This comprehensive introduction to theories of religion is the first single-volume exploration of ideas put forward by both believers and non-believers.

James Thrower analyzes the different types of explanations of religion, not just the thoughts of individuals, advanced primarily—but not exclusively—from within the Western tradition. He begins by looking at religious explanations of religion, which define religion as revelation, experience or philosophy (Plato, Kant, and Hegel). He then examines the naturalist, or nonreligious, explanations, from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, and sociology, including the "masters of suspicion" (including Feurbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Tylor, Frazer, and Freud). The scope of this book ranges from the classical, Semitic, and Indian religious traditions through contemporary thinkers.

Thrower concludes by considering the future of the religions of the world in light of the increasingly close inter-religious encounters that are becoming a feature of the global village of the twenty-first century.

In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person.

Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence.

Dworkin hoped that this short book would contribute to rational conversation and the softening of religious fear and hatred. Religion without God is the work of a humanist who recognized both the possibilities and limitations of humanity.

Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. New gods encountered in foreign lands by merchants and conquerors were sometimes taken home to be adapted and adopted. A full understanding of this complex spiritual world unfolds in Religions of the Ancient World, the first basic reference work that collects and organizes available information to offer an expansive, comparative perspective.

At once sweeping in scope and groundbreaking in format, the Guide eschews the usual encyclopedic approach, instead presenting, side by side, materials from ten cultures and traditions. Thus specific beliefs, cults, gods, and ritual practices that arose and developed in Mediterranean religions--of Egypt, Anatolia and the Near East, Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and the Roman world, from the third millennium to the fourth century C.E.--are interpreted in comparison with one another, and with reference to aspects that crisscross cultural boundaries, such as Cosmology, Myth, Law and Ethics, and Magic. Written by leading scholars of ancient religion, the essays in this guide sketch the various religious histories, raise central theoretical issues, and examine individual topics such as Sacred Times and Spaces; Prayers, Hymns, Incantations, and Curses; Sin, Pollution, and Purity; Death, the Afterlife, and Other Last Things; Divination and Prophecy; Deities and Demons; and Sacred Texts and Canonicity.

Clearly and stylishly written, grandly illustrated, this comprehensive work welcomes readers as never before into the diversity and interconnections of religion in the ancient world.

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world.

Many observers assume that America is a much less religious nation than it was forty years ago. According to Andrew Greeley, however, this is simply not true. Carefully analyzing surveys conducted over the past half-century, Greeley concludes that rates of church attendance, prayer, church membership, activity in church organizations, belief in life after death, and other measures of religious involvement have remained surprisingly constant.

Essays that broaden the historical scope and sharpen the parameters of competitive discourses

Scholars in the fields of late antique Christianity, neoplatonism, New Testament, art history, and rabbinics examine issues related to authority, identity, and change in religious and philosophical traditions of late antiquity. The specific focus of the volume is the examination of cultural producers and their particular viewpoints and agendas in an attempt to shed new light on the religious thinkers, texts, and material remains of late antiquity. The essays explore the major creative movements of the era, examining the strategies used to develop and designate orthodoxies and orthopraxies. This collection of essays reinterprets dialogues between individuals and groups, illuminating the mutual competition and influence among these ancient thinkers and communities.

Features:

• Essays feature competitive discourse as the central organizing theme
• Articles present unique theoretical models that are adaptable to different contexts and highly applicable to religious discourses before and after the Late Antique Period
• Scholars cover a much wider range of traditions including Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and philosophy in order to provide the most complete portrait of the religious landscape

Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa.
 
Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities.

Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.

Philosopher Marcel Hébert developed his Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner (1895) from this background of sustained popular interest in Wagner, an interest that had intensified with the return of his operas to the Paris stage. Newspaper debates about the impact of Wagner's ideas on French society often stressed the links between Wagner and religion. These debates inspired works like Hébert's, intended to explain the complex myth and allegory in Wagner's work and to elucidate it for a new generation of French spectators.

Laws mandating cooperation with the state’s new sexual orthodoxy are among the leading contemporary threats to the religious freedom of Catholic institutions in the United States. These demand that Catholic schools, health-care providers, or social services cooperate with contraception, cohabitation, abortion, same-sex marriage, or transgender identity and surgeries. But Catholic institutions’ responses seem thin and uninspiring to many. They are criticized as legalistic, authoritarian, bureaucratic, retrograde and hurtful to women and to persons who identify as LGBTQ. They are even called “un-Christian.” They invite disrespect both for Catholic sexual responsibility norms and for religious freedom generally, not only among lawmakers and judges, but also in the court of public opinion, which includes skeptical Catholics. The U.S. Constitution protects Catholic institutions’ “autonomy” – their authority over faith and doctrine, internal operations, and the personnel involved in personifying and transmitting the faith. Other constitutional and statutory provisions also safeguard religious freedom, if not always perfectly. Catholic institutions could take far better advantage of all of these existing protections if they communicated, first, how they differ from secular institutions: how their missions emerge from their faith in Jesus Christ, and their efforts both to make his presence felt in the world today, and to display the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. Second, they need to draw out the link between their teachings on sexual responsibility and love of God and neighbor. Drawing upon Scripture, tradition, history, theology and empirical evidence, Helen Alvaré frames a more complete, inspiring and appealing response to current laws’ attempts to impose a new sexual orthodoxy upon Catholic institutions. It clarifies the “ecclesial” nature of Catholic schools, hospitals and social services. It summarizes the empirical evidence supporting the link between personnel decisions and mission, and between Catholic sexual responsibility norms and human flourishing. It grounds Catholic sexual responsibility teachings in the same love of God and neighbor that animate the existence, operations, and services of Catholic institutions.

Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty.

Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices.

With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.

Tensions between religious freedom and equality law are newly strained in America. As lawmakers work to protect LGBT citizens and women seeking reproductive freedom, religious traditionalists assert their right to dissent from what they see as a new liberal orthodoxy. Some religious advocates are going further and expressing skepticism that egalitarianism can be defended with reasons at all. Legal experts have not offered a satisfying response—until now.

Nelson Tebbe argues that these disputes, which are admittedly complex, nevertheless can be resolved without irrationality or arbitrariness. In Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age, he advances a method called social coherence, based on the way that people reason through moral problems in everyday life. Social coherence provides a way to reach justified conclusions in constitutional law, even in situations that pit multiple values against each other. Tebbe contends that reasons must play a role in the resolution of these conflicts, alongside interests and ideologies. Otherwise, the health of democratic constitutionalism could suffer.

Applying this method to a range of real-world cases, Tebbe offers a set of powerful principles for mediating between religion and equality law, and he shows how they can lead to workable solutions in areas ranging from employment discrimination and public accommodations to government officials and public funding. While social coherence does not guarantee outcomes that will please the liberal Left, it does point the way toward reasoned, nonarbitrary solutions to the current impasse.

Despite Russia’s religiously diverse population and the strong connection between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church, the problem of religious freedom has been a driving force in the country’s history. This volume gathers leading scholars to provide an extensive exploration of the evolution, experience, and contested meanings of religious freedom in Russia from the early modern period to the present, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. Addressing different spiritual traditions, clerics and revolutionaries, ideas and lived experience, Religious Freedom in Modern Russia explores the various meanings that religious freedom, toleration, and freedom of conscience had in Russia among nonstate actors.

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.

As Harry Austryn Wolfson deftly isolates and analyzes some of the most vital and often the most enigmatic ideas developed by the religious philosophers of the West, a cumulative and thoughtful continuity emerges from his interpretations. Philo, for example, appears as a dominant force throughout the sixteen centuries that preceded Spinoza's critique of his basic principles.

The ten essays which constitute the critical sequence of this penetrating book are derived from lectures, and from separate publications many of which are not readily available now. They include discussions of Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers; St. Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy; Causality and Freedom in Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. Wolfson concludes with a perceptive distillation of his personal wisdom in an essay contrasting the professed atheist with the “verbal theist.”

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present.

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

Is it possible to be religiously exclusive and socially inclusive? How do we deal with those outside of our own religious community who have completely different and sometimes conflicting views on what should be considered true and right behaviour? What if a religious tradition orders the expulsion or killing of those who leave the faith community and adopt another worldview? This book focuses on biblical texts concerning exclusivity and apostasy, studying different interpretations of such texts. It starts with the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Hebrew Bible, continues with texts from the New Testament, and explores diverse social studies to find ways of understanding the relationship between exclusion and inclusion today. Part of this exploration is the interaction with Jewish and Islamic voices. The collection ends with a systematic and missiological reflection on the issues Christian churches and other religious communities must address today.

In Reliving Golgotha, Richard Trexler brings an important new perspective to religious spectacle in an engrossing exploration of the annual passion play at Iztapalapa, the largest and poorest borough of Mexico City.

After tracing the history of European passion theater, Trexler examines the process by which representations of the passion were established in the Americas, especially in New Spain. Indeed, the Iztapalapan pageant can only be understood in the full historical context of Mexican church and state relations. Originally, this passion was a quintessential means by which the increasingly marginalized indigenous population marked its own culture from the mestizo ruling class. Early twentieth-century reenactments offered a tenaciously traditional spectacle, featuring Nahuatl-speaking actors, for a local audience who embraced it as a living protest against the pervasive power of the Church. A century later, political disorder and a suspicious church hierarchy often forced the suspension of the play in the aftermath of the Revolution. But by the middle of the century, political and religious authorities encouraged its development as a tourist event, and changes wrought by media coverage and the impact of government funding have further fractured the play's local identity.

In addition to offering valuable insights into the political, social, and psychological meanings of religious spectacle, Trexler illuminates the strong cultural forces that have helped provide a voice for some of Mexican society's most powerless members.

For decades, scholars of African, African American, Asian, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American heritage have employed their intellect, histories, and lived experience as a means to produce new and courageous scholarship and imagine greater in the Society of Biblical Literature. This volume celebrates the thirty years of service of SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP), a vital body in SBL dedicated to advancing the representation and work of racial and ethnic minoritized scholars in biblical studies. The volume includes the presidential addresses of groundbreaking scholars Brian K. Blount, Fernando F. Segovia, Vincent L. Wimbush, and Gale A. Yee. Gay L. Byron, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Leslie D. Callahan, Jin Young Choi, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Velma E. Love, Andrew Mbuvi, Raj Nadella, Janette H. Ok, Angela N. Parker, Abraham Smith, Yak-hwee Tan, and Ekaputra Tupamahu provide reflections and responses that honor those who have led the way and point in new directions for future generations of scholars.

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam’s beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

For more than thirty years, the U.S. Catholic Historian has mapped the diverse terrain of American Catholicism. This collection of recent essays tells the story of Catholics previously underappreciated by historians: women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and those on the frontier and borderlands.

Timothy Matovina’s opening essay sets the theme for the volume, encouraging a remapping of U.S. Catholic history to more widely encompass its various localities and peoples, especially the significance of non-European ethnic groups and the role of Catholics in the American Southwest. Jeanne Petit explores Catholic womanhood’s strength and organizational zeal in the post-World War I era, noting the obstacles and successes of women’s attempts to be recognized fully as American citizens and members of the Church. Anne Klejment weaves together the lives of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez to illustrate their use of nonviolence and “weapons of the spirit” to respond to societal injustice. Amanda Bresie provides a window into the life of Mother Katharine Drexel, noting the generosity of the millionaire heiress, but also her meticulous record keeping and close supervision of her funding of educational and evangelization e­orts among Native and African Americans. Kristine Ashton Gunnell analyzes the ways in which the Daughters of Charity crossed cultural boundaries to off­er charitable assistance to Mexican and Japanese communities in Los Angeles. Matthew Cressler explores the intersection of Black Power and distinctive African American-inspired liturgies, arguing that the liturgy became a site of struggle as black self-determination and nationalism impacted worship and black Catholic identity. Finally, Joseph Chinnici off­ers an important essay on re-envisioning post-conciliar U.S. Catholicism in its global context, off­ering a new approach to how we consider the American Catholic narrative and write its history.

Together these path-breaking studies serve as a model for historians seeking to engage in the cartographic task of remapping the U.S. Catholic experience.

From the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, haciendas dominated the Latin American countryside. In the Ecuadorian Andes, Runa—Quichua-speaking indigenous people—worked on these large agrarian estates as virtual serfs. In Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, Barry Lyons probes the workings of power on haciendas and explores the hacienda's contemporary legacy.

Lyons lived for three years in a Runa village and conducted in-depth interviews with elderly former hacienda laborers. He combines their wrenching accounts with archival evidence to paint an astonishing portrait of daily life on haciendas. Lyons also develops an innovative analysis of hacienda discipline and authority relations. Remembering the Hacienda explains the role of religion as well as the reshaping of Runa culture and identity under the impact of land reform and liberation theology.

This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the understanding of social control and domination. It will be valuable reading for a broad audience in anthropology, history, Latin American studies, and religious studies.

Catholic education remains one of the most compelling expressions of the Church’s mission to form disciples. Despite decades of decline in the number of schools and students, many Catholic schools have been experiencing renewal by returning to the great legacy of the Catholic tradition. Renewing Catholic Schools offers an overview of the reasons behind this renewal and practical suggestions for administrators, clergy, teachers, and parents on how to begin the process of reinvigoration. The book begins by situating Catholic education within the Church’s mission. Fidelity to Catholic mission and identity, including a commitment to the fulness of truth, provides the fundamental mark for the true success of Catholic education. The Catholic intellectual tradition, in particular, established by figures such as Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, can continue to direct Catholic schools, providing a depth of vision to overcome today’s educational crisis. To transcend the now dominate secular model of education, Catholic schools can align their curriculum more closely to the Catholic tradition. One touchpoint comes from Archbishop Michael Miller’s The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools, which the book explores as a source for practical guidance. It also offers a Catholic vision for curriculum, examining the full range of subjects from gymnasium, the fine arts, the liberal arts, literature, history, and catechesis, all of which lead to a well-formed graduate, inspired by beauty, attune to truth, and ordered toward the good. Finally, the book provides a practical vision for renewing the school through the formation of teachers, creation of a school community, and by offering suggestions for implementation of a stronger Catholic mission and philosophy of education. The teacher, ultimately, should strive to teach like Jesus, while the community should joyfully embody the school’s mission, making it a lived reality. The book concludes with examples of Catholic schools that have successfully undergone renewal.

Renewing Islam by Service offers a theological account of the contemporary Turkish faith-based service movement started by Fethullah Gülen, and placed against the backdrop of changes in modern Turkish society. The life and works of Gülen are analyzed against the background of developments in Turkish society, and of spiritual Islamic tendencies in the transition from the Ottoman empire to the secular republic. Pim Valkenberg includes stories of his personal experiences with supporters of this movement, in a number of dierent countries, and analyzes the spiritual practices and the faith-based service of this movement that is also compared to some important Christian religious movements.

In a time of discouragement, how can the Church renew itself and its outreach to all people? Bishop Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, insists that a "dumbed down" Catholicism cannot succeed in today's highly educated society--instead, the Church needs to draw upon its great theological heritage in order to renew its hope in Christ. With Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization, Bishop Barron traces this renewal through four stages. "Renewing Our Mission" lays out the challenges that call for Catholics to become more aware of their own intellectual resources in encountering the "Nones." "Renewing Our Minds" showcases the importance of theological reflection as a font of wisdom and sanity in the Church, touching on Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the recently canonized John Henry Newman, and Pope Francis. In "Renewing the Church," he proceeds to look at how Scripture, the family, the seminary, and Catholic college graduates can each contribute to this renewal. Finally, in "Renewing Our Culture," he returns to the judgments Catholics must make in assessing contemporary culture, specifically, family life, liberalism, relativism, and (surprisingly) the beauty of cinema. Bishop Barron, known as the host of the Catholicism PBS video series, was previously rector and professor of systematic theology at Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago, Illinois. He demonstrates again in Renewing Our Hope his ability to make the fruits of his wide reading accessible to a broad audience, while still giving his academic colleagues much to consider.

Renewing the Mind includes an introductory essay on the history and renewal of Catholic education, followed by 38 selections each with an introduction, biography, and study questions; adorning the text throughout are illustrations from the National Gallery of Art. Educators of children and college students will find this an essential guide to the best of what has been said about what it means to be conformed to the mind of Christ.

Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. In an interesting paradox, Andrea Sterk explains that "from the world-rejecting monasteries and desert hermitages of the east came many of the most powerful leaders in the church and civil society as a whole."

Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--she traces the emergence of a new ideal of ecclesiastical leadership: the merging of ascetic and episcopal authority embodied in the monk-bishop. She also studies church histories, legislation, and popular ascetic and hagiographical literature to show how the ideal spread and why it eventually triumphed. The image of a monastic bishop became the convention in the Christian east.

Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church brings new understanding of asceticism, leadership, and the church in late antiquity.

Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

"The writer," according to Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written...In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." And what writer worth his name, E. L. Doctorow asks, will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe? Human consciousness, personal history, American literature, religion, and politics--these are the far-flung coordinates of the universe that Doctorow reports here, a universe that uniquely and brilliantly reflects our contemporary scene.

Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
A Longman–History Today Book Prize Finalist
A Sheik Zayed Book Award Finalist
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

“Deeply thoughtful…A delight.”—The Economist

“[A] tour de force…Bevilacqua’s extraordinary book provides the first true glimpse into this story…He, like the tradition he describes, is a rarity.”
—New Republic

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a pioneering community of Western scholars laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of Islamic civilization. They produced the first accurate translation of the Qur’an, mapped Islamic arts and sciences, and wrote Muslim history using Arabic sources. The Republic of Arabic Letters is the first account of this riveting lost period of cultural exchange, revealing the profound influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the Enlightenment understanding of Islam.

“A closely researched and engrossing study of…those scholars who, having learned Arabic, used their mastery of that difficult language to interpret the Quran, study the career of Muhammad…and introduce Europeans to the masterpieces of Arabic literature.”
—Robert Irwin, Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating, eloquent, and learned, The Republic of Arabic Letters reveals a world later lost, in which European scholars studied Islam with a sense of affinity and respect…A powerful reminder of the ability of scholarship to transcend cultural divides, and the capacity of human minds to accept differences without denouncing them.”
—Maya Jasanoff

“What makes his study so groundbreaking, and such a joy to read, is the connection he makes between intellectual history and the material history of books.”
—Financial Times

This book, the newest volume in the CUA Studies in Early Christianity, presents original works by leading patristics scholars on a wide range of theological, historical, and cultural topics

The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children.

Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men—both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it—as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root.

Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.

Reshaping the World is a nuanced exploration of the plurality, complexity, and adaptability of Precolumbian and colonial-era Mesoamerican cosmological models and the ways in which anthropologists and historians have used colonial and indigenous texts to understand these models in the past. Since the early twentieth century, it has been popularly accepted that the Precolumbian Mesoamerican cosmological model comprised nine fixed layers of underworld and thirteen fixed layers of heavens. This layered model, which bears a close structural resemblance to a number of Eurasian cosmological models, derived in large part from scholars’ reliance on colonial texts, such as the post–Spanish Conquest Codex Vaticanus A and Florentine Codex.
 
By reanalyzing and recontextualizing both indigenous and colonial texts and imagery in nine case studies examining Maya, Zapotec, Nahua, and Huichol cultures, the contributors discuss and challenge the commonly accepted notion that the cosmos was a static structure of superimposed levels unrelated to and unaffected by historical events and human actions. Instead, Mesoamerican cosmology consisted of a multitude of cosmographic repertoires that operated simultaneously as a result of historical circumstances and regional variations. These spaces were, and are, dynamic elements shaped, defined, and redefined throughout the course of human history. Indigenous cosmographies could be subdivided and organized in complex and diverse arrangements—as components in a dynamic interplay, which cannot be adequately understood if the cosmological discourse is reduced to a superposition of nine and thirteen levels.
 
Unlike previous studies, which focus on the reconstruction of a pan-Mesoamerican cosmological model, Reshaping the World shows how the movement of people, ideas, and objects in New Spain and neighboring regions produced a deep reconfiguration of Prehispanic cosmological and social structures, enriching them with new conceptions of space and time. The volume exposes the reciprocal influences of Mesoamerican and European theologies during the colonial era, offering expansive new ways of understanding Mesoamerican models of the cosmos.
 
Contributors:
Sergio Botta, Ana Díaz, Kerry Hull, Katarzyna Mikulska, Johannes Neurath, Jesper Nielsen, Toke Sellner Reunert†, David Tavárez, Alexander Tokovinine, Gabrielle Vail
 

The book offers a renewed, classic vision of the human person and the ordering of the sciences as read through the complementary and, at one level, corrective insights of empirical psychosocial studies on resilience.

This book traces the essence of the Islamist Revolution from its origins in Egypt, through Najaf, Lebanon, Iran and the Iranian Revolution to today. Alastair Crooke presents a compelling account of the ideas and energy which are mobilising the Islamic world.

Crooke argues that the West faces a mass mobilisation against the US-led Western project. The roots of this conflict are described in terms of religious themes that extend back over 500 years. They represent clashing systems of thinking and values. Islamists have a vision for the future of their own societies which would entail radical change from Western norms. Resistance is presented as the means to force Western behaviour to change and to expose the essential differences between the two modes of thinking.

This is a rigourous account that traces the threads of revolution of various movements, including the influence of 'political Shi'ism' and the Iranian Revolution and its impact on Hezbollah and Hamas.

Respectfully Catholic and Scientific traces the unexpected manner in which several influential liberal-progressive Catholics tried to shape how evolution and birth control were framed and debated in the public square in the era between the World Wars-- and the unintended consequences of their efforts. A small but influential cadre of Catholic priests professionally trained in social sciences, Frs. John Montgomery Cooper, John A. Ryan, and John A. O’Brien, gained a hearing from mainline public intellectuals largely by engaging in dialogue on these topics using the lingua franca of the age, science, to the near exclusion of religious argumentation. The Catholics’ approach was more than just tactical. It also derived from the subtle influence of Catholic theological Modernism, with its strong enthusiasm for science, and from an inclination toward scientism inherited from the Progressive Era’s social science milieu. All three shared a fervent desire to translate the Catholic ethos, as they understood it, into the vocabulary of the modern age while circumventing anti-Catholic attitudes in the process. However, their method resulted in a series of unintended consequences whereby their arguments were not infrequently co-opted and used against both them and the institutional church they served. Alexander Pavuk considers the complex role of both liberal religious figures and scientific elites in evolution and birth control discourse, and how each contributed in unexpected ways to the reconstruction of those topics in public culture. The reconstruction saw the topics themselves shift from matters considered largely within moral frameworks into bodies of kno

The essays in this volume explore three areas in which St. Thomas Aquinas's voice has never fallen silent: sacred doctrine, the relationship of sacraments and metaphysics, and the central role of virtue in moral theology.

Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office's archival mission and advocated for fixed recordkeeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson's long life and career. Their account follows Jenson from his arrival as a Danish immigrant to 1860s Utah through trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions, and on to his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of LDS history. Throughout, Jenson emerges as a figure dedicated to the belief that recorded history united past and present Latter-day Saints in heaven and on earth--and for all eternity.

Engaging and informed, Restless Pilgrim is a groundbreaking study of an important figure in Latter-day Saint intellectual life during a transformative era in Church history.

A literary detective story, a historical survey, and an important contribution to translation studies

This book from Kenneth J. Thomas is both a philological and linguistic analysis of Persian translations and a call for interfaith cooperation. Thomas appraises biblical translation efforts from the fifth to the twenty-first centuries of Persian history when successive translators and groups of translators, sometimes of different faiths, worked to reshape and refine versions of the Bible in the supple Persian language of their times. Restless, impelled, and wide-ranging, this is a story of translations commissioned by shahs, undertaken by Christian and Jewish communities, and produced by teams working outside the country.

Features

• Demonstration of the effects of the lack of a standard Persian vocabulary for key biblical terms on literary style and word choice
• Technical analyses and overviews of Persian biblical translations
• A careful examination of sixteen centuries' worth of Bible translations

Ecological restoration integrates the science and art of repairing ecosystems damaged by human activities. Despite relatively little attention from environmental ethicists, restoration projects continue to gain significance, drawing on citizen volunteers and large amounts of public funds, providing an important model of responding to ecological crisis. Projects range from the massive, multi-billion dollar Kissimmee River project; restoring 25,000 acres of Everglades' wetlands; to the $30 million effort to restore selected wetlands in industrial Brownfield sites in Chicago's south side Lake Calumet area; to the reintroduction of tall grass prairie ecosystems in various communities in the Midwest.

Restored to Earth provides the first comprehensive examination of the religious and ethical dimensions and significance of contemporary restoration practice, an ethical framework that advances the field of environmental ethics in a more positive, action-oriented, experience-based direction. Van Wieren brings together insights and examples from restoration ecology, environmental ethics, religious studies, and conservation and Christian thought, as well as her own personal experiences in ecological restoration, to propose a new restoration ethic grounded in the concrete, hands-on experience of humans working as partners with the land.

In this groundbreaking publication, originally published in 1972, George Nickelsburg places ideas in their historical circumstances as he probes biblical and postbiblical texts and challenges widely accepted scholarship. The continuities in literary forms demonstrate that divine justice was the central issue, but that people differed as to whether that justice was enacted in this life, in the assumption to heaven, in a resurrection, or in the ongoing life as an immortal soul.

The expanded edition includes subsequent studies on the resurrection accounts and theologies of the New Testament, the New Testament passion narratives, and Jewish and Christian theologies about the Son of Man.

This book provides a window into aspects of the ancient apocalyptic worldview whose dynamics and functions are often misunderstood.

Explore the embodied foundations of Paul's resurrection ideals

It is commonly recognized that Paul's resurrection ideals are bodily ideals, though this dictum is usually configured along literal and metaphorical lines. The realism of future resurrected bodies is disconnected from the metaphoricity of bodily transformation in the present. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this fresh and innovative study addresses this problem. By eschewing the opposition of metaphor and realism, Tappenden explores the concepts and metaphors Paul uses to fashion notions of resurrection, and the uses to which those notions are put. Rather than asserting resurrection as a disembodied, cognicentric proposition, this book illuminates the body's central role in shaping and grounding the apostle's thought and writings.

Features:

• Close examination of Paul's letters within multiple, interlocking cultural contexts
• Provides a novel and fresh approach to assessing (in)coherence across the undisputed letters
• Addresses the materialist nature of early Christian and Judean resurrection ideals without compromising the metaphoricity of those ideals

Rethinking Cooperation with Evil: A Virtue-Based Approach applies Thomistic virtue theory to today’s most challenging questions of cooperation with evil. For centuries, moralists have struggled to determine the conditions necessary to justify moral cooperation with evil. The English Jesuit Henry Davis even observed: “[T]here is no more difficult question than this in the whole range of Moral Theology.” This important book addresses this challenge by applying the virtue-based method of moral reasoning of St. Thomas Aquinas to issues of cooperation with evil. Those who pastor souls report frequently receiving questions from attentive believers about whether a particular human action inadvertently contributes to some moral evil. Examples of potentially immoral cooperation with evil include whether one may shop at a particular franchise known for its support of abortion, whether Catholics may attend civil marriages outside the Church, or whether an organization may submit to government mandates that health insurance include payment for immoral practices. Although recent moralists have tackled specific topics related to cooperation with evil, agreement on an overall common paradigm has not yet been reached. Rethinking Cooperation with Evil proposes a method for Christian believers and others to approach these questions from the foundation of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church. This text provides both an overall method for how to understand the issue of cooperation, as well as practical counsel for specific cases. Rethinking Cooperation with Evil advances the theological conversation on this topic from both speculative and practical vantage points. To facilitate his argument, Connors utilizes historical analyses that contrast Aquinas’s method of moral reasoning with that of the casuist treatment of cooperation. Consequently, the book includes numerous case studies that will be of interest both to moral theologians and readers new to the topic.

Winner of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies 2015 F. W. Beare Award

Did Paul have formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric, or did he learn what he knew of persuasion informally, as social practice? Pauline scholars recognize the importance of this question both for determining Paul’s social status and for conceptualizing the nature of his letters, but they have been unable to reach a consensus. Using 2 Corinthians 10–13 as a test case, Ryan Schellenberg undertakes a set of comparisons with non-Western speakers—most compellingly, the Seneca orator Red Jacket—to demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies Paul employs in this text are also attested in speakers known to have had no formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric. Since there are no specific indicators of formal training in the way Paul uses these strategies, their appearance in his letters does not constitute evidence that Paul received formal rhetorical education.

As members of various and often conflicting communities, how do we reconcile what we have come to understand as our human rights with our responsibilities toward one another? With the bright thread of individualism woven through the American psyche, where can our sense of duty toward others be found? What has happened to our love—even our concern—for our neighbor?

In this revised edition of his magisterial exploration of these critical questions, renowned ethicist Arthur Dyck revisits and profoundly hones his call for the moral bonds of community. In all areas of contemporary life, be it in business, politics, health care, religion—and even in family relationships—the "right" of individuals to consider themselves first has taken precedence over our responsibilities toward others. Dyck contends that we must recast the language of rights to take into account our once natural obligations to all the communities of which we are a part.

Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities, at the nexus of ethics, political theory, public policy, and law, traces how the peculiarly American formulations of the rights of the individual have assaulted our connections with, and responsibilities for, those around us. Dyck critically examines contemporary society and the relationship between responsibilities and rights, particularly as they are expressed in medicine and health care, to maintain that while indeed rights and responsibilities form the moral bonds of community, we must begin with the rudimentary task of taking better care of one another.

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Revelation & Convergence brings together professors of literature, theology, and history to help both critics and readers better understand Flannery O’Connor’s religious imagination.

The Revelation of Your Words, a collection of essays, treats the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture within the context of the New Evangelization. Some of the essays concern principally the imparting of knowledge and best practices to accomplish this; others concern the fostering of delight in the sacred page and spiritual encounter with God. Although these essays are Catholic, written within a Catholic theological framework and with Catholic seminaries in mind, many of their conclusions can be applied to non-Catholic environments. This book provides insights that, even beyond the seminary, will benefit teachers of the Bible, regardless of their denomination and level of instruction. Readers will encounter the following authors and topics. Peter S. Williamson writes on the implications of the New Evangelization for priestly ministry and for teaching Scripture. Steven C. Smith makes a contribution concerning the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture in forming priests. Michael Magee treats the relevance of Johannine irony to the New Evangelization. Stephen Ryan’s chapter takes up the topic of Old Testament Wisdom literature and formation for a New Evangelization. Juana L. Manzo seeks a path to integrate modern and ancient interpretations into the seminary classroom. Kelly Anderson takes up the father of Proverbs 1–9 as a model of spiritual fatherhood for seminary professors. Scott Carl proposes a spiritual reading of sacred Scripture in the twenty-first century. Michael Magee, in his second contribution, writes on the joy of discovery in the Fourth Gospel. James Keating reflects upon the exegete as seminary formator. Finally, André Villeneuve advocates for the teaching of Biblical Hebrew in Catholic seminaries and academic institutions.

 In Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy historian Merina Smith explores the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, a development that unfolded amid scandal and resistance. Smith considers the ideological, historical, and even psychological elements of the process and captures the emotional and cultural detail of this exciting and volatile period in Mormon history. She illuminates the mystery of early adherents' acceptance of such a radical form of marriage in light of their dedication to the accepted monogamous marriage patterns of their day.

Revelations of Humanity brings together essays into the history and actuality of how our searches for God and for our own humanity are interwoven. They argue that the revelation of God is possible only when accompanied by a revelation of what it means to be a human being. Revelation implies that the truth is not fully evident in either case. This quest is aided in many of the essays by a recollection of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. As opposed to simple memory, recollection implies that memory has been lost or become clouded, here by the misrepresentation of Thomas’ view of humanity’s relation to God as harmonistic, at best semi-Pelagian, often even naturalistic. This difficult recovery is made possible by historical research that alone can escape the easy systematic alienation that supporters and critics of Thomas have often brought to their interpretation of his works. Thomas’s sense of a real but finite capacity of human beings for God, his grace and revelation, anticipates in more ways than is commonly known much of contemporary suspicion about human capacities, but in ways that are open to God. That programmatic insight into the historical Thomas, keenly aware of human entanglements, limits and hopes, offers on many contemporary issues a ressourcement of systematic thought. Revelations of Humanity revolves around three clusters of issues. The first asks about the reality and limits of the human capacity for truth: in metaphysical, moral and political matters and in relation to the disputed issues of analogous reason and faith. The second cluster is structured around the four involvements that the Second Vatican Council identified as the human face of genuine Christian existence: participation in the legitimate joys, hopes, sorrows and fears of the contemporary world. These are refracted in the broken light of the human proprium of risibility, the abiding uncertainty addressed by hope, the disputed question of a suffering God and the recollection of Christ’s anxiety in the face of death. The final cluster brings together anthropological dimensions of current ecumenical and interreligious disputes: the need to complement affirmation with admonition in ecumenical conversation, exemplified by the ambivalence towards sacrifice in a genuinely Catholic theology and the need to avoid the excesses of univocity, equivocity or an all too facile analogy in the determination of interreligious relationalities.

Many Catholic priests, nuns, and brothers in the United States take a strong interest in US policies that affect their "brothers and sisters" abroad. In fact, when the policies of their native government pose significant dangers to their people internationally, these US citizens engage actively in a variety of political processes in order to protect and advance the interests of the transnational religious communities to which they belong. In this provocative examination of the place of religion in world politics, Timothy A. Byrnes focuses on three Catholic communities—Jesuit, Maryknoll, and Benedictine—and how they seek to shape US policy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Based on years of fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews, Reverse Mission details the transnational bonds that drive the political activities of these Catholic orders.

This fascinating book reveals how the men and women of these orders became politically active in complex and sometimes controversial causes and how, ultimately, they exert a unique influence on foreign policy that is derived from their communal loyalties rather than any ethnic or national origin.