With 1.3 billion members, the Catholic Church is the world's largest organization and perhaps its most controversial. The Church's obstinacy on matters like clerical celibacy, the role of women, birth control, and the child abuse scandal has alienate...

For many Christians in America, becoming filled with Christ first requires being empty of themselves – a quality often overlooked in religious histories. In "Emptiness", John Corrigan highlights for the first time the various ways that American Chris...

Despite recent ferocious public debate about the likelihood of the existence of God, the most central concept in such arguments remains strangely obscure. What is God? Are those engaged in the debate all talking about the same thing? In this beautifu...

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in "Empire of Religion", documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparati...

In this engaging and at times heartbreaking book, David Hempton looks at evangelicalism through the lens of well-known individuals who once embraced the evangelical tradition, but later repudiated it. The author recounts the faith journeys of nine cr...

The noted German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote a number of essays that deal directly with religion as a fundamental process in human life. These essays set forth Simmel's mature reflections on religion and its relation to modernity,...

Many biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of Matthew was written after those of Mark and Luke. In this controversial book, an eminent politician who is also a distinguished classical scholar refutes this idea, using textual and literary criticis...

Islam's tense relationship with modernity is one of the most crucial issues of our time. Within Islamic legal systems, with their traditional preference for eyewitness testimony, this struggle has played a significant role in attitudes toward expert...

Over the centuries, observances of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, have traveled far from their origins at Karbala – a windswept desert plain that is now a town in present-day Iraq – where, according to tradition, Hussein, the belo...

Good advice that stands the test of time – those things we all know are true, tips that help us live the good life – we call wisdom. But, one life time is not enough to master the fine art of living. Distilled over centuries, the biblical book of "Ec...