Welcome
Welcome to the website of the North American Patristics Society! NAPS promotes the study of late antiquity and early Christianity primarily through our journal and annual meeting. For further information about our activities and membership in the society, follow the links in the column to the left. The annual meeting will take place at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza in Chicago from May 23 to 25, 2013. Vice-President Robin M. Jensen has organized a wonderful program, further details about which are posted at the Call for Papers. I look forward to seeing you in May.
Kenneth B. Steinhauser, 2012-2013 President of NAPS
Membership & Subscriptions
Subscription to the Journal of Early Christian Studies is included with your membership. *Student Discount Available
Interested in having your work published in an upcoming volume? Read our Submission Guidelines.
Call for Nominations
Now accepting nominations for two Board Members-at-large, one Student Board Member, and one Vice President/President Elect.
News
Open Call for Authors for a Handbook on Latin Patristic Sermons in Brill series A New History of the Sermon.
To all who might be interested,
Patristic sermons have enjoyed a particular academic interest during the last decades. Several aspects of this genre have been explored through a variety of methodologies. More than a few conferences, articles, and monographs have been devoted to this topic. In collaboration with Brill’s series, A New History of the Sermon (http://www.brill.com/publications/new-history-sermon), the Research Departments of Latin Literature (Arts Faculty) and History of Church and Theology (Theology Faculty) of the University of Leuven (Belgium) will compose a handbook on Latin Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, Audiences (working title).
Edited by B. Bitton-Ashkelony & L. Perrone
approx. x + 400 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2013, CELAMA 15, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-54131-0, approx. $167 / € 115
Publication scheduled for Summer 2013
This book addresses change and continuity in late antique Eastern Christianity, as perceived through the lens of the categories of institutional religion and personal religion. The interaction between personal devotion and public identity reveals the creative aspects of a vibrant religious culture that altered the experience of Christians on both a spiritual and an institutional level. A close look at the interrelations between the personal and the institutional expressions of religion in this period attests to an ongoing revision of both the patristic literature and the monastic tradition. By approaching the period in terms of ‘revision’, the contributors discuss the mechanism of transformation in Eastern Christianity from a new perspective, discerning social and religious changes while navigating between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion.
Recognizing the creative aspects inherent to the process of ‘revision’, this volume re-examines several aspects of personal and institutional religion, revealing dogmatic, ascetic, liturgical, and historiographical transformations. Attention is paid to the expression of the self, the role of history and memory in the construction of identity, and the modification of the theological discourse in late antique culture. The book also explores several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the institutional and public sphere.
More info:
www.brepols.net
www.isdistribution.comBy Giselle de Nie
xii + 530 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2012, SEM 31, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-53148-9, $189 / € 130
The unexpected return of contemporary public Christian miracles in the late antique Latin west, after a centuries-long assumption that these had ceased after apostolic times, helped to create a religious mentality there that would continue to characterize the western European Middle Ages. While the social and political functions of the new miracles have been gaining greater scholarly attention, this study is the first in-depth treatment of their experiential dimension. It examines this dimension in the first reactions to the new phenomenon – enthusiasm, puzzlement, deep suspicion, and outright rejection – as they are reflected and, especially, imagined in the earliest contemporary narrative and poetic sources that describe them. And it traces how the new imaginative representations transformed, for many, the up to then precept-centered way of thinking about religion into one that immersed itself in the supralogical dynamics of symbolic images. The tendency of these image-clusters to precipitate transformations, not only in perception but also in physical condition, is examined for the period from 386, when a first public miracle caught everyone’s attention in the ostensibly flourishing Christian Roman Empire, to c. 460, when this empire was crumbling under the onslaught of Germanic tribes.
www.brepols.net
www.isdistribution.comBy Claudio Moreschini
xii + 306 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2012, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-52960-8, $124 / € 80
___________________________________Hermetic theosophy, originally an offspring of Egyptian religion, spread throughout the ancient world from the Hellenistic age onwards and was welcomed by Christianity in Late Antiquity. Cultivated people in a Christian milieu were convinced that Hermetic piety and religion were the preparation, expressed by heathen imagery, of their own faith: Hermes, a wise and pious philosopher in Egypt in the time of Moses, received (so it was thought) the same revelation which would be manifested 1,000 years later by Christ. At the end of the third century AD, this belief did not perish with the end of the Roman Empire; rather, it was taken up and explored during the French Renaissance of the twelfth century. In the fifteenth century, Italian humanism, supported by the rediscovery of Greek language and literature, promoted a fresh new evaluation of the ancient Hermetic texts which continued to be considered and studied as pre-Christian documents. In the sixteenth century, new interpretations of Christian Hermetism were explored until this connection between pagan and Christian was increasingly criticized by scholars who argued that Hermetism was neither as ancient as was thought nor as close to Christianity. The theory was abandoned in scientific milieux from the seventeenth century onwards, whereas Hermetic theosophy, on the contrary, survived in esoteric circles.
More info:
www.brepols.net
www.isdistribution.com
