Beginning with Walt Whitman singing hymns at a wounded soldier's bedside during the Civil War, this surprising and vivid anthology ranges straight through to the twenty-first century to end with Francine Prose crying tears of complicated joy at the s...

It has long been acknowledged that Jews and Christians distinguished themselves through charity to the poor. Though ancient Greeks and Romans were also generous, they funded theatres and baths rather than poorhouses and orphanages. How might we expla...

Despite recent ferocious public debate about the likelihood of the existence of God, the most central concept in such arguments remains strangely obscure. What is God? Are those engaged in the debate all talking about the same thing? In this beautifu...

Rich in detail and broad in scope, this majestic book is the first to reveal the interaction of politics and religion in France during the crucial years of the long seventeenth century. Joseph Bergin begins with the Wars of Religion, which proved to...

When the armies of the First Crusade wrested Jerusalem from control of the Fatimids of Egypt in 1099, they believed their victory was an evident sign of God's favor. It was, therefore, incumbent upon them to fulfill what they understood to be God's p...

Is it possible to capture the spirit of Buddhist meditation, which depends so much upon silence and unspoken wisdom? Can this spirit be found after two millennia? This wise and reassuring book reminds us that the Buddhist meditative tradition, geared...

Followers of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab', often considered to be Islam's Martin Luther, shaped the political and religious identity of the Saudi state while also enabling the significant worldwide expansion of Salafist Islam. Studies of the movement...

Cavan W. Concannon makes a significant contribution to Pauline studies by imagining the responses of the Corinthians to Paul's letters. Based on surviving written materials and archaeological research, this book offers a textured portrait of the anci...

This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry from the world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition,...

Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika, or...