Global challenges fill the news today. It's not always easy to balance fear with hope. That's why this book points to resources for optimism and action. A diverse group of scholars draw on Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Māori traditions to describe challenges and hopes.

he Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial.

Before Theological Study will orient students to the aptitudes, knowledge, spirituality, imagination, and dispositions that are appropriate to thoughtful, engaged, and generous theological study. 

Martyrs create space and time through the actions they take, the fate they suffer, the stories they prompt, the cultural narratives against which they take place and the retelling of their tales in different places and contexts. 

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. 

What did it mean to be a Christian in the Roman Empire? In one of the inaugural titles of Oxford's new Essentials in Biblical Studies series, Harry O. Maier considers the multilayered social contexts that shaped the authors and audiences of the New Testament.

The first inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary work of its kind, this book focuses on the importance of visual culture in the study of classical, Roman, and Christian antiquity. It explores the role of the visual in helping to create a vision of the gods and how commitment to the visibility of the divine affected ancient religious practices, rituals, and beliefs.

Focussing on three first- and early-second-century documents (the Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement and the Ignatian epistles), this work contributes to a growing body of literature concerned with the social setting of early Christianity. 

Current notions of nationhood, communal identity, territorial entitlement, and collective destiny are deeply rooted in historic interpretations of the Bible. Interweaving elements of history, theology, literary criticism, and cultural theory, the essays in this volume discuss the ways in which biblical understandings have shaped Western – and particularly European and North American – assumptions about the nature and meaning of the nation.

Pauline Christianity sprang to life in a world of imperial imagery. In the streets and at the thoroughfares, in the market places and on its public buildings and monuments, and especially on its coins the Roman Empire's imperial iconographers displayed imagery that aimed to persuade the Empire's diverse and mostly illiterate inhabitants that Rome had a divinely appointed right to rule the world and to be honoured and celebrated for its dominion.

A diverse group of New Testament scholars andtheologians offer myriad paths to a betterunderstanding of the Book of Revelation. They discusstopics such as Hispanic / Cuban American and AfricanAmerican perspectives, ecological issues, postcolonialthemes, and liberation theology. The book also provides a setof guidelines for intercultural Bible study.

he Book of Revelation has often been read as a set of endtime scenarios, glorifying a vengeful God and predicting and even fomenting apocalyptic violence. Yet it continues to exert a profound hold on the dreams and visions, fears and nightmares of our contemporary, first-world, secular culture.