About the Book, for the Website Begun as a scholarly work of religious and psychiatric import, 9/11 and its aftershocks has turned this work on messianism to the task of survival of our civilization. For the core motivations of widely disparate people Islamic terrorists, Israeli settlers, and American fundamentalists are frankly messianic. And they are positioned to move the world towards a disaster long depicted in apocalyptic terms on the Plains of Abraham, but now also present in our midst. A degree of self sacrifice is present in messianism, ranging from the purely spiritual to full expression in the Islamic terrorist who glories in a physical immolation that leads to eternal life. The crucial issue for the rest of us lies in its imperative nature, calling for the termination of our lives. Can we reach such people, who live in these other spiritual worlds, and who threaten to evict us from ours? They live in the certitude and rectitude of their cause, and are intolerant of the ambiguity of modern civilization. Their certitude lies in a strangely similar belief in a messenger of God who brings tidings of the End of Days on earth, and a coming glory in a heavenly company, populated by God and the principal figures of their religion. Each of these religions has its own visionary, man of God, or messiah, extant or to come. My thesis is that the key to reaching such imbued people, so alienated from the rest of us, is through utilization of the little we know of reaching alienated individuals and groups. That knowledge has been chiefly developed in asylums by the original alienists, psychiatrists, also the social and political sciences and the pastoral discipline. The Messianic Imperative: Scourge or Savior is offered as a contribution to that study. More so, it is offered as a journey into unfamiliar terrain. It may hopefully lead to a manual for action on the part of people, worldwide, alert to the current danger, who wish to contribute to the world family aborning in these parlous times.

In 'Being and the Messiah', Jose Miranda brings his incisive (and controversial) scholarship to the study of The Gospel of St. John.

Turley begins by surveying the history of the interface between ritual studies and Pauline scholarship, identifying the scholarly gaps in both method and conclusions and a ritual theory adequate to address such gaps. The focus of the work is then on the two rituals that identified the Pauline communities: ritual washings and ritual meals. Turley explores Galatians and 1 Corinthians, two letters that present the richest spread of evidence pertinent to ritual theory. By exploring Paul's reference to ritual washings and meals with a heuristic use of ritual theory, Turley concludes that rituals in early Christianity were inherently revelatory, in that they revealed the dawning of the messianic age through the bodies of the ritual participants. This bodily revelation established both a distinctly Christian ethic and a distinctly Christian social space by which such an ethical identity might be identified and sustained.

In contrast to the other synoptic evangelists the author of Matthew proceeded differently in many respects. Why did he modify the text so much and arrange ten miracle narratives one after the other at one stretch with minor interruptions? Why did he place the so-called «miracle chapters» immediately after the Sermon on the Mount. Why did he enclose them between two summary statements on either side? These are only some of the unanswered questions about chapters 8 and 9 of Matthew's Gospel. Beginning with Aristotle's theory of the drama or tragedy, the author suggests that the way the evangelist has reworked and reorganized the miracle narratives is similar to the structure of the classic drama. By discovering the narrative strategies and the discourse aspect, we are able to demonstrate how each episode corresponds to the different moments of a plot such as the initial situation, inciting moment, complication, climax with suspense and finally resolution and denouement.

“Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’” —Luke 10:8-9 When Jesus sent seventy disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it’s an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital. Underlining how the virtues of charity and hospitality motivated the first generations of Christians, along with Jesus’ explicit command to heal the sick, Aquilina shows just how revolutionary the actions of Christian doctors and nurses were and how they transformed society in ways that still reverberate today. The radical developments in health care spearheaded by Christians influenced culture, society, and civilization. As The Healing Imperative proves, now more than ever, the compassion of Christians is needed to guide the world of medicine. Jesus’ command still resonates, and Aquilina urges us to respond.

This book is about the concept of historical intermittency in five recent and contemporary French philosophers: Alain Badiou, Francoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Ranciere.

Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today.