Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognise now as major world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilisations. This catalogue features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to four major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity. Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualisations of the sacred.0As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images. 00Exhibition: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (19.10.2017-18.02.2018).

Can we re-imagine divine power as deeply related to the changing world? Can we re-imagine the creation of the world as an ongoing process of co-creation in which every individual from particles of atoms to human beings plays a part? Can we re-imagine Goddess/God as the most relational of all relational beings? Can we re-imagine the world as the body of Goddess/God? If we can, then we can understand the deeper meaning of female images of divine power, including Goddess, God-She, Sophia, and Shekhina. Many traditional understandings of divine power begin with thinly disguised rejections of the female body and connection to the natural world. Women theologians from Jewish, Christian, Goddess, and other traditions are re-imagining divine and human power as embodied, embedded in a changing world, and deeply related to all beings in the web of life. Drawing on the work of process philosopher Charles Hartshorne - whose insights deserve a wider hearing - Carol P. Christ offers intellectual foundations for deeply held feelings about the meanings of female images of divine power. Her gift is the ability to make complex ideas seem simple and radically new ideas seem familiar. This book is addressed to everyone who has ever wondered about the implications of re-imagining God as female.

This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars of the art and archaeology of late antiquity (c. 200−1000), across cultures and regions reaching from India to Iberia, to discuss how objects can inform our understanding of religions. During this period major transformations are visible in the production of religious art and in the relationships between people and objects in religious contexts across the ancient world. These shifts in behavior and formalizing of iconographies are visible in art associated with numerous religious traditions including, but not limited to, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, religions of the Roman Empire, and paganism in northern Europe. Studies of these religions and their material culture, however, have been shaped by Eurocentric and post-Reformation Christian frameworks that prioritized Scripture and minimized the capacity of images and objects to hold religious content. Despite recent steps to incorporate objects, much academic discourse, especially in comparative religion, remains stubbornly textual. This volume therefore seeks to explore the ramifications of placing objects first and foremost in the comparative study of religions in late antiquity, and to consider the potential for interdisciplinary conversation to reinvigorate the field.

Religious feminism is at an impasse. Those offering new images and metaphors for the divine have been hit with a backlash - along with charges of heresy, idolatry, and self-aggrandizement. Laurel Schneider's provocative solution is to investigate just how the plethora of divine images are indeed disclosive of divinity. In place of a strict monotheism, she constructs a monistic polytheism, arguing persuasively that this approach solves more problems than trinitarianism does.

Baugh traces the development of the Jesus-film and through critical film and theological analysis show us the limitations of this genre. Baugh analyzes several important and often prize-winning films showing how each film-maker has created a valid and often complex and challenging metaphor of the Christ-event. He questions many of the traditional approaches to religious film, and offers a new approach and new criteria for the appreciation and judgment of these films.

The Divine is a multicultural 100-page coloring book for people of all ages (especially the child in all of us) inspired by folklore and spirituality from the Philippines (Diwatas), Haiti (Lwas of Vodou) and Brazil (Orixás of Candomble and deities of the Indigenous Brazilian Tupi Tribe). Thirteen divinities from each culture are represented, along with the folklore and symbolism associated with each of the divinities. Included throughout the book are inspirational quotes, mindfulness activities for children, and poetry featuring Eniafe Isis of All Her Words, Aimee Amparo, and Haitian songs by Daniel "Brav" Brevil. 40 full-page, 8.5x11 illustrations. Artists include: Andre Hora, Gabrielle Tesfaye, Fermina Caragay Armstrong, Salima Silagon Saway, Grace Bio, Rahana Dariah, Zachary "Bodinho" Present, Stephen Hamilton, Cece Carpio, Nikila Badua/MamaWisdom1, Wisthon Thime, Dee Jae Pa'este, Ubi Maya, Mitzi Ulloa, Rodney Sanon and Laylie Frazier. While many of us grew up with mythologies about Greek and Roman gods, as well as stories like Cinderella, Little Mermaid and Robin Hood, few of us have been exposed to the stories included in The Divine--stories that have been passed down from generation to generation through traditional dance, music, and oral storytelling. The Divine draws a connection between the cultures and beliefs of these diasporas, in hopes of giving them the attention they deserve. From the Americas to Africa to the islands, let's continue to carry and pass down the wisdom that lies in these stories. This book is something meant to grow with and meet the reader where they are. Read and color for yourself, or do it with a little one. Mindfulness activities are meant for children and adults to do together. The poetry, quotes and songs are meant for older youth and adults. And the folklore/symbolism is meant for older youth and grown-ups to read with little ones. Every people, every culture has its own way of honoring the sacred and the spiritual. When we apply the wisdom of these stories to our everyday lives, we discover a deeper relationship to the world around us. Before our lives began, before we believed, the Divine has been both within us and outside of us.

With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review