When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590-1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella – and des...

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world's foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In "God Without Being", Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphys...

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocriti...

Over the course of his forty-year career, S. Kent Brown, professor of religious studies, has taught and inspired thousands of students at Brigham Young University and has produced over one hundred publications and several films in the fields of early...

Losing weight and changing your sexual orientation are both notoriously difficult to do successfully. Yet many faithful evangelical Christians believe that thinness and heterosexuality are godly ideals – and that God will provide reliable paths towar...

German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) is best known in the English-speaking world for his Jerusalem (1783), the first attempt to present Judaism as a religion compatible with the ideas of the Enlightenment. While incorporating much...

In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to re...

In the view of many Christians, the teenage years are simultaneously the most dangerous and the most promising. At the very moment when teens are trying to establish a sense of identity and belonging, they are beset by temptation on all sides – from...

During his lifetime, Archbishop Oscar Romero chose to live the Christian Gospel in a radical way, defending, supporting, and serving the poor, and confronting the oppressive and murderous violence of the Salvadoran dictatorship. As a result, in March...

In "Religion, Fundamentalism, and Violence", Andrew Gluck brings together distinguished scholars to address a fiercely debated topic: the intersection of religion and violence. Among the contributions is an anthropological analysis of the violence as...