Elizabeth A. Castelli

Prayer as Memory

Philosophy

“Prayer as Memory blends theory and theology to explore how prayer--at once a religious performance and an enactment of moral imagination--is rooted in 'the loam of memory,' a fertile ground that locates prayer within a collective, historically situated context. Theoretically astute and theologically insightful, this book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about the perduring effects of collective memory on everyday religious practice.”

The Life of Thecla

History & Biography

“Andrew Jacobs offers an erudite and accessible introduction to the late ancient Life of Thecla, a work that embodies the complex, border-crossing reception history of one of the Christian tradition’s most important literary figures: Thecla of Iconium. His elegant translation is grounded in philological expertise and deep contextual understanding, and the publication in this series of Jacobs’s learned introduction and fluent translation makes the text available for the first time to a wide audience of English readers.”

The Making of the Self

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism opens up traditional Christian and Roman sources to a new kind of close reading, showing us what difference it makes to recast asceticism in a theoretically rich and provocative way. In undertaking this task, Richard Valantasis invites his readers to rethink the historical texture of ancient Mediterranean asceticism as well as the ongoing legacies of asceticism's hardwiring of human society in any time and place where people resist the current order of things and dream of a new and better reality.”