Western Religion

From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these translations remained largely neglected by Biblical scholars and historians. In telling the story of the Bible in Arabic, this book casts light on a crucial transition in the cultural and religious life of Jews and Christians in Arabic-speaking lands.

In pre-Islamic times, Jewish and Christian scriptures circulated orally in the Arabic-speaking milieu. After the rise of Islam--and the Qur'an's appearance as a scripture in its own right--Jews and Christians translated the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into Arabic for their own use and as a response to the Qur'an's retelling of Biblical narratives. From the ninth century onward, a steady stream of Jewish and Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament crossed communal borders to influence the Islamic world.

The Bible in Arabic offers a new frame of reference for the pivotal place of Arabic Bible translations in the religious and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

...a milestone in American religious publishing. The Catholic World. In one series, the original writings of the universally acknowledged teachers of the Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and Islamic traditions have been critically selected, translated and introduced by internationally recognized scholars and spiritual leaders. Birgitta of Sweden-Life and Selected writings edited, with a preface by Marguerite Tjader Harris translation and notes by Albert Ryle Kezel introduction by Tore Nyberg I am a sinner unworthy to say such things; nevertheless, know that Jesus Christ appeared to me at prayer. Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303-1373) The Catholic history of Scandinavia is rich in its legacy of saints and blesseds: Canute, Eric, Hallvard, Henry, Olaf, Sigfrid, Thorlac and many others. One Swedish saint has achieved worldwide fame: Birgitta Birgersdotter, born into wealth and aristocracy, a happily married mother, a religious foundress, a mystical visionary and the fines Scandinavian writer of the Middle Ages. Like Joan of Arc, Birgitta experienced a repeated and insistent visionary call to public action. Her task was to reawaken the Church's attention to the essential things of God; and, in her vividly colorful writings, she has left to the world an exemplary record of her own perseverance in prayer. Knut Westman, a major authority on St. Birgitta, says of her: "Birgitta is of another kind of religion: personal, vocational, mystical, recognized by its strong ethical attitude, its visions of God's work through history, and the consciousness of being called to task...Such a life cannot be explained as a product of known factors." Contained in this volume are four key documents of Birgittine literature: the eyewitness Life of Blessed Birgitta, the complete Fifth and Seventh books of her Revelations, and her Four Prayers. Of the present volume, Birger Bergh, prominent Birgittine textual critic, writes: "This translation, done by a translator with a sensitivity of style and with genuine understanding of the Birgittine world, gives a perfect picture of the Latin original and its fluent diction." +

As essential to the canon as the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, The Book of Common Prayer has been in daily use for centuries. Originally produced for the Church of England in the sixteenth century by Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake upon the accession to the throne of the ardently Catholic Queen Mary, it contains the entire liturgy as first presented in English-as well as some of the oldest phrases to be used by modern English speakers. H ere are daily prayers, scripture readings, psalm recitals, and the services marking such religious milestones as baptism, confirmation, and marriage, all from the 1662 edition, whose influence can be seen in the work of some of the greatest writers in English literature, from Donne and Swift to Austen and the Brontës.

This beautiful deluxe edition includes a new introduction by The New Yorker's book critic James Wood, discussing how The Book of Common Prayer has influenced the English language and literature. Its small trim size allows for easy portability as a daily devotional.

A controversial national best seller upon its initial publication, The Book of J is an audacious work of literary restoration revealing one of the great narratives of all time and unveiling its mysterious author. J is the title that scholars ascribe to the nameless writer they believe is responsible for the text, written between 950 and 900 BCE, on which Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers is based. In The Book of J, accompanying David Rosenberg's translation, Harold Bloom persuasively argues that J was a woman--very likely a woman of the royal house at King Solomon's court--and a writer of the stature of Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. Rosenberg's translations from the Hebrew bring J's stories to life and reveal her towering originality and grasp of humanity. Bloom argues in several essays that "J" was not a religious writer but a fierce ironist. He also offers historical context, a discussion of the theory of how the different texts came together to create the Bible, and translation notes.

The spiritual text that forms the basis of Mormonism, in the last edition edited by its founder, Joseph Smith, Jr.

The Book of Mormon is one of the most influential, as well as controversial, religious documents in American history, and is regarded as sacred scripture by followers around the world, including members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the fourth-largest religious body in the United States. According to Mormon belief, The Book of Mormon was inscribed on golden plates by ancient prophets. It contains stories of ancient peoples migrating from the Near East to the Americas, and also explains that Jesus Christ appeared to the New World after his resurrection. The golden plates were discovered in upstate New York and translated by Joseph Smith, Jr., under the guidance of an angel, Moroni. From this divine revelation, Smith founded the Mormon sect, which is now comprised of more than 12.5 million members worldwide.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A "pure genius" translation of the beloved autobiographical writings of the great 16th-century Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Ávila (Caroline Myss, New York Times-bestselling author)

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) is one of the most beloved of the Catholic saints. In 1562, during the era of the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa sat down to write an account of the mystical experiences for which she had become famous. The result was this book, one of the great classics of spiritual autobiography.

With this fresh translation of The Book of My Life, Mirabai Starr brings the inimitable Spanish mystic to life for a new generation. In contemporary English that mirrors Teresa's own earthy, vernacular Spanish, and that presents us with--four centuries after Teresa's death--someone we feel we know, Mirabai Starr offers a stunning portrait of a woman who is intoxicated by God yet filled with an overflowing love for the world.

A revolutionary look at Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the birth of publishing, on the eve of the Reformation's 500th anniversary

When Martin Luther posted his "theses" on the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, protesting corrupt practices, he was virtually unknown. Within months, his ideas spread across Germany, then all of Europe; within years, their author was not just famous, but infamous, responsible for catalyzing the violent wave of religious reform that would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation and engulfing Europe in decades of bloody war.

Luther came of age with the printing press, and the path to glory of neither one was obvious to the casual observer of the time. Printing was, and is, a risky business--the questions were how to know how much to print and how to get there before the competition. Pettegree illustrates Luther's great gifts not simply as a theologian, but as a communicator, indeed, as the world's first mass-media figure, its first brand. He recognized in printing the power of pamphlets, written in the colloquial German of everyday people, to win the battle of ideas.

But that wasn't enough--not just words, but the medium itself was the message. Fatefully, Luther had a partner in the form of artist and businessman Lucas Cranach, who together with Wittenberg's printers created the distinctive look of Luther's pamphlets. Together, Luther and Cranach created a product that spread like wildfire--it was both incredibly successful and widely imitated. Soon Germany was overwhelmed by a blizzard of pamphlets, with Wittenberg at its heart; the Reformation itself would blaze on for more than a hundred years.

Publishing in advance of the Reformation's 500th anniversary, Brand Luther fuses the history of religion, of printing, and of capitalism--the literal marketplace of ideas--into one enthralling story, revolutionizing our understanding of one of the pivotal figures and eras in human history.

"I didn't think he'd do it. I really didn't think he would. I thought he'd say, whoa, hold on, wait a minute. We made a deal, remember, the land, the blessing, the nation, the descendants as numerous as the sands on the shore and the stars in the sky."

So begins James Goodman's original and urgent encounter with one of the most compelling and resonant stories ever told--God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

A mere nineteen lines in the book of Genesis, it rests at the heart of the history, literature, theology, and sacred rituals of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For more than two millennia, people throughout the world have grappled with the troubling questions about sacrifice, authority, obedience, and faith to which the story gives rise. Writing from the vantage of "a reader, a son, a Jew, a father, a skeptic, a historian, a lover of stories, and a writer," Goodman gives us an enthralling narrative history that moves from its biblical origins to its place in the cultures and faiths of our time. He introduces us to the commentary of Second Temple sages, rabbis and priests of the late antiquity, and early Islamic exegetes (some of whom imagined that Ishmael was the nearly sacrificed son). He examines Syriac hymns (in which Sarah stars), Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade (in which Isaac often dies), and medieval English mystery plays. He looks at the art of Europe's golden age, the philosophy of Kant and Kierkegaard, and the panoply of twentieth-century interpretation, sacred and profane, including the work of Bob Dylan, Elie Wiesel, and A. B. Yehoshua. In illuminating how so many others have understood this story, Goodman tells a gripping and provocative story of his own.

This Companion's starting point is the realization that Jesus of Nazareth cannot be studied purely as a subject of ancient history, or as "a man like any other man". History, literature, theology and the dynamic of a living, worldwide religious reality appropriately impinge on the study of Jesus. This book therefore incorporates the most up-to-date historical work on Jesus with the "larger issues" of critical method--the story of Christian faith and study, as well as Jesus in a global church and in the encounter with Judaism and Islam.

Carmina Burana, literally "Songs from Beuern," is named after the village where the manuscript was found. The songbook consists of nearly 250 poems, on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. Compiled in the thirteenth century in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region of Italy, it is the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse and provides insights into the vibrant social, spiritual, and intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The multilingual codex includes works by leading Latin poets such as the Archpoet, Walter of Châtillon, and the canonist Peter of Blois, as well as stanzas by German lyric poets. More than half these poems are preserved nowhere else.

A selection from Carmina Burana first appeared in Victorian England in 1884 under the provocative title Wine, Women and Song. The title Carmina Burana remains fixed in the popular imagination today, conjured vividly by Carl Orff's famous cantata--no Medieval Latin lyrics are better known throughout the world. This new presentation of the medieval classic in its entirety makes the anthology accessible in two volumes to Latin lovers and English readers alike.

Described by Cornel West as "a towering public intellectual and the leading universalist philosopher of his generation," Forrest Church was one of the preeminent liberal theologians of our time. His final gift, The Cathedral of the World, draws from the entire span of Church's life's work to leave behind a clear statement of his universalist theology and liberal faith. Giving new voice to the power of liberal religion, Church invites all seekers to enter the Cathedral of the World, home to many windows but only one Light.

For two centuries, Catholicism has played a profound and largely unexamined role in America's political and intellectual life. Emphasizing the communal over the individual, protections for workers and the poor over market freedoms, and faith in eternal verities over pragmatic compromises, the Catholic worldview has been a constant foil to liberalism. "Catholicism and American Freedom" is a groundbreaking tale of strange bedfellows and bitter conflicts over issues such as slavery, public education, economic reform, the movies, contraception, and abortion. It is an international story, as both liberals and conservatives were influenced by ideas and events abroad, from the 1848 revolutions to the rise of Fascism and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, to papal encyclicals and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s; and by the people, from scholarly Jesuits to working class Catholics, who immigrated from Europe and Latin America. McGreevy reveals how the individualist, and often vehemently anti-Catholic, inclinations of Protestant intellectuals shaped the debates over slavery and how Catholics, although they were the first to acknowledge the moral equality of black people and disavowed segregation of churches, even in the South, still had difficulty arguing against the hierarchy and tradition represented by slavery. He sheds light on the unsung heroes of American history like Orestes Browson, editor of "Brownson's Quarterly Review," who suffered the disdain of abolitionists for being a Catholic, and the antagonism of conservative Catholics for being an abolitionist; and later heroes like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, who fought to modernize the Church, increased attention to human rights, and urged the Church "to adapt herself vitally . . . to what is valid in American democratic development." Putting recent scandals in the Church and the media's response in a much larger context, this stimulating history is a model of nuanced scholarship and provocative reading."

Reflections by 13 men and women, conveniently gathered into one volume, encompass the works of Angela of Foligno, John Ruysbroeck, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, John Tauler, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Walter Hilton, Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales.

The line that separated Eastern Christendom from Western on the medieval map is similar to the "iron curtain" of recent times. Linguistic barriers, political divisions, and liturgical differences combined to isolate the two cultures from each other. Except for such episodes as the schism between East and West or the Crusades, the development of non-Western Christendom has been largely ignored by church historians. In The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, Jaroslav Pelikan explains the divisions between Eastern and Western Christendom, and identifies and describes the development of the distinctive forms taken by Christian doctrine in its Greek, Syriac, and early Slavic expression.

"It is a pleasure to salute this masterpiece of exposition. . . . The book flows like a great river, slipping easily past landscapes of the utmost diversity--the great Christological controversies of the seventh century, the debate on icons in the eighth and ninth, attitudes to Jews, to Muslims, to the dualistic heresies of the high Middle Ages, to the post-Reformation churches of Western Europe. . . . His book succeeds in being a study of the Eastern Christian religion as a whole."--Peter Brown and Sabine MacCormack, New York Review of Books

"The second volume of Professor Pelikan's monumental work on The Christian Tradition is the most comprehensive historical treatment of Eastern Christian thought from 600 to 1700, written in recent years. . . . Pelikan's reinterpretation is a major scholarly and ecumenical event."--John Meyendorff

"Displays the same mastery of ancient and modern theological literature, the same penetrating analytical clarity and balanced presentation of conflicting contentions, that made its predecessor such an intellectual treat."--Virgina Quarterly Review