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4743 books match the query 'Religion' and 69 start with n

cover of Ninety-Nine: A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of Allah

Ninety-Nine

A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of Allah

Amira Mittermaier

Duke University Press, 2026

According to Islamic tradition, God has at least ninety-nine names. In Ninety-Nine, Amira Mittermaier presents ninety-nine short chapters based on her fieldwork and interviews with over one hundred Egyptians about who God is to them. In Egypt’s turbulent twenty-first century—the Egyptian uprising, a military coup, a pandemic, a climate crisis, wars across the region—God is talked about endlessly yet remains elusive. Ninety-Nine follows Allah into different spaces and conversations without ever claiming to get the full picture. We meet a Cairo beggar, an enigmatic dervish, a queer agnostic, and a Salafi housewife. We meet a depressed God, a cute God, a God who has stopped caring, a loving God, and a God who is a bully. We learn about divine interventions, big and small, and about daily struggles, even fights, with God. An intimate mosaic of Allah, Ninety-Nine celebrates the multiplicity inherent to the Islamic tradition and offers insight into how present-day Muslims grapple with big theological questions amidst their busy lives.
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cover of Nixon's First Cover-up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President

Nixon's First Cover-up

The Religious Life of a Quaker President

H. Larry Ingle

University of Missouri Press, 2015

Have you ever thought you completely knew a story, inside and out, only to see some new information that shatters what you had come to accept as unquestioned fact? Well, Richard Nixon is that story, and Nixon’s First Cover-up is that new information.
With few exceptions, the religious ideologies and backgrounds of U.S. presidents is a topic sorely lacking in analysis. H. Larry Ingle seeks to remedy this situation regarding Nixon—one of the most controversial and intriguing of the presidents. Ingle delves more deeply into Nixon’s Quaker background than any previous scholar to observe the role Nixon’s religion played in his political career.
Nixon’s unique and personally tailored brand of evangelical Quakerism stayed hidden when he wanted it to, but was on display whenever he felt it might help him advance his career in some way. Ingle’s unparalleled knowledge of Quakerism enables him to deftly point out how Nixon bent the traditional rules of the religion to suit his needs or, in some cases, simply ignored them entirely. This theme of the constant contradiction between Nixon’s actions and his apparent religious beliefs makes Nixon’s First Cover-up truly a groundbreaking study both in the field of Nixon research as well as the field of the influence of religion on the U.S. presidency. Forty years after Nixon’s resignation from office, Ingle’s work proves there remains much about the thirty-seventh president that the American public does not yet know.
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cover of No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism

No God but Man

On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism

Atiya Husain

Duke University Press, 2025

Reconceptualizing the relationship between race and Islam in the United States, No God but Man theorizes race as an epistemology using the FBI’s post-9/11 Most Wanted Terrorist list and its posters as its starting point. Atiya Husain traces the origins of the FBI wanted poster form to the work of nineteenth-century social scientist Adolphe Quetelet, specifically his overvalued type of human called “average man.” Husain argues that this notion of the human continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race. Focusing on the curious representations on the Most Wanted Terrorist list that range from Muslims who lack a race category on their posters to the 2013 addition of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur, Husain demonstrates the ongoing influence of the average man and its relevance even today, proposing a counterweight to the category by engaging Shakur’s turn to Islam in the 1970s in the legal context. In doing so, Husain shows the limitations of race as an analytical category altogether.
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cover of Noble Purpose: Joy Of Living A Meaningful Life

Noble Purpose

Joy Of Living A Meaningful Life

William Bill Damon

Templeton Press, 2003

This book describes the personal and spiritual benefits of living life in a way that matters, with an awareness that one's life can reflect a sense of higher purpose no matter what the circumstances. The book draws upon religious, philosophical, and literary writings to show how humans in many cultures and historical epochs have pursued noble purposes by answering God's call as each hears it.

Noble purpose can be pursued both in heroic acts and in everyday behavior. The book shows how ordinary people—teachers, business professionals, parents, citizens—can ennoble what they do by being mindful of its deepest meaning. It also points out that humility is a necessary virtue for those who pursue a noble purpose. Great heroes are bold, courageous, and sometimes audacious in their determination to succeed; but they are also humble in their awareness of their own limitations. Moreover, a person must never violate basic moral laws while pursuing a noble purpose—the means must be as moral as the ends.

Purpose brings coherence and satisfaction to people's lives, producing joy in good times and resilience in hard times. It also presents a paradox: hard work in service of noble purpose that transcends personal gain is a surer path to happiness than the self-indulgent pursuit of happiness for its own sake. The closer we come to God's purpose for us, the more satisfied our lives become.

From the inspiration and examples conveyed in this book, we learn that all individuals have the capacity to discover their own God-given abilities, to learn the world's need for the services they can provide, and to experience joy in serving society and God in their special ways. As theologian Frederick Buechner writes, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

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cover of Nonnus of Nisibis, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John

Nonnus of Nisibis, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John

Robert W. Thomson

SBL Press, 2014

A new English translation of the first text translated from Arabic to Armenian for research and classroom use

Robert W. Thomson translates this ninth-century commentary defending the miaphysite theological position of the Armenian church against the chalcedonian position of the Greek Byzantine church. Nonnus’s exegesis of the gospel falls in the context of trends in Eastern Christian biblical exposition, primarily the Syrian tradition. Therefore, Thomson emphasizes the parallels in Syriac commentaries on the book of John, noting also earlier Greek writers whose works were influential in Syria. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Armenian church and church history.

Features:

  • Introductory material on the text’s history, manuscript traditions, and theological importance
  • Translation of the Armenian text and commentary
  • Bibliography covering the Armenian, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts as well as secondary sources
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cover of Nonreligious Lifeworlds in Egypt: Sense-Making, Emotion, and Embodiment

Nonreligious Lifeworlds in Egypt

Sense-Making, Emotion, and Embodiment

Karin van Nieuwkerk

University of Texas Press, 2026

An analysis of the growing visibility of nonreligion in Egypt.

Egypt's 2011 Uprising, while often perceived as a failed revolution, nonetheless nonetheless had durable social effects. Among these has been a rise in expressing atheism and agnosticism, especially among educated and affluent youth—the country’s future leaders.

An intimate ethnography, Nonreligious Lifeworlds in Egypt explores the intellectual and emotional transformations of atheists and agnostics inspired by the aspirational freedom-seeking of the Arab Spring. Rejecting both of Egypt’s dominant religious traditions, Islam and Coptic Christianity, nonreligious people are widely viewed as agents of moral outrage. Amid media-driven panics, their sanity is often questioned by their own families as they experiment with new ways of living and relating. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork, interviews, and social media analysis, Karin van Nieuwkerk reveals her interlocutors’ changing perspectives on sex and gender, eating and drinking, and life and death. Above all, she emphasizes the affective experiences of renouncing religion, marked by anxiety and regret—but also liberation and relief. With rigor and compassion, Van Nieuwkerk opens our minds to the arduous process of exchanging established norms for self-determination.

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cover of Nostra Aetate

Nostra Aetate

Pim Valkenberg

Catholic University of America Press, 2016

The contents of this book originated in a conference at the Catholic University of America in May 2015. The essays and lectures contained within focus on the relationships of the Catholic Church with the other "Abrahamic" faiths, primarily Islam and Judaism. There is some discussion of the Asian religions as well. This volume, in structure, loosely follows the document Nostra Aetate itself. The first part of the book gives a broad view of the document and its importance. The following parts concentrates on the relationships between the Catholic Church and the Asian, Muslim and Jewish religions. The concluding section of the book surveys the reception Nostra Aetate received in various ecclesial and academic contexts.
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cover of Not Religion: Liberal Separation in a Christian Brotherhood and a Masonic Lodge

Not Religion

Liberal Separation in a Christian Brotherhood and a Masonic Lodge

Graham Hill

Temple University Press, 2027

In Mexico, a Christian brotherhood invites members to have a religion-free personal relationship with God and practice a particular form of born-again self-transformation. In Switzerland, a Masonic lodge pursues a peculiar blend of enlightenment philosophy and esoteric truth seeking. Both organizations cultivate ethical brotherhoods and ritualized relationships to the sacred. Both organizations also disavow “religion,” sidestepping the divisions in time, space, and personhood that liberal modes of governance typically draw between public and private, as well as civic and conscientious.

In Not Religion, Graham Hill asks why members of these organizations pursue relationships with God, the sacred, and the spiritual while also rejecting the religious character of their engagements. He investigates, and sometimes participates in, the organizational activities of both groups with a view to understanding their respective attempts to bridge civic-conscience divides and pursue everyday life-enchanting practices of self-transformation. Hill finds, in both organizations, reflexive, experimental orientations to language—of very different sorts— animating both types of practice.

Not Religion probes the curious features that the two organizations share despite all the ways in which they differ, examining why these vaguely theistic, mundane-sacralizing, everyday life-enchanting organizations distance themselves, their practices, and their beliefs from the category of “religion.”

In the series Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics

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cover of Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s

Not a Catholic Nation

The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s

Mark Paul Richard

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan experienced a remarkable resurgence, drawing millions of American men and women into its ranks. In Not a Catholic Nation, Mark Paul Richard examines the KKK's largely ignored growth in the six states of New England—Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont—and details the reactions of the region's Catholic population, the Klan's primary targets.

Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—French-language newspapers in the New England–Canadian borderlands; KKK documents scattered in local, university, and Catholic repositories; and previously undiscovered copies of the Maine Klansmen—Richard demonstrates that the Klan was far more active in the Northeast than previously thought. He also challenges the increasingly prevalent view that the Ku Klux Klan became a mass movement during this period largely because it functioned as a social, fraternal, or civic organization for many Protestants. While Richard concedes that some Protestants in New England may have joined the KKK for those reasons, he shows that the politics of ethnicity and labor played a more significant role in the Klan's growth in the region.

The most comprehensive analysis of the Ku Klux Klan's antagonism toward Catholics in the 1920s, this book is also distinctive in its consideration of the history of the Canada–U.S. borderlands, particularly the role of Canadian immigrants as both proponents and victims of the Klan movement in the United States.
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cover of Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought

Not by Reason Alone

Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought

Joshua Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Masterfully interweaving political, religious, and historical themes, Not by Reason Alone creates a new interpretation of early modern political thought. Where most accounts assume that modern thought followed a decisive break with Christianity, Joshua Mitchell reveals that the line between the age of faith and that of reason is not quite so clear. Instead, he shows that the ideas of Luther, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau draw on history, rather than reason alone, for a sense of political authority.

This erudite and ambitious work crosses disciplinary boundaries to expose unsuspected connections between political theory, religion, and history. In doing so, it offers a view of modern political thought undistorted by conventional distinctions between the ancient and the modern, and between the religious and the political.

"Original. . . . A delight to read a political philosopher who takes the theologies of Hobbes and Locke seriously." —J. M. Porter, Canadian Journal of History

"Mitchell's argument both illuminates and fascinates. . . . An arresting, even stunning, contribution to our study of modern political thought."—William R. Stevenson, Jr., Christian Scholar's Review
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cover of Notebooks, 1914-1916

Notebooks, 1914-1916

Ludwig Wittgenstein

University of Chicago Press, 1984

This considerably revised second edition of Wittgenstein's 1914-16 notebooks contains a new appendix with photographs of Wittgenstein's original work, a new preface by Elizabeth Anscombe, and a useful index by E.D. Klemke. Corrections have been made throughout the text, and notes have been added, making this the definitive edition of the notebooks. The writings intersperse Wittgenstein's technical logical notations with his thoughts on the meaning of life, happiness, and death.

"When the first edition of this collection of remarks appeared in 1961 we were provided with a glimpse of the workings of Wittgenstein's mind during the period when the seminal ideas of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were being worked out. This second edition provided the occasion to be struck anew by the breadth, rigor, and above all the restlessness of that mind."—T. Michael McNulty, S. J., The Modern Schoolman
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cover of Notes on the Greek Text of Deuteronomy

Notes on the Greek Text of Deuteronomy

John William Wevers

SBL Press, 1995

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Deuteronomy. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Deuteronomy, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.
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cover of Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus

Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus

John William Wevers

SBL Press, 1990

A result of John Wevers’s twenty-five-year association with the Göttingen LXX, this work records his textual notes on the Greek Exodus. The Greek text of Exodus departs in places radically from the Hebrew of the Masoretic tradition. These Notes presuppose that the Hebrew parent text was not all that different from the Masoretic tradition text and that the Greek translator throughout tried to formulate an understanding of the Hebrew from an Alexandrian-Jewish perspective. Included in the Notes are assessments of major textual variants by later readers. This volume is intended for serious students interested in using the LXX text, rather than for the professional LXX scholar.
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cover of Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis

Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis

John William Wevers

SBL Press, 1993

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Genesis. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Genesis, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.
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cover of Notes on the Greek Text of Leviticus

Notes on the Greek Text of Leviticus

John William Wevers

SBL Press, 1997

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Levitcus. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Leviticus, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.
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cover of Notes on the Greek Text of Numbers

Notes on the Greek Text of Numbers

John William Wevers

SBL Press, 1998

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Numbers. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Numbers, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.
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cover of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism

Nothing

Three Inquiries in Buddhism

Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a “Buddhaphobia” that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness, Nothing opens up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed.
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cover of Nots

Nots

Mark C. Taylor

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Nots is a virtuoso exploration of negation and negativity in theology, philosophy, art, architecture, postmodern culture, and medicine. In nine essays that range from nihility in Buddhism to the embodiment of negativity in disease, Mark C. Taylor looks at the surprising ways in which contrasting concepts of negativity intersect.

In the first section of this book, Taylor discusses the question of the "not" in the religious thought of Anselm, Hegel, Derrida, and Nishitani. In the second part, he analyzes artistic efforts "to figure not" in the work of artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, architect Daniel Libeskind, pop artist David Sallee, and pop icon Madonna. The final section consists of a deeply personal and scientifically informed chapter that discusses the workings of negativity in immunology and illness.

Taylor's essays work toward a sense of the not as unnameable as it is irrepressible—an "unthinkable third" that falls between being and nonbeing. Bringing together concerns that span Taylor's early investigations of Hegel and Kierkegaard and recent studies of art and architecture, Nots is an important contribution by one of the most original and distinctive voices now writing on the American scene.

Religion and Postmodernism series
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cover of Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Nuns Behaving Badly

Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Craig A. Monson

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now.

In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation.

In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.

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