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Posted April 22, 2004 Book: Educating People of Faith: Exploring the history of Jewish and Christian Communities Edited by: John Van Engen William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pp.353 An excerpt from the Jacket: A much-needed addition to the emerging literature on the formative power of religious practices, “Educating People of Faith creates a vivid portrait of the lived practices that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity to the seventeenth century. This significant book is the work of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to discover and describe how Jews and Christians through history have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of “practices” as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious figures, community life, and traditional practices such as preaching, sacraments, and catechesis are colorful, detailed, and revealing. The authors are also careful to cover the nature of religious education across all social levels, from the textual formation of highly literate rabbis and monks engaged in Scripture study to the local formation of illiterate medieval Christians for whom the veneration of saints’ shrines, street performances of religious drama, an public preaching by wandering preachers were profoundly formative. Educating People of Faith will benefit scholars and teachers desiring a fuller perspective on how lived practices have historically formed people in religious faith. It will also be useful to practical theologians and pastors wh wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present. An Excerpt from the Book: Judaism’s greatest contribution to Christianity’s understanding of moral and spiritual formation was not institutional but theological. The Jewish Bible recorded the creation of human beings in the image of God. For Jews, the end of human life was set by its beginning. Because we are made in God’s image, the only telos appropriate for human beings is fellowship with God. Only in loving and serving God will we find fulfillment, that supreme good in which good is brought to perfection. Christian themes such as imitatio Dei or “holiness” have their origins in Judaism. Citing Leviticus 19, “You shall be holy for I am holy,” an ancient rabbi said: “Ye shall be holy, and why? Because I am holy, for I have attached you to me, as it is said, ‘For as the girdle cleaves to the loins of a man, so I have caused the whole house of Israel to cleave to me.” From Jewish tradition Christians learned that human beings were called to be “like God,” to “cleave to God,” to walk in God’s ways, to imitate the divine qualities of mercy and compassion. Table of Contents: Early Synagogue and Church Religious formation in ancient Judaism Robert Goldenberg Christian formation in the early church Robert Louis Wilken Simplifying Augustine John C. Cavadini Monastic formation and Christian practice: food in the desert Blake Leyerle Faith formation in Byzantium Stanley Samuel Harakas Community and education in premodern Judaism Michael A. Signer Practice beyond the confines of the medieval parish John Van Engen Orality, textuality, and revelation as modes of education and formation in Jewish mystical circles of high middle ages Elliot R. Wolfson The thirteenth-century English parish Joseph Goering The cult of the Virgin Mary and technologies of Christian formation in the later middle ages Anne L. Clark The Reformation Era Luther and formation in faith David C. Steinmetz Zwingli and reformed practice Lee Palmer Wandel Catechesis in Calvin’s Geneva Robert M Kingdon Ritual and faith formation in early modern Catholic Europe Philip M. Soergel Spiritual direction as Christian pedagogy Lawrence S. Cunningham |