"The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples shed light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement of foreigners in those societies (and on foreigners concomitant integration or non-integration), but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well."--BOOK JACKET.

Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the ideological traditions that shaped a religious community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state--albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price. Paschalis Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing developments such as the translation of modern authors into Greek; the scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and a powerful countermovement. He shows how Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais converged with currents of the European Enlightenment, and demonstrates how the Enlightenment's confrontation with Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped present-day Greece. When the nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive moment is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.

"Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal" reads Galatians 2:11-15 and 3:26-29 through the lens of the 19th-20th century experiences of French colonialism by the Diola people in Senegal, West Africa, and portrays the Apostle Paul as a "'sociopostcolonial hermeneut who acted on his self-understanding as God s messenger to create, through faith in the cross of Christ, free communities' -- a self-definition that is critical of ancient Graeco-Roman and modern colonial lore that justify colonization as a divine mandate." Aliou C. Niang ingeniously compares the colonial objectification of his own people by French colonists to the Graeco-Roman colonial objectifications of the ancient Celts/Gauls/Galatians, and Paul's role in bringing about a different portrayal.