Thoroughly revised and updated in this third edition, Perspectives on Marriage is a comprehensive and multidisciplinary anthology ideal for courses in the theology and spirituality of marriage. This edition features thirteen new articles and incorporates the best of contemporary perspectives on marriage and sexuality. The selections represent a wide range of approaches, from the historical and canonical to the sociological, psychological, and ministerial. Striking a balance between solid theological material and stimulating readings on today's issues, the volume explores marriage in its historical context; current views on the theology of marriage; the meanings and transitions of marriage; attitudes toward sexuality; communication, conflict, and change; commitment, divorce, and annulment; the spirituality of marriage; and various religious perspectives on marriage. The third edition includes a new section on issues that affect marriage--such as the commercialization of marriage and the financial stresses accompanying marriage--as well as new selections on such topics as same-sex marriage, cohabitation, the theology of dating, and counseling. Each essay is enhanced by a detailed editors' introduction and by helpful discussion questions. Rich, provocative, and challenging, Perspectives on Marriage, Third Edition, is the most extensive and up-to-date reader of its kind.

This pioneering study examines the process of reasoning in Islamic law. Some of the key questions addressed here include whether sacred law operates differently from secular law, why laws change or stay the same and how different cultural and historical settings impact the development of legal rulings. In order to explore these questions, the author examines the decisions of thirty jurists from the largest legal tradition in Islam: the Hanafi school of law. He traces their rulings on the question of women and communal prayer across a very broad period of time - from the eighth to the eighteenth century - to demonstrate how jurists interpreted the law and reconciled their decisions with the scripture and the sayings of the Prophet. The result is a fascinating overview of how Islamic law has evolved and the thinking behind individual rulings.

A NYT Bestseller, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi provides an intimate window into American Muslim life, describing how a passionate pursuit of Islam led him to Christ through friendship, apologetics, dreams and visions.

Providing an intimate view into a loving Muslim home, Qureshi shares how he developed a passion for Islam before discovering, almost against his will, evidence that Jesus rose from the dead and claimed to be God. Unable to deny the arguments but not wanting to deny his family, Qureshi struggled with an inner turmoil that will challenge Christians, Muslims, and all those who are interested in two of the world's greatest religions and the quest for truth.

Qureshi - with great courage and intimacy - wrote this book with three major purposes in mind:

• To tear down walls between two of the world's major religions by giving non-Muslim readers an insider's perspective into a Muslim's heart and mind.
• To equip the reader with facts and knowledge, showing the strength of the case for the gospel contrasted with the case for Islam.
• To portray the immense inner struggle of Muslims grappling with the gospel, including all the sacrifices and doubts that rise up along the way.

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus is more than the memoir of a man's pursuit of answers to the most important issues of life and faith. Ultimately, it's the story about the transformative grace and mercy of the one true God.

This edition has been expanded to include:

• A revised foreword and introduction

Loving Stones is a study of devotees' conceptions of and worshipful interactions with Mount Govardhan, a sacred mountain located in the Braj region of north-central India that has for centuries been considered an embodied form of Krishna. It is often said that worship of Mount Govardhan "makes the impossible possible." In this book, David L. Haberman examines the perplexing paradox of an infinite god embodied in finite form, wherein each particular form is non-different from the unlimited. He takes on the task of interpreting the worship of a mountain and its stones for a culture in which this practice is quite alien. This challenge involves exploring the interpretive strategies that may explain what seems un-understandable, and calls for theoretical considerations of incongruity, inconceivability, and other realms of the impossible. This aspect of the book includes critical consideration of the place and history of the pejorative concept of idolatry (and its twin, anthropomorphism) in the comparative study of religions. Loving Stones uses the worship of Mount Govardhan as a site to explore ways in which scholars engaged in the difficult work of representing other cultures struggle to make "the impossible possible."

Kabbalistis believe that ego is the source of evil, destruction, and suffering in this world. It is the aspect of our nature that separates us from the Light of the Creator and from our destiny of happiness. "The Kabbalah Connection" describes the powerful spiritual technology built into the system of Creation that can help us gain control over the ego. This technology is Passover (Pesach). Each year, the window of time known to many as Pesach gives us the ability to escape this source of misery in our own lives. Although many believe Pesach to be holiday for the Jewish people commemorating their freedom from Egypt, it is in fact the greatest transformation agent we have against the ego. Utilizing metaphysics and physics, "The Kabbalah Connection" reveals the consciousness we can utilize the night before Pesach so we can remove the ego and open ourselves up to the Light. This is the necessary step to achieving spiritual fulfillment.

The interpretation of animal sacrifice, now considered the most important ancient Greek and Roman religious ritual, has long been dominated by the views of Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne. No penetrating and general critique of their views has appeared and, in particular, no critique of the application of these views to Roman religion. Nor has any critique dealt with the use of literary and visual sources by these writers. This book, a collection of essays by leading scholars, incorporates all these subjects and provides a theoretical background for the study of animal sacrifice in an ancient context.

Black Elk of the Sioux has been recognized as one of the truly remarkable men of his time in the matter of religious belief and practice. Shortly before his death in August, 1950, when he was the "keeper of the sacred pipe," he said, "It is my prayer that, through our sacred pipe, and through this book in which I shall explain what our pipe really is, peace may come to those peoples who can understand, and understanding which must be of the heart and not of the head alone. Then they will realize that we Indians know the One true God, and that we pray to Him continually."

Black Elk was the only qualified priest of the older Oglala Sioux still living when "The Sacred Pipe "was written. This is his book: he gave it orally to Joseph Epes Brown during the latter's eight month's residence on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Black Elk lived. Beginning with the story of White Buffalo Cow Woman's first visit to the Sioux to give them the sacred pip, Black Elk describes and discusses the details and meanings of the seven rites, which were disclosed, one by one, to the Sioux through visions. He takes the reader through the sun dance, the purification rite, the "keeping of the soul," and other rites, showing how the Sioux have come to terms with God and nature and their fellow men through a rare spirit of sacrifice and determination.

The "wakan "Mysteries of the Siouan peoples have been a subject of interest and study by explorers and scholars from the period of earliest contact between whites and Indians in North America, but Black Elk's account is without doubt the most highly developed on this religion and cosmography. "The Sacred Pipe, "published as volume thirty-six in the Civilization of the American Indian Series, will be greeted enthusiastically by students of comparative religion, ethnologists, historians, philosophers, and everyone interested in American Indian life.

This book offers a fresh and challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it seeks to explore how membership of Greek fifth-century society would have shaped one's understanding of the play, and, more specifically, of Dionysus as a dramatic figure.

In past centuries, human responses to death were largely shaped by religious beliefs. Ralph Houlbrooke shows how the religious upheavals of the early modern period brought dramatic changes to this response, affecting the last rites, funerals, and ways of remembering the dead. He examines the interaction between religious innovation and the continuing need for reassurance and consolation on the part of the dying and the bereaved.

There has recently been much interest in the relationship between science and religion, and how they combine to give us a 'binocular' perspective on things. One important phenomenon which has been neglected in recent work is the concept of spiritual healing. This edited collection explores a variety of approaches to spiritual healing from different religious points of view, identifying both what it is and how it works. The authors also explore the biological and psychological processes, open to scientific enquiry, through which healing may be mediated. As such, this book indicates the central proposition that religious and scientific perspectives answer different questions about healing, and there is not necessarily any conflict between them.

The dawn of the modern age posed challenges to all of the world's religions - and since then, religions have countered with challenges to modernity. In Religious Responses to Modernity, seven leading scholars from Germany and Israel explore specific instances of the face-off between religious thought and modernity, in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As co-editor Christoph Markschies remarks in his Foreword, it may seem almost trivial to say that different religions, and the various currents within them, have reacted in very different ways to the "multiple modernities" described by S.N. Eisenstadt. However, things become more interesting when the comparative perspective leads us to discover surprising similarities. Disparate encounters are connected by their transnational or national perspectives, with the one side criticizing in the interest of rationality as a model of authorization, and the other presenting revelation as a critique of a depraved form of rationality. The thoughtful essays presented herein, by Simon Gerber, Johannes Zachhuber, Jonathan Garb, Rivka Feldhay, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Israel Gershoni and Christoph Schmidt, provide a counterweight to the popularity of some all-too-simplified models of modernization.

Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious texts, the role of Brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in the transmission of divine truths, and the cultural and moral importance of epics such as the Ramayana. In this second edition Knott considers the impact of changes in technology and the flourishing of social media on Hinduism, and looks at the presence of Hinduism in popular culture, considering pieces such as Sita Sings the Blues. She also analyses recent developments in India, and the impact issues such as Hindu nationalism and the politicization of Hinduism have on Hindus worldwide. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Drawing primarily on oral sources from the author's own research carried out between 1993 and 1997, this book outlines the settlement history of Pashto speakers in Pakistan's Northern Areas over the last 150 years, concentrating on the decades following the opening of the Karakoram Highway in 1978. Besides this, it looks at how the migrants' language situation had developed by the mid 1990s. It investigates how Pashto speakers communicated with each other and with members of their respective Shina-, Khowar-, Balti- and Burushaski-speaking host communities, focussing in particular on cross-dialectal communication and language shift. The book also aims to define how the trends related to Pashtun migration to the Northern Areas in the mid 1990s could develop in the near future. Interwoven with this analysis are childhood memories and life stories recounted by the Pashto speakers interviewed by the author. All interviewees were ordinary people leading ordinary lives - traders, cobblers, tea boys, farmers and porters. Their stories provide a voice to the Pashto speaking migrants themselves and give the reader a fascinating insight into their lives.

In this groundbreaking study, Michael Willis examines how the gods of early Hinduism came to be established in temples, how their cults were organized, and how the ruling elite supported their worship. Examining the emergence of these key historical developments in the fourth and fifth centuries, Willis combines Sanskrit textual evidence with archaeological data from inscriptions, sculptures, temples, and sacred sites. The centre-piece of this study is Udayagiri in central India, the only surviving imperial site of the Gupta dynasty. Through a judicious use of landscape archaeology and archaeo-astronomy, Willis reconstructs how Udayagiri was connected to the Festival of the Rainy Season and the Royal Consecration. Under Gupta patronage, these rituals were integrated into the cult of Vishnu, a deity regarded as the source of creation and of cosmic time. As special devotees of Vishnu, the Gupta kings used Udayagiri to advertise their unique devotional relationship with him. Through his meticulous study of the site, its sculptures and its inscriptions, Willis shows how the Guptas presented themselves as universal sovereigns and how they advanced new systems of religious patronage that shaped the world of medieval India.

Children can explore the world of yoga and the stories of the Bible and find meaning in both.