During his lifetime, Archbishop Oscar Romero chose to live the Christian Gospel in a radical way, defending, supporting, and serving the poor, and confronting the oppressive and murderous violence of the Salvadoran dictatorship. As a result, in March...

In "Religion, Fundamentalism, and Violence", Andrew Gluck brings together distinguished scholars to address a fiercely debated topic: the intersection of religion and violence. Among the contributions is an anthropological analysis of the violence as...

The question of Christianity's relation to the other religions of the world is more pertinent and difficult today than ever before. While Christianity's historical failure to appreciate or actively engage Judaism is notorious, Christianity's even mor...

In "The Specter of Salem", Gretchen A. Adams reveals the many ways that the Salem witch trials loomed over the American collective memory from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond. Schoolbooks in the 1790s, for example, evoked the episode to de...

What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spannin...

Although there are several studies dedicated to the lives of Francis and Clare of Assisi, Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez's "Greater Than a Mother's Love" is the first to investigate their spirituality in the context of family relationships. He delves into...

France's great heroine and England's great scourge: whether a lunatic, a witch, a religious icon, or a skilled soldier and leader, Joan of Arc's contemporaries found her as extraordinary and fascinating as the legends that abound about her today. But...

This is a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Robert A. Orsi's classic study of popular religion in Italian Harlem. In a new preface, Orsi discusses significant shifts in the field of religious history and calls for new ways of empirically studying d...

Medieval Christians knew the past primarily through what they saw and heard. History was reenacted every year in ritual observances particular to each place and region and rooted in the legends of local saints. This richly illustrated book explores t...

American spirituality – with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration – is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But, as "The New Metaphysicals" makes clear, contemporary American spirituality has historic roots i...