Angels: A Very Short Introduction PDF Download

Author: David Albert Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199547300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, fairies, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? This Very Short Introduction investigates stories and speculations about angels in religions old and new, in art, literature, film, and the popular imagination.

Author: Ellen Muehlberger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199931933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Ellen Muehlberger explores the diverse and inventive ideas Christians held about angels in late antiquity. During the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians began experimenting with new modes of piety, adapting longstanding forms of public authority to Christian leadership and advancing novel ways of cultivating body and mind to further the progress of individual Christians. Muehlberger argues that in practicing these new modes of piety, Christians developed new ways of thinking about angels. The book begins with a detailed examination of the two most popular discourses about angels that developed in late antiquity. In the first, developed by Christians cultivating certain kinds of ascetic practices, angels were one type of being among many in a shifting universe, and their primary purpose was to guard and to guide Christians. In the other, articulated by urban Christian leaders in contest with one another, angels were morally stable characters described in the emerging canon of Scripture, available to enable readers to render Scripture coherent with emerging theological positions. Muehlberger goes on to show how these two discourses did not remain isolated in separate spheres of cultivation and contestation, but influenced one another and the wider Christian culture. She offers in-depth analysis of popular biographies written in late antiquity, of the community standards of emerging monastic communities, and of the training programs developed to prepare Christians to participate in ritual, demonstrating that new ideas about angels shaped and directed the formation of the definitive institutions of late antiquity. Angels in Late Ancient Christianity is a meticulous and thorough study of early Christian ideas about angels, but it also offers a different perspective on late ancient Christian history, arguing that angels were central rather than peripheral to the emergence of Christian institutions and Christian culture in late antiquity.

Author: Philip Sheldrake
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191642436
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
It has been suggested that 'spirituality' has become a word that 'can define an era'. Why? Because paradoxically, alongside a decline in traditional religious affiliations, the growing interest in spirituality and the use of the word in a variety of contexts is a striking aspect of contemporary western cultures. Indeed, spirituality is sometimes contrasted attractively with religion, although this is problematic and implies that religion is essentially dogma, moralism, institutions, buildings, and hierarchies. The notion of spirituality expresses the fact that many people are driven by goals that concern more than material satisfaction. Broadly, it refers to the deepest values and sense of meaning by which people seek to live. Sometimes these values are conventionally religious. Sometimes they are associated with what is understood as 'the sacred' in a broader sense - that is, of ultimate rather than merely instrumental importance. This Very Short Introduction, written by one of the most eminent scholars and writers on spirituality, explores the historical foundations of the thought and considers how it came to have the significance it is developing today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: David Albert Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199582955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, faeries, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? This concise introduction investigates stories and speculations about angels in religions old and new, in art, literature, film, and the popular imagination.

Author: John Polkinghorne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191577677
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Quantum Theory is the most revolutionary discovery in physics since Newton. This book gives a lucid, exciting, and accessible account of the surprising and counterintuitive ideas that shape our understanding of the sub-atomic world. It does not disguise the problems of interpretation that still remain unsettled 75 years after the initial discoveries. The main text makes no use of equations, but there is a Mathematical Appendix for those desiring stronger fare. Uncertainty, probabilistic physics, complementarity, the problematic character of measurement, and decoherence are among the many topics discussed. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: Scott H. Hendrix
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This introduction presents Martin Luther as historians now see him. Instead of singling him out as a modern hero, the book emphasizes the context in which Luther worked, the colleagues who supported him, and the opponents who adamantly opposed his agenda for change. Scott H. Hendrix explains the religious reformation and Luther's importance, without ignoring the political and cultural forces that led the reformation down paths Luther could neither foresee nor influence. This Very Short Introduction pays tribute to Luther's genius, but also recognizes the self-righteous attitude that alienated contemporaries, offering a unique explanation for that behaviour. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: Tracey Baptiste
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442402962
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Grace has always had wild red hair like no one else in her family and a birthmark on her shoulder that her mother told her was the mark of an angel. When Grace is sent from New York to spend the summer with her grandmother in Trinidad, she looks through the family album and discovers a blurred photograph of a stranger with a birthmark -- her birthmark -- and Grace is full of questions. No one is able to identify the man in the photo, and Grace is left with no choice but to find out who he is and what he might mean to her. What Grace does not know is that her search will lead to a discovery about herself and her family that she never could have imagined. Tracey Baptiste's first novel is a tender coming-of-age story set on the island of Trinidad. Angel's Grace explores the meaning of identity and truth, and the unbreakable ties of a family bound by love.

Author: Stillman Drake
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191606669
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In a startling reinterpretation of the evidence, Stillman Drake advances the hypothesis that Galileo's trial and condemnation by the Inquisition was caused not by his defiance of the Church, but by the hostility of contemporary philosophers. Galileo's own beautifully lucid arguments are used to show how his scientific method was utterly divorced from the Aristotelian approach to physics in that it was based on a search not for causes but for laws. Galileo's method was of overwhelming significance for the development of modern physics, and led to a final parting of the ways between science and philosophy. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Author: Theresa Kaminski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019992824X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
When the Japanese began their brutal occupation of the Philippines in early 1942, 76,000 ill and starving Filipinos and many Americans were left to defend Bataan, Manila, and surrounding islands. During the three violent years of occupation that followed, Allied sympathizers smuggled suppliesand information to guerilla fighters and prisoner camps around the country. Theresa Kaminski's Angels of the Underground tells the story of two such members of this lesser-known resistance movement - American women known only as Miss U and High Pockets. Incredibly adept at skirting occupationauthorities to support the Allied effort, the very nature of their clandestine wartime work meant that the truth behind their dangerous activities had to be obscured as long as the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Were their identities revealed, they would be arrested, tortured, and executed.Throughout the war, Miss U and High Pockets remained hidden behind a veil of deceit and subterfuge.Angels of the Underground offers the compelling tale of two ordinary American women propelled by extraordinary circumstances into acts of heroism. Married to servicemen, Peggy Utinsky and Claire Phillips, the women behind Miss U and High Pockets, hoped that their clandestine efforts would reunitethem with their husbands. Both men died at the hands of the Japanese, but Utinsky and Phillips stayed on through the occupation, working in hospitals, moving supplies, and building their networks. Utinsky narrowly survived a month of torture at Fort Santiago, then joined John Boone's guerilla bandand became a brevet second lieutenant before returning to the Red Cross until the end of the war. Phillips barely escaped execution in 1943, and was sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp, where she remained until February 1945.Angels of the Underground illuminates the complex political dimensions of the occupied Philippines and its importance to the war effort in the Pacific. Kaminski's narrative sheds light on the Japanese-occupied city of Manila; the Bataan Death March and subsequent incarceration of American militaryprisoners in camps O'Donnell and Cabanatuan under horrific conditions; and the formation of guerrilla units in the mountains of Luzon.Angels of the Underground makes a significant contribution to the work on women's wartime experiences. Through the lens of Utinksy and Phillips, who never wavered in their belief that it was their duty as patriotic American women to aid the Allied cause, Kaminksi highlights how women have alwaysbeen active participants in war, whether or not they wear a military uniform. An impressive work of scholarship grounded in archival research and personal interviews, this is also a stunning story of courage and heroism in wartime.

Author: Richard Sowerby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191088110
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In the modern world, angels can often seem to be no more than a symbol, but in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure the angelic assistance for the living and the dead; others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures; and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. Angels in Medieval England offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age. Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God.