Showing titles in Religious Studies

A book of everyday ethics by a man whom Pope St. John Paul II called “one of the great ethicists of the 20th century”, The Art of Living is Dietrich von Hildebrand’s essential guide to the moral life. In just over four hours, Dietrich von Hildebrand, with his wife Alice, presents a distinctive view of the virtuous life that begins with reverence, “the mother of all virtues”, and includes chapters on “Faithfulness”, “Goodness”, “Hope”, “The Human Heart”, and many others.

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

The Wisdom of the Desert was one of Thomas Merton's favorites among his own books, surely because he had hoped to spend his last years as a hermit. The personal tones of the translations and the blend of reverence and humor so characteristic of him show how deeply Merton identified with the legendary authors of these sayings and parables, the fourth-century Christian fathers who sought solitude and contemplation in the deserts of the Near East.

If you’re interested in learning about world religions, this book is the place to start. Packed with informative fact sheets and answers to common questions, this beginner’s guide fills you in on the most important aspects of each religion. You’ll learn about fascinating histories, rituals, and festivals as you grow to better understand the belief systems that offer meaning and purpose to billions of people around the globe.

Explore the universe and immerse yourself in the story of our solar system, planet, and life through meteorites. "Meteorite is a treasure"--Wall Street Journal Meteorites have long been seen as portents of fate and messages from the gods, their fiery remains inspiring worship and giving rise to...

Malleus is Latin for “hammer,” Maleficarum is Latin for “of witches.” Thus, the title tells you everything that is to come. Heinrich Kramer is attempting to forge a hammer made of paper and ink, and to bring it down upon the heads of those he believes to be practising witchcraft. Heinrich was a Dominican Inquisitor traipsing around Germany in the 1480s, hunting for witches.

Born and raised in Essex, Maajid Nawaz was recruited into politicised Islam as a teenager. Abandoning his love of hip-hop music, graffiti and girls, he was recruited into Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Liberation Party), where he played a leading and international role in the shaping and dissemination of an aggressive anti-West narrative. While studying for his Arabic and law degree, he travelled around the UK and to Denmark and Pakistan, setting up new cells.

During a train trip from Chicago to Texas in the late 1940s, A.W. Tozer began to write The Pursuit of God. He wrote all night, and when the train arrived at his destination, the rough draft was done. The depth of this book has made it an enduring favorite.

Why do Hindus feed their dead ancestors? And why do they prefer burning the dead to building tombs? Does Hinduism have no concept of Judgement Day? What is the impact of death on its notions of womanhood and caste? Is the Vedic approach to death different from the Tantric one? The idea of death and rebirth is embedded in the Hindu mind through ritual and story. Death is not just tragic, but ambiguous too. For instance, it is the end of one journey, but it is also the beginning of another.

In The Genealogical Adam and Eve, S. Joshua Swamidass tests a scientific hypothesis: What if the traditional account is somehow true, with the origins of Adam and Eve taking place alongside evolution? Building on well-established but overlooked science, Swamidass explains how it's possible for Adam and Eve to be rightly identified as the ancestors of everyone. 

Have we been taught to discount the veracity and deeper meaning of our emotional resonance with the world around us? In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis looks at the curriculum of the English "prep school" and begins to wonder if this subliminal teaching has indeed produced a generation who discount such a nature.

The Age of Paradise is the first of a projected four-volume history of Christendom, a civilization with a supporting culture that gave rise to what we now call the West. At a time of renewed interest in the future of Western culture, author John Strickland—an Orthodox scholar, professor, and priest—offers a vision rooted in the deep past of the first millennium. At the heart of his story is the early Church’s “culture of paradise”, an experience of the world in which the kingdom of heaven was tangible and familiar.

“Jenkins is one of America’s top religious scholars.” —Forbes magazine The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins offers a revolutionary view of the history of the Christian church. Subtitled “The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and...

Jamie Bartlett takes us inside the worlds of innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and believe they know how to fix it. Radicals introduces us to techno-futurists questing for immortality, far-right groups seeking to close borders, environmentalists striving to save the planet, libertarian movements founding new countries, autonomous cooperatives in self-sustaining micro-societies and psychedelic pioneers attempting to heal society

All but My Life tells the haunting story of Gerda Weissman Klein’s experience under the Nazi regime. Taken from her home in Bielitz, Poland, and sent to German labor camps, Gerda survived and was liberated by American troops. In her memoir, Klein takes audiences on an alarming journey from the...

From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative and eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding of the...

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in three parts from 1794, was a best seller in America, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival. Promoting a creator-God while advocating reason in the place of revelation, Paine’s controversial pamphlet caused his native British audience, fearing the results of the French Revolution, to receive it with more hostility than their American counterparts.

According to the legend, Sage Vasugupta received a divine revelation in a dream where Lord Shiva instructed him to seek out a specific stone near a serene stream. To his amazement, the stone turned over at his touch, revealing the sacred Shiva Sutras etched upon its surface. These profound sutras, reserved for those deemed worthy of divine grace, unravel the mysteries of our true nature and the illusory existence we inhabit. Ranjit Chaudhri has translated some important texts of Kashmir Shaivism from Sanskrit into English.