What words come to mind when we think of God? Merciful? Just? Compassionate? In fact, the Bible lays out Gods primary qualities clearly: jealous, petty, unforgiving, bloodthirsty, vindictive – and worse. Originally conceived as a joint presentation b...

When the King James translation of the Bible was first published in 1611, it was the first time that many people throughout the English-speaking world were able to read the Old and New Testaments in their native tongue. The majestic scope and poetry...

Challenging the long-held assumption that American values – be they Christian or secular – are based on "Judeo-Christian" norms, this provocative study compares ancient Christian discourses on marriage and sexuality with contemporary ones, maintainin...

This collective intellectual biography examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojty³a, future Pope John Paul II, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the future prime minister who would dismantle...

Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no...

"The Patriarch and the Caliph" presents the famous "dialogue without resolution" between the third Abbasid Caliph, al-Mahdi, and the first Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I, in Baghdad in 781 CE. The abundance of versions of this intellectually rich deb...

When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Ch...

In "Becoming a New Self", Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the ca...

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays ex...

A fascinating new study of the symbolic power of food and its role in forming kinship bonds and religious identity in early Christianity. Scholar of religion John Penniman considers the symbolic importance of food in the early Roman world in an enga...