Inventing New Beginnings is the first book-length study to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the "e;Jewish Renaissance,"e; or "e;return"e; to Judaism, that captured much of German-speaking Jewry between 1890 and 1938.
First published in 1989 and now available in a revised and newly designed edition, this bountiful treasury of prayers, rituals, and spiritual guidance from best-selling author and teacher Edward Hays is a celebration of the divine presence that unites all people and faiths of the world.
This study explores the intersection of politics, religious thought, and religious culture in pre-revolutionary England, using hitherto unknown or overlooked manuscripts and printed material to reconstruct and contextualize a forgotten but highly significant antinomian religious subculture that evolved at the margins of the early seventeenth-century puritan community.
Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years.
Brian Davies offers the first in-depth study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's thoughts on God and evil, revealing that Aquinas's thinking about God and evil can be traced through his metaphysical philosophy, his thoughts on God and creation, and his writings about Christian revelation and the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus is the first full-length book devoted to an overview of the Christology of this fourth-century Father of the Church.
Kindred Spirits takes us inside a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
In 2002, the national spotlight fell on Boston's archdiocese, where decades of rampant sexual misconduct from priests-and the church's systematic cover-ups-were exposed by reporters from the Boston Globe.
Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese.
One of the most violent episodes of Chinas Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians.
Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present.
In this original study, Moshe Idel, an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and thought, and the cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Shahar Arzy combine their considerable expertise to explore the mysteries of the Kabbalah from an entirely new perspective: that of the human brain.
Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Bahaism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more.
In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective.
In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious “histories” offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism.
A classroom perennial and comprehensive guide, America's Religions lays out the background, beliefs, practices, and leaders of the nation's religious movements and denominations.
A bold and original study of German missionaries in China, who catalyzed a revolution in thinking among European Christians about the nature of Christianity itself In this accessibly written and empirically based study, Albert Wu documents how German missionaries—chastened by their failure to convert Chinese people to Christianity—reconsidered their attitudes toward Chinese culture and Confucianism.
The first single-volume history of Reformed Protestantism from its sixteenth-century origins to the present This briskly told history of Reformed Protestantism takes these churches through their entire 500-year history—from sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and São Paulo.
A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theoryMigrants in the Profane takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W.
How Western notions of the Buddha have come to misrepresent his teachings and the traditional goals of Buddhist practice This book tells the story of the Scientific Buddha, "born" in Europe in the 1800s but commonly confused with the Buddha born in India 2,500 years ago.
In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—one of the world’s foremost scholars considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it.
In this bold and groundbreaking book, Brent Nongbri provides an up-to-date introduction to the major collections of early Christian manuscripts and demonstrates that much of what we thought we knew about these books and fragments is mistaken.
The story of how Brazilian Catholics and Protestants confronted one of the greatest shocks to the Latin American religious system in its 500-year history This innovative study explores the transition in Brazil from a hegemonically Catholic society to a religiously pluralistic society.
Divination, the use of special talents and techniques to gain divine knowledge, was practiced in many different forms in ancient Israel and throughout the ancient world.
A nuanced narrative about the intersections of religious and economic life in early Christianity The divine was an active participant in the economic spheres of the ancient Mediterranean world.
