The Mogao grottoes in northwestern China, located near the town of Dunhuang on the fabled Silk Road, constitute one of the world's most significant sites of Buddhist art. In some five hundred caves carved into rock cliffs at the edge of the Gobi dese...

A fresh translation of quaestiones from the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Robert Miner. This volume provides direct access to the medieval theologian's deepest thinking about the supreme goal of human life – blessedness-and the virtue...

This book offers a fresh interpretation of the connection between the West German Catholic Church and post-1950s political debates on women's reproductive rights and the protection of life in West Germany. According to Tichenor, Catholic women in Wes...

In this original study, Moshe Idel, an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and thought, and the cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Shahar Arzy combine their considerable expertise to explore the mysteries of the Kabbalah from an entirely new pe...

It has long been acknowledged that Jews and Christians distinguished themselves through charity to the poor. Though ancient Greeks and Romans were also generous, they funded theatres and baths rather than poorhouses and orphanages. How might we expla...

This lavishly illustrated book investigates an outstanding eighteenth-century example of a samut khoi, a type of beautiful folding book found in Southeast Asia, which became particularly popular as a repository for the Buddha's teachings. Written in...

For sale in CIS only! In Western popular imagination, the Caliphate often conjures up an array of negative images, while rallies organised in support of resurrecting the Caliphate are treated with a mixture of apprehension and disdain, as if they we...

The central question of the Arab Spring – what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East – has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations' secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has...

In Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, ho...

This fascinating volume reveals some of the dark, dramatic episodes concealed in the folds of the hasidic cloak – shocking events and anomalous figures in the history of Hasidism. Using tools of detection, Assaf extracts historical truth from a varie...