Eminent social historian Jacob Katz examines the rise and transformation of Jewish communal leadership in Central Europe. It is a story of fragmentation and polarization that sheds light on the tensions within the 19th-century Jewish community in Cen...

Striking in its appeal to the senses, the Song of Songs – the Bible's only book of love poems – is remarkable for its lack of sexual stereotyping and its expression of mutuality in relationships between men and women. Marcia Falk's rich and lyrical t...

In contrast to the role traditionally fulfilled by secular rulers, the pope has been perceived as an individual person existing in a body subject to decay and death, yet at the same time a corporeal representation of Christ and the Church, eternity a...

A century that began with modernism sweeping across Europe is ending with a remarkable resurgence of religious beliefs and practices throughout the world. Wherever one looks today, from headlines about political turmoil in the Middle East to pop musi...

By the mid-1930s, Emil Cioran was already known as a leader of a new generation of politically committed Romanian intellectuals. Researching another, more radical book, Cioran was spending hours in a library poring over the lives of saints. As a mode...

This volume completes the immensely learned three-volume "A History of Religious Ideas". Eliade examines the movement of Jewish thought out of ancient Eurasia, the Christian transformation of the Mediterranean area and Europe, and the rise and diffus...

In "The Quest Mircea Eliade" stresses the cultural function that a study of the history of religions can play in a secularized society. He writes for the intelligent general reader in the hope that what he calls a new humanism "will be engendered by...

In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his magisterial progress through the history of religious ideas. The religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Buddha and his contemporaries, Roman religion, Celtic and German re...

Preface 1. In the Beginning... : Magico-Religious Behavior of the Paleanthropians 2. The Longest Revolution: The Discovery of Agriculture – Mesolithic and Neolithic 3. The Mesopotamian Religions 4. Religious Ideas and Political Crises in Ancient Egy...

Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual behavior. In "The Forge and the Crucible", Mircea Eliade follows the ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, a...