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.

Though many scholars and commentators have predicted the death of religion, the world is more religious today than ever before. And yet, despite the persistence of religion, it remains a woefully understudied phenomenon. With Objective Religion, Baylor University Press and Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion have combined forces to gather select articles from the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion that not only highlight the journal's wide-ranging and diverse scope, but also advance the field through a careful arrangement of topics with ongoing relevance, all treated with scientific objectivity and the respect warranted by matters of faith. This multivolume project seeks to advance our understanding of religion and spirituality in general as well as particular religious beliefs and practices. The volume thereby serves as a catalyst for future studies of religion from diverse disciplines and fields of inquiry including sociology, psychology, political science, demography, economics, philosophy, ethics, history, medicine, population health, epidemiology, and theology. The articles in this volume, Competition, Tension, and Perseverance, document the pervasiveness of religion and demonstrate the complex ways faith, spirituality, and religious matters are consequential for individuals as well as societies across the world. Together these essays demonstrate the resilience of religion.

"Foreigners and Their Food" explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize "us" and "them" through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the "other." Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.

Today's highly fraught historical moment brings a resurgence of antisemitism. Antisemitic incidents of all kinds are on the rise across the world, including hate speech, the spread of neo-Nazi graffiti and other forms of verbal and written threats, the defacement of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, and acts of murderous terror. Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate is an edited collection of 18 essays that address antisemitism in its new and resurgent forms. Against a backdrop of concerning political developments such as rising nationalism and illiberalism on the right, new forms of intolerance and anti-liberal movements on the left, and militant deeds and demands by Islamic extremists, the contributors to this timely and necessary volume seek to better understand and effectively contend with today's antisemitism.