What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers – free will and religion – are in some ways fundamentally opposed. While free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and the conscious weighing of alternatives...

In this provocative work, Matt Jackson-McCabe argues that the concept of Jewish Christianity represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created the category of Jewish Christianity as a means of i...

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the hi...

"Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State" offers a New World rejoinder to the largely Europe-centered academic discourse on church and state. In contrast to what is often assumed, in the Americas the relationship between church and state has no...

The fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were truly an Age of Secrecy in Europe, when arcane knowledge was widely believed to be positive knowledge which extended into all areas of daily life. So asserts Daniel Jutte in this engrossing, vivid,...

Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call "religion". There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese gove...

Scarcely any country in today's world can claim to be free of intolerance. Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland, the Sudan, the Balkans, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Caucasus are just some of the areas of intractable conflict, apparently ins...

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighbourly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian ima...

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...

The question of Christianity's relation to the other religions of the world is more pertinent and difficult today than ever before. While Christianity's historical failure to appreciate or actively engage Judaism is notorious, Christianity's even mor...