Bhagat Singh, 1907-1931, Indian revolutionary and freedom fighter.

This study offers a new understanding of martyrdom across four religious traditions, analyzed through the lens of political theology.

From the refugee camps of the Lebanon to the relative prosperity of life in the USA, the Palestinian diaspora has been dispersed across the world. In this pioneering study, Helena Lindholm Schulz examines the ways in which Palestinian identity has been formed in the diaspora through constant longing for a homeland lost. In so doing, the author advances the debate on the relationship between diaspora and the creation of national identity as well as on nationalist politics tied to a particular territory. But The Palestinian Diaspora also sheds light on the possibilities opened up by a transnational existence, the possibility of new, less territorialized identities, even in a diaspora as bound to the idea of an idealized homeland as the Palestinian. Members of the diaspora form new lives in new settings and the idea of homeland becomes one important, but not the only, source of identity. Ultimately though, Schulz argues, the strong attachment to Palestine makes the diaspora crucial in any understandings of how to formulate a viable strategy for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Greek Bible and the services of the Orthodox Church have proved a rich source of language for many poets of modern Greece, and perhaps for none more than for Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseas Elytis, whose overlapping careers span the period 1876-1996. A blurring of the boundaries between Orthodoxy and 'Greekness' (hellênikotêta, which all three poets celebrate) has often led critics to assume from the Christian borrowings in the poetry the Christian allegiance of the poets. Through detailed analyses of selected poems, focusing on their relation to Biblical and liturgical source texts, this book questions whether the work of these poets is compatible with Christianity at all. It asks whether a Christ who is assimilated, along with the Virgin Mary, into the ancient Greek pantheon, or presented as a symbol of Beauty, or as object of the erotic desire of the women of the Gospels is still within the realm of Orthodoxy. Above all it asks whether, when the poetic ego appropriates to itself words which in their original context belong to Christ or Jehovah, there is any room left for the divine, or whether the poet has not in fact elbowed God off the stage altogether.