| Summary: | "The studies in this volume trace cases where ideas of belonging were reflected, contended, or modified through legal changes or exegetical accounts, by intellectual endeavors, polemics, or seismic shifts in worldviews. Each section of the book addresses a discrete context in which belonging is a pivotal component-the familial, the legal, and the political-and focuses on important an moment of grappling with ideas and expressions of belonging. Among these are moments of change from substance to structure, from materialism to mentalism, from personal to spatial, from theosophy to legality, and from collectivity to individuality. The cases range across different historical periods, cultural contexts, and religious traditions, from eleventh-century Mediterranean theological legal debates to twentiethcentury statist liberalism in Western societies. They address independent discursive contexts (or in Foucaultian terminology, ways of speaking) that are in no way continuous or intertwined, and no pretense is made of a link between them. Each case is an independent demonstration of a distinct effort to contend with the theme of belonging in a different setting, driven by that setting's particular concerns and challenges"--
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