This book was passed as a PhD thesis at Bayreuth University, Germany. The author challenges African Biblical scholars and Christian leaders to premise Biblical interpretation on the experiences of the often neglected underclasses. The author argues that from a comparative historical, cultural and material methodological point of view, the experiences of the Zimbabwean underclasses whose collect…
The study investigates the resilience of Shona religion and culture among ZAOGA Pentecostal Christians. It endeavours to establish whether the Pentecostal Christians in Zimbabwe, through a case study of ZAOGA, have embraced aspects of Shona traditional religion and culture. Through an application of phenomenological-comparative approach as well as fieldwork, the study confirms continuity, chang…
Lying on the border between eastern and western Christendom, Orthodox Karelia preserved its unique religious culture into the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was described and recorded by Finnish and Karelian folklore collectors. This colorful array of ritulas and beliefs involving nature spirits, saints, the dead, and pilgrimage to monasteries represented a unigue fusion of official Church ri…
Mythic discourses in the present day show how vernacular heritage continues to function and be valuable through emergent interpretations and revaluations. At the same time, continuities in mythic images, motifs, myths and genres reveal the longue durée of mythologies and their transformations. The eighteen articles of Mythic Discourses address the many facets of myth in Uralic cultures, from t…
This collection of close textual reading by scholars in a variety of areas, including rabbinics, Jewish history, education, Hebrew literature, Yidish literature, America Jewish literature, is a tribute to Arnold Band. Each Essay constitutes a new and original reading of a text. The texts analyzed are drawn from a wide range of genres: talmudic legal texts, hasidic tales, folklore, as well as mo…
This volume presents a translation and exegesis of Mishnah's Tractate Kilayim (Mixed Species) in an effort to discover the original meaning of the tractate. This volume aims to identify the sense which the formulators of the tractate's laws wished their rules to convey.
The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was the primary Jewish philanthropic umbrella organization until it was combined with another philanthropic organization in 1999. Using original archival research, this volume traces the history of the UJA from its origins to 1982.
This volume examines the role of intention in the Mishnah. What role does intention play in fulfillment of God's commandments according to the rabbis of Late Antiquity?
In The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen (2000), Michael Zank argues that the idea of atonement serves as a key for understanding the larger philosophy of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). Zank situates his sensitive and wide-ranging philosophical evaluation of Cohen within the intellectual and social milieu within which Cohen wrote. The book contains a…
This volume consists of papers (or the offspring of papers) that were delivered by the Hellenistic Judaism section of the 1990 and 1991 annual meetings of the Society for Biblical Literature. In recognition of the fact that so little work had been down on the subject, presenters were not asked to focus on a single set of questions, a single body of evidence, or utilize a single methodology. Rat…