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RELIGION

Charisma and Compassion
C. Julia Huang
Hardcover January 2009
The Peculiar Life of Sundays
Stephen Miller
Hardcover November 2008
Stri
Kevin McGrath
Paperback November 2008
Your Spirits Walk Beside Us
Barbara Dianne Savage
Hardcover November 2008
Migration Miracle
Jacqueline Maria Hagan
Hardcover November 2008
The Clash Within
Martha C. Nussbaum
While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.
Paperback October 2008
Deliverance and Submission
Kelly H. Chong
Hardcover October 2008
Everyday Jihad
Bernard Rougier
Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Rougier plunges us into the heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which became a site for militant Sunni Islamists in the early 1990s. Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, through their own interpretations of sacred texts and jihad, took root in this Palestinian milieu, and explains how radical religious allegiances overcome traditional nationalist sentiment in communities marked by poverty and despair.
Paperback October 2008
God's War
Christopher Tyerman
The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman explores the centuries of violence committed in the name of religious devotion Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by paranoia and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, and told with great authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.
Paperback October 2008
The Power of the Buddhas
Sem Vermeersch
Hardcover October 2008
The Secret Revelation of John
Karen L. King
Karen L. King offers an illuminating reading of this ancient text, said to be Christ's revelation to his disciple John. In her analysis, the Revelation becomes a comprehensible religious vision--and a window on the religious culture of the Roman Empire. A translation of the complete Secret Revelation of John is included.
Paperback October 2008
Seven Deadly Sins
Aviad Kleinberg
Translated by Susan Emanuel
Hardcover October 2008
An Updated Vedic Concordance
Edited by Marco Franceschini
September 2008
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book
Anthony Grafton
Megan Williams
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship.
Paperback September 2008
Journey to the East
Liam Matthew Brockey
One of the great encounters of world history took place in 1579 when highly educated European priests confronted Chinese culture for the first time. This "journey to the East" is explored by Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries from Portugal to China. Moving beyond the image of these Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how they translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.
Paperback September 2008
Leaves from Paradise
Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Paperback September 2008
On the Donation of Constantine
Lorenzo Valla
Translated by G. W. Bowersock
Paperback September 2008
Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety
Daphna Ephrat
Paperback September 2008
What Happened at Vatican II
John W. O'Malley
Hardcover September 2008
Greetings in the Lord
AnneMarie Luijendijk
This is the first book-length study on Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, the site where some of the most important and oldest fragments of early Christian books were unearthed. Bringing the people in these dry papyrus letters and documents back to life, the book reveals how diverse Christians lived in this city of diverse situations.
Paperback August 2008
Beyond Essence
Lori K. Pearson
This book demonstrates the intimate connection between Troeltsch's philosophical writings on the essence of Christianity and his historical investigations of Christianity's past. Pearson argues that as a result of his historical work, Troeltsch moved beyond the category of essence and sought new ways of theorizing Christian identity in the context of modernity's pluralistic yet fragmented society.
Paperback July 2008
The Islamic Marriage Contract
Edited by Asifa Quraishi
Edited by Frank E. Vogel
It is often said that marriage in Islamic law is a civil contract, not a sacrament. This volume collects papers from many disciplines examining the Muslim marriage contract. Articles cover doctrines as to marriage contracts (e.g., may a wife stipulate monogamy?); historical instances; comparisons with Jewish and canon law; contemporary legal and social practice; and projects of activists for women worldwide.
Hardcover June 2008
Practitioners of the Divine
Beate Dignas
Kai Trampedach
“What is a Greek priest?” The volume, which has its origins in a symposium held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., focuses on the question through a variety of lenses: the visual representation of cult personnel, priests as ritual experts, variations of priesthood, ideal concepts and their transformation, and the role of manteis.
Paperback June 2008
Holding Bishops Accountable
Timothy D. Lytton
The prevalence of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and its shocking cover-up by church officials have obscured the largely untold story of the tort system’s remarkable success in bringing the scandal to light. The lessons of clergy sexual abuse litigation give us reason to reconsider the case for tort reform and to look more closely at how tort litigation can enhance the performance of public and private policymaking institutions.
Hardcover May 2008
Out of the Whirlwind
Kathryn Schifferdecker
The book of Job is a complex treatment of the problem of undeserved suffering. It is also a sustained meditation on creation, on humanity's place in creation, and on God's ordering of creation. In this study, Schifferdecker offers a close literary and theological reading of the book of Job--particularly of God's speeches at the end of the book--in order to articulate its creation theology, which is particularly pertinent in our environmentally-conscious age.
Paperback May 2008
Writings on Church and Reform
Nicholas of Cusa
Translated by Thomas M. Izbicki
Nicholas of Cusa(1401–1464), a polymath who studied canon law and became a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance. He wrote principally on speculative theology, philosophy, and church politics. This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time.
Hardcover May 2008
The Faithful
James M. O'Toole
Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
Hardcover April 2008
On Zion's Mount
Jared Farmer
On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Mt. Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.
Hardcover April 2008
The Dalai Lama at MIT
Edited by Anne Harrington
Edited by Arthur Zajonc
Their meeting captured headlines; the waiting list for tickets was nearly 2000 names long. If you were unable to attend, this book will take you there. Including both the papers given at the conference, and the animated discussion and debate that followed, The Dalai Lama at MIT reveals scientists and monks reaching across a cultural divide, to share insights, studies, and enduring questions.
Paperback April 2008
Flesh Made Word
Aviad Kleinberg
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful—the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints.Kleinberg argues that the saints’ stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment. By telling and retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were shaping and reshaping Christianity itself.
Hardcover April 2008
Emplacing a Pilgrimage
Barbara Ambros
The sacred mountain oyama (literally, “Big Mountain”) has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.
Hardcover March 2008
Islam and the Secular State
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies.
Hardcover March 2008
Lost Soul
John Makeham
Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise.
Hardcover March 2008
Partisans of Allah
Ayesha Jalal
Today, more than ever, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. As the line drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims becomes more rigid, Jalal seeks to retrieve the ethical meanings of this core Islamic principle in South Asian history. Drawing on historical, legal, and literary sources, Jalal traces the intellectual itinerary of jihad through several centuries and across the territory connecting the Middle East with South Asia.
Hardcover March 2008
Sugata Saurabha
Edited by Todd T. Lewis
Edited by Subarna Man Tuladhar
Chittadhar Hrdaya
The poem was composed by the greatest modern writer in Newari language, Hrdaya (1906– 1982), while he was imprisoned by the autocratic strongly pro-Hindu Rana regime that governed Nepal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In nineteen long cantos, the Sugata Saurabha tells of the life of the Buddha, following the traditional accounts, but situates it in the strongly local context of Newar and Nepali Buddhism.
Hardcover March 2008
Crossing and Dwelling
Thomas A. Tweed
A deeply researched and vividly written study, this book depicts religion in place and in movement, dwelling and crossing. Drawing on insights from the natural and social sciences, Tweed's work is grounded in the gritty particulars of distinctive religious practices, even as it moves toward ideas about cross-cultural patterns. It offers a responsible way to think broadly about religion, a topic that is crucial for understanding the contemporary world.
Paperback March 2008
Faith on the Margins
Charles H. Parker
In the wake of the 1572 revolt against Spain, the new Dutch Republic outlawed Catholic worship and secularized all church property. Calvinism prevailed as the public faith, yet Catholicism experienced a resurgence in the first half of the seventeenth century, with membership rivaling that of the Calvinist church. In a wide-ranging analysis of a marginalized yet vibrant religious minority, Parker examines this remarkable revival.
Hardcover February 2008
The Fire Spreads
Randall J. Stephens
Pentecostalism came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. With the growth of southern Pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement slipped cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different: while many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end, a growing number did so as active political conservatives.
Hardcover January 2008
On Religious Liberty
James Calvin Davis
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
Hardcover January 2008 / Paperback January 2008
Arguing the Just War in Islam
John Kelsay
Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war.
Hardcover November 2007
Commentaries, Volume 2, Books III-IV
Pius II
Edited by Margaret Meserve
Edited by Marcello Simonetta
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated translation.
Hardcover November 2007
Burning to Read
James Simpson
Amid present-day conflagrations, this illuminating book reminds us of the sources, and profound consequences, of Christian fundamentalism in the sixteenth century. Simpson focuses on the cultural transformation in early modern England that allowed common people to read the Bible for the first time. The last wave of fundamentalist reading in the West provoked 150 years of violent upheaval; as we approach a second wave, this powerful book alerts us to our peril.
Hardcover November 2007
The Betrayal of Faith
Emma Anderson
Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
Hardcover October 2007
Divided by Faith
Benjamin J. Kaplan
Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
Hardcover October 2007
Ancient Religions
Sarah Iles Johnston, General Editor
Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. This collection of essays, drawn from the groundbreaking reference work Religion in the Ancient World, offers an expansive, comparative perspective on this complex spiritual world.
Paperback September 2007
Creativity and Tradition
Israel Ta-Shma
This volume brings together sixteen of Ta-Shma's outstanding studies originally written in English, four of which are published here for the first time. Set in Germany, northern France, Italy, Poland, and Spain, these essays focus on leading rabbinic scholars and their writings, as well as important issues of Jewish intellectual history, such as the nature of halakhah and aggadah, kabbalah and spirituality, childhood, and popular religion.
Hardcover September 2007
Doubting Thomas
Glenn W. Most
From the New Testament, Glenn W. Most traces Thomas's permutations through the centuries: as Gnostic saint, missionary to India, paragon of Christian orthodoxy, hero of skepticism, and negative example of doubt, blasphemy, and violence. This work shows how Thomas's story, in its many guises, touches upon central questions of religion, philosophy, hermeneutics, and, not least, life.
Paperback September 2007
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons
Peter J. Bowler
Bowler doesn't minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the less well-known existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides a valuable alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation.
Hardcover September 2007
Rebuilding Buddhism
Sarah LeVine
David N. Gellner
Rebuilding Buddhism describes in evocative detail the experiences and achievements of Nepalis who have adopted Theravada Buddhism. This form of Buddhism was introduced into Nepal from Burma and Sri Lanka in the 1930s, and its adherents have struggled for recognition and acceptance ever since. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and historical reconstruction, the book provides a rich portrait of the different ways of being a Nepali Buddhist over the past seventy years.
Paperback September 2007
A Secular Age
Charles Taylor
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Hardcover September 2007
Christianity and American Democracy
Hugh Heclo
Mary Jo Bane
Michael Kazin
Alan Wolfe
Christianity, not religion in general, has been important for American democracy. With this bold thesis, Heclo offers a panoramic view of how Christianity and democracy have shaped each other over the years, and how their relationship is changing in the present day. Responding to his challenging argument, Mary Jo Bane, Michael Kazin, and Alan Wolfe criticize, qualify, and amend it. The result is a lively debate about a momentous tension in American public life.
Hardcover June 2007
War and Faith
Carol Richmond Tsang
During the sengoku era in Japan, warlords and religious institutions vied for supremacy, with powerhouses such as The Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism fanning violent uprisings of ikko ikki, bands of commoners fighting for various causes. Tsang delves into the complex relationship between these ikko leagues and the Honganji institution, arguing for a fuller picture of ikko ikki as a force in medieval Japanese history.
Hardcover May 2007
Christian Art
Rowena Loverance
What makes works of art Christian? And what, as such, distinguishes them from other works? These are the questions at the center of this book, which is at once a sumptuously illustrated survey of Christian art across space and time and a probing study of what "Christian art" really means, how it functions, where it arises, and whom it serves.
Hardcover May 2007
The Clash Within
Martha C. Nussbaum
While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.
Hardcover May 2007
Everyday Jihad
Bernard Rougier
Translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
As southern Lebanon becomes the latest battleground for Islamist warriors, Rougier plunges us into the heavily populated Palestinian refugee camp at Ain al-Helweh, which became a site for militant Sunni Islamists in the early 1990s. Rougier documents how Sunni fundamentalists, through their own interpretations of sacred texts and jihad, took root in this Palestinian milieu, and explains how radical religious allegiances overcome traditional nationalist sentiment in communities marked by poverty and despair.
Hardcover May 2007