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.
Michael B. Hundley
SBL Press, 2013
In this book devoted exclusively to temples and perceptions of the divine presences that inhabit them, Michael B. Hundley focuses on the official religions of the ancient Near East and explores the interface between the human and the divine within temple environs.
Hundley identifies common ancient Near Eastern temple systems and examines issues that include what temple structures communicate, how temples were understood to function, temple ideology, the installation of divine presence in a temple, the connection between presence and physical representation, and human service to the deity.
Drawing on architectural and spatial theory, ritual theory, theories of language, art history, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and comparative studies, Hundley offers a single interpretive lens through which to view temple worship.
Features:
James G. Lochtefeld
Lever Press, 2026
God’s Own Land follows the tectonic shift from traditional religious pilgrimage in the early twentieth-century to contemporary pilgrim tourism, in which ever-burgeoning visitor numbers have brought both benefits and challenges to the Garhwal region of India—the source of Hindu India’s sacred river, the Ganges. Despite Hinduism’s regional and sectarian variation, India’s Garhwal Himalaya region is one the most sacred places to Hindus, drawing pilgrims across sectarian lines from throughout the subcontinent and the world. This sacred land—dev bhumi or “land of the gods”—appears in foundational Hindu stories describing the presence and activity of gods, goddesses, saints, and cultural heroes.
This study from James G. Lochtefeld draws out Hindu convictions regarding the Garhwal’s eternal and continuing sanctity as a holy region, based on the premise of an “imagined landscape.” This region is strongly associated with divine activity and yet this landscape is also a real place with a real history inhabited by real people, who have historically been poor because of the challenges created by the region’s geography. Juxtaposing the history of the region with its construction in the Hindu imaginary, this multidisciplinary study unpacks the nuanced image of the region, its religious significance, and the impacts of pilgrimages on the community through textual, historical, and ethnographic methods.
Mary Sojourner
University of Nevada Press, 2010
Maggie Foltz is a fifty-five-year-old cocktail waitress in a rundown casino in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert. She spends her days serving drinks to lonely old folks playing the slot machines and her nights trying to escape her bitter past. When she befriends Sarah, a young Native American woman who is hired to cook in the casino coffee shop, her life begins to change. Maggie finds herself falling in love with a memory-haunted Vietnam veteran and warily begins to hope that together they can find peace. Then Sarah is mysteriously murdered, and Sarah’s ghost enlists Maggie to accompany her on a quest for the wisdom that she needs in order to move into the next world. The story ranges from smoky casinos into the harsh magnificence of the desert and the reservation where Sarah’s people are trying to preserve their culture and find their own place in a modern world that seems to want them to be either shamans or losers. Sojourner’s characters are compellingly real, and the Mojave setting has rarely been depicted as sensitively or truthfully. This is a memorable story of love, redemption, and solace, told by one of the West’s finest writers.
Reuven Kiperwasser
SBL Press, 2021
John Marks Templeton
Templeton Press, 1998
For young or old, rich or poor, this wisdom will find many applications in people's lives. This inspiring collection of time wisdom by Sir John Templeton, presented in a beautiful gift book, is perfect for a person seeking deeper meaning in life. Practical and uplifting advice based on a lifetime of experience is gathered in an attractive package for personal use or as a perfect gift. Juxtaposed to his sayings are short essays that elaborate on the ideas and make them easier to understand and apply. Themes, such as thanksgiving, forgiveness, positive thinking, love, humility, and happiness, arrange the thoughts.
Faith Rogow
University of Alabama Press, 1993
The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States
Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.
Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
Jung, Patricia Beattie
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Vic Sizemore
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Stephen D. Moore
SBL Press, 2017
Essential reading for biblical studies students and scholars interested in cutting-edge critical theory
The current global ecological crisis has prompted a turn to the nonhuman in critical theory. This book breaks new ground in biblical studies as the first to bring nonhuman theory to bear on the gospels and Acts. Nonhuman theory, a confluence of several of the main theoretical streams that have issued forth since the heyday of high poststructuralism, includes affect theory, posthuman animality studies, critical plant studies, object-oriented new materialisms, and assemblage theory. Nonhuman theory dismantles and reassembles the Western concept of “the human” that coalesced during the Enlightenment and testifies to other conceptions of the human and of the nonhuman, not least those found in the canonical gospels and Acts. Stephen D. Moore’s exegetical explorations and defamiliarizations of these overly familiar texts and excavations of their incessantly erased strangeness are the central feature of this provocative book.
Features
Mercedes Navarro Puerto
SBL Press, 2015
An international collection of ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretations
In this volume of the Bible and Women Series, contributors examine how biblical studies intersects with feminist interpretive methods with regard to the Gospels. Authors examine the lives of women in Roman Palestine, named and unnamed women in the Gospels, and the role of gender in the reception of the Hebrew scriptures in the New Testament.
Features:
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Templeton Press, 2014
Donald S. Prudlo
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Philip J. Rossi
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Alexander Y. Hwang
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
Taylor O'Neill
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
Gendun Chopel
University of Chicago Press, 2013
John C. Wei
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Atria A. Larson
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Len Froyen
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013
Leonard J. Arrington
University of Illinois Press, 2004
A classic in Mormon studies and western history, Great Basin Kingdom offers insights into the ‘underdeveloped' American economy, a comprehensive treatment of one of the few native American religious movements, and detailed, exciting stories from little-known phases of Mormon and American history.
This edition includes thirty new photographs and an introduction by Ronald W. Walker that provides a brief biography of Arrington, as well as the history of the work, its place in Mormon and western historiography, and its lasting impact.
Bishop W. Christopher Waddell
University of Utah Press, 2024
Friar Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM
University of Scranton Press, 2010
Although there are several studies dedicated to the lives of Francis and Clare of Assisi, Gilberto Cavazos-González’s Greater Than a Mother’s Love is the first to investigate their spirituality in the context of family relationships. He delves into the writings of Francis and Clare and illustrates how both used observations of their various human relationships to understand their experiences with God. Accompanying this study is an exhaustive bibliography and several appendices that enhance this unique treatment of these two beloved and admired religious figures.

Edited by Robert W. Funk
University of Chicago Press, 1961
Edited by Yves Bonnefoy
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Kirby Olson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002
Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson’s Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso’s work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist.
While Corso is a subject of great controversy—his work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comic—Olson argues that Corso’s poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olson—in his approach and focus—is the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind.
In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso’s concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought.
Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso’s memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso’s poetry.
Richard A. Norris Jr.
SBL Press, 2012
Maureen L. Walsh
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Eric Rebillard
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
Margaret Lamberts Bendroth
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Home and family are key, yet relatively unexplored, dimensions of religion in the contemporary United States. American cultural lore is replete with images of saintly nineteenth-century American mothers and their children. During the twentieth century, however, the form and function of the American family have changed radically, and religious beliefs have evolved under the challenges of modernity. As these transformations took place, how did religion manage to “fit” into modern family life?
In this book, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth examines the lives and beliefs of white, middle-class mainline Protestants (principally northern Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists) who are theologically moderate or liberal. Mainliners have pursued family issues for most of the twentieth century, churning out hundreds of works on Christian childrearing. Bendroth’s book explores the role of family within a religious tradition that sees itself as America’s cultural center. In this balanced analysis, the author traces the evolution of mainliners’ roles in middle-class American culture and sharpens our awareness of the ways in which the mainline Protestant experience has actually shaped and reflected the American sense of self.
Kristine Henriksen Garroway
SBL Press, 2018
The first expansive reference examining the texts and material culture related to children in ancient Israel
Growing Up in Ancient Israel uses a child-centered methodology to investigate the world of children in ancient Israel. Where sources from ancient Israel are lacking, the book turns to cross-cultural materials from the ancient Near East as well as archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic sources. Acknowledging that childhood is both biologically determined and culturally constructed, the book explores conception, birth, infancy, dangers in childhood, the growing child, dress, play, and death. To bridge the gap between the ancient world and today’s world, Kristine Henriksen Garroway introduces examples from contemporary society to illustrate how the Hebrew Bible compares with a Western understanding of children and childhood.
Features:
John Gavin
Catholic University of America Press, 2025

Bartolome Felipe de Ita y Parra
Catholic University of America Press, 2027
Eric Hoenes del Pinal
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Thomas P. McCarthy, C.S.V.
Catholic University of America Press, 2002
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou
Catholic University of America Press, 2013

Edited by Jacob Copeman, Arkotong Longkumer, and Koonal Duggal
University College London, 2023
Byunghoon Kang
Central European University Press, 2026