 "Click for larger image")
Holy Dogs and Asses
Animals in the Christian Tradition
Recognizing animals in the Christian tradition
Analysis of animals in the history of the Christian tradition has been exclusively symbolic, but Laura Hobgood-Oster utilizes the feminist perspective in her examination of the impact of animal presence. In challenging the metaphoric reading of animals that reinforces human superiority and dominance, Holy Dogs and Asses underscores animal agency.
Creatures play various active roles, which Hobgood-Oster categorizes as exemplars of piety, sources of revelation, saintly martyrs, and the primary other in an intimate relationship. Drawing from rich oral histories, legends, artwork, and popular stories of saints, this study directs our attention to the animal body--also a central concern of Christian theology and feminist criticism. Hobgood-Oster invites the reader to venture beyond the exclusive symbolic nature of animals in the Christian tradition to an awareness that we can know ourselves more fully by reference to the animal.
"A welcome contribution to the growing field of animals and religion. . . . Recommended."--Choice
“Raises some important theological and historical questions about the role of animals in the Christian tradition, questions that encourage thoughtful reflection among people of faith.”--Religious Studies Review
"A pioneering study."--Church History
"Laura Hobgood-Oster's incisive contribution to the emerging field of 'religion and animals' is at once scholarly and caring--this remarkable volume models for all of us how valuable new works on the issue of nonhumans in the Christian tradition can be."--Paul F. Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy, Tufts University, and coeditor of A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics
"This study persuasively analyzes popular visual images in an effort to recover the lost significance of animals in Christian iconography. Hobgood-Oster's search in Christian history for a realization of the animal as more than mere sacred symbol is very important."--Belden C. Lane, Theological Studies, Saint Louis University
To order online:
//www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/76nkr2aq9780252032134.html
To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)
Related Titles
The Dumville Family Letters
Edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz
A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating
Howard Williams
Edited by Michael Raposa
Edited by Andrew Linzey
Matthew Pehl
The Animal Studies Group
Christianity and the American Working Class
Edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake
Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics
Edited by Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto
Andrew Linzey
Edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank