Western intellectuals have long theorized that religion would undergo a process of marginalization and decline as the forces of modernity advanced. Yet recent events have disrupted this seductively straightforward story. As a result, while it is clea...

Considered by Muslims as the only true art, calligraphy has played a prominent role in Islamic culture since the time of the prophet Muhammad. Exploring this central role of the written word in Islam and how writing practices have evolved and adapted...

With tremendous speed, the Islamic State has moved from the margins to the center of life in the Middle East. Despite recent setbacks, its ability to conquer and retain huge swaths of territory has demonstrated its skillful tactical maneuvering, ambi...

In "Becoming a New Self", Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the ca...

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays ex...

A fascinating new study of the symbolic power of food and its role in forming kinship bonds and religious identity in early Christianity. Scholar of religion John Penniman considers the symbolic importance of food in the early Roman world in an enga...

Riveting and eloquent, the collected writings of a key figure – and one of the first female leaders – of the eighteenth-century evangelical movement. Sarah Osborn (1714–1796) was one of the most charismatic female religious leaders of her time and o...

For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity's earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Ri...

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a...

Written in Kashmir around 400 CE, Haribhatta's Jatakamala is a remarkable example of classical Sanskrit literature in a mixture of prose and verse that for centuries was known only in its Tibetan translation. But between 1973 and 2004 a large portion...