The evolution of religions

This extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive book demonstrates how evolutionary theory can yield new insight into the development of organized religion. Lance Grande examines the growth and diversification of hundreds of religions over time, highlighting their historical interrelationships.

After jews

The book is an attempt to describe and critically interpret the condition of man living in the shadow of the Shoah, in the world “after Jews”. 

The gospel of john

The contentious life and times of the most widely cited book of the New TestamentWritten some two thousand years ago, the Gospel of John is the only Christian Gospel to place Jesus at the creation of the world, and the only one where we find the stories of the raising of Lazarus, the woman taken ...

Dionysos

A landmark account of the Dionysos myth as an archetypal expression of indestructible lifeNo other god of the Greeks is as widely present in the monuments and ritual practices of antiquity as Dionysos. In this book, acclaimed mythologist and historian of religion Carl Kerényi presents an engaging...

Prometheus

A landmark account of the Prometheus story as myth and archetypeThe god Prometheus stole fire from heaven and bestowed it on humans. In punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock, where an eagle clawed unceasingly at his liver until Herakles freed him. For the Greeks, the myth of Prometheus’s release...

Queer god de amor

Queer God de Amor explores the mystery of God and the relationship between divine and human persons. It does so by turning to the sixteenth-century writings of John of the Cross on mystical union with God and the metaphor of sexual relationship that he uses to describe this union. Juan’s mystical...

Liquid light

The Santo Daime is a syncretic religion whose spiritual practice is based around the sacramental use of ayahuasca. G. William Barnard—an initiate of the religion and a scholar of religious studies—considers the religious practice and transformative inner experiences of the Santo Daime community.

Let in the light

James Boyd White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with St. Augustine’s Confessions. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin—even for those who have never studied the language—guiding readers to experience the immediacy, urgency, and vitality of Augus...

Zhu xi

Zhu Xi (1130–1200) was the preeminent Confucian thinker of the Song dynasty. This book presents the essential teachings of the new Confucian (“Neo-Confucian”) philosophical system that he forged. Daniel K. Gardner’s translation renders these discussions and sayings in an accessible, conversationa...

The sound of salvation

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order in northwest China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation.

Eleusis

A landmark account of the Eleusinian Mysteries by one of the leading mythologists of the twentieth centuryThe Sanctuary of Eleusis near Athens was the center of a religious cult that endured for nearly two thousand years and whose initiates came from all parts of the civilized world. In this clas...

Asklepios

A landmark account of the divine physician of the Greeks in myth and archetypeTo the physicians of classical antiquity, Asklepios was the ideal of their existence as healers. In this book, acclaimed mythologist and historian of religion Carl Kerényi takes readers on a tour of the sacred sites of ...

Shamanism

The foundational work on shamanism from an influential historian of religionShamanism is an essential account of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the shamanic tradition through two and a half millennia of...

Slaves of god

A provocative look at the central role of slavery in Augustine’s religious, ethical, and political thoughtAugustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of God provides a major reassessment of this ...

In the forest of the blind

Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of t...

Sunni chauvinism and the roots of muslim modernism

Muslim intellectuals who sought to establish the boundaries of modern Muslim identityMuslim modernism was a political and intellectual movement that sought to redefine the relationship between Islam and the colonial West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spearheaded by Muslim ...

The clash of values

Mansoor Moaddel provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the Middle East and North Africa’s present and will determine its future. Offering a rigorous perspective on social change, The Clash of Values d...

Archives of conjure

Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in sha...

The rise and fall of the religious left

L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left. He foregrounds the roles played by popular culture, television, and media in Amer...

Buddhist historiography in china

John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks for what they tell us a...

Missions begin with blood

Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer PrizeWhile the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argue...

People get ready

WINNER, COLLEGE THEOLOGY SOCIETY 2024 BEST BOOK AWARDWhat does it mean to be a community of difference?St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston’s Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshape...

Yoga

A groundbreaking account of the theory and practice of yoga, from the Vedas to the twentieth centuryIn this landmark book, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a compr...

Orthodox tradition and human sexuality

This book offers theological, historical, and sociological treatments of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world. It presents both academic and pastoral reflections on sex, seeking to open up the conversation about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity, aiming to creat...

Land of stark contrasts

An important new volume showcasing a wide range of faith-based responses to one of today’s most pressing social issues, challenging us to expand our ways of understanding. Land of Stark Contrasts brings together the work of social scientists, ethicists, and theologians exploring the profound ro...

The body of the cross

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history and how the uses of their bodies in Christian thought led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims—martyrs, mystics, and her...

Revelation 1-3 in christian arabic commentary

The first publication in a new series—Christian Arabic Texts in Translation, edited by Stephen Davis—this book presents English-language excerpts from thirteenth-century commentaries on the Apocalypse of John by two Egyptian authors, Būlus al-Būshī and Ibn Kātib Qas.ar. Accompanied by scholarly i...

Inner animalities

Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth’s creatures—our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theologica...

The renewal of buddhism in china

First published in 1981, Chün-fang Yü’s The Renewal of Buddhism in China challenged the conventional view that Buddhism had reached its height under the Tang dynasty (618–907) and steadily declined afterward. This fortieth anniversary edition features an updated introduction by the author speakin...

The yogin and the madman

Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052–1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in...

When a woman becomes a religious dynasty

In the fifteenth century, the princess Chokyi Dronma was told by the leading spiritual masters of her time that she was the embodiment of the ancient Indian tantric deity Vajravarahi, known in Tibetan as Dorje Phagmo, the Thunderbolt Female Pig. After suffering a great personal tragedy, Chokyi Dr...

Searching for the body

In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. Searching for the Body demonstrates the significance of this debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as conversations on representation and embo...

Islam

The sexual politics of black churches

In essays and conversations, leading writers reflect on how Black churches have participated in recent discussions about issues such as marriage equality, reproductive justice, and transgender visibility. They consider the varied ways that Black people and groups negotiate the intersections of re...

Short dorjé chang mahāmudrā invocation by bängar jampäl zangpo

The volume presents translations and editions of crucial mahāmudrā texts of Tibetan Buddhism.

The politics of arab authenticity

Ahmad Agbaria tells the story of a generation of postcolonial thinkers and activists who came to question their modernist commitments. He analyzes the heated cultural and intellectual debates that overtook the Arab world in the 1970s, uncovering why major figures turned to tradition in search of ...

A partial enlightenment

Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world.

The myth of the eternal return

A landmark work in the history of religions from a pioneer in the fieldFirst published in English in 1954, this founding work in the historical study of religions secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade. Referring to an astonishing number of cultures and...

The bhāgavata purāna

The Bhāgavata Purāna is a versatile Hindu sacred text containing more than 14,000 Sanskrit verses. Finding its present form around the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hi...

God, hierarchy, and power

Presents an interpretation of power and authority in the Orthodox Christian theological tradition by examining four Byzantine authors on the topic of ecclesiastical hierarchy in theoretical, ritual, and pragmatic contexts. Discusses potential application of the interpretation for 21st century sch...

Atonement and comparative theology

The central Christian belief in salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains one of the most intractable mysteries of Christian faith. Throughout history, it has given rise to various theories of atonement, many of which have been subject to critique as they no...

What is theology?

Adam Kotsko makes the case for the continued relevance of Christian theology for contemporary intellectual life, demonstrating its vibrancy as a creative and constructive pursuit outside the church, rethinking its often rivalrous relationship with philosophy, and tracing the theological roots of ...

Commodified communion

WINNER, 2021 HTI BOOK PRIZEResist! This exhortation animates a remarkable range of theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States. And for many theologians, the source and summit of Christian cultural resistance is the Eucharist. In Commodified Communion, Antonio Eduardo Alonso c...

Anarchy and the kingdom of god

Anarchy and the Kingdom of God reclaims the concept of “anarchism” both as a political philosophy and a way of thinking of the sociopolitical sphere from a theological perspective. Through a genuinely theological approach to the issues of power, coercion, and oppression, Davor Džalto advances hum...

Gestures

This concluding volume of the Future of the Religious Past series approaches contemporary religion through the lens of practice: the rituals, performances, devotions, and everyday acts through which humans do religion. In spite of predictions about the inevitability of secularism, religion in the...

Political theology on edge

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge—that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is al...

Readings of śāntideva's guide to bodhisattva practice

Śāntideva’s eighth-century work the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra) is one of the crucial texts of the Buddhist ethical and philosophical tradition. This book serves as a companion to this Indian Buddhist classic, illuminating the Guide’s many philosophical, literary, ritual, and...