This study of Montanism is the first in English since 1878. It takes account of a great deal of scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refers to the epigraphical evidence. Dr Trevett questions some of the most cherished assumptions about Montanism. She covers the origins, development and slow demise, using sources from Asia Minor, Rome, North Africa and elsewhere and pays particular attention to women within the movement. The rise of Montanism was important in the history of the early church. This prophetic movement survived for centuries after its beginnings in the second half of the second century and was a challenge to the developing catholic tradition. Christine Trevett looks at its teachings and the response of other Christians to it. To an unusual degree Montanism allowed public religious activity and church office to women.

As the Sun of Suns Rose: The Darkness of the Creeds Was Dispelled is the first of the eight books of Sehje Rachio Khalsa of Harinder Singh Mehboob, who had written it in a revealed and metaphysical approach after a continuous meditative study for thirty to thirty-five years of world religions, prophets, philosophy, history, psychology, mythology, world folklore, and the different forms of literature as the world epic, divine poetry, fiction, drama, and different types of prose of the elite genius of the world. In this large book, the poet/writer raises so many questions about the decline of world religions with the passage of time, the concept of pure history, the concept of death, the concept of greater holy war, the concept of pure nature, the concept of ecstasy (vismad), the concept of eternal victory, etc. In this book, he describes the answer to the above questions in detail in the most convincing ways. In this worlds history of more than four thousand years, this book can be compared only with very few books that are authorized as distinctive classics as the Bezels of Wisdom by Ibn al-Arabi, The Awakening of Faith by Ashav Ghousha, Kashful Majub by Data Ganj Hujbiri, etc.

A true story of violence and punishment that illuminates a transformative moment in Guatemalan history On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order. Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.

The idea of saints and sainthood are familiar to all, irrelevant of religious faith. In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Yarrow looks at the origins, ideas, and definitions of sainthood, sanctity, and saints in the early Church, tracing their development in history and explaining the social roles saints played in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Along the way Yarrow considers the treatment of saints as objects of literary and artistic expression and interpretation, and as examples of idealised male and female heroism, and compares Christian saints and holy figures to venerated figures in other religious cultures, including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He concludes by considering the experiences of devotees to saints, and looking at how saints continue to be a powerful presence in our modern world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

First published in 1938, this book made a significant contribution to the scholarship on mysticism by approaching the problems of mysticism from the theological angle adopted by the church fathers and medieval scholastics. Seeking to strike a balance with the psychological method, Stolz began his study with an examination not of John of the Cross or Teresa de Avila, but of St. Paul's account of his rapture. Stolz's analysis clarified the theological foundation of mysticism and its development in the ecclesiastical tradition, with his assertion that "mysticism is built on the sacramental and therefore the liturgical life, and is thus bound up intrinsically with Christian life, of which it is the conscious intensification and perfection."

First published in 1938, this book made a significant contribution to the scholarship on mysticism by approaching the problems of mysticism from the theological angle adopted by the church fathers and medieval scholastics. Seeking to strike a balance with the psychological method, Stolz began his study with an examination not of John of the Cross or Teresa de Avila, but of St. Paul's account of his rapture. Stolz's analysis clarified the theological foundation of mysticism and its development in the ecclesiastical tradition, with his assertion that "mysticism is built on the sacramental and therefore the liturgical life, and is thus bound up intrinsically with Christian life, of which it is the conscious intensification and perfection."

Sebastians pierced with arrows, self-portraits of the aging Rembrandt, and the tortured art of Vincent van Gogh. Exploring the tender, complex rapport between art and pain, Spivey guides us through the twentieth-century photographs of casualties of war, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and back to the recorded horrors of the Holocaust.".

Martyrdom is a phenomenon common to many of the world's religious traditions. But why? In this study, John Soboslai offers insights into the practices of self-sacrifice within specific sociopolitical contexts. Providing a new understanding of martyrdom through the lens of political theology, he analyzes discourses and performances in four religious traditions during social and political crises, beginning with second-century Christianity in Asia Minor, where the term 'martyr' first took its meaning. He also analyzes Shi'a Islam in the 1980s, when 'suicide bombing' first appeared as a strategy in West Asia; global Sikhism during World War I, where martyrs stood for and against the British Raj; and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhism, where self-immolators used their bodies in opposition to the programs of the People's Republic of China. Presenting a new theory of martyrdom linked to constructions of sovereign authority, Soboslai reveals common features of self-sacrifice and demonstrates how bodily performances buttress conceptions of authority.

Martyrs' Mirror examines the folklore of martyrdom among seventeenth-century New England Protestants, exploring how they imagined themselves within biblical and historical narratives of persecution. Memories of martyrdom, especially stories of the Protestants killed during the reign of Queen Mary in the mid-sixteenth century, were central to a model of holiness and political legitimacy. The colonists of early New England drew on this historical imagination in order to strengthen their authority in matters of religion during times of distress. By examining how the notions of persecution and martyrdom move in and out of the writing of the period, Adrian Chastain Weimer finds that the idea of the true church as a persecuted church infused colonial identity. Though contested, the martyrs formed a shared heritage, and fear of being labeled a persecutor, or even admiration for a cheerful sufferer, could serve to inspire religious tolerance. The sense of being persecuted also allowed colonists to avoid responsibility for aggression against Algonquian tribes. Surprisingly, those wishing to defend maltreated Christian Algonquians wrote their history as a continuation of the persecutions of the true church. This examination of the historical imagination of martyrdom contributes to our understanding of the meaning of suffering and holiness in English Protestant culture, of the significance of religious models to debates over political legitimacy, and of the cultural history of persecution and tolerance.