Simulated Shelves: Browse April 2016 New Books

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, History, Medical Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Theory & Methodology in Anthropology, along with our New in Paperback titles.

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Available in Paperback!

WITCHES AND DEMONS
A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism
Jean La Fontaine

Volume 10, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology

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World Religion Day 2016

World Religion Day is an interfaith observance initiated in 1950 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, celebrated worldwide on the third Sunday in January each year. Though initiated in the United States, World Religion Day has come to be celebrated internationally.

 

In keeping with this initiative we are offering a 25% discount on all Berghahn Religious Studies titles for the next 30 days. At checkout, simply enter the code WRD16.

 

A full selection of titles from Berghahn can be found on our website.

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JESUS RECLAIMED
Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene
Walter Homolka
Translated by Ingrid Shafer
Foreword by Leonard Swidler

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Margaret Chan: Understanding the Chinese Warrior-Defender of Boundaries

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Margaret Chan. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Chan is the author of the article “Tangki War Magic The Virtuality of Spirit Warfare and the Actuality of Peace,” appearing in that issue. Below, Chan answers a series of questions related to her article in Social Analysis.

 

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Find the previous contributions on our blog.

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How does violence relate to belief?

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Iain Sinclair. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Sinclair is the author of the article War Magic and Just War in Indian Tantric Buddhism appearing in that issue. Below, Sinclair answers a series of questions related to his article in Social Analysis.

This is the third in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Read D. S. Farrer’s interview here, and Jean-Marc De Grave’s interview here.

 

 

 


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Author of ‘Jesus Reclaimed’ Earns German Decoration

The President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Joachim Gauck, honoured Rabbi Walter Homolka with the Officers Cross of the Federal Merit Order.

 

On February 27, 2015, the Prime Minister of the State of Brandenburg, Dr. Dietmar Woidke, handed over the insignia in the state chancellery in Potsdam.

 

Woidke thanked Rabbi Homolka for the establishment of the Abraham Geiger  College in 1999 as the first rabbinical school in Continental Europe after the Holocaust.
Homolka’s initiative in 2013 also formed the School of Jewish Theology of the University of Potsdam, Germany’s Jewish Divinity School. Rabbi Homolka is a professor of Modern Jewish Thought there.

 

 

On the day of the honour Germany’s nationwide tabloid BILD voted Homolka “winner of the day.”

 

 

Rabbi Walter Homolka is author of Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism (1995) and Jesus Reclaimed: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene (2015), and co-editor, with Albert Friedlander, of The Gate to Perfection: The Idea of Peace in Jewish Thought (1994). He is the rector of the Abraham Geiger College, Germany’s first rabbinical seminary after the Holocaust, and a professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the School of Jewish Theology of the University of Potsdam in Germany.

 

Simulated Shelves: Browse January 2015 New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published January 2015 titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Economics, Environmental Studies, Film Studies, History, Jewish Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Politics, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

 

We are especially excited to announce the publication of JESUS RECLAIMED: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene by Walter Homolka

“This book offers a constructive contribution to the debates on the theological significance of Jewish and Christian approaches to the historical Jesus. The author’s knowledge of Jewish and Christian discourses on both sides of the Atlantic is impressive.” · Werner G. Jeanrond, University of Oxford

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JESUS RECLAIMED
Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene
Walter Homolka
Translated by Ingrid Shafer

 

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War Magic & Warrior Religion: Sorcery, Cognition & Embodiment

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Berghahn blog editor Lorna Field.

D. S. Farrer is the co-author of the article Chants of Re-enchantment: Chamorro Spiritual Resistance to Colonial Domination and special issue editor of Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1: War Magic and Warrior Religion: Sorcery, Cognition, and Embodiment

 

 

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Religion, TV Drama, and Life in Africa

 

Television dramas set in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, offer viewers interesting commentaries on life in the African city, according to Katrien Pype. The connection between real-life and filmic melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs and testimonies are described in her book, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa, now available in paperback. Following, the author gives a synopsis of two popular TV shows in Kinshasa, Kalaonga and The Heritage of Death. These descriptions are followed by clips from each serial.

 


 

 

Kalaonga

(produced between March 2004 and November 2005)

 

The serial opens in the Dark World. Baaba, the Devil, accompanied by two demons, is listening to his daughter, the siren Kalaonga.

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