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Western Religion
Muslim people are found all over the world. Most live outside the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. The vast majority of contemporary Muslims are not fluent in Arabic, and speakers of languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Turkish have made essential contributions to Islamic history and culture. However, typical courses on Islam tend to downplay areas beyond the Middle East, focusing on Arabic texts and elite theological and doctrinal arguments.
This book offers an inclusive view of the diversity and complexity of the many worlds of Islam, investigating ethics and aesthetics as much as scriptures and theology. By paying attention to Muslims who are socially, culturally, doctrinally, or politically marginalized, it provides a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. Contributors from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds explore the capaciousness of Muslim identities, helping readers achieve a broader understanding of the past, present, and future of the Muslim world. This book includes communities such as the Nation of Islam and Alevi Muslims, and it goes beyond rituals like prayer and fasting to consider a wider array of practices, such as tattooing. Across the Worlds of Islam is at once student-friendly and cutting-edge, written with both introductory courses and general readers in mind. Examining Muslim identity and practice from the perspective of the margins, it offers nuanced portraits of Muslim life across geographic and sectarian divisions.
These new translations of two treatises dealing with the possibility and nature of knowledge in the face of skeptical challenges are the first to be rendered from the Latin critical edition, the first to be made specifically with a philosophical audience in mind, and the first to be translated by a scholar with expertise in both modern epistemology and philosophy of language.
This bilingual edition of the Qur'an, the Holy Book of Islam, was first published in the United States in 1988. Ahmed Ali, the distinguished Pakistani novelist, poet, critic, and diplomat, presents this elegant and poetic translation in a contemporary and living voice. On each page, the original Arabic and the translated English sit side by side, encouraging the reader to draw from both texts. Professor Ali also includes notes where necessary, providing the full meaning of each word and phrase. This accessible volume is truly essential for both scholars and followers of Islam.
"This man, if ever any have deserved the name, was truly a 'divine, ' and he may be justly placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skilful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble, and sublime that his great soul had compassed he bestowed upon Muhammadanism, and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning that, in the form given them by him, they seem, in my opinion, worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the philosophy of Aristotle or in the Sufi mysticism he discreetly adapted to the Muhammadan theology; from every school he sought the means of shedding light and honour upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Muhammadan divines." -- Dr. August Tholuck
An acclaimed scholar presents a bold new interpretation of the relationship between Greco-Roman religion and Christianity.
The question of Christianity's relation to the other religions of the world is more pertinent and difficult today than ever before. While Christianity's historical failure to appreciate or actively engage Judaism is notorious, Christianity's even more shoddy record with respect to "pagan" religions is less understood. Christians have inherited a virtually unanimous theological tradition that thinks of paganism in terms of demonic possession, and of Christian missions as a rescue operation that saves pagans from inherently evil practices.In undertaking this fresh inquiry into early Christianity and Greco-Roman paganism, Luke Timothy Johnson begins with a broad definition of religion as a way of life organized around convictions and experiences concerning ultimate power. In the tradition of William James's Variety of Religious Experience, he identifies four distinct ways of being religious: religion as participation in benefits, as moral transformation, as transcending the world, and as stabilizing the world. Using these criteria as the basis for his exploration of Christianity and paganism, Johnson finds multiple points of similarity in religious sensibility.
Christianity's failure to adequately come to grips with its first pagan neighbors, Johnson asserts, inhibits any effort to engage positively with adherents of various world religions. This thoughtful and passionate study should help break down the walls between Christianity and other religious traditions.
When a small, peculiar, palm-sized clay tablet made its way to the desk of Irving Finkel, Assyriologist and Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, Finkel could hardly believe his luck. What he discovered was a missing piece in the story of Noah and the Ark. In this captivating, absorbing work of scholarship, Finkel, a world authority on ancient Mesopotamia, leads the reader on a detective hunt for the prototype of Noah's Ark--from cuneiform wedges to bundles of reeds, from ancient Babylon to modern Iraq, Finkel reveals new information on the origin of the Babylonian Flood story which pre-dates the biblical deluge, including the surprising size and shape of the boat itself, and even where it came to rest. New to this edition, Finkel puts the "Ark Tablet" to the test in building a modern version of the ship. Throughout, The Ark Before Noah takes us on an adventurous voyage of discovery, opening the door to an enthralling world of ancient voices and historical lore.
From the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, a "hugely entertaining and irreverent" (Adam Gopnik, New Yorker) account of the art of translating the Hebrew Bible into English
In this brief book, award-winning biblical translator Robert Alter offers a personal and passionate account of what he learned about the art of Bible translation during the two decades he spent completing his own English version of the Hebrew Bible. Showing why the Bible and its meaning can be brought to life in English only by re-creating the subtle and powerful literary style of the original text, Alter discusses the principal aspects of biblical Hebrew that any translator should try to reproduce: word choice, syntax, word play and sound play, rhythm, and dialogue. In the process, he provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to biblical style that also offers insights about the art of translation far beyond the Bible.
A spiritual anthology drawn from the Greek and Russian traditions, concerned in particular with the most frequently used and best loved of all Orthodox prayers--the Jesus Prayer. Texts are taken chiefly from the letters of Bishop Theopan the Recluse, along with many other writers.
While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding.
Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.
NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER - A brilliant interpretation of familiar biblical narratives that "deserves to be the most widely read book on the Bible in years, perhaps decades." (Jewish Exponent).
Since its publication in 1995, The Beginning of Desire has opened new pathways in the reading of the Bible. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's innovative use of midrash, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis draws deeply upon the familiar biblical narratives to produce interpretations that are at once startlingly beautiful and completely authentic. Illuminating the tensions that grip human beings as they search for an encounter with God, Zornberg gives us a brilliant analysis of the stories of Adam and Eve; Noah; Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel, and Leah; and Joseph and his brothers.
Boasting an impressive selection of personal essays, articles, and poems by today's leading luminaries, "The Best Spiritual Writing 2013" captures our nation's spiritual pulse and offers readers an opportunity to explore the most nourishing writings on spirituality published in the past year. As in previous editions, Philip Zaleski draws from a wide range of journals and magazines to build an anthology of stimulating works by some of the nation's most esteemed writers such as Adam Gopnik, Edward Hirsch, and Melissa Range. The result is a book, ideal for gift giving, that will appeal to religious thinkers, atheists, and people of all faiths and beliefs.