Grundtvigs væksttanke - Fra menneskelivets begyndelse til dets fuldendelse

This study is about those Ukrainians who chose faith аs their dominant survival strategy at the beginning of the war. The multifunctionality of the religious strategy (according to K. Pargament) can manifest itself in religious behavior, which is also observed among the respondents: passive, active, in the development of personal relationships with God and interpersonal — in the middle of church communities, focused on solving problems and the emotional calm that religious practices bring — prayer and participation in divine services. A religious coping strategy helps to find hope through faith and trust in God and build a more positive vision of your future and your country. How did Ukrainians use religion to deal with the fear and trauma of war? This study shows how some Ukrainians, feeling the fear and trauma of war, turned to religion and faith not only in the traditional spiritual sense, but also in a broader interpretation as a hope and trust for a better future, victory and the forces of good. In order to identify strategies that help Ukrainians survive difficult trials, we conducted the interviews in April and May 2022 with 31 Ukrainians from different regions of Ukraine and abroad. Our research particularly highlights the spiritual experience of the Roman Catholic community of Ukraine. Religious coping mechanisms included physical activities such аs evening prayer with the family and attending church services. Metaphysical actions included communicating with God in everyday life or "giving everything to God." Religion was singled out as one of the strategies for overcoming difficulties by Ukrainians in extreme situations. Using thematic analysis, several strategic areas for dealing with stress were identified from the interview. In a brief linguistic analysis, It was noted that the word ‘faith’ appears in various meanings, not only faith in God, but also faith in victory, faith in the forces of good, faith in a better future for their children. Verbal concepts that reveal respondent’s religious worldview — faith in God (4 mentions), prayer (4), God (3), religious community (2), hope in God (4), faith (2), Lord God (2), church (1), trust in God.

Service and Advocacy: Matters of Faith?

Problem. Faith in God is a phenomenon that is difficult to define. Yet, it can be seen as an attitude of complete trust in God. As Proctor (1995) stated, faith in God is believing that there is a purpose and a power (called God) available to each of us, giving us an "inexhaustible source of evergreen inspiration" (p. xvii). Therefore, this study focused on how faith in God impacted administrative decision-making practices of three African-American Christian women administrators of higher education. Method. To achieve the purpose of this study, the literature was reviewed to identify existing theories. This descriptive multiple case study approach examined the impact of religious faith on the decision-making practices of three African-American Christian women administrators of higher education. Case study techniques used were interviews, observations, note-taking, reviewing existent documents, etc. to gain an understanding ofwhat the observed world was actually like. Different kinds of questions and analyses, derived from Spradley's (1979) developmental research sequence, were also used to enhance themethod of analyzing and interpreting the data. Findings and conclusions. Throughout this study, numerous attributes or values such as love, honesty, peace, joy, hope, intuition, etc. were engendered by faith in God. These attributes reflected anthropological, psychological, and sociological factors, thereby suggesting three theoretical models (to help understand faith-informed decisions): Fowler's stages of faith, Erikson's theory of human development; and the biblical model (Heb 11 and 1 Cor 13). According to the findings, it was the practice of the three Christian administrators in this study to ask God for help when making decisions, particularly administrative decisions. Because of their experiences, stories, and viewpoints, it was evident that their profession of faith in God was practiced overtly. The study revealed that religious faith was used as a practical approach to problem solving, conflict resolution, and decision-making practices in the lives of these administrators. Finally, the study showed that faith in God has given these Christian women strength of character to make faith-informed administrative decisions, which is the ability to use the qualities of the spiritual life intermingled with expertise and gifts from God for the good of the organization.

Grundtvigs udfordring til moderne theologi

The Book of Ruth is one of the shortest books of the Old Testament, but it gives the believer one of the most important truths of the Christian faith, that is, faith in Divine Providence. Through the history of simple women, Ruth and Naomi, the inspired author shows that God works in the daily routine of man in his intricate fate, which sometimes seems to contradict God’s goodness. The trust of Ruth and Naomi makes their common destiny illuminated by God, who acts not only in great and spectacular salvific events. The Lord reveals His presence in the world by the people who are sent to those who appear to be rejected by him. Women become figures of faith and trust in God. The article, based on the analysis of the Book of Ruth , shows a woman as an example of trust in Divine Providence. Woman’s trust turns out to be the basis of a close relationship with God, which a man can learn from his life partner. This kind of total devotion to God by a woman can also be a sign of God’s fidelity to every human being. So, based on the Book of Ruth , we can create a theory of some kind of biblical feminism that is perfectly morally healthy, because it is based on faith in God, His providence and love, and not on false faith in human capacities and abilities.

This chapter applies the account of trust developed hitherto in another novel area, addressing a current debate in the philosophy of religion. Many writers in recent years have argued that faith in God does not require any propositional belief, such as the belief that God exists, and of these, a number have used the notion of trust to develop a non-doxastic account of faith. This chapter addresses this debate indirectly, arguing that, by trusting in a speaking God, one normally commits oneself to believing a core of what is presented as divine speech. That is, trust in God normally has doxastic implications. This has the implication that, if faith in God involves trust, so faith is normally doxastic. Central to this claim is an argument about the rational implications of two-place trust for three-place trust relations, an argument which also has wider relevance for how to think about trust.

The subject of this chapter is belief in God. In its religiously important sense belief in God, in contrast to creedal belief, is not itself propositional (even though it implies certain propositional beliefs). It is seen how many religious thinkers have emphasized the difference between a bare belief that God exists and belief in God. Belief in God in its religiously important sense is an affective belief, the core of which is trust in God. As such it creates a God-relationship for believers that is defined by trust in God. In its affective sense “belief in God,” it is observed, is synonymous with “faith in God.” The chapter includes a discussion of Martin Buber’s distinction between two types of faith, pistis and emunah.

This study aims to examine the meaning of the concepts of patience (sabr), contentment (ridha), and trust in God (tawakkul) in the Qur’an, as well as to explore their intersections and distinctions with Stoic principles. The background of this study arises from the phenomenon of contemporary Muslim spirituality, which often interprets these three concepts in a narrow sense, whereas in classical Islamic tradition they represent an active form of spirituality imbued with reflection and self-control. This research employs a qualitative approach with the thematic exegesis method (maudhu’i), combined with the ethical framework of Stoicism as an interpretative analytical tool. Thematic data analysis revealed five main themes: (1) patience as active perseverance in facing trials, (2) contentment as sincere acceptance of destiny with faith in God’s wisdom, (3) trust in God as submission of outcomes after maximal effort, (4) the synergistic relationship of the three concepts in shaping holistic spirituality, and (5) their impact on character maturity and psychological resilience. The findings indicate convergence with Stoic principles apatheia, amor fati, and prohairesis yet remain distinct in their theological dimension emphasizing submission to God.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLaurie Shannon The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.Rhodri LewisRhodri LewisUniversity of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI have no doubt that The Accommodated Animal will win an appreciative audience. In it, Laurie Shannon strongly disputes the Cartesian notion of the bête machine; in so doing, she adduces a number of texts produced (for the most part) in the century or so before Descartes wrote and seeks to expose the crudity, injustice, and intellectual poverty that inhere in Descartes’s denigration of animal life. If Descartes is the villain of the piece, then its hero is Montaigne, whose willingness to accept the permeability of the dividing lines between human and animal existence invests nonhuman beings with dignity, agency, and ontological significance. This terrain has been familiar since the publication of George Boas’s classic study of The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1933). But in Shannon’s estimation, Boas “circumscribe[s] the entire logic of the happy beast within an imperturbably human-exceptionalist domain” (136); he is unduly determined to fit zoophilic discourse within the confines of a conventionally defined seventeenth-century literary and intellectual worldview. By contrast, Shannon seeks to unpack the implicit logic of early modern zoophilia and to reconstruct the status of animals as active participants in pre-Cartesian political culture—or what she elaborates as the “constitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that set animals within the scope of justice and the span of political imagination” (3). Shannon conceives of this state as embodying the “cosmopolity” of her subtitle and proposes that “The Accommodated Animal tracks a particular tradition that accommodates the presence of animals and conceives them as actors and stakeholders endowed by their creator with certain subjective interests” (18).Since the advent of the New Historicism nearly forty years ago, students of English literature have grown used to assertions of the special congruity between the critical present and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Accommodated Animal is another case in point. Quite aside from its numerous intersections with the burgeoning subfield of early modern ecocriticism (in particular the work of Bruce Boehrer and Erica Fudge, generously acknowledged throughout), its arguments are directly addressed to contemporary discussions of animal welfare: for instance, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, cited as 1517 by Shannon) is a “prescient intimation” of the brutalities of industrial farming in present-day North America (23–24). For anyone who follows the leads provided by Shannon in her footnotes (or with the will and inclination to search the internet for themselves), it is hard not to endorse the tenor and assumptions of her argument. Further, her argument is in itself advanced with intelligence, verve, and discursive passion. It is thus unfortunate that as an exercise in literary, cultural, or intellectual history—and as a piece of literary criticism—The Accommodated Animal too often falls short of the mark.Some of the responsibility for this belongs to Descartes. In seeking to repudiate so thoroughly his ill-grounded but influential theorizing, Shannon has projected its mirror image onto the cultural world that preceded it. On the one hand, doing so flattens out and misrepresents the nature of human-animal relations in the century or so before Descartes; on the other, it fails fully to account for the emergence of Descartes’s ideas as a reaction to the received early seventeenth-century wisdom. Contra Descartes, biological and religious comparativism had been a staple of accounts of the natural world and of the place of humankind within it, since ancient Athens at the latest. (Think of the scala naturae, or chain of being.) The rub is that the comparability of human beings and elephants, dogs, cats, parrots, apes, ants, or bees does not connote their identity. Nor does such comparability mean that animals are praised for attributes, whether physical or mental, that are anything other than anthropoid: elephants, like humankind, are social and have excellent memories; parrots, like humankind, have well-developed vocal organs; bees, like humankind, live in complex hierarchical societies. On the standard model of animate life derived from Aristotle, elaborated by Galen, and comprehensively baptized over the course of the Middle Ages, all living beings had vegetative and sensitive souls. Most obviously, the sensitive soul comprised the external senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But it also comprised the “internal senses”: these varied in number and nature from theorist to theorist but were usually between three and seven and included the faculties of imagination, memory, judgment, and common sense. In all of these areas, animal life stood in contiguous relation to its human equivalent. In many cases, animal abilities could even exceed those found in humankind: the vision of a cat or a hawk, like the olfactory sensitivity of a bloodhound, far outstripped those of any human being. What made humankind different was the possession of an immortal, immaterial, and intellective soul; it was in virtue of this that human life could claim deiformity and dominion over the created world. It was also through the intellect that humankind could think and communicate through language. As animals lacked an intellective soul, so even those of them with well-developed vocal organs could only express their passions: fear, pain, hunger, pleasure, affection, desire, satiation, and so on.1 What is more, biological comparativism made possible a species of moral comparativism—of which, as Shannon discusses at length, Montaigne was the principal exponent. Animals accepted their cosmic station with (the anthropomorphic) virtues of humility and patience and stood as a lesson and rebuke to the pride, dissatisfaction, anger, doubt, ambition, and cruelty of so much human life. For Descartes, this comparativism failed to put enough distance between human and animal life, thereby threatening the distinctive status of humankind and philosophical truth alike. The cogito and its concomitant bête machine were his response.By maintaining that “Montaigne and Descartes, pro et contra, stage a historically pivotal debate” on the subject of “animal stakeholdership” (13), Shannon elides the reactive quality of Descartes’s thinking just as fundamentally as she distorts Montaigne. As Shannon notes immediately after situating Montaigne and Descartes alongside one another, Montaigne turns to animals as a way in which to excoriate human pride and in which to probe the limitations of human intellection. For him, a vivid marker of humankind’s fallen insufficiency is the inability to comprehend the makeup of the natural world and its animal inhabitants, while even without the benefits of intellective discourse, animals often possess an innate wisdom to which humankind might well aspire. Shannon’s account of Montaigne is vibrant but loses sight of the fact that he nowhere suggests that animals might be political stakeholders, whether in virtue of their physical, mental, or habitual attributes. An example might better encapsulate the point. Montaigne was unquestionably both squeamish and an animal lover, but he was also a keen huntsman—he took pleasure in pursuing and killing (or, rather, having his hounds kill for him) animals like the hare, boar, and deer. By contrast, and in common with the overwhelming majority of his peers in sixteenth-century Europe, Montaigne seems never to have hunted human beings, just as he seems never to have eaten them, worn their skins, or burned them for fuel. Howsoever praiseworthy Montaigne may have taken animals to be, he viewed them as ontologically lesser forms of life. Hunting also provides some clues as to how early modern animals were valorized more generally. I quote from Oliver St John’s attempt to have Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford) tried by bill of attainder rather than with benefit of law: “we give law to Hares and Deeres, because they be beasts of Chase; It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock Foxes and Wolves on the head, as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey.”2 Remarkable though they were often thought to be, foxes and wolves were acknowledged as dangerous vermin. Unlike peaceable and purportedly noble creatures such as the deer and hare (which were to be given the chance to escape while being hunted), they were to be eradicated with violence and the minimum of fuss. Here as elsewhere, early modern animals were defined within a moral economy—call it a polis, if you will—that they had no role in framing or regulating.Although Shannon’s subtitle draws attention to “Shakespearean locales,” her spaces of exploration are textual and overlook the quotidian reality of human-animal interactions in the early modern world. It is good to see Shannon attending so thoughtfully to humanist natural history and the traditions of hexameral commentary (the twin pillars of her contextualizations), but in advancing an argument about early modern animal cosmopolity, one must surely seek to get in behind the learned world and its various idealizations. I have already mentioned hunting; a more surprising omission is that Shannon offers no sustained account of early modern farming, the site of human interactions with domesticated rather than wild animals. I kept hearing Keith Thomas’s admonition that changing attitudes to animals were the province of “well-to-do townsmen, remote from the agricultural process and inclined to think of animals as pets rather than as working livestock.”3 How did animals fare on the pre-Cartesian farm? About the closest we get to finding out comes in Shannon’s observation that the dimensions of Noah’s Ark proposed in John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) “uncannily reflect the exact demands made in contemporary calls for minimum standards concerning livestock confinement” (280). This is ingenious and charmingly arcane but shirks the question. Notwithstanding her attention to Montaigne’s bookish thought experiments, Shannon by no means establishes that her pre-Cartesian stakeholder zootopia existed.There is comparatively little Shakespeare in The Accommodated Animal, and when Shannon does discuss his texts, it is generally as a peg on which to hang her broader arguments or as a pendant with which to adorn them. Chapter 1, for instance, begins with a discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (29–31) and concludes some fifty pages later with As You Like It (80–81). Initially, these readings are unsatisfactory. It does not inspire confidence in Shannon’s critical ear to find her discussing “Jacques” throughout her account of As You Like It (80–81, also 69), but more concerning is her determination to set the play’s action within a prefabricated interpretative mold. After granting that Duke Senior is allowing his fancies to get the better of him by imagining the Forest of Arden as another Eden, Shannon asks us to read his assertion that deer are the “native burghers of this desert city” as evidence of animal political stakeholdership (80). Such a reading leaves no space for the critic to acknowledge Shakespeare’s riff on pastoral convention: the Duke’s metaphor belongs to the overwrought speech of one used to dwelling in an urban court and who is not yet habituated to the realities of country life. He and his cohort will hunt, kill, and eat the deer anyway. Here as elsewhere, it is disappointing that Shannon does not scrutinize the politics and dynamics of the pastoral mode.Things pick up in the book’s final two chapters, particularly in discussions of King Lear (127–37, 165–76) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (180–84, 212–17). Here, instead of constraining her critical faculties to the demands of her thesis, Shannon works with patience and care, deftly teasing out the ways in which early modern writing on animals can help us to comprehend Shakespeare’s dramatic writing. This is historicism at its best. She reads Lear as “part of a larger zoographic critique of man” (133), in which humankind is contrasted unfavorably to the animals who know and contentedly inhabit their place in the order of things; Lear and his extended family are by contrast unaccommodated, disconnected from themselves and their place in the cosmos. As for the Dream, Shannon traces in it anxiety about the nocturnal weakness of humankind; in the darkness of the night, nonhuman animals establish temporary dominion of the worlds they inhabit. Through its “comparatist sensibility, the play engages in the zoographic mode of critique…[and] actually goes further and enforces human identity as a constraint” (180). Aside from their impressively analytical edginess, what these readings have in common is that they are epiphenomenal to Shannon’s stated thesis about pre-Cartesian cosmopolity and animal stakeholding. Animal discourse emerges as something though which Shakespeare was able to develop the thick weave and texture of his dramatic vision and against which he was able to measure certain aspects of the human condition. Near the start of The Accommodated Animal, Shannon announces her intention to move on from the critical habit of thinking “with” animals and to think “about” them instead (5). The problem is that Shakespeare, like Montaigne, resists this categorization: for the non-Cartesian early moderns, animals and the attempt to understand animal life were valuable to the extent that they helped to illuminate the human condition. Descartes’s revolution was to claim that such illuminations were illusory, harmful, and therefore to be discarded. Regrettably, he prevailed. Shannon, like many other broadly ecocritical writers, is to be praised for seeking to push back against him.University of Chicago Press has produced an attractive and affordable volume; it is especially welcome that Shannon’s references are printed in footnote rather than endnote form. Two cavils: copyediting is undistinguished (proper names, e.g., are a lottery); given the breadth and interest of the sources Shannon discusses, I cannot understand why her readers have been deprived of a bibliography.Notes1 The bibliography on such questions is massive. Three good starting points are Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84; Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 219–27; and Richard W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 425–44.2 Oliver St John, An Argument of Law Concerning the Bill of Attainder of High-Treason of Thomas, Earle of Strafford (London, 1641), 72.3 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Lane, 1983), 182. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 4May 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679328 Views: 281Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Basic-theoretical foundations of the blessing in the worship service and ensuing guidelines for the liturgy The Biblical foundations of the blessing in the church service and the meaning and function of the salutatory and sending- away blessings are the focus of this article. A short extract from history follows, and based on findings from Scripture and his- tory, theoretical perspectives for practice and liturgical guide- lines are indicated. Some of the most important conclusions drawn are the following: The congregation of Jesus Christ should receive the blessing of the Lord as indispensable gift in its assemblage. Without this blessing communion with God and each other, trust in God and fulfilment of each believer’s voca- tion in the world are impossible. The salutatory blessing pours out onto the congregation all the blessings that enable mem- bers to participate to advantage in the church service. The congregation is blessed and sent back into the world by God himself. Without the sending-away blessing the congregation cannot fulfil its vocation in the world, especially to be witnesses for Christ. If an ordained minister of the gospel is present in the gathering of the congregation he should pronounce the bles- sing, which comes directly from God. It is vital that the congre- gation appropriate the blessing in faith by means of an overt act, namely by saying “amen” to that.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyah is one of the flag bearers of Islāmic psychology. Ibn Qayyim had rightly identified the relation between the physical and spiritual ailments. He has contributed both in the fields of spiritual and physical health. For curing psycho-spiritual diseases, he has proposed number of spiritual interventions that include faith in God, worship, dhikr (remembrance of God) patience, and supplication. He has also proposed cognitive-behavioral model and the therapeutic intervention of cognitive restructuring that is based on reliance and trust in God for those who are suffering from deprivation or loss.

The article dwells upon the analysis of the doctrine of the faith developed by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) based on his homiletical heritage. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest of theologians, philologists and other scientists in recent years in the preaching activities of the Sourozh archpastor and the need to identify in his homiletical heritage specific features that contribute to the successful work of evangelical preaching, instructing his flock in the true faith and teaching correct spiritual life. The purpose of the study is to show the peculiarities of revealing the theme of faith in the sermons of Metropolitan Anthony, delivered by him on the feasts of the Lord. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the detailed analysis of the structure and definition of the form of Metropolitan Anthony’s sermons, as well as in the reflection of the relationship between his doctrinal and moral instructions in the process of revealing his designated topic. The hermeneutic method was used in the analysis and interpretation of sermon texts; the comparative theological method was used to identify the main features of the author’s exegesis proposed by Metropolitan Anthony for some texts of the Holy Scriptures and the catechetical Word for Easter of St. John Chrysostom; intertextual analysis was used to compare sermons and biblical texts. As a result of the study, it was revealed that Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) reveals the theme of faith in various aspects: faith as a person’s trust in God; faith of God in man; faith as a synergistic movement of God and man; faith as a person’s struggle with his or her internal contradictions; faith as responsibility; actualization of faith through love.

The twofold purposes of the present article are first to discuss several translational issues Isaiah 7 through an exegetical inquiry into it and then to offer a new translation of the present chapter, which can be summed up in a sentence: “You shall not stand firm, if you do not believe.” Isaiah 7 deals with the vital impact of faith in God intervening in human affairs on real political decisions, which runs through the entire book of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah challenges King Ahaz to trust in the Lord and stay firm even in the face of military threats of the Syro-Ephramite coalition against herself and instead absolutely trust in God’s unconditional commitment as promised in the Davidic covenant (2 Sam 7:12-16).<BR> However, King Ahaz and the House of David seriously oscillated between trust in God and trust in a powerful foreign nation like Assyria or Egypt. Isaiah 7 illustrates how badly faith in a living God affects the real political decision of a nation and its aftermaths. Isaiah 7 chronicles the two historic failures of the House of David in a salvific intervention of Yahweh God of Israel on behalf of Israel: the Syro-Ephraimite crisis(B.C. 735-732) and the B.C. 701 Assyrian crisis.<BR> While Isaiah urged both King Ahaz and King Hezekiah to trust God alone, the House of Judah failed to trust in the intervention of God in the two crises and instead relied on powerless idols such as foreign powers and spirits of dead ancestors. Nonetheless, Isaiah 7 emphasizes that the human infidelity of Judah to the divine covenant of God to the House of David could not nullify Yahweh’s zeal for the House of David.<BR> In closing the translation and exegesis of Isaiah 7 offered above has offered some new translations of several key verses in Isaiah 7 such as v. 3 and v. 14, whose nuances have been overlooked.

We tested the hypothesis that religiosity (ie, seeking God's help, having faith in God, trusting in God, and trying to perceive God's will in the disease) is associated with improved survival in patients with end-stage liver disease who have undergone orthotopic liver transplantation. We studied a group of 179 candidates for liver transplantation who responded to a questionnaire on religiosity during the pretransplant psychological evaluation and underwent transplantation between 2004 and 2007. The demographic data, educational level, employment status, clinical data, and results of the questionnaire were compared with the survival of patients during follow-up, regardless of the cause of any deaths. Factorial analysis of responses to the questionnaire revealed 3 main factors: searching for God (active), waiting for God (passive), and fatalism. The consistency of the matrix was very high (consistency index = 0.92). Eighteen patients died during follow-up (median time = 21 months). In multivariate analysis, only the searching for God factor [hazard ratio (HR) = 2.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.05-8.32, χ(2) = 4.205, P = 0.040] and the posttransplant length of stay in the intensive care unit (HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.01-1.08, χ(2) = 8.506, P = 0.035) were independently associated with survival, even after adjustments for the waiting for God factor, fatalism, age, sex, marital status, employment, educational level, viral etiology, Child-Pugh score, serum creatinine level, time from the questionnaire to transplantation, donor age, and intraoperative bleeding. Patients who did not present the searching for God factor were younger than those who did, but they had shorter survival times (P = 0.037) and a 3-fold increased relative risk of dying (HR = 3.01, 95% CI = 1.07-8.45). In conclusion, religiosity is associated with prolonged survival in patients undergoing liver transplantation.

I and II Esdras is Volume 42 in the Anchor Bible series of new book-by-book translations of the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha, each by a preeminent scholar. Jacob M. Myers is Professor of Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg and the author of three earlier volumes in the series: I Chronicles and II Chronicles and Ezra, Nehemiah. The present work constitutes the first English commentary on I Esdras in sixty years and the first on II Esdras in forty. Written about 10 BCE, I Esdras is a history ranging from the pious reign of Josiah to the religious reforms of Ezra. For this period Josephus follows I Esdras in his Antiquities of the Jews. An apocalyptic work, written 250 years later, II Esdras seeks to offer strength, courage, and hope to those whose faith was severely shaken in the gloom and despondency that followed upon the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Its chief purpose was to inspire trust in God and the ultimate triumph of righteousness, if not in this world, then in the world to come. “Tracts for the times such as II Esdras,” writes Dr. Myers in his preface, “have a message for us who in a revolutionary age are obsessed with the impatience reflected by Ezra; it was not that he lacked faith in God but that he, like Job, questioned his ways and the delay, perhaps seeming inactivity, in the face of what appeared to the prophet to be terrible urgencies. The questions posed are still asked in the context of our age.” Eight photographs of ancient Near Eastern sculpture and coins help the reader visualize both the events recounted in I Esdras and the apocalyptic imagery in II Esdras. Each book has its own introduction and bibliography.