A surprising and disturbing origin story There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is this story simply isn't true. Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions - of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party.
‎Eerdmans
|
9780802879349
|
Hardcover
Pamela Colman Smith
By Kaplan, Stuart
Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story brings together the work of four distinguished scholars who have devoted years of research to uncover the life and artistic accomplishments of Pamela Colman Smith. Known to millions as the creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) was also a stage and costume designer, folklorist, poet, author, illustrator of ballads and folktales, suffragette, and publisher of books and broadsheets. This collaborative work presents: a richly illustrated biography of Pamela's life with essays on the events and people that influenced her including Jack Yeats, Ellen Terry, Alfred Stieglitz, Bram Stoker and William Gillette. There is also a chronological survey of her folktales, art and poetry and an exploration of her lasting legacy.
U.S. Games Systems Inc.
|
9781572819122
|
Hardcover
The Bible for Grown-Ups
By Loveday, Simon
The Bible for Grown-Ups neither requires, nor rejects, belief. It sets out to help intelligent adults make sense of the Bible - a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out.Why do the creation stories in Genesis contradict each other? Did the Exodus really happen? Was King David a historical figure? Why is Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus so different from Luke's? Why was St Paul so rude about St Peter? Every Biblical author wrote for their own time, and their own audience. In short, nothing in the Bible is quite what it seems.Literary critic Simon Loveday's book - a labor of love that has taken over a decade to write - is a thrilling read, for Christians and anyone else, which will overturn everything you thought you knew about the Good Book.
Icon Books
|
9781785781315
|
Hardcover
Kabbalah for Beginners
By Schachter, Brian
Gain a better understanding of the Kabbalah path to spiritual transformation and a deeper connection with the Jewish faith Coming from the Hebrew root that means "to receive," Kabbalah is known as the "inner" or "esoteric" dimension of Judaism. Kabbalah for Beginners is your introduction to a great spiritual tradition that will help you deepen your experience of the Divine through Kabbalistic portals into the Eternal Present. Divided into four categories: theosophical, ecstatic, Hasidic, and contemporary, this book explores everything including ancient concepts, core teachings, practices and traditions, and even misconceptions of Kabbalah. Written in a contemporary tone and point of view, this beginner's guide brings this ancient discipline into the here and now.
Rockridge Press
|
9781647390037
|
Paperback
The Souls of China
By Johnson, Ian
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a revelatory portrait of religion in China today - its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China's future. The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world's great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques - as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty - over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.Ian Johnson first visited China in 1984; in the 1990s he helped run a charity to rebuild Daoist temples, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. While researching this book, he lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. Along the way, he learned esoteric meditation techniques, visited a nonagenarian Confucian sage, and befriended government propagandists as they fashioned a remarkable embrace of traditional values. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle - a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world's newest superpower.
Pantheon Books
|
9781101870051
|
Hardcover
Modern Druidism
By Byghan, Yowann
This introduction to modern Druidism provides a comprehensive overview of today's Pagan religion and philosophy, whose roots go back to the Celtic tribal societies of ancient Britain and Ireland. The author covers Druidism's mythology, history and important figures and its beliefs and moral system, and describes practices, rituals and ceremonies. A gazetteer of important sacred sites in Europe and America is included, along with information about modern Druid groups and organizations.
McFarland
|
9781476673141
|
Paperback
A Little History of Religion
By Holloway, Richard
For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity's earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion - from the dawn of religious belief to the twenty-first century - with deepest respect and a keen commitment to accuracy. Writing for those with faith and those without, and especially for young readers, he encourages curiosity and tolerance, accentuates nuance and mystery, and calmly restores a sense of the value of faith. Ranging far beyond the major world religions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Holloway also examines where religious belief comes from, the search for meaning throughout history, today's fascinations with Scientology and creationism, religiously motivated violence, hostilities between religious people and secularists, and more.
Yale University Press
|
9780300208832
|
Print book
Excellent Daughters
By Zoepf, Katherine
For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur'anic schools - and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. But their voices have not been heard. Their stories have not been told.In Syria, before its civil war, she documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who've found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. Deeply informed, heartfelt, and urgent, Excellent Daughters brings us a new understanding of the changing Arab societies - from 9/11 to Tahrir Square to the rise of ISIS - and gives voice to the remarkable women at the forefront of this change.
Penguin Books, 2016.
|
9781594203886
|
Print book
999
By Macadam, Heather Dune
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women--many of them teenagers--were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reichsmarks (about $200) apiece for the Nazis to take them as slave labor. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few would survive. The facts of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz are little known, yet profoundly relevant today. These were not resistance fighters or prisoners of war.
Citadel; Reprint edition
|
9780806539379
|
Paperback
Islamic Exceptionalism
By Hamid, Shadi
In Islamic Exceptionalism, Brookings Institution scholar and acclaimed author Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Divides among citizens arent just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state - and the vexing problem of religions role in public life. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different models of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying - and alarmingly successful - example of ISIS. . With unprecedented access to Islamist activists and leaders across the region, Hamid offers a panoramic and ambitious interpretation of the regions descent into violence. Islamic Exceptionalism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Islams past and present, and its outsized role in modern politics. We dont have to like it, but we have to understand it - because Islam, as a religion and as an idea, will continue to be a force that shapes not just the region, but the West as well in the decades to come.
Bad Faith
By Balmer, Randall
A surprising and disturbing origin story There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is this story simply isn't true. Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions - of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party.
Pamela Colman Smith
By Kaplan, Stuart
Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story brings together the work of four distinguished scholars who have devoted years of research to uncover the life and artistic accomplishments of Pamela Colman Smith. Known to millions as the creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) was also a stage and costume designer, folklorist, poet, author, illustrator of ballads and folktales, suffragette, and publisher of books and broadsheets. This collaborative work presents: a richly illustrated biography of Pamela's life with essays on the events and people that influenced her including Jack Yeats, Ellen Terry, Alfred Stieglitz, Bram Stoker and William Gillette. There is also a chronological survey of her folktales, art and poetry and an exploration of her lasting legacy.
The Bible for Grown-Ups
By Loveday, Simon
The Bible for Grown-Ups neither requires, nor rejects, belief. It sets out to help intelligent adults make sense of the Bible - a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out.Why do the creation stories in Genesis contradict each other? Did the Exodus really happen? Was King David a historical figure? Why is Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus so different from Luke's? Why was St Paul so rude about St Peter? Every Biblical author wrote for their own time, and their own audience. In short, nothing in the Bible is quite what it seems.Literary critic Simon Loveday's book - a labor of love that has taken over a decade to write - is a thrilling read, for Christians and anyone else, which will overturn everything you thought you knew about the Good Book.
Kabbalah for Beginners
By Schachter, Brian
Gain a better understanding of the Kabbalah path to spiritual transformation and a deeper connection with the Jewish faith Coming from the Hebrew root that means "to receive," Kabbalah is known as the "inner" or "esoteric" dimension of Judaism. Kabbalah for Beginners is your introduction to a great spiritual tradition that will help you deepen your experience of the Divine through Kabbalistic portals into the Eternal Present. Divided into four categories: theosophical, ecstatic, Hasidic, and contemporary, this book explores everything including ancient concepts, core teachings, practices and traditions, and even misconceptions of Kabbalah. Written in a contemporary tone and point of view, this beginner's guide brings this ancient discipline into the here and now.
The Souls of China
By Johnson, Ian
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a revelatory portrait of religion in China today - its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China's future. The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world's great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques - as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty - over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.Ian Johnson first visited China in 1984; in the 1990s he helped run a charity to rebuild Daoist temples, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. While researching this book, he lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. Along the way, he learned esoteric meditation techniques, visited a nonagenarian Confucian sage, and befriended government propagandists as they fashioned a remarkable embrace of traditional values. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle - a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world's newest superpower.
Modern Druidism
By Byghan, Yowann
This introduction to modern Druidism provides a comprehensive overview of today's Pagan religion and philosophy, whose roots go back to the Celtic tribal societies of ancient Britain and Ireland. The author covers Druidism's mythology, history and important figures and its beliefs and moral system, and describes practices, rituals and ceremonies. A gazetteer of important sacred sites in Europe and America is included, along with information about modern Druid groups and organizations.
A Little History of Religion
By Holloway, Richard
For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity's earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion - from the dawn of religious belief to the twenty-first century - with deepest respect and a keen commitment to accuracy. Writing for those with faith and those without, and especially for young readers, he encourages curiosity and tolerance, accentuates nuance and mystery, and calmly restores a sense of the value of faith. Ranging far beyond the major world religions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Holloway also examines where religious belief comes from, the search for meaning throughout history, today's fascinations with Scientology and creationism, religiously motivated violence, hostilities between religious people and secularists, and more.
Excellent Daughters
By Zoepf, Katherine
For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur'anic schools - and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. But their voices have not been heard. Their stories have not been told.In Syria, before its civil war, she documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who've found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. Deeply informed, heartfelt, and urgent, Excellent Daughters brings us a new understanding of the changing Arab societies - from 9/11 to Tahrir Square to the rise of ISIS - and gives voice to the remarkable women at the forefront of this change.
999
By Macadam, Heather Dune
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women--many of them teenagers--were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reichsmarks (about $200) apiece for the Nazis to take them as slave labor. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few would survive. The facts of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz are little known, yet profoundly relevant today. These were not resistance fighters or prisoners of war.
Islamic Exceptionalism
By Hamid, Shadi
In Islamic Exceptionalism, Brookings Institution scholar and acclaimed author Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Divides among citizens arent just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state - and the vexing problem of religions role in public life. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different models of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying - and alarmingly successful - example of ISIS. . With unprecedented access to Islamist activists and leaders across the region, Hamid offers a panoramic and ambitious interpretation of the regions descent into violence. Islamic Exceptionalism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Islams past and present, and its outsized role in modern politics. We dont have to like it, but we have to understand it - because Islam, as a religion and as an idea, will continue to be a force that shapes not just the region, but the West as well in the decades to come.