Contemporary psychology is highly influenced by positivism and scientific naturalism. Psychological studies make efforts to control the variables and provide operational definitions of subjective constructs in order to reach the most concrete conclusions. Such efforts are admirable in natural sciences since they have led to a better life. But, this worldview has deprived contemporary psychology of more qualitative sources of knowledge like wahy (revelation). The present book introduces Islamic psychology as a paradigm, which can apply wahy knowledge and consider religious/spiritual dimensions of humans in scientific exploration. The first part discusses the possibility, foundations, and characteristics of Islamic psychology. The second part introduces research methodology in Islamic psychology. The third part reviews the Quranic theory of personality and highlights the concept of shakeleh. Finally, the fourth part presents the theories and methods of religious psychotherapy in the Islamic tradition. Each part provides introductory content for readers interested in Islamic psychology.

We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.

This is the first critical edition in transcription with facing English translation of a medieval Sanskrit text that is known in most parts of India, especially in Bengal. The Krsnakarnamrta ("Nectar to the Ears of Krishna") is a devotional anthology of stanzas in praise of the youthful Krishna, "the dark blue boy," "Lord of Life," lover of the milkmaids in Indian legend, and an incarnation of the great God Vishnu. Of its importance there can be no doubt: for many devout Indians it is a Book of Common Prayer, whose short and ardent hymns to the Lord Krishna come frequently and familiarly to mind. Frances Wilson here provides a masterly English translation of this moving expression of religious adoration. Collating over seventy manuscripts, she has established an authoritative Sanskrit text, including its literary and critical history. In the full introduction, she discusses the legends that have arisen about its author, the mysterious L&#299lasuka Bilvamangala. Medieval Sanskrit studies have in the past been much neglected by European scholars. In breaking free of the classical traditions of Sanskrit philology, Wilson has produced a work that is of profound relevance to the study of Indian civilization today.

A favorite of Tibetans and recommended by the Dalai Lama and other senior Buddhist teachers, this practical guide to inner transformation introduces the fundamental spiritual practices common to all Tibetan Buddhist traditions.The Words of My Perfect Teacher is the classic commentary on the preliminary practices of the Longchen Nyingtig-one of the best-known cycles of teachings and a spiritual treasure of the Nyingmapa school-the oldest Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Patrul Rinpoche makes the technicalities of his subject accessible through a wealth of stories, quotations, and references to everyday life. His style of mixing broad colloquialisms, stringent irony, and poetry has all the life and atmosphere of an oral teaching. Great care has been taken by the translators to render the precise meaning of the text in English while still reflecting the vigor and insight of the original Tibetan. A preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, insightful introductory essays, explanatory notes, and classic illustrations enhance this quintessential introduction to Tibetan Buddhist practice. This new edition includes translations of a postface to the text written a century ago (for the first printed edition in Tibetan) by the first Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, and a new preface by the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. The notes, glossary and bibliography have been expanded and updated, Sanskrit names and terminology have been given their proper transliterated form, and the illustrations have been improved in quality and supplemented with new material.

The purpose of this book is to re-examine those basic issues in the study of midrash, which to some extent have been marginalized by current trends in scholarship and research. Irving Jacobs asks, for example, whether the early rabbinic exegetes had a concept of peshat (plain meaning) and, if so, what significance they attached to it in their exposition of the biblical text. He enquires if the selection of proemial and proof-texts was a random one, dependent purely upon the art or whim of the preacher, or rather if exegetical traditions linked certain pentateuchal themes with specific sections of the Prophets (and particularly the Hagiographa), which were acknowledged by preachers and audiences alike. As midrash in its original, pre-literary form, was a living process involving both live preachers and live audiences in the ancient synagogues of the Holy Land, to what extent, he asks, did the latter influence the former in the development of their art and skills?

A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, "diaspora" has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation abroad and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora may be more constructively construed as a form of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Homeland, he makes the case that a shared homeland or past and traumatic dissociation are not necessary conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their homeland with them in diaspora, in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study. For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.