This book examines the small library of 24 separate books common to all Jewish and Christian Bibles – books that preserve the efforts of diverse individuals over the span of many centuries to make sense of their personal experiences and those of thei...

Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call "religion". There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese gove...

Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous...

Why has religion persisted across the course of human history? Secularists have predicted the end of faith for a long time, but religions continue to attract followers. Meanwhile, scholars of religion have expanded their field to such an extent that...

For sale in CIS only! Forces as divergent as Jihadist Islam and Richard Dawkins are making religion more central to our lives today. Ian Linden has been an active lay member of the Catholic Church for many years and has witnessed firsthand such impo...

Relics affected everyone in medieval society. Saintly morsels such as bones, hair, teeth, and clothes, and items like the Crown of Thorns, coveted by Louis IX of France, were thought to bring the believer closer to the saint who might intercede with...

In this work Calum Carmichael – a legal scholar who applies a literary approach to the study of the Bible – shows how each law and each narrative in "Numbers", the least researched book in the Pentateuch, responds to problems arising in narrative inc...

Combining historical and theological analysis, Christopher Beeley offers a new contextualized reading of early church fathers – among them Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, and Cyril of Alexandria – and reexamines their...

The importance of martyrdom for the spread of Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era is a question of enduring interest. In this innovative new study, Candida Moss offers a radically new history of martyrdom in the first and second cen...

Scarcely any country in today's world can claim to be free of intolerance. Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland, the Sudan, the Balkans, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Caucasus are just some of the areas of intractable conflict, apparently ins...