History of religion

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.

In this delightful autobiography, Smith tells us how he became the dean of world religion experts.

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 medieval church was founded on and governed by concepts of faith and trust--but not in the way that is popularly assumed.

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off.

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.

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.

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.

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace.

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.

A groundbreaking account of how the Book of Exodus shaped fundamental aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and IslamThe Book of Exodus may be the most consequential story ever told.

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.

A leading scholar sheds critical light on the seemingly revelatory events behind new religions and spiritual movementsUnseen presences.

The love of God is perhaps the most essential element in Judaism-but also one of the most confounding.

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.

Rodney Stark's provocative new book argues that, whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have formed our modern culture.

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.

Why Islam is more political and fundamentalist than other religionsWhy does Islam play a larger role in contemporary politics than other religions?

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.

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.

In the history of the Western World, the Bible has been a perpetual source of inspiration and guidance for countless Christians.

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.

Indonesian Islam is often portrayed as being intrinsically moderate by virtue of the role that mystical Sufism played in shaping its traditions.

Heavenly Merchandize offers a critical reexamination of religion's role in the creation of a market economy in early America.

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.

For more than four decades, biblical experts have tried to place the story of Exodus into historical context--without success.

What is jihad?

Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period.

What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages?

The Worlds Religions, by beloved author and pioneering professor Huston Smith (Tales of Wonder), is the definitive classic for introducing the essential elements and teachings of the worlds predominant faiths, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as regional native traditions.

"e;An intellectual conversion of great significance.

There was no neutral response to the announcement that the "e;enforcer"e;Cardinal Joseph Ratzingerhad been elected Benedict XVI, the next pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

World-renowned Jesus scholar Marcus J.