front cover of The Essential Worldwide Laws of Life
The Essential Worldwide Laws of Life
Sir John Templeton
Templeton Press, 2012

What does it mean to live a good life?

The major scriptures of the world, various schools of philosophical thought, storytellers, scientists, artists, and historians have all offered answers to this question. Surprisingly, these answers are common among nearly all sources. Famed investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton called these commonalities the “laws of life.”

Templeton gathers the best of these teachings in The Essential Worldwide Laws of Life. This handsome volume shows readers of all ages, from all parts of the world, how to make their lives more joyous and useful by learning the universal truths that transcend time and culture.

Each law is presented in an essay format, with stories, commentary, and quotations to illustrate its importance. The material is designed to inspire the reader to put these laws into practice and to enjoy the rewarding life that will result.

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Searching for Soul
A Survivor’s Guide
Bobbe Tyler
Ohio University Press, 2009
To dive deep into your inner life. To navigate its complexity and explore your story in depth. To discover who you are exactly—the courage you have when life breaks apart, how conscious you become in that process, and how rich you feel learning the meaning of your life. On a search for wholeness, Bobbe Tyler delves deep to find and tell her story—the trauma of familial mental illness, marriage and divorce, spiritual despair, accountability, addiction and the joy of recovery, surviving loss, and finally that which matters most: love in all its ways. The rewards of her wisdom belong not to her alone but, by way of her unflinching examination of life’s many paths, to all who have a story of their own to tell—who have faced a life-choice gone wrong, or met the peace that had always seemed just out of reach. This searing self-appraisal provides a model for those who seek to know themselves better and are willing to sound their depths to find their story in full.
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Discourse to Lady Lavinia His Daughter
Annibal Guasco
University of Chicago Press, 2003
When eleven-year-old Lavinia Guasca began her new life as a lady-in-waiting at the court of Turin, she brought with her a parting gift from her father Annibal (1540-1619): a detailed guidebook he wrote to help steer her through the many pitfalls of court life. Lavinia had her father's Discourse published in 1586; this English translation is the first version published in any form since that time.

The Discourse displays an incredibly far-sighted view of women's education. Annibal thought gifted young girls should develop their talents and apply them to careers outside the home. In the Discourse, he details the unique and extremely rigorous educational program to which he had subjected Lavinia almost from the cradle with this end in mind. To complete Lavinia's education, Annibal filled the Discourse with advice on spirituality and morality, health and beauty, and how to behave at court—everything a well-bred lady-in-waiting would need to know. This edition also includes an appendix that traces the later events of Lavinia's life through excerpts from her father's letters.
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Trail Guide for a Crooked Heart
Stories and Reflections for Life's Journey
Jim May
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016

"A brilliant mixture of story, philosophy, humor and wisdom, this book reminds us that---if we are open to story, dreams, imagination, and myth---we can open doors within our soul."
     —Jay O’Callahan, author, storyteller, and NPR commentator

A lifetime collection of stories, wise words, assembled musings and quotations about overcoming hurdles, elusive enlightenment, personal evolution, persistence in the face of discouragement, this pastiche is designed to encourage the downhearted, lift up the strivers, and add wings to the heels of spiritual seekers.

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Words Of Common Sense
Brother David Steindl-Rast
Templeton Press, 2002

Brother David Steindl-Rast takes us on a journey to discover the wisdom preserved in common sense sayings that have been passed down through generations. These timeless words reflect the shared values cherished by people all over the world.

"When you drink from a stream,” says one Chinese proverb, “remember the spring." From these simple words we are reminded to be grateful for even the smallest graces that we receive. Another homespun phrase tells us that "a contented heart is a continual feast," reminding us to look within, rather than without, for the source of our happiness.

Words of Common Sense reveals the thread of human experience expressed in the world’s proverbs and sayings. It helps us connect with cultures other than our own and recognize our shared humanity. These words resonate around the world because they are timeless reflections on how to cultivate a life of love, gratitude, and meaning.

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Power, Pleasure, and Profit
Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
David Wootton
Harvard University Press, 2018

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.

Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

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Made In America
Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey
Jeffrey Louis Decker
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Acres Of Diamonds
Russell Conwell
Temple University Press, 2002
Considered by many to be one of the finest speeches ever written, Acres of Diamonds offers a multitude of lessons about the rewards of work, education, and finding the riches of life in one's own back yard.In an era when many Americans would pack public halls to hear speeches given by the greatest citizens of their day, Russell Conwell read his world-famous lecture hundreds of times, and used the income he earned delivering it to found a small seminary to train Baptist ministers. That school soon grew into Temple University, one of the first universities to offer affordable education to working-class Americans: it stands today as the most visible example of Russell Conwell's legacy and vision.There are a multitude of gems to mine from Russell Conwell's words, no matter what your walk of life. Acres of Diamonds remains a significant—and inspirational—lesson about where the true riches of life may be found.
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Twentieth-Century American Success Rhetoric
How to Construct a Suitable Self
John Ramage
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Self-help authors like Tom Peters and Stephen Covey, who have dominated best-seller lists over the last two decades, have exercised increasing influence on political, governmental, and educational organizations. By contrast, the topic of American success books— texts that promise to help readers succeed by retrofitting their identity to meet workplace demands—has been ignored by scholars since the 1980s. John Ramage challenges the neglect of this hugely popular literature and revives a once-lively conversation among eminent critics about the social phenomenon represented in the work of Bruce Barton, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, among others.

Using literary texts from Don Quixote to Catch-22 to gloss the discussion, Ramage utilizes Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory to understand symbolic acts and social issues and brings together earlier commentaries within a new critical framework. He considers the problematic and paradoxical nature of success and examines its meaning in terms of its traditional dialectic partner, happiness. A synopsis of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forerunners prefaces this analysis in which Ramage links literary code heroes with the activities of twentieth-century business leaders to determine whether, in the search for authenticity, the heroic individual or the corporation is ultimately served.

This comprehensive study chronicles the legitimation of the success book genre, enumerates rhetorical strategies used to win over readers, and supplies the historical context that renders each book’s message timely. After considering some of the dangers of crossing disciplinary borders, as exemplified by Deborah Tannen’s work, Ramage critiques Stanley Fish’s theoretical strictures against this practice, finally summoning academic critics to action with a strong call to exert greater influence within the popular marketplace.

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What Is the Good Life?
Luc Ferry
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Has inquiry into the meaning of life become outmoded in a universe where the other-worldiness of religion no longer speaks to us as it once did, or, as Nietzsche proposed, where we are now the creators of our own value? Has the ancient question of the "good life" disappeared, another victim of the technological world? For Luc Ferry, the answer to both questions is a resounding no.

In What Is the Good Life? Ferry argues that the question of the meaning of life, on which much philosophical debate throughout the centuries has rested, has not vanished, but at the very least the question is posed differently today. Ferry points out the pressures in our secularized world that tend to reduce the idea of a successful life or "good life" to one of wealth, career satisfaction, and prestige. Without deserting the secular presuppositions of our world, he shows that we can give ourselves a richer sense of life's possibilities. The "good life" consists of harmonizing life's different forces in a way that enables one to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction in the realization of one's creative abilities.
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Writing From The Heart
Young People Share Their Wisdom
Peggy Veljkovic
Templeton Press, 2000

Writing from the Heart offers us a unique window into what young people have learned about life. This collection of essays captures the values that matter most to teens—values such as love, perseverance, family, and helping others—in their own words. As the young writers reflect on their own experience, readers of all ages will be inspired by their wisdom and hope.

From Chattanooga to China, these essays are all extraordinary. They not only celebrate the accomplishments of the young writers, but also offer an opportunity to peer into the hearts and minds of young people around the world. Readers may be amazed at some of the hardships that these teens have faced, but will have a deep sense of optimism for our future. In addition, they inspire us to make the most of our lives as well.

 

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Ethics, Trust, and the Professions
Philosophical and Cultural Aspects
Edmund D. Pellegrino, Robert M. Veatch, and John P. Langan, SJ
Georgetown University Press, 1991

The essays in Ethics, Trust, and the Professions probe the nature of the fiduciary relationship that binds client to lawyer, believer to minister, and patient to doctor. Angles of approach include history, sociology, philosophy, and culture, and their very multiplicity reveals how difficult we find it to formulate a code of ethics which will insure a relationship of trust between the professional and the public.

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The Young Professional’s Survival Guide
From Cab Fares to Moral Snares
C. K. Gunsalus
Harvard University Press, 2012

Imagine yourself in your new job, doing your best to make a good impression—and your boss asks you to do something that doesn’t feel right, like fudge a sales report, or lie to a customer. You have no idea how to handle the situation, and your boss is hovering. When you’re caught off guard, under pressure from someone more powerful, it’s easy to make a mistake. And having made one, it’s easier to rationalize the next one.

The Young Professional’s Survival Guide shows how to avoid these traps in the first place, and how to work through them if you can’t avoid them. Many of the problems that arise in the workplace are predictable. C. K. Gunsalus, a nationally recognized expert on professional ethics, uses short, pungent real-world examples to help people new to the work world recognize the situations that can lead to career-damaging missteps—and prevent them. Gunsalus offers questions to ask yourself (and others) to help you recognize trouble and temptation, sample scripts to use to avoid being pressured into doing something you’ll regret, and guidance in handling disputes fairly and diplomatically. Most of all, she emphasizes, choose your mentors for their characters as well as their titles and talents.

You can’t control the people around you, but you can control what you do. Reliance on a few key habits and a professional persona, Gunsalus shows, can help you advance with class, even in what looks like a “casual” workplace.

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The Socially Responsive Self
Social Theory and Professional Ethics
Larry May
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Larry May argues that socially responsive individuals need not be self-sacrificing or overly conscientious. According to May, a person's integrity and moral responsibility are shaped and limited not just by conscience but also by socialization and moral support from the communities to which he or she belongs.

Applying his theory of responsibility to professional ethics, May contends that current methods of professional socialization should be changed so that professionals are not expected to ignore considerations of personal well-being, family, or community. For instance, lawyers should not place client loyalty above concerns for the common good; doctors should not place the physical well-being of patients above their mental and spiritual well-being; scientists and engineers should not feel obliged to blow the whistle on fraud and corruption unless their professional groups protect them from retaliation.

This book should prove provocative reading for philosophers, political scientists, social theorists, professionals of many stripes, and ethicists.
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Troping the Body
Gender, Etiquette, and Performance
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance is an interdisciplinary study of etiquette texts, conduct literature, and advice books and films. GwendolynAudrey Foster analyzes the work of such women authors as Emily Post, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Webster Foster, Emily Brontë, Frances E. W. Harper, and Martha Stewart as well as such women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Kasi Lemmons.

“Specifically,” Foster notes, “I was interested in the possibility of locating power and agency in the voices of popular etiquette writers.” Her investigation led her to analyze etiquette and conduct literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Within this wide scope, she redefines the boundaries of conduct literature through a theoretical examination of the gendered body as it is positioned in conduct books, etiquette texts, poetry, fiction, and film.

Drawing on Bakhtin, Gates, Foucault, and the new school of performative feminism to develop an interdisciplinary approach to conduct literature—and literature as conduct—Foster brings a unique perspective to the analysis of ways in which the body has been gendered, raced, and constructed in terms of class and sexuality.

Even though women writers have been actively writing conduct and etiquette texts since the medieval period, few critical examinations of such literature exist in the fields of cultural studies and literary criticism. Thus, Foster’s study fills a gap and does so uniquely in the existing literature. In examining these voices of authority over the body, Foster identifies the dialogic in the texts of this discipline that both supports and disrupts the hegemonic discourse of a gendered social order.

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The Ladies' Etiquette Handbook
The Importance of Being Refined in the 1880s
David E. Schoonover
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Prior to the late nineteenth century, most Americans viewed dining as a utilitarian duty characterized by common “meat and potato” dishes and complemented by little, if any, polite conversation. With the boom in industrialism and the sudden growth of the middle class in the 1880s, America's interest in social etiquette rose dramatically.
Consisting of two separate publications—The Ladies' Handbook and Household Assistant(1886) and Short Hints on Social Etiquette (1887)—The Ladies' Etiquette Handbook can be read as a testament to the growing division between social classes and, at the same time, as a reflection of the middle class' overwhelming desire to cross social lines through the graces of fine etiquette.
Written by a Methodist women's church group in Manchester, New Hampshire, The Ladies' Handbook and Household Assistant provides advice on subjects such as church etiquette and the proper handling of cutlery as well as recipes for the socially active household. Short Hints on Social Etiquette, published as a promotional piece by a Philadelphia soap manufacturer—including descriptions of lavish meals, advice on proper word pronunciation, and illustrations of tasteful calling cards—strives to bring “aristocratic” values into the “republican” home.
The foreword by Kenneth Cmiel, professor of history at the University of Iowa, provides an overview of the historic and social trends leading up to the publication of both handbooks and traces the creation and ultimate development of modern social etiquette.
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In Pursuit of Civility
Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England
Keith Thomas
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Keith Thomas’s earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be “civilized” and how that condition differed from being “barbarous” or “savage.” Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.
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A Genealogy of Manners
Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century
Jorge Arditi
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Remarkable for its scope and erudition, Jorge Arditi's new study offers a fascinating history of mores from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Drawing on the pioneering ideas of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, Arditi examines the relationship between power and social practices and traces how power changes over time.

Analyzing courtesy manuals and etiquette books from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Arditi shows how the dominant classes of a society were able to create a system of social relations and put it into operation. The result was an infrastructure in which these classes could successfully exert power. He explores how the ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Ages, the monarchies from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, and the aristocracies during the early stages of modernity all forged their own codes of manners within the confines of another, dominant order. Arditi goes on to describe how each of these different groups, through the sustained deployment of their own forms of relating with one another, gradually moved into a position of dominance.

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Galateo
Or, The Rules of Polite Behavior
Giovanni Della Casa
University of Chicago Press, 2013
“Since it is the case that you are now just beginning that journey that I have for the most part as you see completed, that is, the one through mortal life, and loving you so very much as I do, I have proposed to myself—as one who has been many places—to show you those places in life where, walking through them, I fear you could easily either fall or take the wrong direction.”

So begins Galateo, a treatise on polite behavior written by Giovanni Della Casa (1503–56) for the benefit of his nephew, a young Florentine destined for greatness.
           
In the voice of a cranky yet genial old uncle, Della Casa offers the distillation of what he has learned over a lifetime of public service as diplomat and papal nuncio. As relevant today as it was in Renaissance Italy, Galateo deals with subjects as varied as dress codes, charming conversation and off-color jokes, eating habits and hairstyles, and literary language. In its time, Galateo circulated as widely as Machiavelli’s Prince and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Mirroring what Machiavelli did for promoting political behavior, and what Castiglione did for behavior at court, Della Casa here creates a picture of the refined man caught in a world in which embarrassment and vulgarity prevail. Less a treatise promoting courtly values or a manual of savoir faire, it is rather a meditation on conformity and the law, on perfection and rules, but also an exasperated—often theatrical—reaction to the diverse ways in which people make fools of themselves in everyday social situations.
           
With renewed interest in etiquette and polite behavior growing both inside and outside the academy, the time is right for a new, definitive edition of this book. More than a mere etiquette book, this restored edition will be entertaining (and even useful) for anyone making their way in modern civilized and polite society, and a subtle gift for the rude neighbor, the thoughtless dinner guest, or the friend or relative in need of a refresher on proper behavior.
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The Hostess
Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity
Tracy McNulty
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
The evolution of the idea of hospitality can be traced alongside the development of Western civilization. Etymologically, the host is the “master,” but this identity is established through expropriation and loss—the best host is the one who gives the most, ultimately relinquishing what defines him as master.In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person—a wife or daughter—as an act of hospitality? In many traditions, the hostess is viewed not as a subject but as the master’s property. A foreign presence that both sustains and undercuts him, the hostess embodies the interplay of self and other within the host’s own identity.Here McNulty combines critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski’s trilogy The Laws of Hospitality with analyses of exogamous marital exchange, theological works from the Talmud to Aquinas, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the theory of femininity in the work of Freud and Lacan. Ultimately, she contends, hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper, affecting the subject as well as interpersonal relations.Tracy McNulty is assistant professor of romance studies at Cornell University.
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The Comity and Grace of Method
Essays in Honor of Edmund F. Perry
Thomas Ryba
Northwestern University Press, 2004
A work that at once celebrates and extends the formidable contributions of the late Edmund Perry to the study of religions, this comprehensive collection brings together three generations of distinguished scholars to consider the history, theory, and applications of the comparative method in religious study. Both the title and the content of this volume reflect Perry's conviction that the comparative religionist is morally bound to contribute to a comity of religions-the voluntary and courteous recognition of the dignity and truth present in all religions. Following the general framework advocated by Perry for this pursuit, the volume reveals the strengths of such a framework-and of Perry's lifelong interest in theory and method--for religious understanding,

The essays in the first section—"Theory and Method in the History and Study of Religion"—clarify the role of scientific, phenomenological, and comparative approaches within the history of the study of religion; collectively, they represent a multifaceted statement about recurring and subtle problems in the field. In the second section—"Theories and Methods in Application"—the authors move from overarching theoretical concerns to the application of these methods in specific religious traditions, Western and Eastern. The third section demonstrates the effectiveness of these theories and methods as guidelines for promoting global inter-religious comity.

More than a fitting tribute to a revered and highly influential scholar, this book gives even those who knew nothing of Perry and his work much to learn from and ponder about the study of religion.
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Teaching about Religions
A Democratic Approach for Public Schools
Emile Lester
University of Michigan Press, 2013

"This provocative and timely book challenges Americans to rethink what it means to take democracy and religious freedom seriously in public education. Emile Lester takes the reader beyond culture war conflicts rooted in religious divisions and offers bold, new solutions for addressing our differences with fairness and robust toleration. Instead of battlegrounds, he argues, public schools can and should be places that include all voices in ways that prepare citizens to engage one another with civility and respect. Teaching about Religions is essential reading for all who care about the future of public schools---and the health of American democracy."
--- Charles C. Haynes, Senior Scholar, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center

"More than simply a synthesis of existing scholarship, [this book is] an original contribution to the field. [The] major themes are timely, and this book might well contribute to public discussion of important issues in our culture wars."
---Warren Nord, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

"Arriving in the wake of a bitter battle over the place of Islam in America and in the midst of calls for greater understanding and civility, Emile Lester's new book is a timely contribution to the debate about the best ways to teach about religion in our nation's public schools. A pioneering researcher in this field, Lester offers thoughtful critiques of existing proposals as well as fresh ideas. His recommendations reflect painstaking efforts to understand the concerns of groups (most notably, conservative Christians) to which he does not belong, and a firm grasp of the difference between fostering understanding of other faiths and pressing for acceptance of them. Lester's prescriptions, always informed and fair-minded and sometimes provocative, should drive the debate forward in productive ways."
---Melissa Rogers, Director, Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Frequent news stories about the debates waged between secularists and religious conservatives have convinced most Americans that public schools must choose between promoting respect for religious minorities and respecting the interests of conservative Christians. As a result, public schools fail to teach students about the meaning and value of protecting religious liberty and consequently perpetuate mistrust across the cultural divide, further empower extremists, and obscure the fact that most Americans of all religious backgrounds share a commitment to basic democratic principles.

In response, the public schools in the religiously diverse and divided community of Modesto, California, have introduced a widely acclaimed required world religions course. Drawing on groundbreaking research on the creation of and response to the Modesto course as well as on political philosophy, Emile Lester advocates a civic approach to teaching about religion in public schools that at once emphasizes respect for all views about religion and provides a special recognition of conservative Christian beliefs.

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Apples and Oranges
Explorations In, On, and With Comparison
Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort.

Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War.

Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.  
 
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Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars
Critical Explorations in the History of Religions
Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude.

The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian.
 
Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.
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In Search of Dreamtime
The Quest for the Origin of Religion
Tomoko Masuzawa
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this pioneering work of discourse analysis, Tomoko Masuzawa observes that the modern study of religion is peculiarly ambivalent toward the question of origin. Today's historians of religion maintain that they have abandoned speculative quests for the origin of religion; at the same time, they allege that concepts of absolute beginnings are fundamental to religion itself. By renouncing the desire for origins that they claim religious peoples embrace, historians can vicariously participate in the forbidden quest—so it seems—without forfeiting the authority accruing from their objectivist position.

This ambivalence of contemporary scholars echoes their ambivalence toward the ancestral "giants" of the discipline: Durkheim, Müller, and Freud. Masuzawa shows that the speculations of these three men on the origins of religion render the very notion of time and history problematic and contain powerful instruments for dislodging the position of "Western man" as the keeper of knowledge. Her critical rereading of these forefathers is framed by a compelling discussion of the postmodernist subversion of absolute origins in the works of Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss and a comparison of Mircea Eliade and Nancy Munn's accounts of the Australian aboriginal "dreamtime." Engaging a number of critical issues within the burgeoning field of cultural studies, Masuzawa's book will have far-reaching implications not only for religious studies but throughout the human sciences.
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Who Owns Religion?
Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century
Laurie L. Patton
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves.

Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all.

Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.
 
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Religion and the Social Sciences
Basic and Applied Research Perspectives
Jeff Levin
Templeton Press, 2018
In recent years, researchers across the social sciences have made important contributions to the study of religion. Thanks to their inquiry, we have greatly improved our understanding of how religion influences the vital dimensions of our lives, communities, and institutions.
 
To give this research the attention it deserves, editor Jeff Levin assembled a panel of preeminent social scientists and gave them a single directive: write the ultimate statement on religion from within their respective social science discipline or field. The result is this single volume, “state-of-the-science” compendium—a first of its kind for the study of religion.
 
Composed of ten essays, this book details the study of religion within nine basic and applied areas of social science. Along with a critical introduction to this subject, these essays include the expert contributions of:
  • Kenneth I. Pargament & Julie J. Exline on psychology
  • Anthony Gill on political science
  • Charles M. North on economics
  • Barry Hankins on history
  • Annette Mahoney on family studies
  • Byron R. Johnson on criminology
  • Linda K. George on gerontology
  • William H. Jeynes on education
  • Jeff Levin on epidemiology
Each essay features:
  • An introduction to the history of the discipline’s or field’s religious research, as well as its most important people and published works.
  • A comprehensive overview of key research findings and theories.
  • A detailed research agenda to guide future scholars.
  • An annotated bibliography of seminal works for the reader’s further consideration.
Broad in scope and essential in focus, Religion and the Social Sciences is a significant addition to the field. It will prove indispensable to both new and established scholars looking for a comprehensive treatment of the subject and seeking promising avenues to pursue in their own research.
 
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Relating Religion
Essays in the Study of Religion
Jonathan Z. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2004
One of the most influential theorists of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith is best known for his analyses of religious studies as a discipline and for his advocacy and refinement of comparison as the basis for the history of religions. Relating Religion gathers seventeen essays—four of them never before published—that together provide the first broad overview of Smith's thinking since his seminal 1982 book, Imagining Religion.

Smith first explains how he was drawn to the study of religion, outlines his own theoretical commitments, and draws the connections between his thinking and his concerns for general education. He then engages several figures and traditions that serve to define his interests within the larger setting of the discipline. The essays that follow consider the role of taxonomy and classification in the study of religion, the construction of difference, and the procedures of generalization and redescription that Smith takes to be key to the comparative enterprise. The final essays deploy features of Smith's most recent work, especially the notion of translation.

Heady, original, and provocative, Relating Religion is certain to be hailed as a landmark in the academic study and critical theory of religion.
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A New Science
The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason
Guy G. Stroumsa
Harvard University Press, 2010
We see the word “religion” everywhere, yet do we understand what it means, and is there a consistent worldwide understanding? Who discovered religion and in what context? In A New Science, Guy Stroumsa offers an innovative and powerful argument that the comparative study of religion finds its origin in early modern Europe. The world in which this new category emerged was marked by three major historical and intellectual phenomena: the rise of European empires, that gave birth to ethnological curiosity; the Reformation, which permanently altered Christianity; and the invention of philology, a discipline that transformed Western intellectual thought. Against this complex historical backdrop, Stroumsa guides us through the lives and writings of the men who came to define the word “religion.” As Stroumsa boldly argues, the modern study of religion, a new science, was made possible through a dialectical process between Catholic and Protestant scholars. Ancient Israelite religion, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Manichaeanism, Zoroastrianism, the sacred beliefs of the New World, and those of Greece, Rome, India, and China, composed the complex ground upon which “religion,” a most modern category, was discovered.
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The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue
Leonard Swidler
Temple University Press, 2000
Religion is the most fundamental, comprehensive of all human activities. It tries to make sense out of not simply one or other aspect of human life, but of all aspects of human experience. At the core of every civilization lies its religion, which both reflects and shapes it. Thus, if we wish to understand human life in general and our specific culture and history, we need to understand religion.

What is religion? As this comprehensive work shows, religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly, based on a notion of  the Transcendent. Normally it contains the four "C's": Creed, Code, Cult, Community-structure.

This volume looks at the ways we humans have developed to study religion. It also examines the new age in human consciousness that is now drawing.  It also examines the new age in human consciousness that is now dawning: The Age of Global Dialogue, a radically new consciousness that shifts the ways we understand everything in life, including religion. This global  dialogical way of understanding life does not lead to one global religion, but it does lead toward a consciously acknowledged common set of ethical principles, a Global Ethic. The book looks at these two movements -- the Age of Global Dialogue and inchoative Global Ethic -- in order to help readers understand what is going on around them, so they may make informed, intelligent decisions about the meaning of life and how to live it.
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Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
Ted Anton
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Winner of 1997 Carl Sandburg Award

On May 21, 1991, University of Chicago professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, award-winning investigative reporter Ted Anton shows that the murder is what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.
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Journal II, 1957-1969
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Mircea Eliade's journal of the years 1957-1969, originally published in English under the title No Souvenirs, is the testimony of a "wandering scholar" caught between three worlds: his native Romania, the France he fled to, and his last homeland, the United States. The journal is filled with his work, dreams, memories of his youth, stories of his travels, the reflections of each day.
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Journal III, 1970-1978
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1989
More an eloquent chronicle of the mind's life than a recital of daily routine, this volume of Mircea Eliade's journal offers a remarkably candid portrait of a renowned scholar and his work. The entries—full of marvelous ideas, outlines for works never written, responses to the works of others, and much more—reveal many rarely glimpsed sides of the private, as well as public, man. What did he really think of the students who came to him for instruction in black magic? What were his private reflections on feminism, student drug use, the sexual revolution, the nature of American scholars and scholarship? Who were his best friends, why did he enjoy their company, and why did he shun the company of others?

Quite apart from the personal, biographical interest the journal holds, it is a document of cultural and intellectual significance. Eliade remarks on such colleagues and friends as Jung, Dumézil, Ricoeur, Bellow, and Ionesco. Moreover, the period covered encompasses Eliade's most active years as a teacher, and the journal beautifully reflects his developing views on religion, history, and the nature of academic culture. Bits and pieces of Eliade's past life are juxtaposed with thoughts about ongoing projects and work yet to be undertaken as well as with anecdotes of his travels and comments on world events.

A genuine treat for Eliade readers and those interested in history of religions, Journal III provides new perspectives on many of Eliade's other works—the History of Religious Ideas, Ordeal by Labyrinth, the Autobiography. At the same time the journal is a mature scholar's record of the aftermath of the 1960s, a turbulent period that profoundly affected American university life. As such, these writings hold valuable insights into not only the life and work of one man but also the cultural history of an entire era.
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Journal IV, 1979-1985
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Journal IV is the first publication, in a translation from the Romanian manuscript, of the journal that Mircea Eliade kept during the last seven years of his life. In this period, Eliade is ensconced as a famous scholar—his works are being translated into many languages and books about him arrive regularly in the mail. His encounters with scholars of like repute are recorded in the journal; after a party in Paris, Eliade shares a taxi with Claude Lévi-Strauss and inadvertently makes off with his raincoat.

Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.

Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.
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front cover of Journal I, 1945-1955
Journal I, 1945-1955
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Journal I is a story of revewal—of the new life that began for Mircea Eliade in the fall of 1945 when he became an expatriate. Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in Romania: his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis, the journal of religious studies he founded.

During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.

Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest. Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.
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front cover of Autobiography, Volume 2
Autobiography, Volume 2
1937-1960, Exile's Odyssey
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
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front cover of Autobiography, Volume 1
Autobiography, Volume 1
1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
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front cover of Waiting for the Dawn
Waiting for the Dawn
Mircea Eliade in Perspective
Davíd Carrasco
University Press of Colorado, 1991
First published in 1991, Waiting for the Dawn is the result of a year-long interdisciplinary study of Mircea Eliade’s scholarly, literary, and autobiographical works which took place at the University of Colorado in 1982. With a preface by Davíd Carrasco that takes into account recent developments in Eliade scholarship, this important work is back in print after renewed interest in Eliade thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptation Youth without Youth (2007).
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Religion and Adaptation
William Adams
CSLI, 2004
Throughout history, religion has been the primary tool used by human societies to understand the inexplicable and the powerful. Religion and Adaptation examines how this role of religion affects the development of human society and individual identity.

The volume uses a wide variety of ethnographic and historical sources to support its analysis, beginning with two detailed case studies of the religions practiced by Navajo Indians and Arab villagers. An intriguing comparison of these two systems of faith reveals the difficulty of finding one definition of religion. William Adams explores this problem of definition, suggesting that religion and science actually share the role of providing logical explanations in human society. In subsequent chapters, he considers the development of religious systems, the growth of religious consciousness in the individual, and the dynamics of religious change. The book ultimately aims to be a purely empirical study that probes the reasons for the existence of religion and its role as a moral and stabilizing force in human societies.
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Creation of the Sacred
Tracks of Biology in Early Religions
Walter Burkert
Harvard University Press, 1996

Sacrifice—ranging from the sacrifice of virgins to circumcision to giving up what is most valued—is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason for these practices? Something that might explain why religions of so many different cultures share so many rituals and concepts? In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion—a religious sense and practice naturally proceeding from biological imperatives.

Because they lack later refinements, the earliest religions from the Near East, Israel, Greece, and Rome may tell us a great deal about the basic properties and dynamics of religion, and it is to these cultures that Walter Burkert looks for answers. His book takes us on an intellectual adventure that begins some 5,000 years ago and plunges us into a fascinating world of divine signs and omens, offerings and sacrifices, rituals and beliefs unmitigated by modern science and sophistication. Tracing parallels between animal behavior and human religious activity, Burkert suggests natural foundations for sacrifices and rituals of escape, for the concept of guilt and punishment, for the practice of gift exchange and the notion of a cosmic hierarchy, and for the development of a system of signs for negotiating with an uncertain environment. Again and again, he returns to the present to remind us that, for all our worldliness, we are not so far removed from the first Homo religiosus.

A breathtaking journey, as entertaining as it is provocative, Creation of the Sacred brings rich new insight on religious thought past and present and raises serious questions about the ultimate reasons for, and the ultimate meaning of, human religiousness.

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