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A member of the United Society of Believers, better known as the Shakers, Isaac Newton Youngs spent most of his life in New Lebanon, New York, home of the society's central Ministry. As both a private diarist and the official village scribe, he kept meticulous records throughout those years of both his own experience and that of the community. All told, more than four thousand pages of Brother Isaac's journals have survived, documenting the history of the Shakers during the period of their greatest success and providing a revealing view of the daily life of a rank-and-file Believer.

In this deeply researched biography, Glendyne R. Wergland draws on Youngs's writings to tell his story and to explore “the tension between desire and discipline” at the center of his life. She follows Youngs from childhood and adolescence to maturity, through years of demanding responsibility into his fatal decline. In each of these stages, he remained a talented and committed yet independent Shaker, one who chose to stay with the community but often struggled to abide by its stringent rules, including the vow of celibacy. Perhaps above all, he was a man who spent most of his waking hours working diligently at a succession of tasks, making clocks, sewing clothes, fixing roofs, writing poetry, chronicling his daily acts and thoughts.

In his journals, Brother Isaac writes at length of his efforts to control his lust as a young man, and he complains repeatedly about overwork as he grows older. He defines the rules of his community and identifies transgressors, while enciphering his critical entries (and those chronicling his own sexual desires) to avoid detection and uphold the demand for conformity. At times he admits doubt, but without ever relinquishing the belief that he is on the straight and narrow path to salvation. What emerges in the end is the complex portrait of an ordinary man striving to live up to the imperatives of his faith.

A broad and accessible history of religion in Texas, from prehistory to the present.

From sprawling megachurches to religious billboards and towering steel crosses, religion quite literally looms over Texas. Christian nationalism determines the state’s politics and, every school day, more than five million Texas children pledge allegiance to “one state under God.” But it wasn’t always this way.

In this wide-ranging chronicle, Joseph Locke uncovers the breadth of Texas’s religious history, from Indigenous painters of cosmological cave art and Spanish invaders who constructed missions to irreligious Anglo colonists, freethinking frontiersmen, Tejano folk saints, evangelical culture warriors, and Muslim immigrants. Locke traces the state’s religious transformations across the centuries, bringing them to life through his depiction of compelling figures, like enslaved preacher Anderson Edwards, fighting fundamentalist J. Frank Norris, and celebrated humanitarian Sister Norma Pimentel, and gripping moments, such as the murder of atheist newspaperman William Cowper Brann and the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Comprehensive, fast-paced, and highly readable, One State Under God reveals how the Lone Star State’s spiritual path was blazed.

A Brill classic now in paperback from SBL Press

Essays in this volume describe the shift in biblical exegesis within the last several decades from the interpretation of biblical texts as the outcome of historical development, or diachronic methodology, to the exploration of the text as the result of a reading process rather than a historical process, or synchronic methodology. The methods discussed include ideology criticism, semantic and poetic analysis, cognitive linguistics, drama theory, narratology, deconstruction, and anthropology, and intertextuality. The authors of this work challenge biblical scholars not to just perform exegesis, but to explore the methods and aims underlying their interpretations.

Features:

• Essays examine texts from the Old or New Testament through the lens of one of the many modern synchronic methods used in postmodern literary interpretation
• Fifteen essays from top scholars in the field

A reimagining of the ancient Greek mystical movement Orphism. 

What does it mean to step outside the civic order through poetry? Ever since it first emerged in Greece around the sixth century BC, Orphic doctrine has marked a powerful rupture with the ancient world. Its salvific practices, closely tied to a belief in the soul’s immortality, its resolute rejection of sacrificial ritual and embrace of vegetarianism, and its distinctive conception of time and memory all defined a way of life, the bios orphikos, that was at once poetic and political.

In this brief yet densely layered text, Gianni Carchia returns to Orphism in all its implications. It becomes clear that, for Carchia, Orphism is not merely a historiographical concern, but an aesthetic and political one. If tragedy constitutes one of the central pillars around which the polis was formed, Orphism represents a radically different path—an alternative to the polis itself—by placing the poetic word, in all its autonomous power, at its core. And if the relationship between philosophy and tragedy has long been a central theme in the history of Western thought, Carchia’s reflections here ask a different question: Is the Orphic path still accessible to us today?

Orthodox Judaism is often perceived simply as the continuation of pre-modern Jewish tradition. In fact, Orthodoxy represents a diverse range of self-conscious attempts to promote new forms of Jewishness that are cast as unchanging over time, filling an urgent need in an age of constant change. In the midst of a tumultuous era, marked by the new values of Enlightenment, Orthodoxy emerged as a new term and movement, struggling to gain stability in a world of conflict and adaptation. Quite unlike its public reputation, Orthodoxy does not convey fixity; rather, it is an elastic term that embraces different and evolving sub-groups of Jews who do not necessarily embrace each other as they struggle to police their boundaries.  

In this first comprehensive history of Orthodoxy, Joshua Shanes argues that Orthodox Jews are not traditional, but traditionalist. As the great historian Jacob Katz explained, traditionalists consciously attempt to recreate a pre-modern system in a new context and with decidedly modern tools, and in an environment that does not take its values as self-evident or authoritative. Even beyond the ritual and theological innovations of Orthodoxy – which are many - its awareness that other options are available produces a counter-intuitive break between Orthodoxy and the world it seeks to perpetuate.

This book traces the emergence and evolution of the term “Orthodoxy” in Judaism and the communities that claimed it, from Western and Central Europe into Eastern Europe, America, Israel and other parts of the Jewish Diaspora. It unpacks an intriguing historical irony: how a traditional culture evolved into a voluntary religio-political community maintained by a determined minority that viewed itself as the sole carriers of Jewish authenticity in the modern world.

Three centuries of faith, intellect, and resilience—Calvinism’s quiet power in the Southern low country.

The South Carolina low country has long been regarded—not only in popular imagination and paperback novels but also by respected scholars—as a region dominated by what earlier historians called “a cavalier spirit” and by what later historians have simply described as “a wholehearted devotion to amusement and the neglect of religion and intellectual pursuits.” Such images of the low country have been powerful interpreters of the region because they have had some foundation in social and cultural realities. It is a thesis of this study, however, that there has been a strong Calvinist community in the Carolina low country since its establishment as a British colony and that this community (including in its membership both whites and after the 1740s significant numbers of African Americans) contradicts many of the images of the "received version" of the region. Rather than a devotion to amusement and a neglect of religion and intellectual interests, this community has been marked throughout most of its history by its disciplined religious life, its intellectual pursuits, and its work ethic.
 

Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to a ‘state-sponsored racism’ fully as incorrigible as that of apartheid South Africa and deserving of the same resolution. Only a path toward a single-state secular democracy can provide the justice essential to healing the wounds of the Middle East.

Kovel is well-known writer on the Middle East conflict. This book draws on his detailed knowledge to show that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible. He offers a thoughtful account of the emergence and disintegration of Zionism that integrates psychological, political, cultural, economic, and ideological levels.

Ultimately, Kovel argues, a two-state solution is essentially hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict.

Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging congressional commitment to end slavery. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.