This entry in the popular Little Bit of series introduces the ancient practice of Zen Buddhism. What is Zen? It's an ancient spiritual system rooted in Buddhism that began in China and spread throughout Asia, finally reaching the West. It encompasses...

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than "heritage". In a creative inve...

In the mid-twentieth century, American Catholic churches began to shed the ubiquitous spires, stained glass, and gargoyles of their European forebears, turning instead toward startling and more angular structures of steel, plate glass, and concrete....

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...

A political, social, and cultural battle is currently raging in the Middle East. On one side are the Islamists, those who believe Islam should be the region's primary identity. In opposition are nationalists, secularists, royal families, military est...

The first comprehensive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in contemporary scholarship, has been largely ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly beca...

This compelling book retells and revises the story of the German Renaissance and Reformation through the lives of two controversial men of the sixteenth century: the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach (the Serpent) and the Wittenberg monk-turned-refor...

For sale in CIS only! Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists, and Catholic crusaders were on t...

For sale in CIS only! Afghanistan and its people, whether in Afghanistan or in its global diaspora, have generated substantial interest in recent years and the desire to understand more about the country is widely felt. International organisations,...

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...