Venice's Hidden Enemies

Venice's Hidden Enemies
Author: John Martin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520912330

How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies. Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies—students and scholars alike.

Heretics!

Heretics!
Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-06-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400884659

An entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative of the dangerous thinkers who laid the foundation of modern thought This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. With masterful storytelling and color illustrations, Heretics! offers a unique introduction to the birth of modern thought in comics form—smart, charming, and often funny. These contentious and controversial philosophers—from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton—fundamentally changed the way we look at the world, society, and ourselves, overturning everything from the idea that the Earth is the center of the cosmos to the notion that kings have a divine right to rule. More devoted to reason than to faith, these thinkers defended scandalous new views of nature, religion, politics, knowledge, and the human mind. Heretics! tells the story of their ideas, lives, and times in a vivid new way. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other—as well as their confrontations with religious and royal authority. It recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy, including the burning of Giordano Bruno for heresy, Galileo's house arrest for defending Copernicanism, Descartes's proclaiming cogito ergo sum, Hobbes's vision of the "nasty and brutish" state of nature, and Spinoza's shocking Theological-Political Treatise. A brilliant account of one of the most brilliant periods in philosophy, Heretics! is the story of how a group of brave thinkers used reason and evidence to triumph over the authority of religion, royalty, and antiquity.

Heretics

Heretics
Author: Leonardo Padura
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374714282

"Padura’s Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . . ingenious." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's greatest detective work yet. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family’s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana. In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt’s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura’s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.

Heretics Anonymous

Heretics Anonymous
Author: Katie Henry
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0062698893

A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year! Put an atheist in a strict Catholic school? Expect comedy, chaos, and an Inquisition. The Breakfast Club meets Saved! in debut author Katie Henry’s hilarious novel about a band of misfits who set out to challenge their school, one nun at a time. Perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Robyn Schneider. When Michael walks through the doors of Catholic school, things can’t get much worse. His dad has just made the family move again, and Michael needs a friend. When a girl challenges their teacher in class, Michael thinks he might have found one, and a fellow atheist at that. Only this girl, Lucy, isn’t just Catholic . . . she wants to be a priest. Lucy introduces Michael to other St. Clare’s outcasts, and he officially joins Heretics Anonymous, where he can be an atheist, Lucy can be an outspoken feminist, Avi can be Jewish and gay, Max can wear whatever he wants, and Eden can practice paganism. Michael encourages the Heretics to go from secret society to rebels intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies one stunt at a time. But when Michael takes one mission too far—putting the other Heretics at risk—he must decide whether to fight for his own freedom or rely on faith, whatever that means, in God, his friends, or himself.

American Heretics

American Heretics
Author: Peter Gottschalk
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137278293

A journey through American history that reveals an unsettling pattern of religious intolerance, from colonial anti-Quaker sentiment to modern-day Islamophobia

Hidden Heretics

Hidden Heretics
Author: Ayala Fader
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0691234485

"This book concerns a cohort of ultra-orthodox Jews based in the greater New York area who, while retaining membership and close familial and other ties with their strictly observant communities, seek out secular knowledge about the world on the down low (so to speak), both online and via in-person encounters. Ayala Fader conducted her ethnographic research in these rarified social circles for years, developing relationships of trust with the mostly young married men and women who have taken to clandestine methods to find alternative social spaces in which to question what it means to be ethical and what a life of self-fulfillment looks like. Fader's book reveals the stresses and strains that such "double-lifers" experience, including the difficulty these life choices inject into relationships with wives, husbands, and one's children. Not all of these "double-lifers" become atheists. Fader's interlocutors can be placed on a broad spectrum ranging from religiously observant but open-minded at one end to atheism on the other. The rabbinical leadership of these ultra-orthodox communities are well aware of this phenomenon and of how unfiltered internet access makes such alternative forms of seeking an ever-present temptation. (Some ultra-orthodox rabbis have been sounding the alarm for years, claiming that the internet represents more of a threat to community survival today than the Holocaust did in the last century.) Fader's book examines the institutional responses of ultra-orthodox communities to the double-lifers. These include what is typically referred to as a Torah-based type of "religious therapy" conducted by trained members of these communities who as therapists and "life coaches" blend elements of modern psychiatry with ultra-orthodoxy and "treat" troubling, potentially life-altering doubt and skepticism as symptoms of underlying emotional pathology"--

Burning Bodies

Burning Bodies
Author: Michael D. Barbezat
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501716816

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.

Bad Religion

Bad Religion
Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 143917833X

Traces the decline of Christianity in America since the 1950s, posing controversial arguments about the role of heresy in the nation's downfall while calling for a revival of traditional Christian practices.

The War on Heresy

The War on Heresy
Author: R. I. Moore
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674065379

Some of the most portentous events in medieval history—the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition—fall between 1000 and 1250, when the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with force. Moore’s narrative focuses on the motives and anxieties of elites who waged war on heresy for political gain.