Suchergebnisse

An analysis of the history of the Christian churches of Europe and North America during the Cold War, discussing the impact of dictatorship, geopolitical confrontation and nuclear politics, and also exploring social, cultural and intellectual developments across the churches in this period.

Abstract:The present article explores the motives behind the so-called 'appropriation' of Aristotelian logic by the Syriac-speaking community in the Near East from the sixth to the ninth centuries. While it is often assumed that the Syrians adopted Greek logic for religious, and polemical, ends, we aim to show rather that the underlying reasons given for the study of logic and its propagation through educational institutions were much the same among Syriac as they were for Greek practitioners of philosophy in Late Antiquity. There was a marked continuity between the late ancient Greek centres of learning and the Syriac monasteries. Syriac theologians rarely, if ever, sought to use Aristotle as a crutch in sectarian religious debates. There are implications for our understanding of how and why the Arabic renaissance in logic came about.

SummaryThis paper sets forth a theory of competition between exclusive religions as an entry deterrence game, in which the incumbent may find it profitable not to accommodate but to deter the competitor's entry by precommitting to sufficient capacity expansion in the event of entry. If entry costs are high enough, deterrence is optimal and the incumbent remains a monopolist, although the entry threat distorts its effort upward. The model is then used to explain the Jews' withdrawal from proselytism in the face of Christian competition in the first century CE. We review the historical evidence on conversion to Judaism before and after the first century and argue that the demise of Jewish proselytism was due not to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE but to the apostle Paul's strategic decision, in his letter to the Galatians, that Gentiles need not convert to Judaism to become Christians.