The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., (...) gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity). (shrink)

"The search for transcendence is an absorbing and ongoing enterprise. Transcendence is the most discussed, the most compelling, and the most engaging of the subjects with which contemporary theologians deal ... The impulse to move from the ordinary dimensions of life to the extraordinary is not invented by the theologians but is one which appears to spring up from the deepest levels of consciousness itself." [Introduction].