Mariam Ibraheem was born in a refugee camp in Sudan. Her Muslim father died when she was six, and her mother raised her in the Christian faith. After a traumatic childhood, Mariam became a successful businessperson, married the man she loved, and had a beautiful baby boy.

But one day in 2013, her world was shattered when Sudan authorities insisted she was Muslim because of her father’s background. She had broken the law by marrying a Christian man, and she must abandon both her marriage and her son and adopt Islam. Under intense pressure, Mariam repeatedly refused. Ultimately, a Sharia court sentenced her to 100 lashes—and death by hanging.

Shackled is the stunning true story of a courageous young mother who was willing to face death rather than deny her faith. Mariam Ibraheem took a stand on behalf of all women who are maltreated because of their gender and all people who suffer from religious persecution.

Follow Mariam’s story from life under Islamic law, through imprisonment and childbirth while shackled, to her remarkable escape from death following an international outcry and advocacy that included diplomats, journalists, activists, and even Pope Francis.

'We're lost again,' said Big Panda

'When I'm lost,' said Tiny Dragon, 'I find it helps to go back to the beginning and try to remember why I started.'

This is the uplifting, beautifully illustrated story of two beloved friends as they journey through the seasons of the year together, into the wild, exploring the thoughts and emotions, hardships and happiness that connect us all.

Writer and artist James Norbury began illustrating the adventures of Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, inspired by Buddhist philosophy and spirituality, to share the ideas that have helped him through the most difficult times, in the hope they can help others too.

For the hundredth time since they'd made their promise, she wondered if she and Agnes were really going to go through with it, if she was brave and terrible enough.

A THRILLING DEBUT NOVEL OF CORRUPTION AND MURDER, SET IN THE NIGHTCLUBS, TENEMENTS AND SKYSCRAPERS OF 1930s NEW YORK - FROM THE WINNER OF THE VIRAGO/THE POOL NEW CRIME WRITER AWARD.

At the top of the Empire State Building on a freezing December night, two women hold their breath. Frances and Agnes are waiting for the man who has wronged them. They plan to seek the ultimate revenge.

Set over the course of a single night, One Night, New York is a detective story, a romance and a coming-of-age tale. It is also a story of old New York, of bohemian Greenwich Village between the wars, of floozies and artists and addicts, of a city that sucked in creatives and immigrants alike, lighting up the world, while all around America burned amid the heat of the Great Depression.

Dit is vir ons onmoontlik om God te verstaan, ons kan slegs klein glimpsies van sy karakter kry. Een manier is om God se Name te bestudeer. Esté Geldenhuys het breedvoerige navorsing gedoen oor God se Name, en die in hierdie boek belig sy die belangrikstes, van Elohim (Drie in een) tot El Roi (die Een wat sien). Sy bespreek die Naam self in Hebreeus, waar dit in Bybel voorkom, die betekenis daarvan, wat dit in ons alledaagse lewe beteken en ook hoe om dit te gebruik in gebed.  

Khamr: The Makings Of A Waterslams is a true story that maps the author’s experience of living with an alcoholic father and the direct conflict of having to perform a Muslim life that taught him that nearly everything he called home was forbidden.

A detailed account from his childhood to early adulthood, Jamil F. Khan lays bare the experience of living in a so-called middle-class Coloured home in a neighbourhood called Bernadino Heights in Kraaifontein, a suburb to the north of Cape Town. His memories are overwhelmed by the constant discord that was created by the chaos and dysfunction of his alcoholic home and a co-dependent relationship with his mother, while trying to manage the daily routine of his parents keeping up appearances and him maintaining scholastic excellence.

Khan’s memories are clear and detailed, which in turn is complemented by his scholarly thinking and analysis of those memories. He interrogates the intersections of Islam, Colouredness and the hypocrisy of respectability as well as the effect perceived class status has on these social realities in simple yet incisive language, giving the reader more than just a memoir of pain and suffering.

Khan says about his debut book: "This is not a story for the romanticisation of pain and perseverance, although it tells of overcoming many difficulties. It is a critique of secret violence in faith communities and families, and the hypocrisy that has damaged so many people still looking for a place and way to voice their trauma. This is a critique of the value placed on ritual and culture at the expense of human life and well-being, and the far-reaching consequences of systems of oppression dressed up as tradition."

"Rediscovering the Beauty of Sabbath Rest"
Our bodies and souls were "created "to rest--regularly--and when they do, we experience heightened productivity, improved health, and more meaningful relationships.
In these pages you'll find wonderful stories of the senator's spiritual journey, as well as special Sabbath experiences with political colleagues such as Bill Clinton, Al and Tipper Gore, John McCain, Colin Powell, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, and others. Senator Joe Lieberman shows how his observance of the Sabbath has not only enriched his personal and spiritual life but enhanced his career and enabled him to serve his country to his greatest capacity.

Kelly Besecke offers an examination of reflexive spirituality, a spirituality that draws equally on religions traditions and traditions of reason in the pursuit of transcendent meaning. People who practice reflexive spirituality prefer metaphor to literalism, spiritual experience to doctrinal belief, religious pluralism to religious exclusivism or inclusivism, and ongoing inquiry to ''final answers.'' Reflexive spirituality is aligned with liberal theologies in a variety of religious traditions and among the spiritual-but-not-religious. You Can't Put God in a Box draws on original qualitative data to describe how people practiced reflexive spirituality in an urban United Methodist church, an interfaith adult education center, and a variety of secular settings. The theoretical argument focuses on two kinds of rationality that are both part of the Enlightenment legacy. Technological rationality focuses our attention on finding the most efficient means to a particular end. Reflexive spiritualists reject forms of religiosity and secularity that rely on the biases of technological rationality-they see these as just so many versions of ''fundamentalism'' that are standing in the way of compelling spiritual meaning. Intellectual rationality, on the other hand, offers tools for analysis, interpretation, and synthesis of religious ideas. Reflexive spiritualists embrace intellectual rationality as a way of making religious traditions more meaningful for modern ears. Besecke provides a window into the progressive theological thinking of educated spiritual seekers and religious liberals. Grounded in participant observation, her book uses concrete examples of reflexive spirituality in practice to speak to the classical sociological problem of modern meaninglessness.

Religous pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape, including a proliferation of new spiritualities, the emergence of widespread adherence to ''Asian'' traditions, and an evangelical Christian resurgence. These recent phenomena-important in themselves as indices of cultural change-are also both causes and contributions to one of the most remarked-upon and seemingly anomalous characteristics of the modern United States: its widespread religiosity. Compared to its role in the world's other leading powers, religion in the United States is deeply woven into the fabric of civil and cultural life. At the same time, religion has, from the 1600s on, never meant a single denominational or confessional tradition, and the variety of American religious experience has only become more diverse over the past fifty years. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.

Singing a Hindu Nation is a study of rags>riya kirtan, a western Indian performance medium that combines song, Hindu philosophical discourse, and nationalist storytelling. Beginning during the anti-colonial movement of the late nineteenth-century, performers of rags>riya kirtan led masses of Marathi-speaking people in temples and streets, and they have continued to preach and sing nationalism as devotion in the post-colonial era, and into the twenty-first century. In this book, author Anna Schultz demonstrates how, through this particular form of musical performance, the political becomes devotional, and explores why it motivates people to action and violence. Through both historical and ethnographic studies, Schultz shows that rags>riya kirtan has been especially successful in combining these two realms because kirtankars perform as representatives of the divine sage Narad, thereby infusing their nationalist messages with ritual weight. By speaking and singing in regional idioms with rich associations for Maharashtrian congregations, they use music to combine political and religious signs in ways that seem natural and desirable, promoting embodied experiences of nationalist devotion. As the first monograph on music and Hindu-nationalism, Singing a Hindu Nation presents a rare glimpse into the lives and performance worlds of nationalists on the margins of all-India political parties and cultural organizations, and is an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars of South Asian studies, religion, and political theory.

The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary obstacles--poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation--to become one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples and schools, and attracting crowds of students and disciples wherever he went. Now, in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, James Carter draws on untapped archival materials to provide a book that is part travelogue, part history, and part biography of this remarkable man.
This revealing biography shows a Chinese man, neither an intellectual nor a peasant, trying to reconcile his desire for a bold and activist Chinese nationalism with his own belief in China's cultural and social traditions, especially Buddhism. As it follows Tanxu's extraordinary life, the book also illuminates the pivotal events in China's modern history, showing how one individual experienced the fall of China's last empire, its descent into occupation and civil war, and its eventual birth as modern nation. Indeed, Tanxu lived in a time of almost constant warfare--from the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, to the Boxer Uprising, the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation, and World War II. He and his followers were robbed by river pirates, and waylaid by bandits on the road. Caught in the struggle between nationalist and communist forces, Tanxu finally sought refuge in the British colony of Hong Kong. At the time of his death, at the age of 89, he was revered as "Master Tanxu," one of Hong Kong's leading religious figures.
Capturing all this in a magnificent portrait, Carter gives first-person immediacy to one of the most turbulent periods in Chinese history.

Gurus of Modern Yoga explores the contributions that individual gurus have made to the formation of the practices and discourses of yoga in today's world. The focus is not limited to India, but also extends to the teachings of yoga gurus in the modern, transnational world, and within the Hindu diaspora. Each of the sections deals with a different aspect of the guru within modern yoga. Included are extensive considerations of the transnational tantric guru; the teachings of modern yoga's best-known guru, T. Krishnamacharya, and those of his principal disciples; the place of technology, business and politics in the work of global yoga gurus; and the role of science and medicine. Although the principal emphasis is on the current situation, some of the essays demonstrate the continuing influence of gurus from generations past. As a whole, the book represents an extensive and diverse picture of the place of the guru in contemporary yoga practice.

Buddhism in Mongolia explores the unique historical and cultural elements of Mongolian Buddhism while challenging its stereotyped image as a mere replica of Tibetan Buddhism. Vesna A. Wallace brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to explore the interaction between the Mongolian indigenous culture and Buddhism, the features that Buddhism acquired through its adaptation to the Mongolian cultural sphere, and the ways Mongols have been constructing their Mongolian Buddhist identity. In a collection of fifteen chapters, the book illuminates the historical, social, and cultural contexts within which Buddhism has operated as a major social and cultural force among various groups Mongolian ethnic groups. The volume covers an array of topics pertaining to the important historical events, social and political conditions, and influential personages in Mongolian Buddhism from the sixteenth century to the present. It shows how Buddhism underwent a series of transformations, adapting itself to the social, political, and nomadic cultures of the Mongols. The contributors demonstrate the ways that Buddhism retained unique Mongolian features through Qing and Mongol support. Most chapters bring to light the ways in which Mongolian Buddhists saw Buddhism as inseparable form "Mongolness". They posit that by being greatly supported by Mongol and Qing empires, suppressed by the communist governments, and experiencing revitalization facilitated by democratization and challenged posed by modernity, Buddhism underwent a series of transformations, while retaining unique Mongolian features. Wallace covers historical events, social and political conditions, and influential personages in Mongolian Buddhism from the sixteenth century to the present. Buddhism in Mongolia also addresses the artistic and literary expressions of Mongolian Buddhism and various Mongolian Buddhist practices and beliefs.

The paradigmatic Buddhist is the monk. It is well known that ideally Buddhist monks are expected to meditate and study-to engage in religious practice. The institutional structure which makes this concentration on spiritual cultivation possible is the monastery. But as a bureaucratic institution, the monastery requires administrators to organize and manage its functions, to prepare quiet spots for meditation, arrange audiences for sermons, or simply to make sure food is available, and rooms and bedding provided. The valuations placed on such organizational roles were, however, a subject of considerable controversy among Indian Buddhist writers, with some considering them significantly less praiseworthy than meditative concentration or teaching and study, while others more highly appreciated their importance. Managing Monks, as the first major study of the administrative offices of Indian Buddhist monasticism and of those who hold them, explores literary sources, inscriptions and other materials in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Chinese in order to explore this tension and paint a picture of the internal workings of the Buddhist monastic institution in India, highlighting the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward administrators revealed in various sources.