Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism provides an annotated anthology of primary sources highlighting Manichaeism, a dualist religion emerging in Mesopotamia in the third century and which spread rapidly throughout the Roman and Sasanian empires until it was violently suppressed by both polities. It nevertheless continued to flourish - largely clandestinely - in the Near East, Central Asia, and China until it finally disappeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This book translates and assesses the importance of a number of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and even Hebrew language testimonies for a better understanding of the cultural importance of what many scholars characterize as the first 'world religion'.

All Religion Is Inter-Religion analyses the ways inter-religious relations have contributed both historically and philosophically to the constructions of the category of "religion" as a distinct subject of study. Regarded as contemporary classics, Steven M. Wasserstrom's Religion after Religion (1999) and Between Muslim and Jew (1995) provided a theoretical reorientation for the study of religion away from hierophanies and ultimacy, and toward lived history and deep pluralism. This book distills and systematizes this reorientation into nine theses on the study of religion. Drawing on these theses--and Wasserstrom's opus more generally--a distinguished group of his colleagues and former students demonstrate that religions can, and must, be understood through encounters in real time and space, through the complex relations they create and maintain between people, and between people and their pasts. The book also features an afterword by Wasserstrom himself, which poses nine riddles to students of religion based on his personal experiences working on religion at the turn of the twenty-first century.

'This book is a masterpiece. I haven't been this excited or awakened by a book for a decade. This is what it looks like when an artist follows her heart and her passion instead of the crowd.' - Glennon Doyle From the author of REVEAL and How to Love Yourself (and Sometimes Other People) comes a shocking new exploration of the long-lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. A gospel, as old and authentic as any that now make up the Bible, was buried deep in the Egyptian desert after an edict was sent out in the 4th century to have all copies of it destroyed. Fortunately, some rebel monks refused, and thanks to their disobedience we have several ancient manuscripts of the only gospel that was written in the name of a woman: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. It speaks of a message quite different from the one that has been spread by Christian leaders for the past two millennia. Mary Magdalene's gospel says that we are not sinful, but that humans too, are made of the divine - and that divinity is not something you can receive through confession or absolution, but by turning inward and tuning in to the radical presence of love within.

In Gnostic Afterlives, fourteen scholars explore the intersection of Gnostic spirituality in American religion and culture. Papers theorize Gnosis/Gnostic in modernity, examine neo-Gnostic movements in America, and investigate the Gnostic in popular American films, literature, art, and other aspects of culture.