The doctrine of "the covenant of works" arose to prominence in the late sixteenth century and quickly became a regular feature in Reformed thought. Theologians believed that when God first created man he made a covenant with him: all Adam had to do was obey God's command to not eat from the tree of knowledge and obey God's command to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth. The reward for Adam's obedience was profound: eternal life for him and his offspring. The consequences of his disobedience were dire: God would visit death upon Adam and his descendants. In the covenant of works, Adam was not merely an individual but served as a public person, the federal head of the human race. The Covenant of Works explores the origins of the doctrine of God's covenant with Adam and traces it back to the inter-testamental period, through the patristic and middle ages, and to the Reformation. The doctrine has an ancient pedigree and was not solely advocated by Reformed theologians. The book traces the doctrine's development in the seventeenth century and its reception in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Fesko explores the reasons why the doctrine came to be rejected by some, even in the Reformed tradition, arguing that interpretive methods influenced by Enlightenment thought caused theologians to question the doctrine's scriptural legitimacy.

The myths of Greece and Rome have provided us with timeless tales of the ancient past, when the world was young and the gods and goddesses shared it with men and women. Classical Mythology provides a complete panoply of these colorful myths, including those that have become familiar references in countless works of world literature: Prometheus’s theft of fire The twelve labors of Hercules Icarus’s flight too close to the sun Jason’s recovery of the Golden Fleece Perseus’s slaying of the Medusa These myths have inspired some of the greatest paintings and sculptures in western art. This volume is illustrated with more than sixty reproductions of classical art that span five centuries and bring these tales of heroes and heroines and their adventures with the gods and goddesses of antiquity vividly to life.  

"None of that people should be spared, not even the babe in its cradle." With these chilling words, the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan declared his intention to destroy the Ismailis, one of the most intellectually and politically significant Muslim communities of medieval Islamdom. The massacres that followed convinced observers that this powerful voice of Shi'i Islam had been forever silenced. Little was heard of these people for centuries, until their recent and dramatic emergence from obscurity. Today they exist as a dynamic and thriving community established in over twenty-five countries. Yet the interval between what appeared to have been their total annihilation, and their modern, seemingly phoenix-like renaissance, has remained shrouded in mystery. Drawing on an astonishing array of sources gathered from many countries around the globe, The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation is a richly nuanced and compelling study of the murkiest portion of this era. In probing the period from the dark days when the Ismaili fortresses in Iran fell before the marauding Mongol hordes, to the emergence at Anjudan of the Ismaili Imams who provided a spiritual centre to a scattered community, this work explores the motivations, passions and presumptions of historical actors. With penetrating insight, Shafique N. Virani examines the rich esoteric thought that animated the Ismailis and enabled them to persevere. A work of remarkable erudition, this landmark book is essential reading for scholars of Islamic history and spirituality, Shi'ism and Iran. Both specialists and informed lay readers will take pleasure not only in its scholarly perception, but in its lively anecdotes, quotations of delightful poetry, and gripping narrative style. This is an extraordinary book of historical beauty and spiritual vision.

This exciting collection of papers is an international, ecumenical, and interdisciplinary study of Jesus' resurrection that emerged from the "Resurrection Summit" meeting held in New York at Easter of 1996. The contributions represent mainstream scholarship on biblical studies, fundamental theology, systematic theology, philosophy, moral theology, and homiletics. Contributors represent a wide range of viewpoints and denominations and include Richard Swinburne, Janet Martin Soskice, Peter F. Carnley, Sarah Coakley, Willian Lane Craig, William P. Alston, M. Shawn Copeland, Paul Rhodes Eddy, Francis Schussler Fiorenza, Brian V. Johnstone, Carey C. Newman, Alan G. Padgett, Pheme Perkins, Alan F. Segal, Marguerite Shuster, and John Wilkins. Combined, they offer a timely, wide ranging, and well balanced work on the central truth of Christianity."

Though clergy are clearly important religious leaders within American society, their significance extends far beyond the church doors. Clergy are also important figures within American public life. They are so, in part, because houses of worship stand at the center of American civic life. Gathering to worship is a religious activity, but it is also an important public activity in that, beyond its religious qualities, congregational life brings together relatively diverse individuals for sustained periods of time, frequently on a fairly regular basis. Based on data gathered through national surveys of clergy across four mainline Protestant (the Disciples of Christ; the Presbyterian Church, USA; the Reformed Church in America; and the United Methodist Church) and three evangelical Protestant denominations (the Assemblies of God; the Christian Reformed Church; and, the Southern Baptist Convention), Pastors and Public Life examines the changing sociological, theological, and political characteristics of American Protestant clergy. In this book, Corwin E. Smidt examines what has changed and what has stayed the same with regard to the clergy's social composition, theological beliefs, and perspectives related to the public witness of the church within American society across three different points in time over the past twenty-plus years. Smidt focuses on the relationship between clergy and politics, particularly clergy positions on issues of American public policy, norms on what is appropriate for clergy to do politically, as well as the clergy's political cue-giving, their pronouncements on public policy, and political activism. Written in a manner that makes it accessible to pastors and church laity-yet of interest and value to scholars as well-Pastors and Public Life constitutes the first and only published study that systematically examines such changes and continuity over time.

Volume XXIV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the question of relations between Jews and Protestants in modern times. One of the four major branches of Christianity, Protestantism is perhaps the most difficult to write about; it has innumerable sects and churches within it, from the loosely organized Religious Society of Friends to the conservative Evangelicals of the Bible Belt. Different strands of Protestantism hold vastly different views on theology, social problems, and politics. These views play out in differing attitudes and relationships between mainstream Protestant churches and Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel. In this volume, established scholars from multiple disciplines and various countries delve into these essential questions of the "Protestant-Jewish conundrum." The discussion begins with a trenchant analysis of the historical framework in which Protestant ideas towards Jews and Judaism were formed. Contributors delve into diverse topics including the attitudes of the Evangelical movement toward Jews and Israel; Protestant reactions to Mel Gibson's blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ."; German-Protestant behavior during and after Nazi era; and mainstream Protestant attitudes towards Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict.. Taken as a whole, this compendium presents discussions and questions central to the ongoing development of Jewish-Protestant relations. Studies in Contemporary Jewry seeks to provide its readers with up-to-date and accessible scholarship on questions of interest in the general field of modern Jewish studies. Studies in Contemporary Jewry presents new approaches to the scholarly work of the latest generation of researchers working on Jewish history, sociology, demography, political science, and culture.

This book examines the importance of the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Toleration Act to the development of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Most historians have considered these events to be of little significance in this connection. From Persecution to Toleration focuses on the importance of the Toleration Act for contemporaries, and also explores its wider historical context and impact. Taking its point of departure from the intolerance of the sixteenth century, the book goes on to emphasize what is here seen to be the very substantial contribution of the Toleration Act for the development of religious freedom in England. It demonstrates that his freedom was initially limited to Protestant Nonconformists, immigrant as well as English, and that it quickly came in practice to include Catholics, Jews, and anti-Trinitarians. Contributors: John Bossy, Patrick Collinson, John Dunn, Graham Gibbs, Mark Goldie, Ole Peter Grell, Robin Gwynn, Jonathan I. Israel, David S. Katz, Andrew Pettegree, Richard H. Popkin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Nicholas Tyacke, and B. R. White.

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change?
In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy offers illuminating and surprising answers to these questions. Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was understood as the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry in the community. In the early Middle Ages, women served in at least four central ministries: episcopa (woman bishop), presbytera (woman priest), deaconess and abbess. The ordinations of women continued until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries radically altered the definition of ordination. These reforms not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past.
With profound implications for how women are viewed in Christian history, and for current debates about the role of women in the church, The Hidden History of Women's Ordinationoffers new answers to an old question and overturns a long-held erroneous belief.

Based in the idea that social phenomena are best studied through the lens of different disciplinary perspectives, Empty Churches studies the growing number of individuals who no longer affiliate with a religious tradition. Co-editors Jan Stets, a social psychologist, and James Heft, a historian of theology, bring together leading scholars in the fields of sociology, developmental psychology, gerontology, political science, history, philosophy, and pastoral theology. The scholars in this volume explore the phenomenon by drawing from each other's work to understand better the multi-faceted nature of non-affiliation today. They explore the complex impact that non-affiliation has on individuals and the wider society, and what the future looks like for religion in America. The book also features insightful perspectives from parents of young adults and interviews with pastors struggling with this issue who address how we might address this trend. Empty Churches provides a rich and thoughtful analysis on non- affiliation in American society from multiple scholarly perspectives. The increasing growth of non-affiliation threatens the vitality and long-term stability of religious institutions, and this book offers guidance on maintaining the commitment and community at the heart of these institutions.

Although their statues grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, few tourists are aware that the founding ministers of Hartford's First Church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (after whose English birthplace the city is named), carried a distinctive version of Puritanism to the Connecticut wilderness. Shaped by Protestant interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine, and largely developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and as "godly" lecturers in English parish churches, Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Focusing especially on Hooker, Baird Tipson explores the contributions of William Perkins, Alexander Richardson, and John Rogers to his thought and practice, the art and content of his preaching, and his determination to define and impose a distinctive notion of conversion on his hearers. Hooker's colleague Samuel Stone composed The Whole Body of Divinity, a comprehensive treatment of his thought (and the first systematic theology written in the American colonies). Stone's Whole Body, virtually unknown to scholars, not only provides the indispensable intellectual context for the religious development of early Connecticut but also offers a more comprehensive description of the Puritanism of early New England than anything previously available. Hartford Puritanism argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism, one where Hartford's founding ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, both fully embraced and even harshened Calvin's double predestination.

India is frequently represented as the quintessential land of religion. Johannes Quack challenges this representation through an examination of the contemporary Indian rationalist organizations: groups who affirm the values and attitudes of atheism, humanism, or free-thinking. Quack shows the rationalists' emphasis on maintaining links to atheism and materialism in ancient India and outlines their strong ties to the intellectual currents of modern European history. At the heart of Disenchanting India is an ethnographic study of the organization ''Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti'' (Organization for the Eradication of Superstition), based in the Indian State of Maharashtra. Quack gives a nuanced account of the Organization's specific "mode of unbelief. " He describes the group's efforts to encourage a scientific temper and to combat beliefs and practices that it regards as superstitious. Quack also shows the role played by rationalism in the day-to-day lives of the Organization's members, as well as the Organization's controversial position within Indian society. Disenchanting India contributes crucial insight into the nature of rationalism in the intellectual life and cultural politics of India.

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation-the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics, particularly such texts as Nagarjuna's Jewel Garland of Advice (Ratnavali), Aryadeva's Four Hundred Verses (Catuhsataka), and especially Santideva's How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicaryavatara) and its commentaries. All of these texts reflect the Madhyamaka tradition of philosophy, and all emphasize both the imperative to cultivate an attitude of universal care (karuna) grounded in the realization of emptiness, impermanence, independence and the absence of any self in persons or other phenomena. This position is morally very attractive, but raises an important problem: if all phenomena, including persons and actions, are only conventionally real, can moral injunctions or principles be binding, or does the conventional status of the reality we inhabit condemn us to an ethical relativism or nihilism? In Moonshadows, the international collective known as the Cowherds addresses an analogous problem in the domain of epistemology and argues that the Madhyamaka tradition has the resources to develop a robust account of truth and knowledge within the context of conventional reality. The essays explore a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory so as to make sense of the genuine force of morality. The volume combines careful textual analysis and doctrinal exposition with philosophical reconstruction and reflection, and considers a variety of ways to understand the structure of Mahayana Buddhist ethics.

"Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God, ' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book."
-- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America."
--Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University
Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world."

One Unitarian preacher prefaces his opposition to the invasion of Iraq by insisting that meaningful religion is a process of "ongoing revelation." He pits this essential "liberal" tenet against the closed-canon biblicism of "the Fundamentalists who find in their Holy Book the blueprints for war, who discover in the prejudices of ancient peoples the legitimization of oppression today," and concludes by invoking Ralph Waldo Emerson as his authority on the necessity of continuing revelation. Elsewhere, a conservative evangelical Christian observes the Episcopalian convention that nearly dissolved over the ordination of a homosexual bishop and is disgusted by the "ease with which ... clergy and laity speak of an open canon." We must be, he sarcastically suggests, "all Latter-day Saints now." Why did these two men revert to religious innovations of the antebellum era - Transcendentalism in one case, Mormonism in the other - to frame their understanding of contemporary religious struggles? David Holland argues that the generation from which Emerson and Mormonism emerged might be considered the United States' revelatory moment. From Shakers to Hicksite Quakers, from the obscure African American prophetess Rebecca Jackson to the celebrated theologian Horace Bushnell, people throughout antebellum Americans advocated the idea of an open canon. Holland tells their stories and considers their place within the main currents of American thought. He shows that in the antebellum era, the notion of an open canon appeared to many to be a timely idea, and that this period marked the beginning of a distinctive and persistent engagement with the possibility of continuing revelation. This idea would attain deep significance in the intellectual history of the United States. Sacred Borders deftly analyzes the positions of the most prominent advocates of continuing revelation, and engages the essential issues to which the concept of an open canon was inextricably bound. Holland offers a new perspective of the matter of cultural authority in a democratized society, the tension between subjective truths and communal standards, a rising historical consciousness, the expansion of print capitalism, and the principle of religious freedom.

The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order. Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.

Evangelicals are increasingly turning their attention toward issues such as the environment, international human rights, economic development, racial reconciliation, and urban renewal. This marks an expansion of the social agenda advanced by the Religious Right over the past few decades. For outsiders to evangelical culture, this trend complicates simplistic stereotypes. For insiders, it brings contention over what "true" evangelicalism means today. The New Evangelical Social Engagement brings together an impressive interdisciplinary team of scholars to map this new religious terrain and spell out its significance. The volume's introduction describes the broad outlines of this "new evangelicalism." The editors identify its key elements, trace its historical lineage, account for the recent changes taking place within evangelicalism, and highlight the implications of these changes for politics, civic engagement, and American religion. Part One of the book discusses important groups and trends: emerging evangelicals, the New Monastics, an emphasis on social justice, Catholic influences, gender dynamics and the desire to rehabilitate the evangelical identity, and evangelical attitudes toward the new social agenda. Part Two focuses on specific issues: the environment, racial reconciliation, abortion, international human rights, and global poverty. Part Three contains reflections on the new evangelical social engagement by three leading scholars in the fields of American religious history, sociology of religion, and Christian ethics.

Although puritans in 17th-century New England lived alongside both Native Americans and Africans, the white New Englanders imagined their neighbors as something culturally and intellectually distinct from themselves. Legally and practically, they saw people of color as simultaneously human and less than human, things to be owned. Yet all of these people remained New Englanders, regardless of the color of their skin, and this posed a problem for puritans. In order to fulfill John Winthrop's dream of a "city on a hill," New England's churches needed to contain all New Englanders. To deal with this problem, white New Englanders generally turned to familiar theological constructs to redeem not only themselves and their actions (including their participation in race-based slavery) but also to redeem the colonies' Africans and Native Americans. Richard A. Bailey draws on diaries, letters, sermons, court documents, newspapers, church records, and theological writings to tell the story of the religious and racial tensions in puritan New England.

One of the most widely read and studied texts produced in Late Antiquity is the prison diary of a young woman who was martyred in the year 202 or 203 C.E. in Carthage, as part of a civic celebration. Her name was Perpetua, and, despite her honorable marriage and her baby son, she refused to recant her faith after she was arrested with a group of Christians. Imprisoned with her was a slave girl called Felicitas, who was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Felicitas gave birth just before she entered the arena, where the two women were mauled by wild animals and died with their fellow inmates. A description of their heroic deaths is appended to the diary by an editor, who tells us that, as they died, Perpetua and Felicitas arranged each other's clothes modestly and finally bid farewell in this life with the kiss of peace. This remarkable document survives in one Greek manuscript and nine Latin versions. Perpetua's story is read in numerous courses and, thanks to the Frontline (PBS) special "From Jesus to Christ," it has found a growing popular audience. Thomas Heffernan's new edition of this extraordinary work contains much that has never been done before, including a new English translation and the first detailed historical commentary in English on the entire narrative of the Passion. It also includes newly edited versions of the Latin manuscripts and - rarer still - a version of the Greek manuscript. He concludes the book with a description of all of the known manuscripts and thorough scholarly indices of the text itself.

In The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Kenneth Baxter Wolf offers a study and translation of the testimony given by witnesses at the canonization hearings of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who died in 1231 in Marburg, Germany, at the age of twenty-four. The bulk of the depositions were taken from people who claimed to have been healed by the intercession of this new saint. Their descriptions of their maladies and their efforts to secure relief at Elizabeth's shrine in Marburg provide the modern reader not only with a detailed, inside look at the genesis of a saint's cult, but also with an unusually clear window into the lives and hopes of ordinary people living in Germany at the time.
Beyond testimony about her miracles, the papal commissioners also heard witnesses speak to the holiness of Elizabeth's life. Four women who knew Elizabeth from her arrival at the Wartburg castle in Thuringia as the future wife of Landgrave Ludwig IV to her death as a caregiver in the hospital that she founded in Marburg provide vivid vignettes about her life. Together with the testimony of Elizabeth's confessor and guardian, Conrad of Marburg, they capture in words the Hungarian princess's tireless, creative efforts to "cure" her life of privilege with its opposite: a life of voluntary deprivation and direct service to the poor and sick.

The essays in this volume offer a groundbreaking comparative analysis of religious education, and state policies towards religious education, in seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole. They pose a challenging and crucial question: can religious education effect positive civic change and foster solidarity across different ethnic and religious communities? In many traditional societies and increasingly in secular European societies, our place in creation, the meaning of good and evil, and the definition of the good life, virtue, and moral action, are all addressed primarily in religious terms. Despite the promise of the Enlightenment and of the nineteenth-century ideology of progress, it seems impossible to come to grips with these issues without recourse to religious language, traditions, and frames of reference. Unsurprisingly, countries approach religious education in dramatically different ways, in keeping with their respective understandings of their own religious traditions and the relative saliency of different ethno-religious groups within the polity. Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism addresses a pervasive problem: in most cases, it is impossible to provide a framework of meaning, let alone religious meaning, without at the same time invoking language of community and belonging, or of borders and otherness. This volume offers in-depth analysis of such pluralistic countries as Bulgaria, Israel, Malaysia, and Turkey, as well as Cyprus-a country split along lines of ethno-religious difference. The contributors also examine the connection between religious education and the terms of citizenship in the EU, France, and the USA, illuminating the challenges facing us as we seek to educate our citizenry in an age of religious resurgence and global politics.

In the face of ongoing religious conflicts and unending culture wars, what are we to make of liberalism's promise that it alone can arbitrate between church and state? In this wide-ranging study, John Perry examines the roots of our thinking on religion and politics, placing the early-modern founders of liberalism in conversation with today's theologians and political philosophers.
From the story of Antigone to debates about homosexuality and bans on religious attire, it is clear that liberalism's promise to solve all theo-political conflict is a false hope. The philosophy connecting John Locke to John Rawls seeks a world free of tragic dilemmas, where there can be no Antigones. Perry rejects this as an illusion. Disputes like the culture wars cannot be adequately comprehended as border encroachments presided over by an impartial judge. Instead, theo-political conflict must be considered a contest of loyalties within each citizen and believer. Drawing on critics of Rawls ranging from Michael Sandel to Stanley Hauerwas, Perry identifies what he calls a 'turn to loyalty' by those who recognize the inadequacy of our usual thinking on the public place of religion. The Pretenses of Loyalty offers groundbreaking analysis of the overlooked early work of Locke, where liberalism's founder himself opposed toleration.
Perry discovers that Locke made a turn to loyalty analogous to that of today's communitarian critics. Liberal toleration is thus more sophisticated, more theologically subtle, and ultimately more problematic than has been supposed. It demands not only governmental neutrality (as Rawls believed) but also a reworked political theology. Yet this must remain under suspicion for Christians because it places religion in the service of the state. Perry concludes by suggesting where we might turn next, looking beyond our usual boundaries to possibilities obscured by the liberalism we have inherited.

You believe that there is a book (or a computer screen) in front of you because it seems visually that way. I believe that I ate cereal for breakfast because I seem to remember eating it for breakfast. And we believe that torturing for fun is morally wrong and that 2+2=4 because those claims seem intuitively obvious. In each of these cases, it is natural to think that our beliefs are not only based on a seeming, but also that they are justifiably based on these seemings-at least assuming there is no relevant counterevidence.
These considerations have prompted many to endorse some version of dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism. These views hold that, in the absence of defeaters, a seeming that P provides justification to believe P. The main difference is that dogmatism is restricted to some domain, often perception, and phenomenal conservatism is intended to apply to all seemings. Critics worry that such views run into problems with traditional Bayesianism and that they are too permissive, in part because of their implications regarding cognitive penetration.
The primary aim of this book is to understand how seemings relate to justification and whether some version of dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism can be sustained. In addition to addressing each of these issues, this volume also addresses a wide range of related topics, including intuitions, the nature of perceptual content, access internalism, and the epistemology of testimony and disagreement.

John Finnis is a pioneer in the development of a new yet classically-grounded theory of natural law. His work offers a systematic philosophy of practical reasoning and moral choosing that addresses the great questions of the rational foundations of ethical judgments, the identification of moral norms, human agency, and the freedom of the will, personal identity, the common good, the role and functions of law, the meaning of justice, and the relationship of morality and politics to religion and the life of faith. The core of Finnis' theory, articulated in his seminal work Natural Law and Natural Rights, has profoundly influenced later work in the philosophy of law and moral and political philosophy, while his contributions to the ethical debates surrounding nuclear deterrence, abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, and religious freedom have powerfully demonstrated the practical implications of his natural law theory. This volume, which gathers eminent moral, legal, and political philosophers, and theologians to engage with John Finnis' work, offers the first sustained, critical study of Finnis' contribution across the range of disciplines in which rational and morally upright choosing is a central concern. It includes a substantial response from Finnis himself, in which he comments on each of their 27 essays and defends and develops his ideas and arguments.

Winner of an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today Book Awards, History/Biography category
On January 17, 1776, one week after Thomas Paine published his incendiary pamphlet Common Sense, Connecticut minister Samuel Sherwood preached an equally patriotic sermon. "God Almighty, with all the powers of heaven, are on our side," Sherwood said, voicing a sacred justification for war that Americans would invoke repeatedly throughout the struggle for independence.
In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James Byrd offers the first comprehensive analysis of how American revolutionaries defended their patriotic convictions through scripture. Byrd shows that the Bible was a key text of the American Revolution. Indeed, many colonists saw the Bible as primarily a book about war. They viewed God as not merely sanctioning violence but actively participating in combat, playing a decisive role on the battlefield. When war came, preachers and patriots alike turned to scripture not only for solace but for exhortations to fight. Such scripture helped amateur soldiers overcome their natural aversion to killing, conferred on those who died for the Revolution the halo of martyrdom, and gave Americans a sense of the divine providence of their cause. Many histories of the Revolution have noted the connection between religion and war, but Sacred Scripture, Sacred War is the first to provide a detailed analysis of specific biblical texts and how they were used, especially in making the patriotic case for war. Combing through more than 500 wartime sources, which include more than 17,000 biblical citations, Byrd shows precisely how the Bible shaped American war, and how war in turn shaped Americans' view of the Bible.
Brilliantly researched and cogently argued, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War sheds new light on the American Revolution.