Product Description: Early Christians built on the stories of Jesus' and Mary s birth and childhood. Their later accounts, many of them found nowadays among collections of non-canonical ('apocryphal') texts, are important and interesting. They give insights into the growth of Christian theology, especially concerning the role and status of Mary, and also the way in which the earliest stories were elaborated and interpreted in popular folk religion...read more

Product Description: This book attempts to read the character of Mary in the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew alongside the lives of experiences of the Indian surrogate mother living a postcolonial India. Reading Mary through these lenses helps us see this mother and her actions in a more ambivalent light, as a mother whose love is both violent and altruistic...read more

This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren’s Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D’Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative content of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems.“The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years. . . . I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka’s is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way.”―Donald Evans“Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase.”―John Macquarrie“The first thing to be said about Outka’s book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory.”―The Humanities Association Review

Product Description: The New York Times bestselling final volume in the Pope’s Jesus of Nazareth series, detailing how the stories of Jesus’ infancy and childhood are as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. In 2007, Joseph Ratzinger published his first book as Pope Benedict XVI in order “to make known the figure and message of Jesus...read more

Two authorities on the life of Jesus draw on the gospels of Matthew and Luke to tell the true story of Jesus's birth and to place its lessons in context with the modern world.

A feminist analysis of the first chapters of Matthew and Luke argues that they describe an illegitimate pregnancy and divine sonship and that God sided with a socially rejected woman and her child

Product Description: Early Christians built on the stories of Jesus' birth found in the New Testament. Their later accounts, many of them found nowadays among collections of non-canonical ('apocryphal') texts, are important and interesting. They give insights into the growth of Christian theology, especially concerning the role and status of Mary, and also the way in which the earliest stories were elaborated and interpreted in popular folk religion...read more

Product Description: The Way it Was is a look at the evangelists' account of the birth of Jesus, to light up the background of what they've written, and to try to see more closely the personalities they glance at, and who play so large a part in the events surrounding the birth...read more

Product Description: Freed's highly accessible introduction, directed at students and interested non-specialists as well as scholars, explains and examines these well-known stories from a critical perspective. "Critical" is taken in the sense of judging among alternative answers to problems that arise from such study and arguing for the preferred solution...read more

(view table of contents)

Biblical passages recounting the conception, birth, and infancy of Jesus are followed by a commentary on Old Testament antecedents

Product Description: This book is an in-depth introduction and appraisal of midrash criticism, a critical approach applied to Gospel studies. Though midrash criticism utilizes genre criticism, redaction criticism, and historical criticism, it has developed into a separate critical approach with its own unique methodology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Current biblical scholarship tends to treat the nativity narratives as having little historical basis and to see in them illustrations of the particular theologies of Matthew and Luke. Nonbiblical scholarship sees in these narratives only an adaptation of traditional folklore themes relating to the birth of the hero...read more

This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren’s Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D’Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative content of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems.“The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years. . . . I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka’s is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way.”―Donald Evans“Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase.”―John Macquarrie“The first thing to be said about Outka’s book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory.”―The Humanities Association Review (view table of contents)