The Greeks, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, 'shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-entity'. The culture of ancient Greece was thronged with personifications. In poetry and the visual arts, personified figures of what might seem abstractions claim our attention. This study examines the logic, the psychology and the practice of Greeks who worshipped these personifications with temples and sacrifices, and addressed them with hymns and prayers. Emma Stafford conducts case-studies of deified 'abstractions', such as Peitho (Persuasion), Eirene (Peace) and Hygieia (Health). She also considers general questions of Greek psychology, such as why so many of these figures were female. Modern scholars have asked, Did the Greeks believe their own myths? This study contributes importantly to the debate, by exploring widespread and creative popular theology in the historical period.

Contemplates the meaning and importance of such classic virtues as sensitivity, beauty, prudence, compassion, intellect, and tact.

In Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture, Eran Almagor and Lisa Maurice offer a comprehensive collection of chapters dealing with the reception of antiquity in popular media of the modern era (19th-21st centuries). These media include theatrical plays, cinematic representations, Television drama, popular newspapers or journals, poems and outdoor festivals. For the first time in Classical Reception Studies, ancient Jewish literature and imagery are included in the discussion. The focus of the volume is both the continuity and variance between ancient and modern sets of values, which appear in the new interpretations of the ancient stories, figures and protagonists.

An examination of social imaginary surrounding Thai kingship and Thainess that yield an intriguing amalgam of ideas concerning popular religion, Buddhist kingship, nationalism, and material culture. It explores the contemporary appeal of King Chulalongkorn and considers what this ruler's unprecedented popularity says about Thai society.

To contemporary minds, the notion of justice toward God is seldom considered and often foreign. Far more discussed is how God might either undermine or motivate social justice. The Primacy of God by R. Jared Staudt offers an important intervention. With the aid of St. Thomas Aquinas, Staudt argues that it is vital for both contemporary society and contemporary Catholic theology to return to the traditional view of God as the one to whom all human and social action must be ordered and to recover the virtue of religion as the virtue which orders all other virtues to God. Not only does Staudt helpfully remind readers of the ancient philosophical and biblical notion of worship as a dictate of the natural law, he also illuminates the way in which Christian liturgy, as an enactment of Christ’s high priesthood, is the great fulfillment of natural and biblical worship. Accordingly, Staudt secures religion as essential for the virtue of love. This brings Staudt to criticize modern theologians like Karl Barth, who claimed that religion is inherently idolatrous, as well as Karl Rahner, who claimed that love of neighbor is the highest moral act. Staudt also considers the question of religious truth in light of the plurality of religions, soliciting the assistance of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, as well as the way in which religion relates to the development of culture, engaging the great Catholic social historian Christopher Dawson. The Primacy of God is a much-needed work that ought to set the agenda for Catholic theology in the twenty-first century.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets, explains, and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. The book is divided into four sections. The first three essays cover basic themes: they introduce the major aspects of Kant's ethics; explain different interpretations of the Categorical Imperative; and sketch a 'constructivist' reading of Kantian normative ethics distinct from the Kantian constructivisms of Onora O'Neill and John Rawls. The next section is on virtue, and the essays collected here discuss whether it is a virtue to regard the natural environment as intrinsically valuable, address puzzles about moral weakness, contrast ideas of virtue in Kant's ethics and in 'virtue ethics,' and comment on duties to oneself, second-order duties, and moral motivation in Kant's Doctrine of Virtue. Four essays on moral rules propose human dignity as a guiding value for a system of norms rather than a self-standing test for isolated cases, contrast the Kantian perspectives on moral rules with rule-utilitarianism and then with Jonathan Dancy's moral particularism, and distinguish often-conflated questions about moral relativism. Hill goes on to outline a Kantian position on two central issues. In the last section of the book, three essays on practical questions show how a broadly Kantian theory, if critical of Kant's official theory of law, might re-visit questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes. In the final essay, Hill develops the implications of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue for the responsibility of by-standers to oppression.

"Katharine Breen challenges our understanding of how medieval authors received philosophical paradigms from antiquity in their construction and use of personification in their writings. She shows that our modern categories for this literary device (extreme realism versus extreme rhetoric, or novelistic versus allegorical characters) would've been unrecognizable to their medieval practitioners. Through new readings of key authors and works--including Prudentius's "Psychomachia," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life"--she finds that medieval writers accessed a richer, more fluid literary domain than modern critics have allowed. Breen identifies three different types of personification--Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian--inherited from antiquity that both gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters, while bypassing the modern confusion of conflicting relationships between personifications and persons on the path connecting divine power and human frailty. Recalling Gregory the Great's phrase "machinae mentis" (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, much the same way that, within the category of hand-tools, an open-end wrench differs in function from a hex-key wrench or a socket wrench. It will be read by medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as scholars interested in character-making and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages"--

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions is the first comprehensive single-volume reference work offering authoritative coverage of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world. Chronologically, the volume’s scope extends from pre-historical antiquity in the third millennium B.C.E. through the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. An interdisciplinary approach draws out the common issues and elements between and among religious traditions in the Mediterranean basin. Key features of the volume include: Detailed maps of the Mediterranean World, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic World A comprehensive timeline of major events, innovations, and individuals, divided by region to provide both a diachronic and pan-Mediterranean, synchronic view A broad geographical range including western Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe This encyclopedia will serve as a key point of reference for all students and scholars interested in ancient Mediterranean culture and society.