Spiritual Grammar identifies a genre of religious literature that until now has not been recognized as such. In this surprising and theoretically nuanced study, F. Dominic Longo reveals how grammatical structures of language addressed in two medieval texts published nearly four centuries apart, from distinct religious traditions, offer a metaphor for how the self is embedded in spiritual reality. Reading The Grammar of Hearts (Nahw al-qulūb) by the great Sufi shaykh and Islamic scholar 'Abd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī (d. 1074) and Moralized Grammar (Donatus moralizatus) by Christian theologian Jean Gerson (d. 1429), Longo reveals how both authors use the rules of language and syntax to advance their pastoral goals. Indeed, grammar provides the two masters with a fresh way of explaining spiritual reality to their pupils and to discipline the souls of their readers in the hopes that their writings would make others adept in the grammar of the heart.

What does it mean for the spirit world to be real? Scholars from different disciplines investigate this topic focusing on the role played by the spiritual realm in Pentecostalized Africa. The grammatical angle of their research proves to be a fruitful avenue to clarify the kind of reality or realities the spirit world has. This novel approach takes us beyond most existing research by investigating the often unaddressed assumption that we know what it means for the spirit world to be taken as real. This volume shows the importance of paying close attention to the grammar according to which people speak of spirits, Spirit, witchcraft, ancestors and other aspects of the spirit world.

In this wise and charming book, Lawrence Weinstein explores how self-expression reveals the psyche and how changing language can change lives. In chapters like “Tolerating Ambiguity” and “Getting Out of One’s Own Way,” he describes how the proper use of an element of punctuation or syntax, even the simple reversal of an object and subject, can help one become a whole human being. Clear examples, amusing anecdotes, and telling quotes support Weinstein's technique for teaching self-improvement through improved grammar.

Between the years 350 and 500 a large body of Latin artes grammaticae emerged, educational texts outlining the study of Latin grammar and attempting a systematic discussion of correct Latin usage. These texts—the most complete of which are attributed to Donatus, Charisius, Servius, Diomedes, Pompeius, and Priscian—have long been studied as documents in the history of linguistic theory and literary scholarship. In Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World, Catherine Chin instead finds within them an opportunity to probe the connections between religious ideology and literary culture in the later Roman Empire. To Chin, the production and use of these texts played a decisive role both in the construction of a pre-Christian classical culture and in the construction of Christianity as a religious entity bound to a religious text. In exploring themes of utopian writing, pedagogical violence, and the narration of the self, the book describes the multiple ways literary education contributed to the idea that the Roman Empire and its inhabitants were capable of converting from one culture to another, from classical to Christian. The study thus reexamines the tensions between these two idealized cultures in antiquity by suggesting that, on a literary level, they were produced simultaneously through reading and writing techniques that were common across the empire. In bringing together and reevaluating fundamental topics from the fields of religious studies, classics, education, and literary criticism, Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World offers readers from these disciplines the opportunity to reconsider the basic conditions under which religions and cultures interact.

This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. Several thousand distinct languages are currently spoken across the globe, each with its own grammatical system and its own selection of diverse grammatical structures. Comprehensive reference grammars offer a basis for understanding linguistic diversity and can provide a unique perspective into the structure and social and cognitive underpinnings of different languages. Alexandra Aikhenvald describes the means of collecting, analysing, and organizing data for use in this type of grammar, and discusses the typological parameters that can be used to explore relationships with other languages. She considers how a grammar can made to reflect and bring to life the society of its speakers through background explanation and the judicious choice of examples, as well as by showing how its language, history, and culture are intertwined. She ends with a full glossary of terms and guidance for those wanting to explore a particular linguistic phenomenon or language family. The Art of Grammar is the ideal resource for students and teachers of linguistics, language studies, and inductively-oriented linguistic, cultural, and social anthropology.

Fully updated and revised, this fourth edition of Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar explains the principles of systemic functional grammar, enabling the reader to understand and apply them in any context. Halliday's innovative approach of engaging with grammar through discourse has become a worldwide phenomenon in linguistics. Updates to the new edition include: Recent uses of systemic functional linguistics to provide further guidance for students, scholars and researchers More on the ecology of grammar, illustrating how each major system serves to realise a semantic system A systematic indexing and classification of examples More from corpora, thus allowing for easy access to data Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, Fourth Edition, is the standard reference text for systemic functional linguistics and an ideal introduction for students and scholars interested in the relation between grammar, meaning and discourse.

A Grammar of Christian Faith is a two-volume set that aims to confront the widespread disarray in the language and practices of Christian faith today. As a 'grammar,' it explains how Christian faith provides special ways of speaking and acting that make sense of human life by giving it meaning, practicality, and hope. It advances the thesis that learning how to speak Christian language in worship and life is crucial to learning how to be a Christian. Rather than supposing that Christian language and theology need continual updating in order to be relevant to the world, Jones urges the church to recover anew how Christian concepts and understanding are intended to form Christian life in all its rich depths. Construing theology as confessional theology in the context of the church, Jones understands the church as that liberative and redemptive community called into being by the Gospel of Jesus Christ to witness in word and deed the triune God for the benefit of the world. The full range of doctrinal themes that are deemed essential to the witness of the church are explored, including clear explanations of why they are essential and how they are to be understood. In pursuit of a truthful and beneficial witness of the church, the work centers on a trinitarian understanding of God, in which God freely and lovingly interacts with the world as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. The work throughout affirms the belief that the gracious triune God is the Ultimate Companion who will redeem all creation.

The present volume is a result of an international symposium on the encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, which was organized by Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College in June 2017. In Asia, Protestants encountered a mixed Jesuit legacy: in South Asia, they benefited from pioneering Jesuit ethnographers while contesting their conversions; in Japan, all Christian missionaries who returned after 1853 faced the equation of Japanese nationalism with anti-Jesuit persecution; and in China, Protestants scrambled to catch up to the cultural legacy bequeathed by the earlier Jesuit mission. In the Americas, Protestants presented Jesuits as enemies of liberal modernity, supporters of medieval absolutism yet master manipulators of modern self-fashioning and the printing press. The evidence suggests a far more complicated relationship of both Protestants and Jesuits as co-creators of the bright and dark sides of modernity, including the public sphere, public education, plantation slavery, and colonialism.