"Human beings," the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, "are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge." In his new book, Assmann explores images...

In early modern Catholic Europe and its colonies priests frequently developed close relationships with pious women, serving as their spiritual directors during their lives, and their biographers after their deaths. In this richly illustrated book...

Devji focuses on the ethical content of the jihadist worldview, as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda views their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions of modernity rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.

Why is it that a text, particularly a canonical text, is often said to contain a meaning different from what it literally says? How did allegorical readings arise and develop? By looking at such examples as Jewish and Christian interpretations of the...

The first volume of trilogy of books providing a bold, original, and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion.

In Habits of Devotion, four senior scholars take the measure of the central religious practices and devotions that by the middle of the twentieth century defined the "ordinary, week-to-week religion" of the majority of American Catholics.

"In an era of military conflict and economic hardship, religious and political leaders adamantly speak in the language of crisis. Whether one attributes this public religious fervor to a response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, millennial hopes...

In Divided Houses, Caroline Ford examines how the so-called feminization of religion in France from the French Revolution to the First World War contributed to the formation of a distinctive secular (laïc) republican political culture in France. She...

"Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage...

Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture among Russia's religious sectarians: Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks.