This book tells the story of the Prophet Muhammad as an inspirational role model for anyone who wants to be extraordinary.

You will learn how Muhammad shaped his personality as a child, dealt with the universal challenges of adolescence while a teenager, and then emerged as a leader in his community as a young adult. The book deliberately avoids the language of historical narration used in typical biographies of the Prophet in favor of a more informal, down-to-earth approach.

In this book, the reader will get a completely different view of Muhammad and hopefully will see how Muhammad addressed our own daily challenges, inspiring us to excel in confronting these challenges.

This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century-the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.

Whether on a national or a personal level, everyone has a complex relationship with their closest neighbors. Where are the borders? How much interaction should there be? How are conflicts solved? Ancient Israel was one of several small nations clustered in the eastern Mediterranean region between the large empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia in antiquity. Frequently mentioned in the Bible, these other small nations are seldom the focus of the narrative unless they interact with Israel. The ancient Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of multiple neighbors, and this context profoundly shaped Israel. Indeed, it was through the influence of the neighboring people that Israel defined its own identity-in terms of geography, language, politics, religion, and culture. Ancient Israel's Neighbors explores both the biblical portrayal of the neighboring groups directly surrounding Israel-the Canaanites, Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans-and examines what we can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. Through its analysis of these surrounding groups, this book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent to which ancient Israelite identity was forged both within and against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will invite readers into journey of scholarly discovery to explore the world of Israel's identity within its most immediate ancient Near Eastern context.

Through the Virgin Mary, Remensnyder examines the dynamics of Christian and non-Christian identity in the pre-modern Spanish world. Rather than focusing on the Virgin Mary, she instead uses the Virgin as a lens to understand how people established identities for themselves in the contexts of domination and devotion. The first half of the book looks at how Spanish Christians used the Virgin's martial functions to draw lines of demarcation between themselves and non-Christians both metaphoric differences such as doctrinal differences and religious polemic and physical ones of war. She could also embody religious borderlands, the places of hybrid and fluid spiritual identities. The second half of the book looks at how the Virgin served as a place of passage where religious lines could be crossed through conversion. The book considers Christian stories that depict Mary as a particularly effective agent in the conversion of Jews, Muslims, and natives of the Americas. The project also examines those Jews, Muslims, and Indians who converted to Christianity: the Virgin was a figure of power through whom they could express their new hybrid identities.

From 1962 to 1965, in perhaps the most important religious event of the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council met to plot a course for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. After thousands of speeches, resolutions, and votes, the Council issued sixteen official documents on topics ranging from divine revelation to relations with non-Christians. But the meaning of the Second Vatican Council has been fiercely contested since before it was even over, and the years since its completion have seen a battle for the soul of the Church waged through the interpretation of Council documents. The Reception of Vatican II looks at the sixteen conciliar documents through the lens of those battles. Paying close attention to reforms and new developments, the essays in this volume show how the Council has been received and interpreted over the course of the more than fifty years since it concluded. The contributors to this volume represent various schools of thought but are united by a commitment to restoring the view that Vatican II should be interpreted and implemented in line with Church Tradition. The central problem facing Catholic theology today, these essays argue, is a misreading of the Council that posits a sharp break with previous Church teaching. In order to combat this reductive way of interpreting the Council, these essays provide a thorough, instructive overview of the debates it inspired.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform offers a major re-assessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul's prominence in the devot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, the volume explores how he turned a personal vocational desire to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three inter-related strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal welfare. Alison Forrestal further demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The central questions of the volume therefore concern de Paul's efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and Forrestal argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the devot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. This is the first study to assess de Paul's activities against the wider backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions. A work of forensic detail and complex narrative, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform is the product of years of research in ecclesiastical and state archives. It offers a wholly fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities entailed in the promotion of religious reform and renewal in seventeenth-century France.

This volume continues the work of a recent collection published in 2012 by Oxford University Press, Dogen: Textual and Historical Studies. It features some of the same outstanding authors as well as some new experts who explore diverse aspects of the life and teachings of Zen master Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of the Soto Zen sect (or Sotoshu) in early Kamakura-era Japan. The contributors examine the ritual and institutional history of the Soto school, including the role of the Eiheji monastery established by Dogen as well as various kinds of rites and precepts performed there and at other temples. Dogen and Soto Zen builds upon and further refines a continuing wave of enthusiastic popular interest and scholarly developments in Western appropriations of Zen. In the last few decades, research in English and European languages on Dogen and Soto Zen has grown, aided by an increasing awareness on both sides of the Pacific of the important influence of the religious movement and its founder. The school has flourished throughout the medieval and early modern periods of Japanese history, and it is still spreading and reshaping itself in the current age of globalization.

Jeffrey L. Rubenstein offers a translation from the Hebrew of The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud by David Weiss Halivni. Halivni's work is widely regarded as the most comprehensive scholarly examination of the processes of composition and editing of the Babylonian Talmud. Halivni presents the summation of a lifetime of scholarship and the conclusions of his multivolume Talmudic commentary, Sources and Traditions (Meqorot umesorot). Arguing against the traditional view that the Talmud was composed c. 450 CE by the last of the named sages in the Talmud, the Amoraim, Halivni proposes that its formation took place over a much longer period of time, not reaching its final form until about 750 CE. The Talmud consists of many literary strata or layers, with later layers constantly commenting upon and reinterpreting earlier layers. The later layers differ qualitatively from the earlier layers, and were composed by anonymous sages whom Halivni calls Stammaim. These sages were the true author-editors of the Talmud, who reconstructed the reasons underpinning earlier rulings, created the dialectical argumentation characteristic of the Talmud, and formulated the literary units that make up the Talmudic text. Halivni also discusses the history and development of rabbinic tradition from the Mishnah through the post-Talmud legal codes, the types of dialectical analysis found in the different rabbinic works, and the roles of reciters, transmitters, compilers, and editors in the composition of the Talmud. This volume contains an introduction and annotations by Jeffrey Rubenstein.

This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion.
The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.

Taking the Long View argues in a series of engagingly written essays that remembering the past is essential for men and women who want to function effectively in the present--for without some knowledge of their own past, neither individuals nor institutions know where they have been or where they are going. The book illustrates its thesis with tough-minded examples from the Church's life and thought, ranging from more abstract problems like the theoretical role of historical criticism to such painfully concrete issues as the commandment of Jesus to forgive unforgivable wrongs.

In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of certain cultural expectations. Yu shows how individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions. Self-inflicted violence as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place included such varied works as topographical histories, literary anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel literature, and maps.
By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities, and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world, reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping tradition in the Islamic world.
Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of religion and family to notions of community and belonging among Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.

The gift of the land of Israel by God is an essential element in Jewish identity, religiously and politically. That the gift came at the expense of the local Canaanites has stimulated deep reflections and heated debate in Jewish literature, from the creation of the Bible to the twenty-first century. The essays in this book examine the theological, ethical, and political issues connected with the gift and with the fate of the Canaanites, focusing on classical Jewish texts and major Jewish commentators, legal thinkers, and philosophers from ancient times to the present.

Brian Davies offers the first in-depth study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's thoughts on God and evil, revealing that Aquinas's thinking about God and evil can be traced through his metaphysical philosophy, his thoughts on God and creation, and his writings about Christian revelation and the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Davies first gives an introduction to Aquinas's philosophical theology, as well as a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Aquinas's writings have been considered over time. For hundreds of years scholars have argued that Aquinas's views on God and evil were original and different from those of his contemporaries. Davies shows that Aquinas's views were by modern standards very original, but that in their historical context they were more traditional than many scholars since have realized.
Davies also provides insight into what we can learn from Aquinas's philosophy. Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil is a clear and engaging guide for anyone who struggles with the relation of God and theology to the problem of evil.

Religious controversies frequently center on origins, and at the origins of the major religious traditions one typically finds a seminal figure. Names such as Jesus, Muhammad, Confucius, and Moses are well known, yet their status as "founders" has not gone uncontested. Does Paul deserve the credit for founding Christianity? Is Laozi the father of Daoism, or should that title belong to Zhuangzi? What is at stake, if anything, in debates about "the historical Buddha"? What assumptions are implicit in the claim that Hinduism is a religion without a founder? The essays in Varieties of Religious Invention do not attempt to settle these perennial arguments once and for all. Rather, they aim to consider the subtexts of such debates as an exercise in comparative religion: Who engages in them? To whom do they matter, and when? When is "development" in a religious tradition perceived as "deviation" from its roots? To what extent are origins thought to define the "essence" of a religion? In what ways do arguments about founders serve as a proxy for broader cultural, theological, political, or ideological questions? What do they reveal about the ways in which the past is remembered and authority negotiated? As the contributors survey the landscape shaped by these questions within each tradition, they provide insights and novel perspectives about the religions individually, and about the study of world religions as a whole.

Jeffrey L. Broughton offers an annotated translation of the Whip for Spurring Students Onward Through the Chan Barrier Checkpoints, which he abbreviates to Chan Whip. This anthology is a classic of Chan (Zen) Buddhism that has served as a Chan handbook in both China and Japan since its publication in 1600. It is a compendium of extracts, over eighty percent of which are drawn from an enormous Chan corpus dating from the late 800s to about 1600-a survey that covers most of the history of Chan literature. The rest of the text consists of complementary extracts from Buddhist sutras and treatises. The extracts, many of which are accompanied by Chan master Dahui Zhuhong's commentary, deliberately eschew abstract discussions of theory in favor of sermons, exhortations, sayings, autobiographical narratives, letters, and anecdotal sketches dealing frankly and compassionately with the concrete experiences of lived practice.
While there are a number of publications in English on Zen practice, none contain the vivid descriptions found within the Chan Whip. This translation thus fills a large gap in the English-language literature on Chan, and by including the original Chinese text as well Broughton has produced an invaluable tool for scholars and practitioners alike.

This is Laurence Gardner's final book, written shortly before his death in 2010 and is the accompanying book to his Origin of God (published 2011 by dash house publishing). Together with Origin of God, this book outlines an irrefutable and searing indictment of conventional belief and exposes the evils and absurdities perpetuated over the millenia in the name of Christianity. In Revelation of the Devil, Laurence Gardner traces the history of the Devil, from its roots in Mesopotamia and the Old Testament all the way up to the modern world of today. Travelling through the New Testament, as well as the Koran, and then passing in turn through the Inquisitions, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, he unmasks what he has called "the myth of evil and the conspiracy of Satan." For nearly 2,000 years a supernatural entity known as the Devil has been held responsible by Church authorities for bringing sin and wickedness into the world. Throughout this period, the Devil has been portrayed as a constant protagonist of evil, although his origin remains a mystery and his personality has undergone many interpretive changes, prompting questions such as: If God is all good and all powerful, then why does evil exist? How can it exist? If God created everything, then where did the Devil come from? If the Devil exists, then why does he not feature in any pre-Christian document? Revelation of the Devil follows the Devil's sinister history, in the manner of a biography, from his scriptural introduction to the dark satanic cults of the present day. In a strict chronological progression, we experience the mood of each successive era as the Devil's image was constantly manipulated to suit the changing motives of his creators in their bid for threat-driven clerical control.

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics. Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on ''Manifest Destiny,'' American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

In a groundbreaking examination of the antislavery origins of liberal Protestantism, Molly Oshatz contends that the antebellum slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to adopt an historicist understanding of truth and morality. Unlike earlier debates over slavery, the antebellum slavery debates revolved around the question of whether or not slavery was a sin in the abstract. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to answer the proslavery claim that slavery was not a sin in and of itself, antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Moses Stuart, Leonard Bacon, and Horace Bushnell, argued that biblical principles opposed slavery and that God revealed slavery's sinfulness through the gradual unfolding of these principles. Although they believed that slavery was a sin, antislavery Protestants' sympathy for individual slaveholders and their knowledge of the Bible made them reluctant to denounce all slaveholders as sinners. In order to reconcile slavery's sinfulness with their commitments to the Bible and to the Union, antislavery Protestants defined slavery as a social rather than an individual sin. Oshatz demonstrates that the antislavery notions of progressive revelation and social sin had radical implications for Protestant theology. Oshatz carries her study through the Civil War to reveal how emancipation confirmed for northern Protestants the antislavery notion that God revealed His will through history. She describes how after the war, a new generation of liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Charles Briggs, and George Harris, drew on the example of antislavery and emancipation to respond to evolution and historical biblical criticism. The theological innovations rooted in the slavery debates came to fruition in liberal Protestantism's acceptance of the historical and evolutionary nature of religious truth.

One of Aquinas's best known works after the Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles is a theological synthesis that explains and defends the existence and nature of God without invoking the authority of the Bible. A detailed expository account of and commentary on this famous work, Davies's book aims to help readers think about the value of the Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) for themselves, relating the contents and teachings found in the SCG to those of other works and other thinkers both theological and philosophical. Following a scholarly account of Aquinas's life and his likely intentions in writing the SCG, the volume works systematically through all four books of the text. It is, therefore, a solid and reflective introduction both to the SCG and to Aquinas more generally. The book is aimed at students of medieval philosophy and theology, and of Aquinas in particular. It will interest teachers of medieval philosophy and theology, though it does not presuppose previous knowledge of Aquinas or of his works. Davies's book is the longest and most detailed account and discussion of the SCG available in English in one volume.