Manichaeism is a world religion that was widespread between Europe and China in various periods between the 3rd and 12th/13th centuries. Sources in Central Asia led scholars to realize that under the influence of other religions, special syncretic forms of the religion had arisen. This volume contains the papers of an international workshop on the history of the genres and works of the literature of Central Asian Manichaeism.

'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the 'persecuted collective Jew', as one of its main targets. This political project has taken the notion of the 'new antisemitism' and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's 'working definition' of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organisations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticise Israel. The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimising Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicising principled opposition to antisemitism.

'This is Irish history seen anew, from below, bristling with practical lessons for working-class struggle today' - Eamonn McCann The 32 counties of Ireland were divided through imperial terror and gerrymandering. Partition was borne from a Tory strategy to defend the British Empire and has spawned a 'carnival of reaction' in Irish politics ever since. Over the last 100 years, conservative forces have dominated both states offering religious identity as a diversion from economic failures and inequality. Through a sharp analysis of the history of partition, Kieran Allen rejects the view that the 'two cultures' of Catholic and Protestant communities lock people into permanent antagonism. Instead, the sectarian states have kept its citizens divided through political and economic measures like austerity, competition for reduced services and low wages. Overturning conventional narratives, 32 Counties evokes the tradition of James Connolly and calls for an Irish unity movement from below to unite the North and the Republic into a secular, socialist and united Ireland.

Established in 1542, the Roman Inquisition operated through a network of almost fifty tribunals to combat heretical and heterodox threats within the papal territories. Whilst its theological, institutional and political aspects have been well-studied, until now no sustained work has been undertaken to understand the financial basis upon which it operated. Yet - as The Business of the Roman Inquisition in the Early Modern Era shows - the fiscal autonomy enjoyed by each tribunal was a major factor in determining how the Inquisition operated. For, as the flow of cash from Rome declined, each tribunal was forced to rely upon its own assets and resources to fund its work, resulting in a situation whereby tribunals increasingly came to resemble businesses. As each tribunal was permitted to keep a substantial proportion of the fines and confiscations it levied, questions quickly arose regarding the economic considerations that may have motivated the Inquisition's actions. Dr Maifreda argues that the Inquisition, with the need to generate sufficient revenue to continue working, had a clear incentive to target wealthy groups within society who could afford to yield up substantial revenues. Furthermore, as secular authorities also began to rely upon a levy on these revenues, the financial considerations of decisions regarding heresy prosecutions become even greater. Based upon a wealth of hitherto neglected primary sources from the Vatican and local Italian archives, Dr Maifreda reveals the underlying financial structures that played a vital part in the operations of the Roman Inquisition. By exploring the system of incentives and pressures that guided the actions of inquisitors in their procedural processes and choice of victims, a much clearer understanding of the Roman Inquisition emerges. This book is an English translation of I denari dell'inquisitore. Affari e giustizia di fede nell'Italia moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 2014).

With the theory of secularization increasingly contested as a plausible development at a global scale, this book focuses on the changing significance of the religious element within a context of complex diversity. This concept reflects the rationale behind the deep transformations that have taken place in the dynamics of social change, giving way to a recombination of social, political and cultural cleavages that overlap and compete for legitimacy at a national and supranational level. Far from disappearing with modernization, new forms of religious diversity have emerged that continue to demand specific policies from the state, putting pressure on the established practices of religious governance while creating a series of normative dilemmas. European societies have been a testing ground for many of these changes, but for decades Canada has been viewed as a pioneering country in the management of diversity, thus offering some interesting similarities and contrasts with the former. Accordingly, the book deals with the diverging routes that political secularization has followed in Europe and Canada, the patterns of religious governance that can be recognized in each region, and the practices for accommodating the demands of religious minorities concerning their legal regulation, the management of public institutions, and the provision of social services.

The Persecution of the Jews in Photographs, the Netherlands 1940-1945 is the first book of its kind on the subject. Both the professional photographers commissioned by the occupying forces and amateurs took moving photographs. On 10 May 1940, the day of the German invasion, there were 140,000 Jewish inhabitants living in the Netherlands. The full extent of their terrible fate only became known after the war: at least 102,000 were murdered, died of mistreatment or were worked to death in the Nazi camps. This tragedy has had a profound effect on Dutch society. Photographic archives and private collections were consulted in the Netherlands and abroad. Extensive background data was researched, which means that the moving pictures have an even greater force of expression. The result is an overwhelming collection of almost 400 photographs, accompanied by detailed captions.

Shinners, dissos, and dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican media activism since 1998 and the tumultuous years that followed the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated in a period in which schism and dissent underscored a return to violence for dissidents. Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling snap shot of a political ideology in transition as it is moulded by the forces of the Peace Process and often violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the 'bad old days' of the Troubles. -- .

This Handbook breaks new ground by addressing global security through the lens of religion and examining the role religion plays in both war and peace.

In recent years there has been a considerable upsurge of public concern about the role of religion in contemporary violence. However, other than historical materials, there has been a relative neglect of the subject of religion and security. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Security fills this gap in the literature by providing an interdisciplinary, comprehensive volume that helps non-specialists and experts alike understand how religion is both part of the problem and part of the solution to security challenges. Featuring contributions from many of the key thinkers in the field, the Handbook is organized into thematic sections, reflective of three basic questions:

• What does religion think of security?;
• What does security think of religion?; and,
• What happens when the two are mixed in specific real-world cases of religious conflict?

This Handbook offers analyses of how nine different world religions have related to issues of war and peace, theologically and practically; overviews of how scholars and practitioners in nine different topical areas of security studies have (or have not) dealt with the relationship between religion and security; and five case studies of particular countries in which the religion--security nexus is vividly illustrated: Nigeria, India, Israel, the former Yugoslavia and Iraq.

This Handbook will be of great interest to students of religion, security studies, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres - from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing - was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

Much like our world today, Late Antiquity (fourth-seventh centuries CE) is often seen as a period rife with religious violence, not least because the literary sources are full of stories of Christians attacking temples, statues and 'pagans'. However, using insights from Religious Studies, recent studies have demonstrated that the Late Antique sources disguise a much more intricate reality. The present volume builds on this recent cutting-edge scholarship on religious violence in Late Antiquity in order to come to more nuanced judgments about the nature of the violence. At the same time, the focus on Late Antiquity has taken away from the fact that the phenomenon was no less prevalent in the earlier Graeco-Roman world. This book is therefore the first to bring together scholars with expertise ranging from classical Athens to Late Antiquity to examine the phenomenon in all its complexity and diversity throughout Antiquity.

1) This book looks at the issue of violence through religion and literature, and addresses the question of violence in the context of religion, particularly in Sri Lankan Sinhala Buddhism with special reference to Sinhala and Tamil ethnic issues. 2) It fills a major gap by bringing analysis of Sri Lankan literature. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of literature and languages, South Asian literature, literary criticism and theory, linguistics, cultural studies, philosophy, religion, Buddhist studies, diaspora studies, and Sri Lankan literature and sociology.

Anna Bernard untersucht Motive, Vorgehen und Erfolg von Staat und Kirche bei der Revokation des Edikts von Nantes auf zentraler und regionaler Ebene (Provence und Dauphine). Im Mittelpunkt stehen die weltlichen und geistlichen Institutionen und Personen, die an der Konzeption und Ausfuhrung der Protestantenpolitik beteiligt waren. Der Erfolg ihrer Politik wird u.a. an der Reaktion und am Widerstand der Protestanten gemessen. So verdeutlicht sich am Beispiel der Protestantenpolitik, wie der Absolutismus funktionierte. Gleichzeitig geben die Methoden zur Durchsetzung der Politik Aufschluss daruber, ob und inwieweit die Revokation des Edikts von Nantes als Bestandteil eines fruhneuzeitlichen Prozesses der Konfessionalisierung zu verstehen ist. Anna Bernard ist Redakteurin beim ZDF in Berlin."

In this book Norman Housley, one of the most distinguished historians of the medieval period, provides an introduction to the complex history of crusading.

Steers readers through the key debates in this popular area of medieval history.
Draws on the author's 30 years' experience of crusading scholarship.
Issues addressed range from the definition of 'crusade', through the motivation and intentions of the crusaders, to the consequences of the crusades for European society

The staggering story of the most influential Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regime Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a Chinese poet and journalist arrested by the regime in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Alone among the victims of Mao's dictatorship, she maintained a stubborn and open opposition during the years she was imprisoned. She rooted her dissent in her Christian faith--and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets. Miraculously, Lin Zhao's prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with friends, family, and classmates, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.

In the capital city of Nairobi, Kenya, African Catholic and Sunni Muslim leaders addressing HIV and AIDS are faced with a unique challenge. On the one hand, they are called to attend to the spiritual wellbeing of the infected individual; on the other hand, they are increasingly charged with serving as the stewards of the physical bodies of those negatively affected by such a physiologically debilitating and social stigmatized disease through certain identifiable interreligious traditions common to both faiths. This book explores this development firsthand. While conducting fieldwork in Nairobi, Carey interviewed Muslim and Catholic leaders working in three areas-HIV and AIDS prevention, education, and destigmatization. These recorded observations and accounts help to illustrate that religious officials from within African Catholicism and Sunni Islam are attempting to provide the common inter-religious traditions of mercy, hospitality, and justice in a holistic manner for those living with the virus in the city. The research that produced this book involved six weeks of fieldwork during the summer of 2014 to help fill in the interstices between anthropological, sociological, and ethnographic accounts provided by other leading academics in their respective fields. It presumed that religious traditions in Kenya exhibit a susceptibility to culture and context and a practical openness to its social environment which then affords this particular work a unique theological perspective in its attempt to identify and analyze patterns of social behavior and religious organization.

The phrase "The Black Legend" was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, "Rereading the Black Legend" contextualizes Spain's uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the "Black Legend."
A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.

'Dan's book demonstrates that the future will belong to the peacemakers - the true heroes among us.' - Bear Grylls When thirty-three Chilean miners stepped into the light, alive and well, after sixty-nine days entombed in the earth, the world experienced a rare treat - some good news. Was this an anomaly, or are there other untapped glimmers of hope, hidden behind the headlines? Armed with a camera, a notebook, and a perilous sense of curiosity, Dan Morrice embarks upon a global journey to meet the peacemakers - unsung heroes, forging peace in extreme environments, from war-torn nations to disaster zones. From Chilean miners to Syrian refugees, from ex-football hooligans in Britain, to revolutionaries in Israel-Palestine, Dan discovers how the most unlikely people are rediscovering Christian faith and rewriting the fractured history of our time. At the apex of his journey, Dan's interviews lead him on a five-hundred-mile walk across the Negev Desert to find their source of hope first-hand. In a generation tired of divided nations and negative news, Finding the Peacemakers tells the unreported story of a global movement overcoming the odds to build peace in troubled times. 'One of the most inspiring books I have read for many years.' - Baroness Caroline Cox

The book will be welcome for tackling the Crusades from a fresh but important angle; the relations of the Crusader states with their neighbours, both Christian (the Byzantines) and, especially, Islamic aEURO" the rulers of Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Cairo etc. It contributes to the very fashionable approach of seeing the Crusades as a prime example of early European colonialism, and investigating them much more for their social, political and ethnic impact on the region than for their ostensible ideological and religious motives. Holt uses original Arabic sources, which are generally difficult for Western historians, and therefore this book is an important addition to literature about the Crusades.

Since 2012, hundreds of men and women have left Western countries to join jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Many are still there, many have been killed, but some have chosen to return to their countries of origin. French Journalist David Thomson met some of those who came back. Bilel, Yassin, Zoubeir, Lena, each has a different profile and story. Some have returned disgusted by the violence of the Syrian battlefields, or the terrorist attacks that have struck across Europe; they try to become forgotten, living under extreme surveillance. Others return seriously wounded or psychologically destroyed. Others still are in jail, a breeding ground for broader radicalization. And some have come back to continue to carry out jihad in Europe. In utmost secrecy, David Thomson gathered their testimonies and recounts them in this remarkable and revealing book. With ISIS losing ground on all fronts, the steady flow of jihadists returning to Europe represents one of the greatest challenges facing countries across the continent. This nuanced analysis of the social, religious, political, familial and psychological factors that push people to violent extremism is more necessary now than ever. It will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand how we might address this threat.

The Conflict over the Conflict chronicles one of the most divisive and toxic issues on today's college and university campuses: Israel/Palestine. Some pro-Palestinian students call supporters of Israel's right to exist racist, and disrupt their events. Some pro-Israel students label pro-Palestinian students terrorists, and the Jews among them traitors. Lawsuits are filed. Legislation is proposed. Faculty members are blacklisted and receive death threats. Academic freedom is compromised and the entire academic enterprise is threatened. How did we get here and what can be done? In this passionate book, Kenneth S. Stern examines attempts from each side to censor the other at a time when some say students, rather than being challenged to wrestle with difficult issues and ideas, are being quarantined from them. He uniquely frames the examination: our ability to think rationally is inhibited when our identity is fiercely connected to an issue of perceived social justice or injustice, and our proclivity to see in-groups and out-groups - us versus them - is obvious. According to Stern, the campus is the best place to mine this conflict and our intense views about it to help future generations do what they are supposed to do: think. The Conflict over the Conflict shows how this is possible.

An updated and modernized edition of the unparalleled classic with resurgent relevance for the twenty-first century Foxe's Book of Martyrs is one of the most influential and well-known books in history, as well as one of the top-sellers of the past, right up there with the Bible itself. Immensely popular in Foxe's own sixteenth century, its influence has been felt throughout literature. Copies of the original text (Acts and Monuments) were chained beside the Bible in churches of England, and even sailed with English pirates. This was not a book designed to comfort, but instead to present the truth of the persecution faced by Protestant Christians in hostile environments. The inscription from the 1563 edition--now commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs--indicates the gravity of the task: "[In] latter and perilous days . . . the great persecutions and horrible troubles . . . [are here] gathered and collected according to true copies and writings . . . of the parties themselves that suffered." Foxe was committed to commemorating the ultimate sacrifice of those who gave their lives for the sake of their faith. Paul L. Maier brings his exceptional mind for history to bear on Foxe's work in this new edition. While abridgement of the original 2,100 pages was necessary, Maier does include every martyr, and text was changed only where modern readers may not readily understand the original archaic wording. John Foxe (1516-1587) was an academic and zealous student of the Scriptures, leading to his persecution as a Protestant by the Catholic rulers of his day. Beyond his work in pastoral ministry, Foxe continued to work on his martyrology until his death.

Thousands of men and women were executed for incompatible religious views in sixteenth-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively for the first time, providing a compelling argument for the importance of martyrdom as both a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

Brad Gregory explores Protestant, Catholic, and Anabaptist martyrs in a sustained fashion, addressing the similarities and differences in their self-understanding. He traces the processes and impact of their memorialization by co-believers, and he reconstructs the arguments of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities responsible for their deaths. In addition, he assesses the controversy over the meaning of executions for competing views of Christian truth and the intractable dispute over the distinction between true and false martyrs. He employs a wide range of sources, including pamphlets, martyrologies, theological and devotional treatises, sermons, songs, woodcuts and engravings, correspondence, and legal records. Reconstructing religious motivation, conviction, and behavior in early modern Europe, Gregory shows us the shifting perspectives of authorities willing to kill, martyrs willing to die, martyrologists eager to memorialize, and controversialists keen to dispute.