Rached Ghannouchi has long been known as a reformist or moderate Islamist thinker. In "Public Freedoms in the Islamic State", he argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – in its broad outlines – meets with wide acceptance among Muslims...

In this long-awaited follow-up to his 2003 book on Genesis, biblical scholar Leon Kass explores how Exodus raises and then answers the central political questions of what defines a nation and how a nation should govern itself. Considered by some th...

The thirteenth-century mystic Christina of Hane led an extraordinary life, but her recently unearthed case remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world. Her disturbing account of vaginal mutilation, her competition with the Virgin Mary, and...

"Migrants in the Profane" takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theolog...

Rabbi Moses b. Nahman (1194-1270), known in English as Nahmanides, was the greatest Talmudic scholar of the thirteenth century and one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters. Beyond his monumental scholastic achievements, Nahmanides w...

Evangelicalism is arguably America's most controversial religious movement. Nonevangelical people who follow the news may have a variety of impressions about what "evangelical" means. But one certain association they make with evangelicals is white R...

"Calling the Spirits" investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer's "Odyssey" to the emergence of Spiritualism – when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born. Among our cast are the...

Many people today claim that their positions on various issues are grounded in biblical values, and they use scriptural passages to support their claims. But the Bible was written over the course of several hundred years and contains contradictory po...

In the first book devoted to representations of Jesus Christ in contemporary photography, Nathalie Dietschy presents a rich range of images from the 1980s to the present day. Acclaimed photographers such as Catherine Opie, Wang Qingsong, Joan Fontcu...

The book of Job has often been called the greatest poem ever written. The book, in Edward Greenstein's characterization, is "a Wunderkind, a genius emerging out of the confluence of two literary streams" which "dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled...