The Divine Image

Although recent scholarship has examined gender issues in Judaism with regard to texts, rituals, and the rabbinate, there has been no full-length examination of the education of Jewish children in day schools. Drawing on studies in education, social science, and psychology, as well as personal interviews, the authors show how traditional (mainly Orthodox) day school education continues to re-inscribe gender inequities and socialize students into unhealthy gender identities and relationships. They address pedagogy, school practices, curricula, and textbooks, as along with single-sex versus coed schooling, dress codes, sex education, Jewish rituals, and gender hierarchies in educational leadership. Drawing a stark picture of the many ways both girls and boys are molded into gender identities, the authors offer concrete resources and suggestions for transforming educational practice.

For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. A scholar of poetry as well as a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Advent. Among the classic writers he includes are: George Herbert, John Donne, Milton, Tennyson,and Christina Rossetti,as well as contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and Grevel Lindop. He also includes a selection of his own highly praised work.

"Drawing from topics of religion in India such as bhakti, puja rituals, and spirit posessions, these essays offer a close study of the physical representations of god as the central feature of Hinduism. A valuable tool for students of anthroplogy and the philosophy and history of religion." --

Although relatively obscure during his lifetime, William Blake has become one of the most popular English artists and writers, through poems such as “The Tyger” and “Jerusalem,” and images including The Ancient of Days. Less well-known is Blake’s radical religious and political temperament and that his visionary art was created to express a personal mythology that sought to recreate an entirely new approach to philosophy and art. This book examines both Blake’s visual and poetic work over his long career, from early engravings and poems to his final illustrations, to Dante and the Book of Job. Divine Images further explores Blake’s immense popular appeal and influence after his death, offering an inspirational look at a pioneering figure.

John Wesley strived for a theology--a theology both written and lived--that delicately balanced sanctification and justification. He hoped to uphold both "faith alone" and "holy living." Sadly, says theologian H. Ray Dunning, many of Wesley's followers have not maintained that balance. Some have tended toward legalism, some toward a preoccupation with personal holiness, and others toward social activism with little theological grounding. Dunning believes Wesleyanism possesses the resources to help all Christians "reflect the divine image," and to do so holistically, in all aspects of life. His book incisively examines issues of ethical methodology and then shows how an ethic based on the "Imago Dei" shapes our relation to God, to one another and to the earth. This introduction to and overview of ethics will enlighten and benefit Christians in all traditions, not despite but especially because it is written in the true Wesleyan tradition--passionate, profoundly faithful and plainspoken.

In AD 726, the Byzantine emperor ordered the destruction of all icons, or religious images, throughout the empire, and icons were subject to an imperial ban that was to last, with a brief remission, until AD 843. A defender of icons, St John of Damascus wrote three treatises against "those who attack the holy images." He differentiates between the veneration of icons, which is a matter of expressing honor, and idolatry, which is offering worship to something other than God.