This collection of studies in honor of François Bovon highlights the rich diversity found within early expressions of Christianity as evidenced in ancient texts, in early traditions and movements, and in archaic symbols and motifs.

If the word trinity isn’t in Scripture, why is it such an important part of our faith? And if the Bible can be interpreted in many ways, how do we know what to make of it? And who decided what should be in the Bible anyway? The Church Fathers provide the answers. These brilliant, embattled, and sometimes eccentric men defined the biblical canon, hammered out the Creed, and gave us our understanding of sacraments and salvation. It is they who preserved for us the rich legacy of the early Church. D’Ambrosio dusts off the dry theology and brings you the exciting stories and great heroes such as Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Jerome. This page-turner will inspire and challenge you with the lives and insights of these seminal teachers from when the Church was young.

Sixteen new essays by a team of leading international scholars on the theme of the Bible and its reception and appropriation in the context of radical practices, and an exposition of the imaginative possibilities of radical engagement with the Bible in inclusive social contexts.

"The Eastern Church venerates among its saints several Early Christian women whose teaching and wisdom contribute to the depth of our theological heritage. Their inspired voices can be heard at work witnessing: in the New Testament, in the early centuries of the Church Fathers and throughout the Byzantine era. Readers will find this volume bringing female leaders from the Early Church to life from the traditional ancient sources and sharing their experience of the presence of God. Their remembered advice to followers still illuminates issues of faith and justice which bind us together as Christians today"--

This fascinating resource examines the day-to-day lives of early Christians—as depicted through documented accounts of the period—from the beginning of Christianity through 325 CE. Early Christianity drew its doctrine from a variety of sources—personal interpretation, Hebrew scriptures, and church council—yet the core ideology endured, even as the religion transitioned from being the object of persecution to becoming a legal institution in the Roman Empire. This book celebrates the voices that helped create and develop Christianity during that period. Voices of Early Christianity: Documents from the Origins of Christianity is a collection of excerpts from significant documents from early Christian history, organized topically, then listed chronologically within each section. The author compares textual variations among the works of the apostles, as well as key themes over time, and frames the discussion for further critical thinking. Topics include sexuality, marriage, and divorce; food issues; women in early Christianity; and politics and Christianity.

Introduction to "Gnosticism": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds is the first textbook on Gnosticism, guiding students through the most significant of the Nag Hammadi texts, grouping them by theme and genre, and revealing to the uninitiated their most inscrutable mysteries.

Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to reforms and is getting worse. This analysis of the causes underlying the crisis seeks to offer concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform. Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles, two experienced classroom teachers and education consultants, argue that because teachers are recruited from a pool of underqualified candidates, given inadequate preparation, and dropped into a culture of isolation without mentoring, support, or incentives for excellence, they are programmed to fail. Half quit within their first five years. Troen and Boles offer an alternative, a model of reform they call the Millennium School, which changes the way teachers work and improves the quality of their teaching. When teaching becomes a real profession, they contend, more academically able people will be drawn into it, colleges will be forced to improve the quality of their education, and better-prepared teachers will enter the classroom and improve the profession.

In seventeen inspiring narratives Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom introduce a new and robust company of saints that has left a lasting imprint on the new Christian heartlands of Africa and Asia. Spanning a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, their stories demonstrate the vitality of the Christian faith in a diversity of contexts.

This fascinating and lively book provides the first comprehensive discussion of the production, circulation, and use of books in early Christianity. It explores the extent of literacy in early Christian communities; the relation in the early church between oral tradition and written materials; the physical form of early Christian books; how books were produced, transcribed, published, duplicated, and disseminated; how Christian libraries were formed; who read the books, in what circumstances, and to what purposes. Harry Y. Gamble interweaves practical and technological dimensions of the production and use of early Christian books with the social and institutional history of the period. Drawing on evidence from papyrology, codicology, textual criticism, and early church history, as well as on knowledge about the bibliographical practices that characterized Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, he offers a new perspective on the role of books in the first five centuries of the early church.

Research on pilgrimage has traditionally fallen across a series of academic disciplines - anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history and theology. To date, relatively little work has been devoted to the issue of pilgrimage as writing and specifically as a form of travel-writing. The aim of the interdisciplinary essays gathered here is to examine the relations of Christian pilgrimage to the numerous narratives, which it generates and upon which it depends. Authors reveal not only the tensions between oral and written accounts but also the frequent ambiguities of journeys - the possibilities of shifts between secular and sacred forms and accounts of travel. Above all, the papers reveal the self-generating and multiple-authored characteristics of pilgrimage narrative: stories of past pilgrimage experience generate future stories and even future journeys. Simon Coleman moved to Sussex University in 2004, having spent 11 years at Durham University as Lecturer and then Reader in Anthropology, and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. John Elsner is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.