Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of how Amerindian epistemology and ontology concerning indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon have spread to Western societies, and of how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon. Ayahuasca use has spread far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a variety of legal and cultural responses in the countries to which it has spread. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenous people and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies for their marginalized position. Some essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in post-colonial contexts, and the combination of shamanism with a network of health and spiritually related services. Finally, Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond addresses the topic of identity hybridization in global societies. The rich ethnographies and extensive analysis of these essays will allow deeper understanding of the role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modern societies.

This study reconstructs the history of a significant crisis in Christian-Jewish relations: the attempt to confiscate and destroy all Jewish books in Renaissance Germany. This unprecedented effort to end the practice of Judaism throughout the empire was challenged by Jewish communities and also, in an unexpected move, by Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), the founder of Christian Hebrew studies. Reuchlin had revolutionized the Christian study of the Bible with his Hebrew grammar. In 1510 he published an extensive, impassioned, and successful defense of Jewish writings and Jewish legal rights against the book pogrom, later acknowledged by Josel of Rosheim, the leader of German Jewry, as a ''miracle within a miracle.'' The fury that greeted Reuchlin's defense of Judaism resulted in a protracted heresy trial that polarized Europe, ultimately fostering a receptive environment for the nascent Reformation movement. The legal and theological battle over charges that Reuchlin's opinions were "impermissibly favorable to Jews," a conflict that elicited intervention on both sides from the most powerful political and intellectual leaders throughout Renaissance Europe, formed a new context for Christian reflection on the status of Judaism. David Price offers insight into important new Christian discourses on Judaism and anti-Semitism that emerged from the clash of Renaissance humanism with this potent anti-Jewish campaign, as well as an innovative analysis of Luther's virulent anti-Semitism in the context and aftermath of the Reuchlin Affair. His book is a valuable contribution to study of an important and complex development in European history: Christians acquiring accurate knowledge of Judaism and its history.

Although trade connects distant people and regions, bringing cultures closer together through the exchange of material goods and ideas, it has not always led to unity and harmony. From the era of the Crusades to the dawn of colonialism, exploitation and violence characterized many trading ventures, which required vessels and convoys to overcome tremendous technological obstacles and merchants to grapple with strange customs and manners in a foreign environment. Yet despite all odds, experienced traders and licensed brokers, as well as ordinary people, travelers, pilgrims, missionaries, and interlopers across the globe, concocted ways of bartering, securing credit, and establishing relationships with people who did not speak their language, wore different garb, and worshipped other gods. Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900 focuses on trade across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium. Written by an international team of scholars, the essays in this volume examine a wide range of commercial exchanges, from first encounters between strangers from different continents to everyday transactions between merchants who lived in the same city yet belonged to diverse groups. In order to broach the intriguing yet surprisingly neglected subject of how the relationship between trade and religion developed historically, the authors consider a number of interrelated questions: When and where was religion invoked explicitly as part of commercial policies? How did religious norms affect the everyday conduct of trade? Why did economic imperatives, political goals, and legal institutions help sustain commercial exchanges across religious barriers in different times and places? When did trade between religious groups give way to more tolerant views of "the other " and when, by contrast, did it coexist with hostile images of those decried as "infidels "? Exploring captivating examples from across the world and spanning the course of the second millennium, this groundbreaking volume sheds light on the political, economic, and juridical underpinnings of cross-cultural trade as it emerged or developed at various times and places, and reflects on the cultural and religious significance of the passage of strange persons and exotic objects across the many frontiers that separated humankind in medieval and early modern times.

This is a brief, accessible introduction to the thought of the philosopher John Buridan (ca. 1295-1361). Little is known about Buridan's life, most of which was spent studying and then teaching at the University of Paris. Buridan's works are mostly by-products of his teaching. They consist mainly of commentaries on Aristotle, covering the whole extent of Aristotelian philosophy, ranging from logic to metaphysics, to natural science, to ethics and politics. Aside from these running commentaries on Aristotle's texts, Buridan wrote influential question-commentaries. These were a typical genre of the medieval scholastic output, in which the authors systematically and thoroughly discussed the most problematic issues raised by the text they were lecturing on. The question-format allowed Buridan to work out in detail his characteristically nominalist take on practically all aspects of Aristotelian philosophy, using the conceptual tools he developed in his works on logic. Buridan's influence in the late Middle Ages can hardly be overestimated. His ideas quickly spread not only through his own works, but to an even larger extent through the work of his students and younger colleagues, such as Nicholas Oresme, Marisilius of Inghen, and Albert of Saxony, who in turn became very influential themselves, and turned Buridan's ideas into standard textbook material in the curricula of many late medieval European universities. With the waning of scholasticism Buridan's fame quickly faded. Gyula Klima argues, however, that many of Buridan's academic concerns are strikingly similar to those of modern philosophy and his work sometimes quite directly addresses modern philosophical questions.

The academic study of death rose to prominence during the 1960s. Courses on some aspect of death and dying can now be found at most institutions of higher learning. These courses tend to stress the psycho-social aspects of grief and bereavement, however, ignoring the religious elements inherent to the subject. This collection is the first to address the teaching of courses on death and dying from a religious-studies perspective.
The book is divided into seven sections. The hope is that this volume will not only assist teachers in religious studies departments to prepare to teach unfamiliar and emotionally charged material, but also help to unify a field that is now widely scattered across several disciplines.

Written from the perspective of the various denominations that thrived in the 19th century, this comprehensive survey of the middle period in America's religious past actually starts a little earlier, in the 1780s. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the citizens of the newly-minted republic had to cope with more than the havoc wreaked on churches and denominations by the war. They also tasted for the first time the effects of two novel ideas incorporated in the Constitution and the First Amendment: the separation of church and state and the freedom to practice any religion.

Grant Wacker takes readers on a lively tour of the numerous religions and the major historical challenges--from the Civil War and westward expansion to immigration and the Industrial Revolution--that defined the century. The narrative focuses on the rapid growth of evangelical Protestants, in denominations such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, and their competition for dominance with new immigrants' religions such as Catholicism and Judaism. The author discusses issues ranging from temperance to Sunday schools and introduces the personalities--sometimes colorful, sometimes saintly, and often both--of the men and women who shaped American religion in the 19th century, including Methodist bishop Francis Asbury, ex-slave Sojourner Truth, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

Religion in American Life explores the evolution, character, and dynamics of organized religion in America from 1500 to the present day. Written by distinguished religious historians, these books weave together the varying stories that compose the religious fabric of the United States, from Puritanism to alternative religious practices. Primary source material coupled with handsome illustrations and lucid text make these books essential in any exploration of America's diverse nature. Each book includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and index.

Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass - his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines - as the key to the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the common view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic critique of modernity, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

Most of us believe everything happens for a reason. Whether it is "God's will," "karma", or "fate," we want to believe that an overarching purpose undergirds everything, and that nothing in the world, especially a disaster or tragedy, is a random, meaningless event. Abraham's Dice explores the interplay between chance and randomness, as well as between providence and divine action in the monotheistic religious traditions, looking at how their interaction has been conceptualized as our understanding of the workings of nature has changed. This lively historical conversation has generated intense and engaging theological debates, and provocative responses from science: what of the history of our universe, where chance and law have played out in complex ways? Or the evolution of life, where random mutations have challenged attempts to find purpose within evolution and convinced many that human beings are a "glorious accident." The enduring belief that everything happens for a reason is examined through a conversation with major scholars, among them holders of prestigious chairs at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the University of Basel, as well as several Gifford lecturers, and two Templeton prize winners. Now, as never before, confident scientific assertions that the world embodies a profound contingency are challenging theological claims that God acts providentially in the world. The random and meandering path of evolution is widely used as an argument that God did not create life. Organized historically, Abraham's Dice provides a wide-ranging scientific, theological, and biblical foundation to address the question of divine action in a world shot through with contingency.

The United States has never had an officially established church. Since the time of the first British colonists, it has instead developed a strong civil religion that melds national symbols to symbols of God. In a deft exploration of American civil religious symbols ranging from the Liberty Bell and Vietnam Memorial to Mount Rushmore and Disney World, Peter Gardella explains how the places, objects, and symbols that Americans hold sacred came into being and how they have changed over time. In addition to examining revered historical sites and structures, he analyzes such sacred texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Kennedy Inaugural, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and shows how five patriotic songs-''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' ''America the Beautiful,'' ''God Bless America,'' and ''This Land Is Your Land''-have been elevated into hymns. Arguing that certain values-personal freedom, political democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance-have held American civil religion together, this book chronicles the numerous forms those values have taken, from Jamestown and Plymouth to the September 11, 2001, Memorial in New York.

Stories of Gods and Monsters   Scandinavians of the Viking era explored the mysteries of life through their sagas. Folklorist Helene Adeline Guerber brings to life the gods and goddesses, giants and dwarves, and warriors and monsters of these stories in her classic Tales of Norse Mythology.   Ranging from the comic to the tragic, these legends are packed with such legendary figures as the beautiful and fierce Valkyries, the wily trickster Loki, and the mighty god Thor. They tell of passion, love, friendship, pride, courage, strength, loyalty, and betrayal.   Packed with colorful illustrations, Tales of Norse Mythology is necessary reading for anybody who is interested in learning more about Nordic legends, or who simply likes a great story.  

Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), also known as St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, is popularly named the Little Flower. A Carmelite nun, doctor of the church, and patron of a score of causes, she was famously acclaimed by Pope Pius X as the greatest saint of modern times. Therese is not only one of the most beloved saints of the Catholic Church but perhaps the most revered woman of the modern age. Pope John Paul II described her as a living icon of God. Her autobiography Story of a Soul has been translated into sixty languages. Having long transcended national and linguistic boundaries, she has crossed even religious ones. As daughter of Allah, she is venerated widely in Islamic cultures. Therese has been the subject of innumerable biographies and treatises, ranging from hagiographies to attacks on her intelligence and mental health. Thomas R. Nevin has gained access to many untapped archival materials and previously unpublished photographs. As a consequence he is able to offer a much fuller and more accurate portrait of the saint's life and thought than his predecessors. He explores the dynamics of her family life and the early development of her spirituality. He draws extensively on the correspondence of her mother and documents her influence on Thereses autobiography and spirituality. He charts the development of Thereses career as a writer. He gives close attention to her poetry and plays usually dismissed as undistinguished and argues that they have great value as texts by which she addressed and informed her Carmelite community. He delves into the French medical literature of the time, in an effort to understand how the tuberculosis of which she died at the age of 24 was treated and lamentably mistreated. Finally, he offers a new understanding of Therese as a theologian for whom love, rather than doctrines and creeds, was the paramount value. Adding substantially to our knowledge and appreciation of this immensely popular and attractive figure, this book should appeal to many general readers as well as to scholars and students of modern Catholic history.

If you have ADHD, your brain doesn't work in the same way as a "normal" or neurotypical brain does because it's wired differently. You and others may see this difference in circuitry as somehow wrong or incomplete. It isn't. It does present you with significant challenges like time management, organization skills, forgetfulness, trouble completing tasks, mood swings, and relationship problems. In Your Brain's Not Broken, Dr. Tamara Rosier explains how ADHD affects every aspect of your life. You'll finally understand why you think, feel, and act the way you do. Dr. Rosier applies her years of coaching others to offer you the critical practical tools that can dramatically improve your life and relationships. Anyone with ADHD--as well as anyone who lives with or loves someone with ADHD--will find here a compassionate, encouraging guide to living well and with hope.

In her latest book, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her ground-breaking study, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (OUP 1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and others.
While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that - gender-specific or not - religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged, only so long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity.
Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that, more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.

After a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition-re-appropriated, reinvented, and sometimes instrumentalized-might play in a contemporary context. The Sage and the People, originally published in French, is the first comprehensive enquiry into the "Confucian revival" that began in China during the 2000s. It explores its various dimensions in fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual, and politics. Resulting from a research project that the two authors launched together in 2004, the book is based on the extensive anthropological fieldwork they carried out in various parts of China over the next eight years. Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval suspected, despite the prevailing academic consensus, that fragments of the Confucian tradition would sooner or later be re-appropriated within Chinese society and they decided to their hypothesis. The reality greatly exceeded their initial expectations, as the later years of their project saw the rapid development of what is now called the "Confucian revival" or "Confucian renaissance". Using a cross-disciplinary approach that links the fields of sociology, anthropology, and history, this book unveils the complexity of the "Confucian Revival" and the relations between the different actors involved, in addition to shedding light on likely future developments.

In Plantation Church, Noel Leo Erskine investigates the history of the Black Church as it developed both in the United States and the Caribbean after the arrival of enslaved Africans. Typically, when people talk about the "Black Church" they are referring to African-American churches in the U.S., but in fact, the majority of African slaves were brought to the Caribbean. It was there, Erskine argues, that the Black religious experience was born. The massive Afro-Caribbean population was able to establish a form of Christianity that preserved African Gods and practices, but fused them with Christian teachings, resulting in religions such as Cuba's Santeria. Despite their common ancestry, the Black religious experience in the U.S. was markedly different because African Americans were a political and cultural minority. The Plantation Church became a place of solace and resistance that provided its members with a sense of kinship, not only to each other but also to their ancestral past. Despite their common origins, the Caribbean and African American Church are almost never studied together. This book investigates the parallel histories of these two strands of the Black Church, showing where their historical ties remain strong and where different circumstances have led them down unexpectedly divergent paths. The result will be a work that illuminates the histories, theologies, politics, and practices of both branches of the Black Church. This project presses beyond the nation state framework and raises intercultural and interregional questions with implications for gender, race and class. Noel Leo Erskine employs a comparative method that opens up the possibility of rethinking the language and grammar of how Black churches have been understood in the Americas and extends the notion of church beyond the United States. The forging of a Black Christianity from sources African and European, allows for an examination of the meaning of church when people of African descent are culturally and politically in the majority. Erskine also asks the pertinent question of what meaning the church holds when the converse is true: when African Americans are a cultural and political minority.

Chapters 22 and 23 of 2 Kings tell the story of the religious reforms of the Judean King Josiah, who systematically destroyed the cult places and installations where his own people worshipped in order to purify Israelite religion and consolidate religious authority in the hands of the Jerusalem temple priests. This violent assertion of Israelite identity is portrayed as a pivotal moment in the development of monotheistic Judaism. Monroe argues that the use of cultic and ritual language in the account of the reform is key to understanding the history of the text's composition, and illuminates the essential, interrelated processes of textual growth and identity construction in ancient Israel. Until now, however, none of the scholarship on 2 Kings 22-23 has explicitly addressed the ritual dimensions of the text. By attending to the specific acts of defilement attributed to Josiah as they resonate within the larger framework of Israelite ritual, Monroe's work illuminates aspects of the text's language and fundamental interests that have their closest parallels in the priestly legal corpus known as the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26), as well as in other priestly texts that describe methods of eliminating contamination. She argues that these priestly-holiness elements reflect an early literary substratum that was generated close in time to the reign of Josiah, from within the same priestly circles that produced the Holiness Code. The priestly composition was reshaped in the hands of a post-Josianic, exilic or post-exilic Deuteronomistic historian who transformed his source material to suit his own ideological interests. The account of Josiah's reform is thus imprinted with the cultural and religious attitudes of two different sets of authors. Teasing these apart reveals a dialogue on sacred space, sanctified violence and the nature of Israelite religion that was formative in the development not only of 2 Kings 23, but of the historical books of the Bible more broadly.

As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English immigrants sailed for North America full of hope. However, the rocky soil and cold winters of New England quickly persuaded Puritan and Quaker colonists to convert their search for a physical paradise into a quest for Eden's less tangible perfections: temperate physiologies, intellectual enlightenment, linguistic purity, and harmonious social relations. Scholars have long acknowledged explorers' willingness to characterize the North American terrain in edenic terms, but Inventing Eden pushes beyond this geographical optimism to uncover the influence of Genesis on the iconic artifacts, traditions, and social movements that shaped seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American culture. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. From public nudity to Freemasonry, a belief in Eden affected every sphere of public life in colonial New England and, eventually, the new nation. Spanning two centuries and surveying the work of English and colonial thinkers from William Shakespeare and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that shaped American literature, identity, and culture.

On the Bondage of the Will was considered by Luther himself as one of his best writings. This particular treatise is a reply to Erasmus' work On the Freedom of the Will. Students of Luther and the Reformation period will welcome the helpful footnotes and many excerpts from Erasmus' writings that accompany On the Bondage of the Will.