Yor B Beliefs And Sacrificial Rites

A comprehensive and essential field reference, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America reveals the spiritual landscape in the American Archaic period. Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America describes, illustrates, and offers nondogmatic interpretations of rituals and beliefs in Archaic America. In compiling a wealth of detailed entries, author Cheryl Claassen has created both an exhaustive reference as well as an opening into new archaeological taxonomies, connections, and understandings of Native American culture. The material is presented in an introductory essay about Archaic rituals followed by two sections of entries that incorporate reports and articles discussing archaeological sites; studies of relevant practices of ritual and belief; data related to geologic features, artifact attributes, and burial settings; ethnographies; and pilgrimages to specific sites. Claassen’s work focuses on the American Archaic period (marked by the end of the Ice Age approximately 11,000 years ago) and a geographic area bounded by the edge of the Great Plains, Newfoundland, and southern Florida. This period and region share specific beliefs and practices such as human sacrifice, dirt mound burial, and oyster shell middens. This interpretive guide serves as a platform for new interpretations and theories on this period. For example, Claassen connects rituals to topographic features and posits the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as a major stimulus to Archaic beliefs. She also expands the interpretation of existing data previously understood in economic or environmental terms to include how this same data may also reveal spiritual and symbolic practices. Similarly, Claassen interprets Archaic culture in terms of human agency and social constraint, bringing ritual acts into focus as drivers of social transformation and ethnogenesis. Richly annotated and cross-referenced for ease of use, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America will benefit scholars and students of archaeology and Native American culture. Claassen’s overview of the archaeological record should encourage the development of original archaeological and historical connections and patterns. Such an approach, Claassen suggests, may reveal patterns of influence extending from early eastern Americans to the Aztec and Maya.

Scholars of religion have long assumed that ritual and belief constitute the fundamental building blocks of religious traditions and that these two components of religion are interrelated and interdependent in significant ways. Generations of New Testament and Early Christian scholars have produced detailed analyses of the belief systems of nascent Christian communities, including their ideological and political dimensions, but have by and large ignored ritual as an important element of early Christian religion and as a factor contributing to the rise and the organization of the movement. In recent years, however, scholars of early Christianity have begun to use ritual as an analytical tool for describing and explaining Christian origins and the early history of the movement. Such a development has created a momentum toward producing a more comprehensive volume on the ritual world of Early Christianity employing advances made in the field of ritual studies. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual gives a manifold account of the ritual world of early Christianity from the beginning of the movement up to the end of the fifth century. The volume introduces relevant theories and approaches; central topics of ritual life in the cultural world of early Christianity; and important Christian ritual themes and practices in emerging Christian groups and factions.

Ritual Studies have achieved prominence since the 1980s, when interest in ritual as an object of inquiry was established, bridging over a number of humanities and social science disciplines. Both connected with religious studies and independent of it; overlapping with social and cultural anthropology, but also with history; related to science and health practices and ranging across the life course to education, Ritual Studies has come to encompass studies of change and dynamism in social life. Rituals are determinate in form, but not static. They enunciate distinctive social values within specific contexts that frame them; and they relate to the wider concerns and issues of their practitioners. Due to this broad and wide-ranging scope, it is often difficult to find a single resource on Ritual Studies, and even more so to find one which moves beyond the beginnings of anthropological theorizing to grapple with the present-day contexts of ritual. Bringing together recent ethnographies of ritual practice and ritualization from across the globe, this Handbook provides case study of ritual in the light of Emotion and Cognition, Identity, Religious Power, Performance and Literature, Ecology and Ecological Disaster, Media, and other topics. While each chapter provides a deep ethnography of a specific society, ritual, or ritualized practice, each also engages with current theoretical and substantive approaches to the relevant topic. The scholars collected here provide original synoptic and indicative pieces as guideposts and pathways through the complex, varied and cross-disciplinary, and vast landscape of scholarship that constitutes Ritual Studies today and points to developments in the future.

In his Apostolic Exhortation "Evangelii Nuntiandi", Pope Paul VI explores the connections between the practises of evangelization and the social, economic and political advancement of human affairs. The author, Jude Okocha, agrees with Paul VI that the church should not ignore the importance of the problems in the society in which we live, namely those concerning justice, liberation, development and peace in the world. Okocha points out that in evangelizing one takes very seriously the social context of the evangelized, since, after all, this is the whole issue of inculturation or contextualization of theology. This way, the content of theology - God - remains the same. Only the manner of expression differs. One can approve the contextualization of theology, but that does not imply compromising the deposit of faith.

A History of Modern Drama: Volume II explores a remarkable breadth of topics and analytical approaches to the dramatic works, authors, and transitional events and movements that shaped world drama from 1960 through to the dawn of the new millennium. Features detailed analyses of plays and playwrights, examining the influence of a wide range of writers, from mainstream icons such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, to more unorthodox works by Peter Weiss and Sarah Kane Provides global coverage of both English and non-English dramas – including works from Africa and Asia to the Middle East Considers the influence of art, music, literature, architecture, society, politics, culture, and philosophy on the formation of postmodern dramatic literature Combines wide-ranging topics with original theories, international perspective, and philosophical and cultural context Completes a comprehensive two-part work examining modern world drama, and alongside A History of Modern Drama: Volume I, offers readers complete coverage of a full century in the evolution of global dramatic literature.

This volume brings together sixteen articles on the religions, literatures and histories of South and Central Asia in tribute to Patrick Olivelle, one of North America's leading Sanskritists and historians of early India. An exceptionally prolific scholar, Olivelle's best-known works include 'Manu's Code of Law' (2005), 'The Early Upaniṣads' (1998) and 'The Āśrama System' (1993). Over the last four decades, the focus of his scholarship has been on the ascetic and legal traditions of India, but his work as both a researcher and a teacher extends beyond early Indian religion and literature. 'Religion and Identity and South Asia and Beyond' is a testament to that influence. The contributions in this volume, many by former students of Olivelle, are committed to linguistic and historical rigor, combined with sensitivity to how the study of Asia has been changing over the last several decades. Several of the essays examine the construction of religious and cultural identity (whether among Brahmins, Buddhists, Dalits or Muslims), while others are concerned particularly with problems of historical reconstruction and textual interpretation.