A unique and comprehensive account of attitudes to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome.

"From the earliest interactions of Christians with the Roman Empire to today's debates about the separation of church and state, the Christian churches have been in complex relationships with various economic and political system for centuries. Renowned theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether analyzes the ways Christian churches historically interacted with powerful systems such as patriarchy, racism, slavery and environmentalism, while looking critically at how the church shapes these systems today. This book is neither an attack on the relationship between Christianity and these systems nor an apology bur rather a nuanced examination of the interactions between them. By understanding how these interactions have shaped history, we can more fully understand how to make ethical decisions about the role of Christianity in some of today's most pressing social issues."--BOOK JACKET.

Collection containing thirty-five letters and sermons of St Augustine on politics, addressing essential themes in Augustine's thought.

The new edition of this celebrated anthology surveys the Western philosophical tradition from its origins in ancient Greece to the work of today’s leading philosophers Western Philosophy: An Anthology provides an authoritative guided tour through the great tradition of Western philosophical thought. The seminal writings of the great philosophers along with more recent readings of contemporary interest are explored in 144 substantial and carefully chosen extracts, each preceded by a lucid introduction, guiding readers through the history of a diverse range of key arguments, and explaining how important theories fit into the unfolding story of Western philosophical inquiry. Broad in scope, the anthology covers all the main branches of philosophy: theory of knowledge and metaphysics, logic and language, philosophy of mind, the self and freedom, religion and science, moral philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and the meaning of life, all in self-contained parts which can be worked on by students and instructors independently. The third edition of the Anthology contains newly incorporated classic texts from thinkers such as Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, William James, and Wittgenstein. Each of the 144 individual extracts is now followed by sample questions focusing on the key philosophical problems raised by the excerpt, and accompanied by detailed further reading suggestions that include up-to-date links to online resources. Also new to this edition is an introductory essay written by John Cottingham, which offers advice to students on how to read and write about a philosophical text. Part of the Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies series, Western Philosophy: An Anthology, Third Edition remains an indispensable collection of classic source materials and expert insights for both beginning and advanced university students in a wide range of philosophy courses.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.

Alexis convincingly examines the crisis in education from a Christian perspective. (Social Issues)

This is the first volume of a projected four-volume series charting the causes of war from 3000 BCE to the present day, written by a leading international lawyer, and using as its principal materials the documentary history of international law largely in the form of treaties and the negotiations which led up to them. These volumes seek to show why millions of people, over thousands of years, slayed each other. In departing from the various theories put forward by historians, anthropologists and psychologists, Gillespie offers a different taxonomy of the causes of war, focusing on the broader settings of politics, religion, migrations and empire-building. These four contexts were dominant and often overlapping justifications for the first four thousand years of human civilisation, for which written records exist.