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The book presents a novel defense of the beneficial epistemic effect that extra logical features can have on the assessment of religious arguments.

Muslims have always used verses from the Qur'an to support opinions on law, theology, or life in general, but almost no attention has been paid to how the Qur'an presents its own precepts as conclusions proceeding from reasoned arguments. Whether it is a question of God's powers of creation, the rationale for his acts, or how people are to think clearly about their lives and fates, Muslims have so internalized Qur'anic patterns of reasoning that many will assert that the Qur'an appeals first of all to the human powers of intellect. This book provides a new key to both the Qur'an and Islamic intellectual history. Examining Qur'anic argument by form and not content helps readers to discover the significance of passages often ignored by the scholar who compares texts and the believer who focuses upon commandments, as it allows scholars of Qur'anic exegesis, Islamic theology, philosophy, and law to tie their findings in yet another way to the text that Muslims consider the speech of God.

Denise Kimber Buell radically rethinks the origins of Christian identity, arguing that race and ethnicity played a central role in early Christian theology. Focusing on texts written before the legalization of Christianity in 313 C.E., including Greek apologetic treatises, martyr narratives, and works by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, Buell shows how philosophers and theologians defined Christians as a distinct group within the Roman world, characterizing Christianness as something both fixed in its essence and fluid in its acquisition through conversion. Buell demonstrates how this view allowed Christians to establish boundaries around the meaning of Christianness and to develop the kind of universalizing claims aimed at uniting all members of the faith. Her arguments challenge generations of scholars who have refused to acknowledge ethnic reasoning in early Christian discourses. They also provide crucial insight into the historical legacy of Christian anti-Semitism and contemporary issues of race.

Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how individuals and groups ascribed religious categories during late antiquity. Particular focus is given to the role of rhetoric in the expression of religious identity, in order to give mutual illumination to both phenomena in this period.