"The Patriarch and the Caliph" presents the famous "dialogue without resolution" between the third Abbasid Caliph, al-Mahdi, and the first Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I, in Baghdad in 781 CE. The abundance of versions of this intellectually rich deb...

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...

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...

Through countless retellings, from the Talmud to Archibald MacLeish and since, the story of Job has become a fixture in the cultural imagination of the West. In this study, Susan E. Schreiner analyzes interpretations of the Book of Job by Gregory the...

Recent decades have seen substantial questioning of the unity of the books of Luke and Acts. With this volume, Stefan Nordgaard takes a close look at that question, with a specific eye toward Luke's attitude toward possessions and family. He clearly...

Derived from Latin ex voto suscepto "in pursuance of a vow", an ex voto embodies the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the person who deposits it. Almost anything, regardless of size, weight, form, or original function, can become a votive object. Ulti...

The Yaysmawurk' is an Armenian liturgical collection of brief saints' lives arranged according to the day on which they were celebrated in the annual church calendar. The first Yaysmawurk' was translated from an existing Greek liturgical collection,...

A distinctive feature of Christian culture in early Islamic Syria and Palestine was a renewed interest in literature on martyrs, which represented a potential reaction among some Christian communities to the rise of Islam in the region. The adaption...

A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling and complicated figures ever to occupy the Oval Office. A political outsider, Wilson brought to the presidency a distinctive, strongly held worldview, built on powerful...