New Books: Mani’s Living Gospel and Platonists at Prayer

Here are notices regarding two forthcoming titles (via PaleoJudaica):

Mani’s Living Gospel and the Ewangelyonig Hymns, by Mohammed Shokri-Fumeshi (Unviersity of Religions and Denominations, Qom), deals with the fragments of Mani’s Living Gospel and the Ewangelyōnīg hymns (the hymn of the Gospel) discovered in the Turfan Oasis in the early 20th century, preserved in the Berlin Turfan Collection. 25 fragments have been studied in this work. Some of these fragments have already been published by other scholars, but only the work presented here aims at finalizing the work begun by others, as the author was able to identify new fragments and with their help, was able to complete the fragments available.

Platonic Theories of Prayer,Edited by John Dillon (Trinity College Dublin) and Andrei Timotin (Romanian Academy – ISEES), is a collection of ten essays on the topic of prayer in the later Platonic tradition. The volume originates from a panel on the topic held at the 2013 ISNS meeting in Cardiff, but is supplemented by a number of invited papers. Together they offer a comprehensive view of the various roles and levels of prayer characteristic of this period. The concept of prayer is shown to include not just formal petitionary or encomiastic prayer, but also theurgical practices and various states of meditation and ecstasy practised by such major figures as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius or Dionysius the Areopagite.