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In Global Visions of Violence , the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends.  This allows  Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians. 

A long line of research has established that Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism have a preference for those inside their group and animosity toward those outside their group. These beliefs may impede the equal application of the rule of law, a link that has been suggested but not formally tested. Utilizing experimental data from a survey conducted in fall 2021, we assess the equal application of the rule of law for in and outgroup members conditional on Christian nationalism and belief in Christian persecution. We suggest that ingroup love may move distinctly from outgroup hate. Our results suggest that Christian nationalists have a preference for the ingroup, but do not automatically denigrate outgroups. However, belief in Christian persecution drives animosity toward outgroups, while not elevating the ingroup. Christian nationalist outgroup hatred must be triggered by threat, which has been the project of movement and party elites.

Research on disaster preparedness finds little connection between religious variables, such as beliefs surrounding the end of the world (apocalypticism), and physical preparations (e.g., having three days of food and water stored). In light of rhetoric from evangelical elites urging the faithful to prepare for the apocalypse given recent events, such as the 2020 election, we sought to re-evaluate the connection between physical preparations for difficult times and religious variables including Christian nationalism, apocalypticism, church attendance, and the belief that Christians are being persecuted in the country. Results from an original survey conducted in early 2021 reveal a strong positive association between apocalypticism and measures of disaster preparedness. Other religious variables (Christian nationalism, in particular) do not always relate to preparedness behavior in expected ways. While it remains unclear what role, if any, Christian elites played in convincing the faithful to prepare not only their souls for the apocalypse, but also their pantries, it is evident that apocalyptic beliefs track with physical preparedness behavior.

Licinius was a ruler whose attitude towards Christians changed over the years. First, he guaranteed freedom of religion to them; then, he persecuted them. This article aims to analyse how these persecutions are described by sources originating from the period during or shortly after the reign of Licinius. The analysis of the sources shows that the details of the persecution under Licinius are known only from the works of Eusebius of Caesarea. However, although he portrays Licinius in a negative light only to justify the war between him and Constantine, other sources confirm that there was indeed persecution though limited in scope under Licinius.

The scapegoating of the Christians by Nero for the fire of Rome in 64 and its consequences, followed by their public execution, is not only a political and police accusation against so-called culprits ; it is also, and maybe more, a «  procuration of prodigy  » : the exceptional procuration, in the form of human sacrifice, of an exceptional prodigy. Roman history, in these related fields, held quite a few precedents, which will be examined here. Thus, that fundamental aspect was overshadowed until today by Tacitus’historiographical construction, even more than by the Neronian staging it redoubles and caricatures.

Is it possible that early Christian anti-Judaism was directed toward people other than Jews? Michele Murray proposes that significant strands of early Christian anti-Judaism were directed against Gentile Christians. More specifically, it was directed toward Gentile Christian judaizers. These were Christians who combined a commitment to Christianity with adherence in varying degrees to Jewish practices, without viewing such behaviour as contradictory. Several Christian leaders thought that these community members dangerously blurred the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism. As such, Gentile Christian judaizers became the target of much anti-Jewish rhetoric in various early Christian writings. Evidence of Gentile Christian judaizers can be found in canonical sources, such as Pauls Letter to the Galatians and the Book of Revelation, as well as non-canonical sources, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. In order to compare the phenomenon of judaizing and the reaction to it of ecclesiastical authorities, Murray organizes the evidence by probable geographical location, using Asia Minor and Syria as the two main loci. The phenomenon of Gentile Christian judaizing is examined within the broader context of Jewish-Christian relations in the early centuries, and is the first attempt to draw all possible references to Gentile Christian judaizers together into one study to consider them as a whole. This discussion invites readers to reflect on the existence of Gentile Christian judaizers as another point on the continuum of Jewish-Christian relations in the Greco-Roman world — an area, Murray concludes, that needs to be more carefully defined.

Fear is ubiquitous but slippery. It has been defined as a purely biological reality, derided as an excuse for cowardice, attacked as a force for social control, and even denigrated as an unnatural condition that has no place in the disenchanted world of enlightened modernity. In these times of institutionalized insecurity and global terror, Facing Fear sheds light on the meaning, diversity, and dynamism of fear in multiple world-historical contexts, and demonstrates how fear universally binds us to particular presents but also to a broad spectrum of memories, stories, and states in the past. From the eighteenth-century Peruvian highlands and the California borderlands to the urban cityscapes of contemporary Russia and India, this book collectively explores the wide range of causes, experiences, and explanations of this protean emotion. The volume contributes to the thriving literature on the history of emotions and destabilizes narratives that have often understood fear in very specific linguistic, cultural, and geographical settings. Rather, by using a comparative, multidisciplinary framework, the book situates fear in more global terms, breaks new ground in the historical and cultural analysis of emotions, and sets out a new agenda for further research. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Alexander Etkind, Lisbeth Haas, Andreas Killen, David Lederer, Melani McAlister, Ronald Schechter, Marla Stone, Ravi Sundaram, and Charles Walker.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Apologists' Use of Mythology Myth and the Rejection of Greek and Roman Religion The Persistence of Mythology Education and the Survival of Myth Conclusions Further Reading

Ausgangspunkt dieses in zweiter Auflage durchgesehenen und ergänztenBandesist ein Exkurs im Bellum Iudaicum des hier dem Ambrosius zugeschriebenen sog. Hegesippus über den Wettstreit des Petrus mit Simon Magus in Rom und die sich daran anschlieende Christenverfolgung Neros, in der die Apostel Petrus und Paulus das Martyrium erleiden. Die Frage nach den Quellen dieser Episode und deren Historizität führt zu einer Überprüfung der \"Schlüsselbeweise\" für einen Aufenthalt des Petrus in Rom und der sonstigen literarischen Zeugnisse vom Neuen Testament bis in die Spätantike. Im Vordergrund stehen die apokryphen Apostelakten, der 1. Clemensbrief, Iustinus Martyr, Dionysios von Korinth, Polykarp von Smyrna und die Antihäretiker Hegesippus und Irenäus von Lyon. Die vermeintlich echten Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochien werden in den Rahmen christlicher und heidnischer Pseudepigrapha der Zweiten Sophistik eingeordnet, ihre Entstehungszeit auf das Jahrzehnt 170-180 festgelegt. Ein breites Kapitel ist philologischen Untersuchungen zur Datierung des 1. Clemensbriefes und der Spätschriften des Neuen Testamentes gewidmet. Am Ende steht eine kritische Edition (mit Übersetzung) der Martyrien des Petrus und des Paulus unter Berücksichtigung einer hier erstmalig eingeführten griechischen Handschrift, die ein bisher nicht bekanntes Selbstporträt des Paulus enthält.

This chapter examines the politics of fear underlying the antipersecution discourse that revolved around evangelical Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century. A video made by the U.S.-based Christian evangelical group Voice of the Martyrs showed that Christians are being persecuted all around the world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservatives as well as liberal and moderate evangelicals. The chapter shows how antipersecution discourse resulted in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It also considers the significance of spectacles of the violated body to the discourse of persecution and how intense attention to Christian persecution created a tension for evangelicals between the universalizing language of human rights and a specific commitment to the “persecuted body” of Christ. Finally, it explores how evangelicals' attention to Christian persecution intersects with Islamic concerns.