Christian Devotion Research Articles

Christ Existing in Ordinary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sanctification

One task of any doctrine of sanctification is to attend to a theological rationale for the significance of a habitual and developing Christian life within a broader salvific economy. This article introduces the problem of claiming ‘ordinary’ life as the arena and instrument of God and distils three elements of Bonhoeffer's early theology that might be employed to articulate a theology of sanctification as the counterpoint of justification: the realization of a new humanity in Christ that constitutes an ontology of justification; Christian devotion as the act of this new humanity in the Spirit; and the dynamic integrity accorded to historical existence.

Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. By Jeffrey S. Shoulson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 266 pp. $65.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England . By Jeffrey S. Shoulson . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013. 266 pp. $65.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAt first glance Fictions of Conversion may strike the reader as oddly subtitled since Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Yet in this volume, Jeffrey Shoulson shows that theologians and churchmen, preachers and poets, dramatists and alchemists turned to Jews and Judaism to understand and explore the nature of conversions--authentic and inauthentic. Native Christian devotion signaled to the English their providential role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But confessional shifts in England's official religion--from Anglican to Roman Catholic to the Elizabethan Settlement--along with the subsequent growth in numbers of Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers, among others, served to complicate and undermine a coherent and singular English identity. The Jews--their religion, scriptures, and contested conversions in Spain--provided fictions of for writers anxious about English identity. Indeed, such encounters tended to be textual and imagined apart from the few Englishmen who had contact with Jews in the Low Countries and the Levant. Through the Jews English authors indirectly explored their own religion specifically and fractious cultural change as a whole. Such Jewish fictions of offered narratives and models that proved productive, provocative, and perilous as English scholars translated and interpreted the biblical text, plumbed the transformation of matter and spirit in alchemy, and measured the dissenting claims of religious enthusiasts.Shoulson's investigation opens with the multiple meanings of as reflected in the New Testament of the Apostle Paul, the theological legacy of the continental Reformers, and English efforts to make sense of contemporary religious change and authenticity. Even as some conversions were sudden, others were incremental; some appeared fleeting, while others appeared fictitious, feigned conversions designed to conceal one's actual religion, heresy, or treachery. To make sense of this authors such as Richard Hooker, John Foxe, and Thomas Cooper compared confessional shifts and feigned conversions in England to the response of Jews to early Christianity, and even more so to the forced conversions of marronos in Spain. Fictions of Conversion then turns more directly to the interpretation of scripture and how English scholars developed typologies of from the Old Testament narratives of Abraham, Jethro, Naaman, Rahab, and Ruth. Such typologies revealed subtle nuances of and further uncertainties in relation to ethnicity, gender, and ecumenism. In short, the Jews provided scriptural and early modern accounts of that were at the same time decisive and dubious in meaning.In the final three chapters Shoulson considers deeply related fictions of conversion: linguistic translation, alchemical transformation, and the poetic assessment of religious enthusiasm. In each case, the Jews play a surprising and essential role. In the early modern period translation was itself a form of conversion as English texts of the Hebrew Bible and the epics of Homer raised the question of continuity and discontinuity between Judaism and classical paganism, on the one hand, and early modern England, on the other (90). …

Our Lady reconsidered: John Knox and the Virgin Mary

AbstractThe cult of the Virgin Mary had a complicated history in Scotland during the sixteenth century, with historical, devotional and literary evidence indicating both widespread acceptance of the church's traditional practices and growing dissatisfaction with them, particularly in elite culture. Anti-Marian polemics entered Scottish Christianity through various sources, including the Lollards around Kyle, the prominent witness of Patrick Hamilton, the preaching of Thomas Guillaume and George Wishart, the theological climate at St Leonard's college in St Andrews, as well as a number of popular works.John Knox (1514–72) incorporated many of his contemporaries’ concerns in his own treatment of the question, being trained at St Andrews University and heavily influenced by Guillaume and Wishart. Knox considered the cult of Mary using the same tool that he used to analyse the cult of the saints in general, the mass, and liturgical ritual, contending that they could not be reconciled with his stringent doctrine of sola scriptura, in particular as read through the lens of Deuteronomy 12:32.Yet for all that Mary and her place in Christian life and devotion formed a major aspect of sixteenth-century Scottish religious praxis, Knox gave little attention to her, preferring to indicate her proper place in Christian theology by presenting a vision of Christianity which omitted her almost entirely. Knox does indirectly indicate what he considers to be the proper Christian attitude towards the Virgin, however, through his explication of sola scriptura and its implications for genuine religious practice as opposed to idolatry, and his understanding of 1 Timothy 2:5 and the unique mediation of Christ. Where Knox does directly address the Marian question, he expresses his rejection of her cult in far more restrained terms than readers of his polemics against the mass may expect; while he is firm and unequivocal in denying Mary's intercessory role and in uprooting Marian devotional practice, his rhetorical restraint points to the irreducible dignity of Mary in the scriptural texts.This article analyses the theology of Mary which Knox reveals in occasional comments scattered through his writings and attempts to place his ideas in their historical and theological context. By explicating the precise nature of Knox's objection to the cult of Mary, the article attempts to open the door for future Reformed–Catholic dialogue on the person of Mary and her place in the church of Christ.

Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti (review)

Reviewed by: Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti Andrew N. Palmer Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Bibliotheca Erik Peterson. Collana di Studi del Centro di Scienze Religiose, 3.] (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso. 2011. Pp. viii, 236. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-6274-307-5.) I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Aculei, 3.] (Rome: Salerno editrice. 2011. Pp. 188. €12,50 paperback. ISBN 978-88-8402-720-7.) The Shroud of Turin, a unique icon presenting itself as Christ’s burial-sheet, is now probably, thanks to the publicity so successfully sought by Ian Wilson, the best-known object of Christian devotion in the West; the icon of the Mandylion of Edessa, Christ’s “image not made by hand,” enjoys comparable fame among the Orthodox and has been identified with other towel-icons venerated in Genoa and Rome; the icon of Veronica’s Veil, a western mutation of the Mandylion, has become one of the Stations of the Cross. Carbon 14 tests have dated the Shroud to the fourteenth century. This is confirmed by the evolution of the loom and by the fact that the Shroud cannot be traced back beyond the second half of that century, when it is first signaled in the church of Lirey in Champagne. Yet the rumor persists that science and scholarship have conspired to discredit a genuine relic that may even be evidence of the Resurrection. Those who make this claim support it with pseudo-science and pseudo-scholarship. Andrea Nicolotti deplores the irresponsibility of the media and the gullibility of the literate public. He argues that serious historians ought not to ignore pseudo-history, but should take the pains to refute it; that they ought to disseminate more widely an understanding of the differences between hypothesis and certainty as well as between evidence, interpretation, conjecture, and speculation. If his books reach the public outside the “ivory tower” of university discourse, they will certainly supply arguments to those who have all along been unconvinced by the self-styled “sindonologists,” without feeling able to refute their supposed proofs. In this way the genre of these two books is somewhat similar to that of the catechisms that flourished among Christian communities in the Islamic Middle East, which taught Christians what to say in reply to the classic Muslim arguments against Christianity. Nicolotti does not, of course, simplify things as much as these question-and-answer tracts do. After all, he is not trying to reach the man in the medieval street, but the modern reader who borrows Wilson’s Shroud of Turin (Garden City, NY, 1978) from the public library and is all the more impressed by this book because it has all the trappings of scholarship. Confronted with the thirteen centuries in which no relic resembling the Shroud was known anywhere in the Christian world, Wilson suggests that it was there all [End Page 319] along but incognito. According to him, the Shroud was folded, leaving only the face visible. The rest, for some reason, was carefully concealed, so that the cloth appeared to be about the size of a towel. This gave rise to the legend that it was in fact a towel used by Jesus to dry his face, leaving the imprint of his features there—the Mandylion of Edessa, as described in the Greek Acts of Thaddaeus. This icon was translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and probably taken in 1204 to Western Europe, where, according to Wilson, it was unfolded and so “emerged” as the Shroud in fourteenth-century France. Wilson’s book, simultaneously published in the United States and France, enjoyed a success and inspired several other sindonologists. A popular refinement of his theory—to which Nicolotti devotes the second book—identifies it with an “idol” allegedly venerated in secret by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century. The hypothesis that the Shroud was folded rests on the use of the Greek word tetrádiplon to describe the towel on...

Lenin on Tolstoy: Between Imaginary Resolution and Revolutionary Christian Communism

Lenin's criticisms of Tolstoy, spread over half a dozen articles, provide both an anticipatory insight and a blind spot. The insight is that they offer the first example of what would later be called an imaginary resolution of real social and economic conditions. The contradictions of Tolstoy's works are manifested as, on the one hand, incisive critiques of the depredations of the transition between feudalism and capitalism, and, on the other, as inadequate and unarticulated solutions. But these contradictions give voice to the contradictory political situation of the peasants. The blind spot is that Lenin dismisses Tolstoy's response — non-resistance to evil and the recovery of the simple life of Christian devotion and poverty — as reactionary and misguided. What Lenin fails to register is that both elements of Tolstoy's works — the simplicity of collective life as well as the incisive and revolutionary critiques (which Lenin wished to appropriate for the socialists) — come out of the tradition of revolutionary Christian communism.

Eros and Pilgrimage in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Poetry

The paper discusses erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage in the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. What connects most of the texts chosen for consideration in the paper is their diptych-like composition, corresponding to the dual theme of eros and pilgrimage. At the outset, I read the first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s Prologue and demonstrate how the passage attempts to balance and reconcile the eroticism underlying the description of nature at springtime with Christian devotion and the spirit of compunction. I support the view that the passage is the first wing of a diptych-like construction opening the General Prologue. The second part of the paper focuses on the motif of pilgrimage, particularly erotic pilgrimage, in Shakespeare’s sonnets. I observe that most of the sonnets that exploit the conceit of travel to the beloved form lyrical diptychs. Shakespeare reverses the medieval hierarchy of pilgrimage and desire espoused by Chaucer. Both poets explore and use to their own ends the tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of sacred and profane love. Their compositions encode deeper emotional patterns of desire: Chaucer’s narrator channels sexual drives into the route of communal national penance, whereas the Shakespearean persona employs religious sentiments in the service of private erotic infatuations.

The Native as Exemplum: Missionary Writings and Colonial Complexities in Eastern Indonesia, 1819–1860

In the year 1819, three years after the British return of the East Indies to the Netherlands, a young man of twenty arrived to Kupang, a port on the coast of West Timor. Kupang was by no means a large place but it was the centre of Dutch colonial power over this part of Indonesia, and its administration monitored the various islands that the Netherlands laid claim to: Solor, Alor, Rote, Savu, and others. This task was made the more difficult since some of these places were also claimed by Portugal, which maintained a colonial governor in Dili, in the eastern part of Timor. The last serious conflict between the two colonial powers had occurred the previous year when the little harbour Atapupu was forcibly occupied by the Dutch resident. The tempests of the Age of Napoleon had been severely felt in Timor, whose inhabitants were located at the extremities of the colonial claims of the warring parties. Britons, Dutchmen, and Portuguese had fought or intrigued for the resources of an island that was neither the richest nor the most accessible in the island world of Southeast Asia—rather the opposite.The name of the young man was Reint Le Bruyn. Born in Zutphen, Le Bruyn had spent his early years as a child labourer in a textile factory. Coming from relatively destitute conditions, he had nevertheless picked up some education, and in 1818 he signed up for the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG), the Dutch Missionary Society. This society, the first among about fifteen to concentrate on the East Indies, had been established in 1797 by a missionary who later worked in South Africa. It was modelled on the London Missionary Society which was founded two years earlier. Societies of this kind emerged as part of the wave of rising interest in undertaking missionary activity in non-Western societies, which, interestingly, coincided with the questioning of traditional clerical hierarchy after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Biographical sketches of Le Bruyn's life have typically pointed to his Christian devotion to explain his career choice. However, it could also have been a way for poor men of ability to engage in work that provided a degree of professional recognition that they could not have hoped for at home. Missionaries received scant preparation for their task in Rotterdam; they had little knowledge of the societies that awaited them, and they only learned any substantial Malay, the main language of communication, on arrival in the Indies. Le Bruyn successfully overcame these obstacles and had an eventful career on Timor for the next ten years, to the extent that posterity hailed him as the true pioneer of the Protestant mission in these waters.

Spectacle, Community and Holy War in Fourteenth-Century Cyprus

Abstract This article examines how temporal and ecclesiastic authorities on Lusignan Cyprus used rhetoric and performance to mobilize support for the Alexandria Crusade. While King Peter I appealed to the chivalric ideals of his vassals in order to overcome their reluctance to endanger the kingdom’s economic and military security, papal legate Peter of Thomas led interfaith processions that presented Cyprus’s population as united in its Christian devotion despite long-standing tensions between the Latin and Greek communities. This presentation of a shared Cypriot identity reflected nascent moves away from the physical and social segregation of confessional groups. It also clarifies the role played by perceptions of a constant threat of Mamlūk invasion in this process of acculturation. Such concerns and responses were not unique to Cyprus. By considering late-medieval Cyprus as a frontier society, we can gain insight into the complex politics of holy war in other composite medieval communities.

Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of early modern Christian devotion by examining a source that has received no scholarly attention of any kind: Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement(1619). Oelhafen, a prominent Nuremberg lawyer, composed thePious Meditationsshortly after his wife, Anna Maria, died. He did so in order to console himself and his eight children in the midst of their considerable grief. Drawing on well-known rhetorical devices and consolatory remedies, Oelhafen produced a work of private devotion that is remarkable in terms of its rich affectivity and considerable artistic skill. ThePious Meditationswas never published, rather Oelhafen intended it for a private circle of intimates, especially his children and their posterity. The work illustrates especially well the theme of spiritual self-care that was so prominent in early modern Lutheran devotion. ThePious Meditationsalso demonstrates how creative and resourceful early modern Christians could be as they sought to contend with mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence.

The Case of Anger in The Siege of Milan and The King of Tars

Anger was an ambivalent emotion in the Middle Ages, oscillating between acceptance and condemnation in theological discourse. Initially defined as detrimental during the Carolingian era unless it was internally directed against one’s own sins, anger came to be rehabilitated in a context of Crusade, where zealous leaders were required to defend ecclesiastical interests on the battlefield. However, certain very specific conventions regulated its verbalization, thus permitting authors to either magnify or denounce the protagonists they portrayed according to how they framed the emotion. This paper offers a reading of The Siege of Milan and The King of Tars , two Middle English crusading romances, in light of these codes. A close look at the way anger is represented throughout the texts enables us to acquire a subtle and enriched understanding of two prominent issues inherent to the texts’ ideologies: the promotion of Christian devotion to the religious and military standards intrinsic to the Crusades in The Siege of Milan , and the importance of Christian expansion and incorporation in The King of Tars.

Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers’ Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel

Filipino Christian care and domestic workers’ migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them to transcend through performance the ‘migrant’ label assigned to them by contemporary migration regimes in the international division of labour. Becoming pilgrims (and tourists) in the Holy Land, migrants discover alternative life narratives, which position them on a journey within a sacred geography at the centre of Christian devotion, suffusing their movements along transnational networks and migration routes. By interpreting Holy Land pilgrimages as dynamic and at times awkward encounters with the sacred, inflected by Filipinos’ legal, social and economic status in Israel, I show the creative fusion of pilgrimage, tourism and migration achieved by migrants in their transnational journeys.

Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome (review)

Reviewed by: Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome John Pinto Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome. Edited by Jill Burke and Michael Bury. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Pp. xviii, 289. $114.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65690-6.) The twelve essays gathered in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome contribute to our understanding of the unique social and conceptual structures within which artists and patrons operated over the course of two centuries, between 1450 and 1650. Since the publication of Francis Haskell’s classic Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London, 1963), the study of artistic patronage in Rome has been greatly enriched by scholars who have explored the social dimension of art, viewing it as a revealing index of familial, institutional, political, and spiritual identity. Although the twelve contributing authors understandably do not speak with the same voice, their essays effectively reinforce one another and add up to much more than the sum of their parts. This is due, in no small part, to the disciplined hands of the editors and the opportunity for all of the authors to discuss their research in a 2005 workshop at the British School at Rome. The essays are organized into four thematic groups, the first of which examines the mechanics of patronage. Irene Fosi considers the changing status—juridical and social—of foreign residents in Rome and the implications for artistic patronage. Piers Baker Bates explores the revealing case of Girolamo Bencucci da Schio, a bishop who rose from humble origins in the Veneto to negotiate a position of prominence in Rome, where he supported Sebastiano del Piombo. Guido Guerzoni’s essay, which focuses on the Este cardinals in the sixteenth century, illuminates how artists were recruited and [End Page 541] compensated. His research reveals a preference for employing artists for specific commissions rather than according them salaried positions. The second group of essays considers cardinals and their worldly goods, illuminating the complex relationship between the material world and Christian devotion. Mary Hollingsworth reconstructs the responsibilities of Ippolito d’Este, cardinal protector of France, in 1560. Clare Robertson, in one of the most stimulating essays, offers an instructive comparison between the patronage of a cardinal from a well-established family (Odoardo Farnese) and that of a relative parvenu (Pietro Aldobrandini), illustrating how different the patronage strategies and aesthetic judgments of two princely cardinals could be. Equally valuable is Karin Wolfe’s contribution, which focuses on Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s use of the arts for political ends. As cardinal protector of France, he went so far as to give his support to an iconographic program for the French national Church in Rome that directly challenged the authority of the papacy. The third group of essays explores the dynamics of family identity in papal Rome. For papal families, status was ephemeral; for the native nobility, the dominance of Roman society by foreign clerics posed distinct challenges. Christina Strunck’s incisive essay shows how the oldest and most illustrious of Roman families, the Colonna, consciously employed artistic commissions to combat the loss of power that occurred in the transition from the Barberini to the Pamphilj pontificates. Susan Russell argues that Pope Innocent X elevated the genre of landscape painting as part of a distinctive artistic policy. Lisa Beaven examines Camillo Massimo’s role as art agent of the Altieri, revealing how he used his artistic expertise and connections to construct a cultural identity for the papal family. The last group of essays explores the relationship between individual and institution, with an emphasis on how the popes employed the visual arts to construct different kinds of lineage. Carol Richardson’s essay on fifteenth-century papal tombs in St. Peter’s makes the apt observation that their placement against the sagging south wall of the Constantinian basilica showed them to be buttressing the fabric of the church. Opher Mansour’s investigation of papal state portraiture reveals changing attitudes toward the representation of the temporal and spiritual powers vested in the person of the pope. Maarten Delbeke’s essay shows how Pope Urban VIII used painted galleries to situate the time...

“Family Values” and the Formation of a Christian Right Agenda

During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised social conservatives that, if elected, he would convene a conference examining how the federal government could support American families. That promise—alongside Carter's description of being “born again” and his well-documented Christian devotion—thrilled American evangelicals. They provided him with a crucial bloc of support in the 1976 election. Four years later, Carter finally made good on his campaign pledge when he convened the White House Conference on Families. Carter declared that the conference would “examine the strengths of American families, the difficulties they face, and the ways in which family life is affected by public policies.” He recruited a panel of organizers and asked them to focus on how government policy might better support family life.

Book Review: "The Bhajan: Christian Devotional Music in Indian Diaspora"

Book Review: "The Bhajan: Christian Devotional Music in Indian Diaspora"

An Archetypal Symbol of Water in the Amazon

Archetypal symbols traced on the thousand-year-old art of the moundbuilders of the Marajoara people support the assumption that some sort of ritual honoring of a great goddess took place at the mouth of the Amazon River prior to European colonization. An intriguing figurine, 30 centimeters high, seems to have played a central role in these rituals. The fish-like body of the goddess, covered in red, black, and white spirals, suggests the regenerating process of the waters. A double portal around the vulva is a gateway to undiscovered regions, perhaps associated to life after death, as corroborated by other symbols. Breast-shaped vases found at the same archeological site are covered in images of shoots, leaves, and scrolls in mandala-like symbols. These vases suggest that the cult of the goddess might have included the drinking of her milk, which was made of hallucinogenic plants. The cult of this “Lady of the Waters” may have helped to lessen the psychological hardships of tropical life in the ebb and flow of the tides and the recurrent season of floods, which brought aquatic animals with it. Frogs, snakes, fish, turtles, scorpions, and water birds represented in the ancient pottery were possibly part of the goddess domain. Today the same archetypal manifestation that influenced the prehistorical adaptation is present in the modern Christian devotion to Our Lady of Nazareth. Exploring the native and the Christian cults can help us understand what is missing in today's psychology and guide us to take right action toward water preservation around the world. The symbolic approach of this indigenous art can provide rich soil in which to nourish a sustainable connection with water, flora, and fauna.

Seeking Historical Perspectives for Spiritual Direction and Soul Care Today

This article is a prophetic and historical look at the prospects for spiritual direction and soul care in our contemporary setting. The thrust of this essay is to argue that soul care today needs to embrace three dimensions: the historical, the biblical, as well as the contemporary behavioral sciences. Otherwise our judgments will be imprisoned within our own culture if we have not traveled abroad in time as well as space, to understand the faith and devotion of God's people in the cultures of the past. We will suggest five aspects of the history of Christian devotion that we need to “remember” today: the lives of the saints, the exercise of contrition, the memory of the Psalms, the basic use of figurative language, and the importance of letter-writing.

Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination

Trees abound in the manuscripts, visions and prayers, on the walls, altars and vestments of the Middle Ages. Their presence indicates a spiritual arborescence, a profound proliferation of arboreal imagery constituent in Christian devotion. Spiritual arborescence is the process of conjuring Christ in the imagination through contemplation of trees. It is a practice that mediates the individual meditant’s relationship with the larger religious community and with Christ. The examples of medieval spiritual arborescence explored in this essay demonstrate profound concerns about accessing divinity in the material world.

Creating sacred space: the religious visual culture of the Renaissance Venetian casa*

Religion and its visible manifestations were fundamental and consistent aspects of the Renaissance household, yet the subject remains largely overlooked in the scholarship on the domestic environment. Based on a variety of contemporary sources for evidence, this article introduces readers to the religious visual culture of the Venetian casa through an examination of its three main components: the sacred objects acquired for the domestic sphere, the ritual settings fashioned through their display and use, and the purposes that this visible piety served for the familial audience. Holy domestic articles – which consisted of a wide variety of goods, including painting, sculpture, and decorative arts – fostered devotion within the interior setting, while serving important roles as protective devices, as aids for religious development, and as outward expressions of the family's devoutness and honorable reputation. Additionally, while located within a ‘private’ setting, religious objects from domestic spaces connected individuals and families to Venice's wider community of Christian devotion and were intimately tied to the Republic's mercantile way of life.

Ancestral Veneration and the Possiblity of its Incorporation into the Christian Faith

AbstractIn Nostra Aetate – one of the 16 documents of the Second Vatican Council – the Catholic Church firmly declares: 'The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions⃜ The Church, therefore, urges all her sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussions and collaboration with members of other religious faith traditions…; (cf. NA. 2). The so-called 'other religions' as stated by Nostra Aetate includes traditional religion in the form of ancestral veneration. It is still widely and popularly practiced by Christians of various ethnic groups in Asia and Africa as well as in other parts of the world – Latin America, Melanesia and Australia (the Aborigines). Despite the suppression and expulsion done in the past, this religious tradition is still able to survive and continue to demonstrate its vital force in the lives of many Asians and Africans, including those who have embraced the Christian faith. In this article we argue that ancestral veneration does not contradict the Christian faith. It has a place in the Christian faith and should be incorporated into, at least, in Catholic Christian devotion.

The visual, the visionary and her viewer: media and presence in the Psalter of Christina of Markyate (St Albans Psalter)

In the year 600, Gregory the Great wrote to Bishop Serenus of Marseille admonishing him for overly ambitious iconoclastic fervor. Serenus abhorred the use of images in the churches of his diocese as reflexes of pagan worship and wished to have them destroyed. Gregory responded with a defense of images in Christian devotion that was to become the most commonly cited authority on the subject throughout the Middle Ages. Gregory's defense turned around the difficulty of disseminating understanding of the Christian cult, one based on the authority of the written word, among the newly or still-to-be converted peoples of the former Roman empire. ‘For that which is made available through scripture to those who read is presented to the ignorant through pictures, because in pictures they see what they ought to follow; they read in pictures who have no knowledge of letters’.1