Monday, January 21, 2013

Seeing the God is coming

JARED CALLAWAY notes the forthcoming Gorgias Press book Seeing the God: Ways of Envisioning the Divine in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (ed. Jeffrey Pettis), to which he is a contributor. The publisher's description:
Seeing the God: Ways of Envisioning the Divine in Ancient Mediterranean Religion is a collection of scholarly essays exploring the concept of how the ancients “envisioned” the deities within various religious traditions, including Judaism, Gnosticism, Syriac Christianity, Byzantium, and Classical Greco-Roman religion and philosophy.

In this book, specific attention is given to phenomena such as dreams, day or night-time visions, and initiation rites perceived as mediums of divine encounter. The work derives from an idea of Robin Lane Fox, who, in his Pagans and Christians writes, “When people prayed, they expected their gods to come, from the age of Homer to the last Platonists in the fifth century A.D.”