Explores the formation of clemency as a human and social value in the Roman Empire

This book analyzes the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, both in terms of rhetorical fittingness, and Christian tradition concerning the significance of his dying forgiveness prayer. It questions the historicity of the account of his death, underscores Acts' rhetorical violence, and reads Acts against narratives of the martyrdom of James as a means to a richer history of early Jewish-Christian relations.

The pardon is an act of mercy, tied to the divine right of kings. Why did New York retain this mode of discretionary justice after the Revolution? And how did governors’ use of this prerogative change with the advent of the penitentiary and the introduction of parole? This book answers these questions by mining previously unexplored evidence held in official pardon registers, clemency files, prisoner aid association reports and parole records. This is the first book to analyze the histories of mercy and parole through the same lens, as related but distinct forms of discretionary decision-making. It draws on governors’ public papers and private correspondence to probe their approach to clemency, and it uses qualitative and quantitative methods to profile petitions for mercy, highlighting controversial cases that stirred public debate. Political pressure to render the use of discretion more certain and less personal grew stronger over the nineteenth century, peaking during constitutional conventionsand reaching its height in the Progressive Era. Yet, New York’s legislators left the power to pardon in the governor’s hands, where it remains today. Unlike previous works that portray parole as the successor to the pardon, this book shows that reliance upon and faith in discretion has proven remarkably resilient, even in the state that led the world toward penal modernity.

The Academy of Parish Clergy 2020 Reference Book of the Year 2020 Association of Catholic Publishers first place award in Scripture 2020 Catholic Press Association third place award for best new religious book series This reading of Mark's Gospel engages this ancient text from the perspective of contemporary feminist concerns to expose and resist all forms of domination that prevent the full flourishing of all humans and all creation. Accordingly, it foregrounds the Gospel's constructions of gender in intersectionality with the visions, structures, practices, and personnel of Roman imperial power. This reading embraces a rich tradition of feminist scholarship on the Gospel, as well as masculinity studies, particularly pervasive hegemonic masculinity. Its politically engaged discussion of Mark's Gospel provides a resource for clergy, students, and laity concerned with contemporary constructions of gender, power, and a world in which all might experience fullness of life.

De Clementia (or On Clemency in English) is a two-volume hortatory essay written in AD 55–56 by Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, to the emperor Nero. You will love this timeless contrast between a good ruler and a tyrant.

This volume analyzes the emergence of Jewish and Christian discourses of religious violence within their Roman imperial context with an emphasis on the shared textual practices through which authoritative scriptural traditions were redeployed to represent, legitimate, and indeed sacralize violence.

Drawing on unusually broad range of sources for this study of Imperial period philosophical thought, Michael Trapp examines the central issues of personal morality, political theory, and social organization: philosophy as the pursuit of self-improvement and happiness; the conceptualization and management of emotion; attitudes and obligations to others; ideas of the self and personhood; constitutional theory and the ruler; the constituents and working of the good community. Texts and thinkers discussed range from Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aspasius and Alcinous, via Hierocles, Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Plutarch and Diogenes of Oenoanda, to Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and the Tablet of Cebes. The distinctive doctrines of the individual philosophical schools are outlined, but also the range of choice that collectively they presented to the potential philosophical 'convert', and the contexts in which that choice was encountered. Finally Trapp turns his attention to the status of philosophy itself as an element of the elite culture of the period, and to the ways in which philosophical values may have posed a threat to other prevalent schemes of value; Trapp argues that the idea of 'philosophical opposition', though useful, needs to be substantially modified and extended.