A survey of Adventist church statements regarding church policy in the North American Division and World Church regarding Climate Change. It will be argued that unlike other policies the Adventist church supports, its statements on Climate Change lack the typical biblical support common for other initiatives and indicates a lack of spiritual…[Read more]

This short-form article explores the various presentations of “the Middle” within Valentinian authored documents (the Gospel of Truth and Gospel of Philip) and sources which report about the Valentinians (Irenaeus and his report about Ptolemy’s theology). It suggests underscores the deep distinctions each view has and suggests that these may be…[Read more]

This essay seeks to introduce briefly the background and idea of what can be called a confrontational approach to theology. It will begin by outlining the biblical background of this often-ignored portrait and then will proceed to outline how this theological approach can breathe new life into various approaches toward God.

In this chapter, a biblical overview of the topic of doubt is provided, focused on the Gospel accounts. A theological argument is made for the necessity and contribution of doubt toward the process of faith.

This chapter traces cross-communal interactions in the fields of medicine, mathematics and what the historical actors called the natural sciences. It discusses various modern interpretations of those interactions and engages with a number of historical problems researchers face when studying the extant sources. After a substantive survey of the…[Read more]

This study juxtaposes the concerns of Catholicos Timothy I (r. 780–823), leader of the Church of the East, with those of al-Jāḥiẓ (about 776–868/9), a popular Muslim writer, regarding the dangers for each community when Christians appear as plaintiffs or defendants in Islamic courts. Timothy’s Canons attempt to obviate some of the reasons…[Read more]

Eine kurze Geschichte der Heiligenverehrung rund um den wichtigsten serbisch-orthodoxen Heiligen. Dargestellt aus einer kultur-anthropologischen Perspektive und im Kontext der politischen Mythologien verschiedener Bewegungen serbischer Identitätsprojekte: vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, von dynastischer Kulturpropaganda bis zum…[Read more]

En el marco de las controversias indianas del siglo XVI, la obra de José de Acosta (1540-1600) refleja una nueva actitud intelectual que, más que plantearse el problema de la legitimidad del dominio español en América o los modos moralmente aceptables de conseguirlo, se enfrenta a la necesidad de asumir los hechos consumados y orientar el fun…[Read more]

The aim of this contribution is to review some of the major areas of current research on the Arabic Bible, along with the factors and trends contributing to them. Also we present some of the tools that are currently under development in the Biblia Arabica team, Munich.

We provide here a very condensed survey of the transmission of traditions,…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

According to Charles Taylor, faith in a secular age is cross-pressured; that is, it is contested by the presence of multiple accounts of belief and unbelief in contemporary Western culture. According to Taylor, these multiple accounts fragilize our own accounts of faith. This fragilization is what nurtures the conditions for believing today and…[Read more]

The new economic realities that arose from the Spanish presence in America produced a lively debate as part of the Indian Controversies of the sixteenth century. Two important theoreticians, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) and the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540-1600) differed from one another in important ways, but n…[Read more]

Review of a book by Giuseppe Marcocci on politics and culture in the Portuguese Empire in the long 15th century.

This chapter explores the survival of a Portuguese presence in Mylapore (today a suburb of Chennai, South India) after the loss of its political and military autonomy. Notions of sovereignty and the boundaries between a pre-colonial and a fully colonial dimension are here questioned on the basis of a little known case study.

Norbert Bar-Le-Duc (1697- 1769), also known as Abbé Jacques Platel, Pierre Parisot, Pierre Curel, traversed identities and continents, making a career out of controversy, becoming knowns as “le fameux Père Norbert”. He worked in South India as a missionary in 1736-1739 and thereafter played a pivotal role in the Malabar Rites controversy. Back…[Read more]

This chapter challenges the idea tha Roberto Nobili was a pioneer of interreligious dialogue and inculturation. On the contrary, it suggests that his interest for our times is rather his theology of religions. A man of the Counter-Reformation, Nobili made propositions as daring as the ones of today’s “Asian theology”.

This article is an archival contribution to the reassessment of the concrete phases of Roberto Nobili’s education. Here I demonstrate that, contrary to what previous historians repeated, Nobili’s involvement with the College Romano was very short. Moreover, I have discovered that, before joining the Society of Jesus, he studied at the Seminario…[Read more]

The Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano, praised for adapting Christianity to the cultures of Japan and China, did not support a similar strategy for India and Africa. He theorized racial hierarchies in which a darker skin was associated with ignorance and vice, whereas the similarity to European physical features implied a higher degree of…[Read more]