The Oxford History Of Christian Worship

A comprehensive history of the origins and development of Christian worship, from ancient times to the present day, provides a defintive study of the evolution of Christian liturgy, theology, church history, artistic influence, and social and cultural contexts, covering such topics as Russian Orthodoxy, Women in Worship, Liturgical Music, and the Apostolic Tradition.

"At the Origins of Christian Worship" can deepen readers' understanding of early Christian worship by setting it within the context of the Roman world in which it developed. Hurtado highlights the two central characteristics of earliest Christian worship: its exclusive rejection of the ancient-world gods and its inclusion of Christ with God as the focus of devotion.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.

This text re-examines the great variety of liturgical practices in the first four centuries in the light of modern Jewish and Christian scholarship.

Now available in a compact, more convenient format, this book offers the same acclaimed text which first appeared in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. Written by a team of expert scholars, this astonishingly comprehensive volume traces the history of Christianity from the Early Church to the present day exploring every aspect of the faith. The opening section takes events from the earliest Christian communities to 1800, and includes chapters on Eastern Christendom, Christianity and Islam, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the expansion of Christianity. The second section, covering the period from 1800 to the present day, is divided by geographical area and examines the impact of Christianity around the world from Britain and Europe, Africa, India, and the Far East. The final section, considering questions of theology, conscience, and belief, explores new images of the Christian community and provides a glimpse of the future of the faith. Authoritative and readable, The Oxford History of Christianity is essential for anyone interested in the enduring history of one of the world's most vibrant religious traditions.

The Oxford History of Anglicanism is a major new and unprecedented international study of the identity and historical influence of one of the world's largest versions of Christianity. This global study of Anglicanism from the sixteenth century looks at how was Anglican identity constructed and contested at various periods since the sixteenth century; and what was its historical influence during the past six centuries. It explores not just the ecclesiastical and theological aspects of global Anglicanism, but also the political, social, economic, and cultural influences of this form of Christianity that has been historically significant in western culture, and a burgeoning force in non-western societies today. The chapters are written by international exports in their various historical fields which includes the most recent research in their areas, as well as original research. The series forms an invaluable reference for both scholars and interested non-specialists. Volume three of The Oxford History of Anglicanism explores the nineteenth century when Anglicanism developed into a world-wide Christian communion, largely, but not solely, due to the expansion of the British Empire. By the end of this period an Anglican Communion had come into existence as a diverse conglomerate of often competing Anglican identities with their often unresolved tensions and contradictions, but also with some measure of genuine unity. The volume examines the ways the various Anglican identities of the nineteenth century are both metropolitan and colonial constructs, and how they influenced the wider societies in which they formed Anglican Churches.

This is a text-only paperback edition of The Oxford History of the Biblical World. a comprehensive survey of the world from which the Bible emerged. Chronologically ordered, it is an authoritative synthesis written by leading scholars and incorporating the latest archeological discoveries andcurrent methodologies. Chapters present a readable and integrated study of the history, art, architecture, languages, literature, and religion of biblical Israel and early Judaism and Christianity in their larger cultural context. For the paperback edition the maps and tables will remain intact.However, Coogan selects an eight-page black and white insert from the original art program. The art insert compiles the most visually compelling and historical important items that are illustrative of the text.