Defining The Holy

Holy sites, both public - churches, monasteries, shrines - and more private - domestic chapels, oratories - populated the landscape of medieval and early modern Europe, providing contemporaries with access to the divine. These sacred spaces thus defined religious experience, and were fundamental to both the geography and social history of Europe over the course of 1,000 years. But how were these sacred spaces, both public and private, defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time, and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions from the point of view of archaeology, architectural and art history, liturgy, and history to consider the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane. Exploring the establishment of sacred space within both the public and domestic spheres, as well as the role of the secular within the sacred sphere, each chapter provides fascinating insights into how these concepts helped shape, and were shaped by, wider society. By highlighting these issues on a European basis from the medieval period through the age of the reformations, these essays demonstrate the significance of continuity as much as change in definitions of sacred space, and thus identify long term trends which have hitherto been absent in more limited studies. As such this volume provides essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ecclesiastical development of western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

In this 2005 book, leading historians examine sanctity and sacred space in Europe during and after the religious upheavals of the early modern period.

The history of the transmission of the biblical text is definitely an empirical subject, for it has left in its trail textual evidence, much of it available for research and evaluation. Thanks to the great advances in philology in general, the discipline of biblical philology has been released from the bonds of religious polemics and has become an important tool for straightforward, literal interpretation, with Protestant researchers leading the way. Revealing the Holy Spirit in Humans: Stories from the Bible is meant to be a continued adherence to the popular historical interpretation of the sanctity of the Holy Spirit in particular and not as a disregard for the available textual evidence in the contemporary Christian doctrine. The theme in the book is to convey that Jesus gave the Holy Spirit as a compensation for his absence, to perform the functions to advance our goals, which he would have done if he had remained personally with us. An exploration has been made of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives starting with the church, the congregation and the composition of its human talents, and the personalities and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. In the process, I have been compelled to apply imaginative emendation to the question of life after death. This book is intended to provide a foundation for Bible study by groups and persons interested in Christianity.

We Believe in the Holy Spirit is a collection of articles reflecting some of the most important ideas in pneumatology in recent years. Although the articles were not written to fit the articles of the Nicene Creed (381), linking these articles to the articles of the creed sheds imaginative light on the development of ideas in theologies of the Spirit.

Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, focuses on the unique ways that natural materials carry the spirit of place. Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Academic discourse has indiscriminately grouped material tokens from holy places and their containers with architectural and topographical emulations, two-dimensional images and bodily relics. However, unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials do not describe or interpret the Holy Land; they are part of it. Tangible and timeless, they realize the meaning of their place of origin in new locations. What makes earth, stones or bottled water transported from holy sites sacred? How do they become pars pro toto, signifying the whole from which they were taken? This book will examine natural media used for translating loca sancta, the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning. It will address their metamorphosis, natural or induced; how they change the environment to which they are transported; their capacity to translate a static and distant site elsewhere; the effect of their relocation on users/viewers; and how their containers and staging are used to communicate their substance.

Central to God’s character is the quality of holiness. Yet, even so, most people are hard-pressed to define what God’s holiness precisely is. Many preachers today avoid the topic altogether because people today don’t quite know what to do with words like “awe” or “fear.” R. C. Sproul, in this classic work, puts the holiness of God in its proper and central place in the Christian life. He paints an awe-inspiring vision of God that encourages Christian to become holy just as God is holy. Once you encounter the holiness of God, your life will never be the same.

This volume promotes a pragmatic, anti-essentialist and anti-hegemonic approach to the problem of the definition of religion. It argues that definitions of religion are context-bound strategies for pursuing a variety of purposes, extra-academic as well as academic. Religions being immensely varied, complex and multi-functional phenomena, they need to be studied by several academic disciplines from many different perspectives. It is, therefore, legitimate and useful that many definitions of religions are developed. The volume has contributions from scholars in Philosophy of Religion, the Comparative Study of Religions, Anthropology of Religion, Sociology of Religion and Psychology of Religion. It has chapters on the polemics of defining religion in modern contexts, the history of the concept of religion, and the methodology of its definition; it includes several definition proposals.