Sacred Script

Thirteen papers on different subjects, focussing on writings and inscriptions in medieval art, explore the faculty of writing to create and determine spaces and to generate the sacred by the display of holy scripture. The subjects range from book illumination over wall painting, mosaics, sculpture, and church interiors to inscriptions on portals and façades.

In Secularising the Sacred, Mishory offers an account of Zionist Israeli artists-designers' visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion,” through a process of giving visual form to Zionist ideas and myths.

Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts is the first comprehensive study of the role of languages and texts in the religions of the Greco-Roman world, including Judaism and Christianity. It explores bilingualism, language learning, literacy, book production and translation, as well as some of the more explicitly religious factors, including beliefs about language, missionary zeal, ritual, conservatism and the power of a priestly establishment. Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts sheds new light on the role of the power of words, spoken and written, in religion.

Contributions by Ofra Amihay, Madeline Backus, Samantha Baskind, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Scott S. Elliott, Assaf Gamzou, Susan Handelman, Leah Hochman, Leonard V. Kaplan, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Shiamin Kwa, Samantha Langsdale, A. David Lewis, Karline McLain, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Joshua Plencner, and Jeffrey L. Richey Comics and Sacred Texts explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave new modes of seeing and understanding the sacral. Comics and graphic narratives help readers see religion in the everyday and in depictions of God, in transfigured, heroic selves as much as in the lives of saints and the meters of holy languages. Coeditors Assaf Gamzou and Ken Koltun-Fromm reveal the graphic character of sacred narratives, imagining new vistas for both comics and religious texts. In both visual and linguistic forms, graphic narratives reveal representational strategies to encounter the sacred in all its ambivalence. Through close readings and critical inquiry, these essays contemplate the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability to think about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Organized into four sections—Seeing the Sacred in Comics; Reimagining Sacred Texts through Comics; Transfigured Comic Selves, Monsters, and the Body; and The Everyday Sacred in Comics—the essays explore comics and graphic novels ranging from Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Marvel’s X-Men and Captain America to graphic adaptions of religious texts such as 1 Samuel and the Gospel of Mark. Comics and Sacred Texts shows how claims to the sacred are nourished and concealed in comic narratives. Covering many religions, not only Christianity and Judaism, this rare volume contests the profane/sacred divide and establishes the import of comics and graphic narratives in disclosing the presence of the sacred in everyday human experience.

The volume contains a critical review of data, results and open problems concerning the principal Greek and Coptic majuscule bookhands, based on previous research of the author, revised and updated to offer an overview of the different graphic phenomena. Although the various chapters address the history of different types of scripts (i.e. biblical majuscule, sloping poitend majuscule, liturgical majuscule, epigraphic and monumental scripts), their juxtaposition allows us to identify common issues of the comparative method of palaeography. From an overall critical assessment of these aspects the impossibility of applying a unique historical paradigm to interpret the formal expressions and the history of the different bookhands comes up, due to the fact that each script follows different paths. Particular attention is also devoted to the use of Greek majuscules in the writing of ancient Christian books. A modern and critical awareness of palaeographic method may help to place the individual witnesses in the context of the main graphic trends, in the social and cultural environments in which they developed, and in a more accurate chronological framework.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It is designed as a textbook for university and college classes, and is also suitable for individuals learning ancient Egyptian on their own. It contains 26 lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of 25 essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion and literature. The combination of grammar lessons and cultural essays allows users not only to read hieroglyphic texts but also to understand them. The book gives readers the foundation they need to understand the texts on monuments and to read the great works of ancient Egyptian literature in the original. It can also serve as a complete grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt for specialists in linguistics and other related fields.

"Why," an exasperated Jonathan Edwards asked, "can't we be contented with. . . the canon of Scripture?" Edwards posed this query to the religious enthusiasts of his own generation, but he could have just as appropriately put it to people across the full expanse of early American history.In the minds of her critics, Anne Hutchinson's heresies threatened to produce "a new Bible." Ethan Allen insisted that a revelation which spoke to every circumstance of life would require "a Bible of monstrous size." When the African-American prophetess Rebecca Jackson embarked on a spiritual journey toward Shakerism, she dreamt of a home in which she could find multiple books of scripture. Orestes Brownson explained to his skeptical contemporaries that the idea drawing him to Catholicism was the prospect of an "ever enlarging volume" of inspiration. Early Americans of every color and creed repeatedly confronted the boundaries of scripture. Some fought to open the canon. Some worked to keep it closed.Sacred Borders vividly depicts the boundaries of the biblical canon as a battleground on which a diverse group of early Americans contended over their differing versions of divine truth. Puritans, deists, evangelicals, liberals, Shakers, Mormons, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, and Transcendentalists defended widely varying positions on how to define the borders of scripture. Carefully exploring the history of these scriptural boundary wars, Holland offers an important new take on the religious cultures of early America.He presents a colorful cast of characters-including the likes of Franklin and Emerson along with more obscure figures--who confronted the intellectual tensions surrounding the canon question, such as that between cultural authority and democratic freedom, and between timeless truth and historical change. To reconstruct these sacred borders is to gain a new understanding of the mental world in which early Americans went about their lives and created their nation.

"The essays in this book were originally prepared for ... during the 2001-2002 academic year."--Acknowledgments.

Darrells Theory of numbers and numerology. completely different!!!