Richard Valantasis

This book is a collection of nearly seventy Late Antique primary religious texts that constitute a comprehensive view of religious practice in Late Antiquity. This sourcebook includes discussions of asceticism, religious organization, ritual, martyrdom ...

Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice

Vincent L. Wimbush

From meditation and fasting to celibacy and anchoritism, the ascetic impulse has been an enduring and complex phenomenon throughout history. Offering a sweeping view of this elusive and controversial aspect of religious life and culture, Asceticism looks at the ascetic impulse from a unique vantage point. Cross-cultural, cross-religious, and multidisciplinary in nature, these essays provide a broad historical and comparative perspective on asceticism--a subject rarely studied outside the context of individual religious traditions. The work represents the input of more than forty preeminent scholars in a wide range of fields and disciplines, and analyzes asceticism from antiquity to the present in European, Near Eastern, African, Asian, and North American settings. Asceticism is organized around four major themes that cut across religious traditions: origins and meanings of asceticism, which explores the motivations and impulses behind ascetic behaviors; hermeneutics of asceticism, which looks at texts and rhetorics and their presuppositions; aesthetics of asceticism, which documents responses evoked by ascetic impulses and practices, as well as the arts of ascetic practices themselves; and politics of asceticism, which analyzes the power dynamics of asceticism, especially as regards gender, cultural, and ethnic differences. Critical responses to the major papers ensure the focus upon the themes and unify the discussion. Two general addresses on broad philosophical and historical-interpretive issues suggest the importance of the subject of asceticism for wide-ranging but serious cultural-critical discussions. An Appendix, Ascetica Miscellanea, includes six short papers on provocative topics not related to the four major themes, and a panel discussion on the practices and meanings of asceticism in contemporary religious life and culture. A selected bibliography and an index are also included. The only comprehensive reference work on asceticism with a multicultural, multireligious, and multidisciplinary perspective, Asceticism offers a model not only for an understanding of a most important dimension of religious life, but also for future interdisciplinary study in general.

Asceticism

Spirituality is always developed and nurtured in community, and communities have particular spiritualities. Dazzling Bodies promotes practices and performances as the basis for individual and community spiritual formation by analyzing specific experiences and real-life situations in personal and corporate life. Three bodies are delineated as the basis for spiritual formation: the physical body, the social body, and the corporate body. Drawing on theories of communication (semiotics, social semiotics, and narrative theory), the book examines personal and corporate spiritual formation, both by plotting the ways community systems create solidarity, and by analyzing community systems for the modulation of power at work. Dazzling Bodies explores the development of a specific language system for each community, taking the sermon as the primary instrument of community formation. Liturgy and worship receive special attention. A theory of asceticism, based on specific performances, founded in renewed social relationships, and forming an alternative symbolic universe, provides parameters for individual and corporate spiritual formation.

Rethinking Spirituality and Community Formation

Dazzling Bodies

Janet F. Carlson

James D. Smith

Deborah J. Haynes

One of the great joys of the academic life is to pay homage in a Festschrift to a scholar who has influenced both colleagues and students over years of interaction and friendship both professional and personal. This volume honors a scholar and theologian of historical theology, a theorist and a practitioner of religion and the arts, and a keen analyst of cultural trends both ancient and modern. . . . [Margaret R.] Miles's prodigious production as a scholar has legendary qualities. Her dozen-plus books alone explore history, patristics, ancient philosophy, art and art history, spiritual formation and religious practice, critical theory, film, ethics and values, personal growth, gender and women's studies, as well as her true academic loves, Augustine and Plotinus. . . . The breadth and depth of her own work and her influence upon others demands an expansive volume, which the editors of this Festschrift unfortunately had to restrict to four categories--Historical Theology, Religion and Culture, Religion and Gender, and Religion and the Visual Arts--in order to capture the heart of our appreciation for her. --from the Introduction

Richard Valantasis

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