Drawing on the wisdom of teacher from the world's great religious traditions, including Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg, Ram Dass, Mother Mary Clare Vincent, Joan Halifax, and Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, Gifts of the Spirit deepens our appreciation of such everyday routines as waking up, eating, and working, as well as the abundant rewards of enjoying music, gardening, walking, and being with others.
For the first time, Thomas Oden's Systematic Theology classic series (individually titled The Living God, The Word of Life, and Life in the Spirit) is available in one complete volume.
The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon's influential and delightfully entertaining memoirSolomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt.
A history of unparalleled scope that charts the global transformation of Christianity during an age of profound political and cultural changeChristianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity.
The life and times of an enduring work of Jewish spiritualityThe Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller.
The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South AsiaThe first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947.
They sought to transform the world, and ended up transforming twentieth-century AmericaBetween the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world.
How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing ZionismBy the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism.
A major new account of the most intensely creative years of Luther's careerThe Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the sixteenth century.
How the Ottomans refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authorityThe medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750-1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed's political authority.
From one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, an innovative and comprehensive account of religion in the ancient Roman and Mediterranean worldIn this ambitious and authoritative book, Jorg Rupke provides a comprehensive and strikingly original narrative history of ancient Roman and Mediterranean religion over more than a millennium-from the late Bronze Age through the Roman imperial period and up to late antiquity.
The first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern JudaismThis is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism.
The Peace of the Gods takes a new approach to the study of Roman elites' religious practices and beliefs, using current theories in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, as well as cultural and literary studies.
The first major history of the scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish originsThe Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins?
New insights into how the Book of Samuel offers a timeless meditation on the dilemmas of statecraftThe Book of Samuel is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of biblical literature.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain.
How ancient thinkers grappled with competing conceptions of divine lawIn the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present.
How a Greek philosopher's encounters with Buddhism in Central Asia influenced Western philosophyPyrrho of Elis went with Alexander the Great to Central Asia and India during the Greek invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire in 334-324 BC.
How the history of Texas illuminates America's post-Civil War pastTracing the intersection of religion, race, and power in Texas from Reconstruction through the rise of the Religious Right and the failed presidential bid of Governor Rick Perry, Rough Country illuminates American history since the Civil War in new ways, demonstrating that Texas's story is also America's.
The life and times of the most important theological work of medieval ChristendomThis concise book tells the story of the most important theological work of the Middle Ages, the vast Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, which holds a unique place in Western religion and philosophy.
The rise, fall, and modern resurgence of an enigmatic book revered by yoga enthusiasts around the worldConsisting of fewer than two hundred verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice.
Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture.
The important role of liberal ecumenical Protestantism in American historyThe role of liberalized, ecumenical Protestantism in American history has too often been obscured by the more flamboyant and orthodox versions of the faith that oppose evolution, embrace narrow conceptions of family values, and continue to insist that the United States should be understood as a Christian nation.
This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine.
The first encylopedic guide to the history of relations between Jews and Muslims around the worldThis is the first encyclopedic guide to the history of relations between Jews and Muslims around the world from the birth of Islam to today.
Between Heaven and Earth explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic history, and reflects, more broadly, on how people live in the company of sacred figures and how these relationships shape the ties between people on earth.
An inside look at how religious diversity came to PrincetonIn 1981, Frederick Houk Borsch returned to Princeton University, his alma mater, to serve as dean of the chapel at the Ivy League school.
A sweeping history of Islam and the West from the seventh century to todayEurope and the Islamic World sheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a "e;clash of civilizations"e; between the Muslim world and Europe.
Unraveling the controversies surrounding the Dead Sea ScrollsSince they were first discovered in the caves at Qumran in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have aroused more fascination-and more controversy-than perhaps any other archaeological find.
An essential biography of one of the Bible's most influential booksDuring its 2,500-year life, the book of Genesis has been the keystone to almost every important claim about reality, humanity, and God in Judaism and Christianity.
A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman EmpireJesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.
How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah beganThe Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition.
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's ConfessionsIn this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed.
From National Book Awardwinning author Martin Marty, the surprising story of a Christian classic born in a Nazi prison cellFor fascination, influence, inspiration, and controversy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison is unmatched by any other book of Christian reflection written in the twentieth century.
How an eccentric spiritualist from Trenton, New Jersey, helped create the most famous text of Tibetan BuddhismThe Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927.