Guided Reading for The Western Traditions.

Find the answer to each of these questions as it is given in the textbook before moving on to the next question. Some answers, drawn from the textbook alone, will be rather simplistic. They can, and should, be elaborated upon as your knowledge of the subject grows.

Pages 11 - 29:

The symbol (*) after a question indicates that these might be used for longer essays in your quizzes.

1. What is humanism?

 

2. What had Christianity assimilated during the thousand years before the Renaissance?

 

3. In what way is the modern Western literary image of antiquity inaccurate?

 

4. What happens if we expect an organized, doctrinally explicit portrayal of Greek religion?

 

5. What are etiologies?

 

6. With what does "history" proper begin? (*)

 

7. What proportion of the written materials surviving from antiquity are mythological texts?

 

8. What is the Enuma Elish?

 

9. Who was Utnapishtim?

 

10. Which hero figure was the protector of the city of Babylon?

 

11. What was an important feature of Mesopotamian religion?

 

12. With what do scholars link the narrative of the death and rebirth of Osiris?

 

13. What might account for the fact that the ancient Egyptian culture appears to be obsessed with death?

 

14. Why was Egypt thought to contain occult secrets?

 

15. What is the "truly mistaken impression" often held about pre-Islamic Arabia?

 

16. What two types of deities were enumerated by the pre-Islamic Arabs?

 

17. Through what is Northern and Eastern European pre-Christian religion known?

 

18. To what inference does the practice of covering the bodies of the dead and sometimes breaking their leg lead us?

 

19. What does the alignment of the stones of Stonehenge suggest?

 

20. How and when did agricultural technology spread in Europe?

 

21. What is one theory that attempts to answer the question how did a central role of the goddess come to be suppressed by patriarchal societies?

 

22. What are the Eddas and when did they come into being?

 

23. With what is the Norse god, Balder, associated?

 

24. How did Julius Caesar describe Druids? When was this?

 

25. When do the Celtic festivals of Samhain and Beltane occur?

 

26. How do the natural and supernatural worlds relate in Celtic mythology?

 

27. When do groupings in the diversity of religion emerge?

 

28. Into what three groups does Oxtoby divide religions?

 

29. What does it mean to say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are exclusive?

 

30. Who was Akhenaten, and what may have been his significance?

 

31. What does the term "henotheism" describe?

 

32. How did the prophets read the calamities of their day? What did the logic of this interpretation mean?

 

33. What happened to the status of the Hebrew God just as the Hebrews lost their worldly kingdom?

 

34. What developed despite the contrast between Jewish monotheism and Greco-Roman civic and popular polytheism? (*)

 

35. What did Wilhelm Schmidt maintain in his book Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God)?

 

36. What do scholars mean by "dualism?"

 

37. What follows from the thinking that God has an arch-rival?

 

38. What was an influential narrative response to questions about the compromise of the creator’s power and the assurance of the triumph of the good?

 

39. What have both been termed "dualistic?"

 

40. What appears to be the case despite Wilhelm Schmidt’s theory?

 

41. What one possible explanation is offered of why most human societies have been polytheistic?

 

42. What may occur in the case of some nature deities? What example is given?

 

43. What does Oxtoby mean by "sequential monotheism?"

 

44. In order to do what does polytheism enter as an organizing concept?

 

45. What happened when the ancient Babylonians conquered the Sumerians?

 

46. Of what does the biblical tradition overtly and consciously disapprove?

 

47. What is clear about religions at times of vitality and confidence?

Additional Notes: