BRILL
Polemical encounters; esoteric discourse and its others.
When religion meets religion, the result can be peaceful apologetics, controversy and debate, or war. In these 12 essays contributors describe responses to western esotericism and the polemics that result. Their papers on Kabbalah cover the place of Jewish mystic Pico in anti-Jewish polemics and Christian Kabbalah, Christian orthodoxy and Jewish Kabbalah in Russia, Adorno's Kabbalah, and the polemics of academic scholars of Jewish mysticism against those practicing Kabbalah, while those on issues of heresy analyze polemics against images in western esotericism, the relations of alchemy to piety and theosophy to orthodox Christianity, and shifting identities in suspect groups such as in the multiple identities of Salomo Semler. Issues within modern culture include the place of Guénon within traditionalist polemics, the case of dowsers and their skeptics' responses, responses of New Age practitioners to the Gospel of Thomas, and the external and internal polemics of modern witchcraft. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The politics of language in Chinese education, 1895-1919.
Kaske's (Chinese studies, Frankfurt U.) text makes available to a wider audience the thesis completed for her doctoral work in Chinese studies at Heidelberg U. in 2006. The author examines the origins of the "literary revolution" proclaimed in 1917 by Hu Shi (1891-1962), Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), and others in the new culture magazine Zin Quingnian, an event which Kaske considers the beginning of the promotion and elaboration of the vernacular written language by leading intellectuals, and a milestone in the development of the modern Chinese standard language. Focusing on the key role played by education in the debates on language, the study covers the period from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 to the establishment of the Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language — the country's first permanent language planning institution — in April 1919. The text features an extensive selected bibliography, index and glossary. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Political violence and the international community; developments in international law and policy.
Samuels (Constitution-Building Processes program at International IDEA, "an inter-governmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide") analyzes the response of the "international community" to recent political violence taking the forms of civil conflicts or coups d'état and considers their implication for evolving norms of international policy and law. He provides an overview of the practice of the United Nations Security Council to 32 situations and offers three case studies of responses of states and regional organizations to conflict in Sierra Leone, Côte D'Ivoire, and Liberia before turning to analysis of normative trends concerning prohibitions of political violence against a democratic government and prohibitions on violence to gain political power. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The pot-king; the body and technologies of power.
Anthropologist Warnier takes a sensori-motor approach to understanding sacred kingship, as exemplified by the king of Mankon in western Cameroon. The present king is trained as an agricultural engineer, is a businessman, and a national politician, but takes part in the traditional rituals and practices, which have to do with the sanctity of his body rather than what he or anyone else thinks about anything. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Proceedings of the Boston area colloquium in ancient philosophy, v.22, 2006.
Six papers, and commentaries on them, are from various meetings of the Colloquium during the 2005-06 academic year. A seventh, by Eric Brown, was printed in the previous volume, but without footnotes, so is printed here again in full. The topics this year include force and compulsion in Aristotle's ethics; consciousness and introspection in Plotinus and Augustine; and goat-stags, philosopher-kings, and eudaimonism in the Republic. Only names are indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Psalms and prayers; proceedings.
The two previous joint meetings investigated the historical and prophetic literature of the Old Testament, while this one looked at the poetic literature. The 15 papers selected for publication discuss such topics as the Ark and the Cherubim in the Psalms, whether idols are hiding in Psalm 139:20, the demarcation of hymns and prayers in the Prophets, the prayer of Isaiah and the sundial of Ahaz in 2 Kings 20:11, and prayer and practice in the Psalms. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Reading other-wise: socially engaged biblical scholars reading with their local communities.
Examples of biblical scholarship when trained biblical scholars and non-scholarly readers of the Bible collaborate are demonstrated in 12 essays that privilege voices on the periphery of world power. The authors, all in the first group of course, are from Africa, Brazil, India as well as Europe and the US. Their topics include conversational biblical hermeneutics and theologies, how the woman who anointed Jesus became a victim of Luke's redactional and theological principles, and the Bible in British urban theology. There is no index. The hardbound edition of this work is published by Brill; the paperbound is published by the Society of Biblical Literature. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Recovering nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible.
This valuable collection of 14 essays reveals works directed by women to peers who were entirely domestic, involved in religious education or leadership, or committed to social advocacy. Editors deGroot (religion, Calvin College) and Taylor (Old Testament, Wycliffe College) offer a strong introduction to efforts to recover women's work in biblical interpretation, and essay topics include Sarah Trimmer's compassionate commentary for the unlearned, Harriet Beecher Stowe's skillful blend of the domestic and the scholarly, Florence Nightingale's private approach to public motherhood, Josephine Butler's subtle understanding of the place of social involvement, Christina Rossetti's particularly female approach to prophecy, and Elizabeth Wordsworth's contributions beyond the "muscular Christianity" of the Oxford Movement. The hardbound edition is published by Brill; the paperbound is publised by the Society of Biblical Literature. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Religion and society; an agenda for the 21st century.
From the March 2005 World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, held in Tokyo, 25 papers — some responses to others — explore conflict and peace. They look at the religious dimensions of war and peace; technology, life, and death; global religions and local cultures; boundaries and segregations; method and theory in the study of religion, and the study of religion in Japan. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The relationship between Roman and local law in the Babatha and Salome Komaise archives; general analysis and three case studies on law of succession, guardianship, and marriage.
In the 1960s, in a three-chambered cave on the western shore of the Dead Sea, excavators discovered two sets of family archives along with skeletons and other artifacts dating from a second-century Jewish revolt against the Romans. The documents clearly described legal issues related to child custody, inheritance and marriage. Independent scholar Oudshoorn closely examines and compares the documents to discern how Roman law actually affected family life, describing external and internal evidence about the law behind the documents and taking as case studies the legal position of daughters in matters of succession, guardianship of women and children, marital relationships within Hellenistic and Jewish law, and legal attitudes toward premarital cohabitation. The result is a remarkably accessible analysis of exactly how much impact Roman legal policies and practices had on the lives of second-century Jews and on the development of their own legal systems. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Religion, globalization, and culture.
For all the talk of globalization and all the talk of religion, there is very little being said about the relationship between them, except mention of various forms of fundamentalism. Here contributors identified only by name explore these relationships in 27 essays. They cover theoretical and global perspectives, religious institutions, key issues, and regional particularizations. Specific topics include sub-Saharan Africa, religious opposition to globalization, new religious movements, and conceptual boundaries and the marginalization of religious practices. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Religion past & present; encyclopedia of theology and religion; v.3: Chu-Deu.
Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart was first published in 1909- 13 by Mohr Siebeck; this is a translation and adaptation of the fourth German edition, of 1998-2005. Some editing was done for the English translation, including the removal of short articles mainly of interest to a German audience, and the addition of articles on figures who have died since the German ed. was published, including Paul Ricoeur, Gerhard Ebeling, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Pope John Paul II. The topics selected come from a wide range of fields, including biblical studies, ethics, practical theology, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, science, law, and economics. Articles on general topics can be wide-ranging; that on creation, for example, contains discussion of its occurrence in the history of religion, the Old Testament, Judaism, the New Testament, the history of theology, dogmatics, religious education, Islam, science, and the history of art. The entry on Church architecture is divided into several individually authored sections by nation or type of church with many b&w illustrations. This is a wonderfully rich resource that will be valuable to academics, theologians, the general reader, and students. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The right to food and the TRIPS agreement; with a particular emphasis on developing countries' measures for food production and distribution.
Some might think that in a moral universe, a conflict between the right to eat and the right to profit from intellectual property would be quickly resolved, but it turns out that the industrial and non-industrial worlds have different ways of measuring such things. Haugen (political science, Diakonhjemmet U. College, Oslo) seeks to identify how the protection of intellectual property rights on agricultural inputs, primarily seeds, impacts human rights obligations of States that have signed international agreements about both. The dissertation (2006, U. of Oslo, Sweden) on which this study is based received His Majesty the King's Gold Medal for 2007. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The role of international law in the elimination of child labor.
Child labor includes issues of slavery, commercial sexual and criminal exploitation, and child soldiering. Therefore Cullen (law, human rights, Durham U.) not only examines the types of child labor but also the means of enforcement and intervention. She introduces the history of child labor and its emergence as a human rights issue, then examines the priorities and provisions of international law in the "worst case" scenarios (slavery, sexual exploitation and soldiering), critiquing the effectiveness of current provisions and offering alternative approaches to regulation. She then describes implementation of child labor norms through international law through treaties, state reporting, petition systems, international trading systems, technical assistance and private enforcement. She supports creating a common language of children's rights, thereby raising the profile of child labor; she also supports ending impunity and giving authority of private methods of enforcement to end further exploitation. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Rumi and the hermeneutics of eroticism.
Known primarily as a masterpiece of Perso-Islamic mystical medieval literature and theosophic teachings, Rumi's Mathnawi is also known for its explicit sexual material and ribald tales. Here Tourage (religion and Islam, Colgate U.) draws upon recent interpretations of medieval kabbalistic texts to analyze the links between eroticism and the esotericism of the Mathnawi. Tourage takes a Lacanian approach to Rumi's phallocentric esotericism, for example, and finds the phallus and other references to be bearers of esoteric secrets, particularly when used along gender lines, related through erotic imagery, or expressed in sexual terms. Particularly interesting is Tourage's analysis of two miniature paintings of the Mathnawi bawdy tales, in which the subjects learn the secret of the symbol and the secret of the gaze. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Russian commercial law, 2d ed.
As a society and an economy in transition, Russia has had to make significant and frequent changes to its laws of trade, including laws on court procedure and on such particulars as insolvency. Oda (Japanese law, U. of London) is convinced, however that the situation is stabile enough to warrant this new edition. He covers the sources of commercial law in Russia, including those of constituent entities and executive decrees, the influence of international treaties and foreign law, the institutions and procedures within the system of settling disputes, basic principles and rules of private law (including system of juristic acts) and of company law (including privatization issues, copyright, joint stock companies, securities and limited liability companies, insolvency law, the law of obligations and means of securing them, contract law, property and land law, tort and unjust enrichment, banking, natural resources, environmental law, taxation and private international law. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Scribal habits in early Greek New Testament Papyri.
Royse, who earned his doctorate in theology at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California, presents a complete revision of his dissertation in this substantial volume. The writing of six scribes responsible for the Greek papyri are each discussed in turn, with sections on their corrections by type — obvious errors, significant readings, etc. — and corrections by later readers. Orthographic and nonsense singulars, copying techniques, additions, omissions, leaps, transpositions, substitutions, pronouns, and other peculiarities are each noted in separate sections for each scribe, as appropriate. Containing a number of indices and appendices, the volume will be welcome among scholars of the New Testament. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Self-determination of peoples and plural-ethnic states in contemporary international law; failed states, nation-building and the alternative, federal option.
A Canadian scholar of international law, McWhinney here republishes in expanded and augmented form, and in English rather than French, lectures he delivered at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2002. He explores the potential of federalism and federal institutions for harmonizing and reconciling otherwise disparate national, ethnic-culturally-based interests in countries that were hastily slapped together for imperial interests with little or no regard for the people who actually lived there. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The settlement issue in Turkey and the Kurds; an analysis of spatial policies, modernity and war.
Here Jongerden (technology studies, Wageningen U.) examines Turkey's practice of social and cultural engineering, which he feels is based on an idiosyncratic understanding of modernity. Armed with tools from sociology, political science, history and social geography, he analyzes the spatial perspectives of armed conflict, focusing on environmental deprivation (in the case of Turkish counter-insurgency), rehabilitation doctrines, the move toward a new spatial organization of the countryside, the use of colonization in control, and the manipulation of the relationship of people to what they claim is their land. Jongerden's maps showing relocation projects are particularly interesting. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The sons of Bayezid; empire building and representation in the Ottoman civil war of 1402-1413.
There being almost no previous study of the civil war, Kastritsis (Ottoman history, U. of St. Andrews, Scotland) confesses that he was forced to construct for himself — and of course for readers and subsequent scholars — a narrative putting events into a basic sequence from primary sources. Perhaps his innovation first noticed is calling the episode a civil war rather than an interregnum, but casting light on the period has revealed many surprises where dusty assumptions lay undisturbed for centuries. The study began as his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University in 2005, and has been little changed for publication. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
