Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities

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 up 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 formation. Their studies 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 dramas, and 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 who wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present.

Foreword
Dorothy C. Bass
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Formative Religious Practices in Premodern European Life
John Van Engen

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

THE MIDDLE AGES
Faith ormation 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 the 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