"Wright and Palmer explore the implications of heightened state repression and control of minority religions in an increasingly multicultural, globalized world."--Back cover.

'Storming Zion' offers a compelling explanation for the growing trend of state raids on new and nontraditional religious communities. Stuart Wright and Susan Palmer base their study on a massive data set documenting 116 government raids over the last six decades, primarily in Western countries.

In spite of its diminutive size, the book of the minor prophet Obadiah has consistently occasioned major literary-critical, exegetical and hermeneutical questions. Jerome's observation 'the shorter, the more difficult' serves as a useful illustration of the complexity of the work. The present commentary seeks to answer some of the questions surrounding the book and its author on the basis of the literary structure of the transmitted text. The volume makes use for the first time of ancient text divisions gleaned from the Masoretic, Syriac and Greek textual traditions, with the help of which the colometry of the book is established and the larger literary units thereof delimited. The exegetical comments are based, among other things, on recent tradition-historical and linguistic research. The result is a contemporary commentary, accessible to students and scholars alike.

While the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament has captured the attention of biblical scholars over the years, no study has been devoted to the presence of Scripture in Colossians, largely because there are no explicit quotations in Colossians. With the introduction of literary intertextuality into the discipline, however, scholars have begun to devote more attention to the NT authors’ less explicit references to Scripture, often labelled as ‘allusions’ and/or ‘echoes.’ Scholars, however, continue to debate what constitutes an allusion or echo, or how one validates a given proposal as such. This study proposes new definitions of these terms and offers a methodology on how to detect and validate them, using Colossians as a test case.

“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans through rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law. In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali’s radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali’s teachings, including the many movements they inspired. As Dew shows, Ali’s teachings demonstrate an implicit yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the various features and challenges of the relationships between peace, state, law, and education in their transnational and international context.

This work employs an eclectic mix of structuralist and post-structuralist theories in a doomed attempt to discover the symbolic logic at work in Zechariah 1-8's surreal narrative world. Lengthy analyses of Zechariah's intra- and intertextual logic, or lack thereof, are presented. It is finally concluded that Zechariah lacks a concrete symbolic logic, defies grammatical conventions and is 'unreadable' as it stands-and always was this way. One suggestion is that it was the intent of the author, conceived of in a postmodern way, to produce such a work. It is finally concluded that the 'post-prophetic' age of Hebrew literature has much in common with the postmodern.