Ancient Hindu texts speak of the three aims of human life: dharma,artha, and kama. Translated, these might be called religion, politics, and pleasure, and each is held to be an essential requirement of a full life. Balance among the three is a goal n...

Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall's sweeping new history – the first major overview for general readers in a generation – argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neit...

"Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State" offers a New World rejoinder to the largely Europe-centered academic discourse on church and state. In contrast to what is often assumed, in the Americas the relationship between church and state has no...

In the West, we tend to think of Islamic law as an arcane and rigid legal system, bound by formulaic texts yet suffused by unfettered discretion. While judges may indeed refer to passages in the classical texts or have recourse to their own orientati...

From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the...

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...

First published in Arabic in 1994, progressive Muslim scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's controversial essay argued that conventional fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts are ahistorical and misleading. Conservativ...

This groundbreaking book is the first to address the catastrophic results of centuries of conflict, imperialism, and colonialism by the global north – China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America – in the Muslim world. We see this legacy in the flood...