Leonard B. Glick recounts the history of the Ashkenazic Jewish experience in medieval western Europe from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, focusing on interaction between Jews and Christians during this vital formative period. He demonstrates that Ashkenazic Jewish culture was profoundly shaped and conditioned by life in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Drawing on diverse Christian documents, he portrays Christian beliefs about medieval Jews and Judaism with a degree of detail seldom found in Jewish histories. Emphasizing social, political, and economic history, but also discussing religious topics, Glick describes the evolution of a complex, inherently unequal relationship. Because the Ashkenazic Jews of medieval Europe were ancestral to almost the entire Jewish population of eastern Europe, their historical experience played a major role in the heritage of most Jewish Americans.

Argues that collaboration and bonds of respect are possible between Muslim, Jews and Christians today.The three Abrahamic traditions have a long history of clashes, often with disastrous results. This book offers an alternative to those who see only a future like the past: of increasing friction and violence.Three of the most respected figures representing Catholic Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, Professor Reuven Firestone, and Professor Mahmoud Ayoub--show that collaboration can work, that it is possible to foster mutual understanding and appreciation of the different traditions in practical ways.

More than ever before, today's news brings Middle Eastern wars into our homes as the animosity between the Arab world and Israel escalates. "Will they ever have peace?" everyone asks. Attempting to answer that question, "Heirs of Abraham" is a historical family saga stretching over a time span of almost four thousand years. It follows the lives of the Biblical nomad Abraham, who is the foundation of the world's three great religions-Islam, Judaism, and, indirectly, Christianity-and his two sons. There is Ishmael, born of an Egyptian slave whose descendants are today's Arabs. And there is Isaac, son of Abraham's beloved wife and the Jews' patriarch. Set against the backdrops of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel-of wars and famines, goat-haired tents and kings' palaces-this is a saga of real people whose actions will have an everlasting effect on all future generations and worlds. First, there is Abraham, who struggles with faith, power, love and cowardice. There are his women-Sarah, the wife, and Hagar, the slave-whose jealous love for him and hatred of each other never die. Finally, there are the two brothers who have been pitted against each other for thousands of years in the age-old battle for the land now known as the State of Israel. Yet most of all, "Heirs of Abraham," faithfully following the Holy Bible's accounting in Genesis, is a dramatic reminder of God's love for all people.

Christianity is widely understood to be a "universal" religion that transcends the particularities of history and culture, including differences related to kinship and ethnicity. In traditional Pauline scholarship, this portrait of Christianity has been justified by the letters of Paul. Interpreters claim that Paul eliminates ethnicity, or at least separates it from what is important about Christianity. This study challenges that perception. Through a detailed examination of kinship and ethnic language in Paul's letters, Johnson Hodge argues that notions of peoplehood and lineage are not rejected or downplayed by Paul; instead they are central to his gospel. Paul's chief concern is the status of the gentile peoples who are alienated from the God of Israel. Ethnicity defines this theological problem, just as it shapes his own evangelizing of the ethnic and religious "other." According to Paul, God has responded to the gentile predicament through Christ. Johnson Hodge details how Paul uses the logic of patrilineal descent to construct a myth of origins for gentiles: through baptism into Christ the gentiles become descendants of Abraham, adopted sons of God and coheirs with Christ. Although Jews and gentiles now share a common ancestor, they are not collapsed into one group (of "Christians," for example). They are separate but related lineages of Abraham. Through comparisons with other ancient authors, Johnson Hodge shows that Paul is not alone in his strategic use of kinship and ethnic language. Because kinship and ethnicity present themselves as natural and fixed, yet are also open to negotiation and reworking, they are effective tools in organizing people and power, shaping self-understanding and defining membership. If Sons, Then Heirs demonstrates that Paul's thinking is immersed in the story of Israel. He speaks not as a Christian theologian, but as a first-century Jewish teacher of gentiles responding to concrete situations in these early communities of Christ-followers. As such Paul does not reject or critique Judaism, but responds to God's call to be a "light to the nations."

Thanks to coded notes taken by the teenager John Pynchon, this volume transports the reader, virtually, back to Sundays in the seventeenth century, when the community gathered to listen to the Rev. George Moxon. The setting was Springfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 by John's father William Pynchon. As a note-taker, John recorded just what he heard in this rare resource, which allows the reader to listen in on the weekly sermons he documented in the 1640s. This symbol-by-symbol transcription into a word-for-word text preserves the character of the minister's original remarks, and reveals Moxon as an able, engaging speaker who offered encouragement--and challenge--to the growing plantation he faithfully served through its earliest years on the edge of a wilderness. Not only do the sermons in this collection provide snippets of popular theological discourse at particular moments in the 1600s; they also point to issues of the day, and they help us get inside the thoughts and word patterns of that era.