Books in the AAR Cultural Criticism Series series

This work explores relationships between film and religion, aesthetics and ethics. The volume examines these relationships by viewing how otherness is imaged in film and how otherness alternately might be imagined.

This text by an established specialist in French deconstruction, written after his many years in Asia and in the West, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the negative but fertile differences between them.

This title explores the retelling of the life of Moses in three 20th-century American narratives: "Moses in Red", by Lincoln Steffens; "Moses, Man of the Mountain", by Zora Neale Hurston; and Cecil B. DeMille's film, "The Ten Commandments".

This is an interdisciplinary and multicultural study of ancient and contemporary texts that encode women's spirituality. It encompasses both contemporary and historical contexts, tracing the roles, actions, writings, and beliefs of women in pre-Christian, Christian, Islamic, and neo-pagan contexts.

Over the centuries, New Testament texts have often been read in ways that reflect and encourage anti-Semitism. Since the Holocaust, Christian scholars have increasingly recognized and rejected this inheritance. In Parables for Our Time Tania Oldenhage seeks to fashion a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with memories of the Holocaust.

Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mahayana Buddhisttext-Santideva's Compendium of Training (Siksasamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come intocontact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. Virtuous Bodies explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery andsuspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals.

Presents cases from both Asian and European traditions: classical and medieval Hinduism, early and contemporary Buddhism in South and East Asia, European antiquity, early and medieval Christianity, and 19th/20th century Aryan religion. This book suggests that the critique of asceticism is based on a worldview differing from the ascetic worldview.