Willi Braun Bücher

The book explores the portrayal of Jesus as a dinner sage in the Gospel of Luke, emphasizing the rhetorical techniques employed by the author. Willi Braun analyzes the Pharisaic dinner episode in Luke 14, highlighting its construction as a persuasive argument aimed at the wealthy urban elite. The study delves into the social and literary contexts of Greco-Roman banquet culture, suggesting that the episode serves to encourage a transformation in values among the elite, reflecting the gospel writer's intent to shape Christian community ideals.

Focusing on the anthropocentric nature of religious practices, this work argues that behaviors deemed uniquely religious are fundamentally human. It contends that scholars of religion should examine human experiences across different contexts, emphasizing the complexity of human existence, which includes the creation of more-than-human entities and realities. The book challenges conventional notions of religious authority, advocating for a study that recognizes the ordinary aspects of human behavior in the context of spirituality.

What is religion? Can it be defined at all? Or is it too easily defined in far too many ways so as to make a "religion" a drifting signifier or whatever one's pleasure is? Does the study of religion require special, perhaps religious, tools of analysis and explanation? What is the difference between a knowledge of religion derived from practicing it and a knowledge about religion derived from nonreligious modes of inquiry? Sooner or later, any serious student of religion must face these questionsif religious practices are to be investigated in the light of the terms and aims of the social and human sciences in the modern university.The Guide to the Study of Religion provides a map of the key concepts and thought-structures for imagining and studying religion as a class of everyday social practices that lend themselves to no more or less difficult explanation than any other class of social phenomena.