASA received over eight million letters and petition signatures supporting the right of American astronauts to free religious expression in space. Prompted by Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s complaints about the reading of Genesis during the flight of Apollo 8, the petition campaign points to the complex…[Read more]

Tibet – end of the legend

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

A short note on a 2012 find from Göbekli Tepe – a seated figurine with an animal on its shoulder.

In July 2013, the recently elected Pope Francis chose Lampedusa for his fist pastoral visit. A tiny island, part of the Sicilian region yet closer to Tunisia than to Italy, Lampedusa has at times become hyper-visible in the media and national discourses surrounding immigration while at other times it is ignored — part of Italy’s geographic and soc…[Read more]

Recent debates about the ethics of identity in a global age have dealt with how to prioritize conflicting local and global allegiances. Guided by these concerns, the fiction of Alice Walker develops a distinctive view of how local cultures and global movements can fruitfully interact. This vision depends on concepts from Asian religions, a major…[Read more]

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

The Baylor-Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christianity series undertook this translation of a monumental synthetic study of ecclesiology in the Gospel of Matthew by notable German scholar Matthias Konradt. Israel, Church, and the Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew is a meticulously researched and provocative challenge to latent anti-Semitism and…[Read more]

Virginia Tech professor Brian Britt presents this far-reaching study on biblical curses and their reception history. Britt’s introduction clearly sets out his goals for the book, especially the importance of distinguishing between the general power of curses in the ancient world and the general profanity of curses in early modern modern Europe and beyond.

University of Lethbridge professor Kevin McGeough presents a meticulous and thorough three-volume series on the reception of Near Eastern culture, his- tory, and art in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Both in the introduction to the first volume and throughout the series, McGeough makes clear the fascination held by Western entities such as…[Read more]

A dictionary length entry on conversion in early Judaism for the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Introductory overview of the legal literature in the Bible