Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What religion does not serve as a theater of tears? Holy Tears addresses this all but universal phenomenon with passion and precision, ranging from Mycenaean Greece up through the tragedy of 9/11. Sixteen authors, including many leading voices in the study of religion, offer essays on specific topics in religious weeping while also considering broader issues such as gender, memory, physiology, and spontaneity. A comprehensive, elegantly written introduction offers a key to these topics. Given the pervasiveness of its theme, it is remarkable that this book is the first of its kind--and it is long overdue. The essays ask such questions as: Is religious weeping primal or culturally constructed? Is it universal? Is it spontaneous? Does God ever cry? Is religious weeping altered by sexual or social roles? Is it, perhaps, at once scripted and spontaneous, private and communal? Is it, indeed, divine? The grief occasioned by 9/11 and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere offers a poignant context for this fascinating and richly detailed book. Holy Tears concludes with a compelling meditation on the theology of weeping that emerged from pastoral responses to 9/11, as described in the editors' interview with Reverend Betsee Parker, who became head chaplain for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and leader of the multifaith chaplaincy team at Ground Zero. The contributors are Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Amy Bard, Herbert Basser, Santha Bhattacharji, William Chittick, Gary Ebersole, M. David Eckel, John Hawley, Gay Lynch, Jacob Olúpqnà (with Solá Ajíbádé), Betsee Parker, Kimberley Patton, Nehemia Polen, Kay Read, and Kallistos Ware.

Crying --- Religious aspects. --- Anchorite. --- Bhakti. --- Bodhisattva. --- Book of Lamentations. --- Braj. --- Buddhism. --- Chaplain. --- Christian art. --- Church Fathers. --- Contrition. --- Counter-Reformation. --- Crocodile tears. --- Damnation. --- Deity. --- Devotio Moderna. --- Devotio. --- Empty tomb. --- Equanimity. --- Exegesis. --- Ezekiel. --- Fall of man. --- Fertility rite. --- Glorification. --- God. --- Good and evil. --- Gopi. --- Hadith. --- Harrowing of Hell. --- Hasid (term). --- Husain. --- Hyperbole. --- Impermanence. --- Infidel. --- Isaac of Nineveh. --- Islamic literature. --- Jews. --- John Chrysostom. --- Judaism. --- Judas Maccabeus. --- Kabbalah. --- Karbala. --- Lament. --- Laughter. --- Literature. --- Mahayana. --- Majlis. --- Margery Kempe. --- Martyr. --- Mary Magdalene. --- Mary, mother of Jesus. --- Metatron. --- Midrash. --- Mircea Eliade. --- Mono no aware. --- Mortal sin. --- Mourning. --- Muslim. --- Names of God in Judaism. --- Oral Torah. --- Ordination of women. --- Pablo Picasso. --- Penitential. --- Perfection of Wisdom. --- Pity. --- Poemen. --- Poetry. --- Pope Gregory I. --- Popular piety. --- Premarital sex. --- Psalms. --- Pseudo-Bonaventura. --- Purgatory. --- Raccolta. --- Rashi. --- Recitation. --- Relic. --- Religion. --- Religious experience. --- Rite. --- Rogier van der Weyden. --- Sadness. --- Salvation. --- Shams Tabrizi. --- Shekhinah. --- Simon the Pharisee. --- Sin. --- Society of Jesus. --- Sotah (Talmud). --- Spirituality. --- Stupa. --- Sufism. --- Supplication. --- Surdas. --- Sutra. --- Ta'anit. --- Theodicy. --- Theology. --- To This Day. --- Virginity. --- William Chittick.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

Jews --- Judaism --- Martyrdom --- Martyrdom in literature. --- Hebrew literature, Medieval --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Religions --- Martyrdom (Judaism) --- Persecutions --- History --- Judaism. --- History and criticism. --- Religion --- Abraham ibn Ezra. --- Allusion. --- Apostasy. --- Ashkenaz. --- Blood libel. --- Book burning. --- Book of Ezekiel. --- Books of Kings. --- Christian literature. --- Christianity. --- Conversion to Christianity. --- Conversion to Judaism. --- Crusades. --- Defection. --- Desecration. --- Desperation (novel). --- Elohim. --- Emeritus. --- Exegesis. --- Ezekiel. --- First Crusade. --- Gershom. --- God. --- Hagigah. --- Hagiography. --- Halevi. --- Harassment. --- Hazzan. --- Hebrew Bible. --- Hebrew language. --- Heresy. --- High Middle Ages. --- Historian. --- Host desecration. --- Humiliation. --- Illustration. --- In Death. --- Incorruptibility. --- Israelites. --- Jewish identity. --- Jewish studies. --- Jews. --- Kohen. --- Lament. --- Lamentations Rabbah. --- Laments (Kochanowski). --- Libation. --- Literature. --- Maimonides. --- Martyr. --- Martyrology. --- Medieval Hebrew. --- Meir of Rothenburg. --- Middle Ages. --- Mishnah. --- Nahmanides. --- Names of God in Judaism. --- Narrative. --- Old French. --- Penitential. --- Persecution. --- Piyyut. --- Poetry. --- Polemic. --- Princeton University. --- Prose. --- Psalms. --- Pyre. --- Quatrain. --- Rabbi. --- Rabbinic literature. --- Rashbam. --- Rashi. --- Relic. --- Religious text. --- Responsa. --- Righteousness. --- Second Crusade. --- Sefer (Hebrew). --- Sefer Hasidim. --- Simhah. --- Soloveitchik. --- Stanza. --- Suffering. --- Suggestion. --- Talmud. --- Tefillin. --- Ten Martyrs. --- The Other Hand. --- The Song of Roland. --- Torah scroll. --- Torah. --- Treatise. --- Troyes. --- V. --- Writer. --- Writing. --- Yechiel of Paris. --- Yom Tov of Joigny.