THE THREE KINGS, A STAR CHILD, AND UNIVERSAL RELIGION / Nick Gier
THE THREE KINGS, A STAR CHILD, AND UNIVERSAL RELIGION By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (nickgier@roadrunner.com) Read all of his Christmas columns at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/XmasColumns.htm A myth is a tale that tells truth. —anonymous Wait a little while, just under the star! Then if a child comes to you, and if he laughs, if he has golden hair, you’ll know who he is. —St. Exubery’s Little Prince During my 1992 sabbatical in India, I had the great privilege of sharing food and living quarters with “Saint Thomas” monks in Bangalore. These...
Read MoreA Syrian-Christian Perspective on the Supernatural Silke trzcionka
Whenever anyone looks with envy upon beautiful objects, the ambient air becomes charged with a malignant quality, and that person’s breath, laden with bitterness, blows hard upon the person near him. This breath, made up of the finest particles, penetrates to the very bones and marrow, and engenders in many cases the disease of envy, which has received the appropriate name of the influence of the evil eye.1 And so Heliodorus, in his novel Aethiopica, presents a perspective on the topic that will form the supernatural focus of this presentation − the evil eye. Providing a context for this...
Read MoreIamblichus of Chalcis: The Letters Dillon, John M., and Wolfgang Polleichtner
This review was published by RBL ⎡2011 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp. The Neoplatonist Iamblichus, of Syrian origin and an authority on Syrian deities, was a disciple of Porphyry, probably in Rome, before moving back to Syria to found his own school in Apamea, the city of the Middle Platonist (and Neopythagorean) Numenius. The only works that have survived of his are his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum, more properly his reply to Porphyry’s letter to Anebo, and the first four...
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