Leviticus has shaped both Jewish and Christian theology and practice over the centuries. The final chapter examines its influence in the rest of the Old Testament and into the Second Temple period and the New Testament. Levitical theology also influenced a Christian understanding of sacred space in church architecture as well as helping shape the Christian liturgical year.

This chapter examines the transition of pagan architecture and religious practices in Late Antiquity, focusing on the treatment of Roman temples under Christian emperors. Drawing on legal texts, literature, inscriptions and archaeological findings, it evaluates whether temples were preserved, repurposed or destroyed. Challenging the common assumption of widespread temple destruction, it argues that such actions were neither systematic nor state-enforced. Instead, the chapter presents a nuanced perspective, demonstrating that many temples remained intact and were gradually adapted for secular or Christian purposes. Archaeological evidence suggests that abandonment and natural decay played a greater role in their decline than deliberate demolition. It also highlights how Christian emperors often sought to suppress pagan rituals while preserving architectural heritage, with legal measures typically prohibiting sacrifices rather than mandating temple destruction. By emphasising regional variations in temple transformations and critically assessing sources that exaggerate instances of destruction, the chapter challenges traditional narratives, offering a more complex understanding of religious and architectural change in Late Antiquity.

This chapter examines glass production in Late Antiquity, with a particular focus on technological advancements, economic significance and regional variations. Drawing on archaeological evidence, chemical analyses, typological studies and historical texts, it traces the evolution of glass manufacturing and distribution across the Roman and Byzantine worlds. The authors argue that glass production in Late Antiquity was highly adaptable, responding to shifts in economic structures, raw material availability and technological innovations. A key factor in this development was the dominance of large-scale glass furnaces in Egypt and the Levant, which supplied raw glass to secondary workshops throughout the empire. The chapter also explores how glassmakers refined shaping and decorating techniques, incorporating blown glass, engraved patterns, gold-leaf applications and coloured blobs. In terms of function, it demonstrates that glass was used across a wide range of contexts, from everyday tableware to luxury drinking vessels, lamps and even windowpanes. Regional differences are evident, with eastern Mediterranean workshops favoring elaborate embellishments, while western traditions drew inspiration from ceramic and metal vessels. A key conclusion is that glass was not only a practical commodity but also a marker of status and innovation.

Brennan Breed’s “The Reception History of Isaiah: Unsealing the Book” takes a single theme attested in just a few verses (Isa 8:16; 29:11; and 30:8) and shows how it has been reinterpreted by readers ceaselessly across the centuries, all the way from later biblical authors to modern times, in response to everything from sectarian divisions to African-American slavery to the trauma of the Holocaust. These verses refer to the words of the prophet being sealed, especially to those who are ignorant, until the time comes for their meaning to be revealed. This theme brings into focus the ways in which Isaiah has been used polemically, and it also points to the text’s power as a seemingly inexhaustible well of meaning.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

This volume reflects on modes of scholarship in Latin literature: what texts do we read? How do we read them? And why? The introductory chapter first surveys the tools of the trade in the twenty-first century, then asks how ‘classical Latin’ is defined. We reflect on the exclusion of Christian Latin texts from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, try to quantify the corpus of surviving classical Latin, and uncover striking continuities between the canon of authors prescribed by Quintilian and modern teaching and research in classical Latin; commensurately, we draw attention to the neglect suffered by most surviving classical Latin authors and still more by the pagan and Christian texts of late antiquity. In the process we set an agenda for the volume as a whole, of ‘decentring’ classical Latin, and offer some first points of orientation in the late antique, mediaeval and early modern eras. Third, we look afresh at relations between Latin and fellow sub-disciplines in Classics and beyond. How much do we have in common, and what problems stand in the way of more successful communication? We close with some reflections on ‘close reading’ and on the possibility of evolving ‘distant reading’.

Macedonian conqueror, in both Jewish and Christian sources, was a composite and of complicated design. It was constantly created and recreated, using varied techniques and inspirations, which resulted in a number of disparate, fragmentary projections. The dominant features of these projections were selected according to the immediate need and agenda of the text in which the figure of Alexander appeared. There is a certain continuity between the development of Alexander stories and legends in the Jewish milieu and those of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions, but there are significant innovations as well. As for the Christian authors, as much as they were familiar with Classical writings on Alexander, they would also exploit the Jewish corpus of Alexander legends, some of which have no direct parallel in Greco-Roman pagan writings.

1 Introduction

2 Digital Religion: History and Context

3 Digital Religious Practice as Contemporary Lived Religion

4 Challenges of Digital Religion to Offline Religious Practice

 4.1 Shifts in Religious Authority Online and Offline

 4.2 Digital Ritual: Transforming Traditional Religious Practice

5 Religious Community in the Digital Age

6 Future Developments in Digital Religion

Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

Is “patience a virtue” in Shakespeare? Yes, this chapter argues—though Shakespeare also fully acknowledges how the word and the virtue itself can be abused. For an example of the more troubling ways in which patience is invoked by Shakespeare, consider Petruchio’s promise to see Katherine become “a second Grissel,” an icon of patient wifely submission. Or take the jarring way Prince Ferdinand, in The Tempest, reaps romantic rewards for “patient” labors of the same sort that the enslaved Caliban has long unwillingly and unprofitably endured. Such scandalous appeals to patience invite us to read into Shakespeare a modern critique of this virtue: a critique that has been prominent ever since Nietzsche called patience one of Western culture’s key “fabricated ideals,”a constraint on human potential. To show why the abuse of patience discourse is not the whole story in Shakespeare, this chapter recalls how classical and Christian traditions envision patience as not a loser’s but a winner’s virtue. In classical ethics it is a practice of acting deliberately rather than reactively. And in Christianity, patience not only builds confidence in a better world to come, but—as Marina’s perseverance in Pericles shows—can also further meaningful change in this one.

Christian theological interpretation of Scripture is a practice that brings together both trained biblical scholars as well as theologians of various types. In recent years this has enabled the importance of some foundational theological questions about scriptural interpretation to come to the forefront. This chapter both highlights the importance of addressing these questions and how the practice of theological interpretation might move forward in the future.

The chapter focuses on religious and ethnic affiliation as social factors that influence the structure of variation in several Arabic-speaking communities. We go beyond the simplistic correlations between religious/ethnic groupings and language, and seek to uncover the histories and social meanings of variation based on such groupings. We include examples, both old and new, to illustrate variation according to these factors.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

What did Celsus know about late second-century Christianity and how did he know it? This paper argues that Celsus is a biased but nonetheless valuable independent witness into late second-century Christianity, providing insight into the public perception of Christian groups as a social phenomenon and of the Christian meta-narrative that was seeping into public consciousness.

Examines interaction, focused on highlighting the tools of conversation analysis, a long-standing staple in discourse analysis, to understand how religious doctrine is worked out in interaction.