This study in the relationship between religion and the comic focuses on the ways in which the latter fulfils a central function in the sacred understanding of reality of pre-modern cultures and the spiritual life of religious traditions.
Classical Indian schools of philosophy undertake major debates on a variety of issues with the formal aim of attaining a supreme end to existence - liberation from the cycle of lives.
Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men.
The untold story of how the Arabic Qur'an became the English KoranFor millions of Muslims, the Qur'an is sacred only in Arabic, the original Arabic in which it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century; to many Arab and non-Arab believers alike, the book literally defies translation.
A bold new literary history that says women's writing is defined less by domestic concerns than by an engagement with public lifeIn a bold and sweeping reevaluation of the past two centuries of women's writing, At Home in the World argues that this body of work has been defined less by domestic concerns than by an active engagement with the most pressing issues of public life: from class and religious divisions, slavery, warfare, and labor unrest to democracy, tyranny, globalism, and the clash of cultures.
A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coedAs the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time.
The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism.
A compelling history of atheism in American public lifeA much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation's moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God.
The first in-depth look at Stael's political life and writingsGermaine de Stael (1766-1817) is perhaps best known today as a novelist, literary critic, and outspoken and independent thinker.
A comparative look at female political activism in today's most influential Israeli and Palestinian religious movementsHow do women in conservative religious movements expand spaces for political activism in ways that go beyond their movements' strict ideas about male and female roles?
The real history of the Amazons in war and loveAmazons-fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world-were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks.
The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance"e;We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.
A groundbreaking account of how religion made society possibleHow did human societies scale up from tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today-even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation?
In this pathbreaking study of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill, Susan Moller Okin turns to the tradition of political philosophy that pervades Western culture and its institutions to understand why the gap between formal and real gender equality persists.
Based on two years of ethnographic research in the southern suburbs of Beirut, An Enchanted Modern demonstrates that Islam and modernity are not merely compatible, but actually go hand-in-hand.
How Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have reimagined Abraham in their own imagesJews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles.
In the decade following World War I, nineteenth-century womanhood came under attack not only from feminists but also from innumerable "e;ordinary"e; young women determined to create "e;modern"e; lives for themselves.
Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "e;Christian-Muslim divide"e;--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule.
The Faith of Scientists is an anthology of writings by twenty-one legendary scientists, from the dawn of the Scientific Revolution to the frontiers of science today, about their faith, their views about God, and the place religion holds--or doesn't--in their lives in light of their commitment to science.
Why the battle between superstition and science is far from overFrom uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture?
Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families.
In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all.
In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims.
Mark Graber looks at the history of abortion law in action to argue that the only defensible, constitutional approach to the issue is to afford all women equal choice--abortion should remain legal or bans should be strictly enforced.
Maintaining that women's storytelling is a telling activity, Karen McPherson "e;reads for guilt"e; in novels by five twentieth-century writers--Simone de Beauvoir (L'Invitee), Marguerite Duras (Le ravissement de Lol V.
This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore.
