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.

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'.