Between known men and visible saints

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Charles P. Hanson

In Necessary Virtue Charles P. Hanson explores the disruptive effects of the American Revolution on the religious culture of New England Protestantism. In this book, Hanson raises questions about difference, tolerance, and the role of religious belief in politics and government that help us see the American Revolution in a new light. Necessary Virtue is timely in pointing to the historical contingency and, perhaps, the fragility of the church-state separation that is very much a political and legal issue today.

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Marije Altorf

"Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining offers a new appreciation of Iris Murdoch's philosophy, emphasising the importance of images and the imagination for her thought." "This book is first and foremost a study of Iris Murdoch's philosophical work. It examines how literature and imagination enabled Murdoch to form a philosophical response to the decline of religion. It thus argues that Murdoch is an important philosopher, because she has not confined herself to philosophy. The book also reconsiders various contemporary assumptions about what philosophy is and does. Through Le Doeuff's notion of the philosophical imaginary, it examines the different ways in which images and imagination are part of philosophy."--Jacket.

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H.R. Ellis Davidson

Tiw, Woden, Thunor, Frig... these ancient northern deities gave their names to the very days of our week. Nevertheless most of us know far more of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and the classical deities. Recent researches in archaeology and mythology have added to what was already a fairly consistent picture (largely derived from a twelfth-century Icelandic account) of the principal Scandinavian gods and godesses. This study is the work of a scholar who has long specialized in Norse and Germanic mythology. She describes the more familiar gods of war, of fertility, of the sky and the sea and the dead, and also discusses those most puzzling figures of Norse mythology – Heimdall, Balder and Loki. All these deities were worshipped in the Viking Age, and the author has endeavoured to relate their cults to daily life and to see why these pagan beliefs gave way in time to the Christian faith. **Hilda Ellis Davidson** studied Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse under the Chadwicks at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she took Firsts in English Literature and what was then known as Archaeology and Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in 1940 for a thesis on beliefs about the dead in Old Norse literature. She lectured in English Language and Literature at Royal Holloway College and BirkBeck College in the University of London, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of the Antiquaries in 1950. In 1973 she became a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she was Vice-President from 1975 until 1980. She was president of the Folklore Society from 1973 to 1976, and General Editor of the nineteen Mistletoe Books published between 1974 and 1984. She is married with two children, and ten grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge.

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Gregory J. Riley

An expert on the historical context in which Christianity arose, Riley illuminates the Greco-Roman world of the early Christians, a world steeped in heroic ideals. Jesus was embraced as a new and compelling hero that one could follow into a whole new life of caring community and transcendent hope. Riley boldly asserts that it was only as Christianity became the religion of the empire that the myth of the Apostles' Creed was created, thereby promulgating the illusion that the Apostles had gathered together and agreed upon a core set of doctrines essential to Christian faith. But the reality is that doctrinal orthodoxy was not an issue for the early Christians. Rather, they focused, in quite varied ways, on following Jesus as a model for living. This book not only provides a whole new understanding of the nature of earliest Christianity, but it also conveys a vital message for today about what Christian faith is really about. Riley reveals the authentic character of Christianity as inherently pluralistic and tolerant of diverse ideas while passionately centered in Jesus.