A groundbreaking new look at the story of America At the heart of the nation's spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look. Thomas Jefferson himself collected books on all religions and...

A fascinating look at the myriad religious beliefs from the long history of the Indian subcontinent. Written by eminent American Sanskrit scholar Edward Washburn Hopkins.

Joseph M. Kitagawa is Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School and of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations there: he is also a former Dean of the Divinity School. Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential...

In this ambitious and authoritative book, Jörg Rüpke provides a comprehensive and strikingly original narrative history of ancient Roman and Mediterranean religion over more than a millennium--from the late Bronze Age through the Roman imperial period and up to late antiquity. While focused primarily on the city of Rome, Pantheon fully integrates the many religious traditions found in the Mediterranean world, including Judaism and Christianity....

The individual and cultural upheavals of early colonial New France were experienced differently by French explorers and settlers, and by Native traditionalists and Catholic converts. However, European invaders and indigenous people alike learned to negotiate the complexities of cross-cultural encounters by reimagining the meaning of kinship. Part micro-history, part biography, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France explores the lives...

The author compares Celtic mythology and religion with the beliefs of early Scandinavian society. Vikings and Norsemen who raided British shores ruled parts of Britain for centuries. The religion of the Scandinavians was the same as the religious beliefs and practices of their fellow Teutonic and Germanic tribes, and their chief deities and religious rituals were like those of Teutonic people anywhere.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. His many books include Anglomania (Random House), Inventing Japan (Modern Library), and Murder in Amsterdam (Penguin), which won a Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is a regular contributor to many publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. Why religion must be separated from politics...

Scientology is known for its celebrity believers and its team of "volunteer ministers" at disaster sites such as the World Trade Center; its notably aggressive response to criticism or its attacks on psychiatry; its requirement that believers pay as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach the highest levels of salvation. The author offers a full, journalistic history of the Church of Scientology, in an even-handed account that establishes...

Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. The Devil's Tabernacle is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. Anthony Ossa-Richardson shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery...

Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history:...