St Gregory of Nyssa is the most important author of the fourth century in relation to theological anthropology, and was one of the most outspoken of the early Church Fathers on the subject of slavery. Gregory’s theology is built upon his perception that Jesus Christ was truly human; therefore, to be human is to be made in the image of Christ. We cannot justify slavery if we accept that humans are made in God’s image, because slaves are no less made in the image of God than those who are free. This book examines Gregory’s theology, how he understood and taught about the relationship of human beings to God, and how he applied this theology to the practical issue of slavery.

St Gregory of Nyssa is known to theologians as one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers who are credited with the final clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity in the late fourth century. Few have ventured to study his role as a bishop who took pains to teach his flock the mysteries of the faith and how to lead a good Christian life. This short study delves into the moral teaching that St Gregory delivered to his audience by analyzing the specific sins about which he is teaching. Given that he preached all over Roman Anatolia, the details found in his homilies give us some insight into which sins were most notorious in the lands of Asia Minor and which, therefore, needed to be addressed.

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. This timely book, the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this: in what way did the Christian theologians of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries appropriate the discourse of slavery in their theological formulations, and what could the effect of this appropriation have been for actual physical slaves? This fascinating study is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in early Christianity or Late Antiquity, and slavery more generally.

I have conversations with people about how they pray the Jesus Prayer as they walk the city streets, as they travel on buses or on the Tube, as they cycle, or as they sit at home. From these experiences I have come more and more to see the Jesus Prayer as a way of praying well suited to urban life; a form of attentiveness practice that can help us to grow in God-experience amid the changes and chances of metropolitan living. This book explains the prayer, its ethos, and how to begin to practise it in daily life.

Biblical monotheism imagines God as a slave master who owns and has total control over humans as his slaves, who are expected to show obedience to him. The theological use of slavery metaphors has a limited value, however, and is deeply problematic from the perspective of real-life slave practices. Ancient authors already supplemented the metaphor of God as a slave master with other images and emphasized God's difference from human slave owners. Ancient and modern experiences of and attitudes toward slavery determined the understanding and applicability of the slavery metaphors. This Element examines the use of slavery metaphors in ancient Judaism and Christianity in the context of the social reality of slavery, modern abolitionism, and historical-critical approaches to the ancient texts.

Listen to podcast on “Slaving Zones, Contemporary Slavery and Citizenship: Reflections from the Brazilian Case”. In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory. This theory has recently taken the field of Mediterranean slavery studies by storm, and the challenge posed by the editors was to see if the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory could be applied in the wider context of long-term global history. The results of this experiment are promising. In the Introduction, Jeff Fynn-Paul points out over a dozen ways in which the contributors have added to the concept of ‘Slaving Zones’, helping to make it one of the more dynamic theories of global slavery since the advent of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.