As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualising his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi's classic work. At the heart of Rumi's mystical poetry is the "religion of love" which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gifts of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.

This book examines the relationship between divine in/activity and human agency in the five books of the Megilloth-the books of Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther. As works of literature dating to the early Second Temple period (ca. 6th-3rd centuries BCE), these books and the implicit interpretation of these particular themes reflect the diverse cultural and theological dynamics of the time. Megan Fullerton Strollo contends that the themes themselves as well as the correlation between them should be interpreted as implicit theology insofar as they represent reflective interpretation of earlier theological traditions. With regard to divine in/activity, she argues that the Megilloth presents a certain level of skepticism or critical analysis of the Deity. From doubt to protest, the books of the Megilloth grapple with received traditions of divine providence and present experiences of absence, abandonment, and distance. As a correlative to divine in/activity, human agency is presented as consequential. In addition, the portrayal of human agency serves as a theological response insofar as the books advance the theme through specific references to and reevaluations of earlier theocentric traditions.

In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a hurriedly assembled band that would play marching music to other inmates, forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the most brutal and dehumanising of circumstances, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. It was the only entirely female orchestra in any of the Nazi prison camps and, for almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra was to save their lives.

What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care.

From Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members and the response of other prisoners for the very first time.

Al-Minhaj Al-Sawi is a milestone work, the first work of its kind for many centuries. It is a compendium of Prophetic Hadiths, categorised under a number of headings and compiled with clear relevance to the lives and situation of Muslims in the modern age. The work is authenticated by a rigorous and detailed process of Takhreej - referencing each hadith to its sources - from a study of over 300 authentic works of hadith. This work will be useful for academics in many relevant fields, whether researching the basis of orthodox Sunni belief and practice, or examining the contemporary Muslim response to religious extremism. It is split into 2 volumes: Prophetic Virtues and Miracles and Righteous Character and Social Interactions. The first part Prophetic Virtues and Miracles will prove invaluable to readers who wish to understand, in the light of the most authenticated and sourced classical Islamic materials, the responsibilities of Muslims in modern age, and the rights of others, and will provide clarity in relation to the Prophet Muhammad's virtues and life, his methods of worship and spiritual practice and other aspects of his Sunnah.

Reading Siva is an illustrated bibliography on the Hindu god Siva in the arts, crafts, coins, seals and inscriptions from South and Southeast Asia. It results from a century of ABIA bibliographic work and covers over 1500 academic publications since 1672. This scholarly and multi-disciplinary volume offers keyword-indexed annotations. The detailed indices on authors, geographic terms and subjects enable an easy search through the data. Links with the entries to resource repositories (such as JSTOR, Persee, Project MUSE, Academia.edu, ResearchGate and the Internet Archive) and links added to the sumptuous illustrations immediately take you to these resource sites.

Could Confucius hit a curveball?
Could Yoda block the plate?
Can the Dalai Lama dig one out of the dirt?

No, there is only one Zen master who could contemplate the circle of life while rounding the bases.

Who is this guru lurking in the grand old game? Well, he's the winner of ten World Series rings, a member of both the Hall of Fame and the All-Century Team, and perhaps the most popular and beloved ballplayer of all time. And without effort or artifice he's waxed poetic on the mysteries of time ("It gets late awful early out there"), the meaning of community ("It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore"), and even the omnipresence of hope in the direst circumstances ("It ain't over 'til it's over").

It's Yogi Berra, of course, and in What Time Is It? You Mean Now? Yogi expounds on the funny, warm, borderline inadvertent insights that are his trademark. Twenty-six chapters, one for each letter, examine the words, the meaning, and the uplifting example of a kid from St. Louis who grew up to become the consummate Yankee and the ultimate Yogi.

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. This volume is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions.

China has a long and complex history of interactions with the world around it. One of the most successful imports-arguably the most successful before modern times and the impact of the West-is Buddhism, which, since the first centuries of the Common Era, has spread into almost every aspect of Chinese life, thought and practice. Erik Zurcher was one of the most important scholars to study the history of Buddhism in China, and the ways in which Buddhism in China gradually became Chinese Buddhism. More than half a century after the publication of Zurcher's landmark The Buddhist Conquest of China, we now have a collection of essays from the top contemporary specialists exploring aspects of the legacy of Zurcher's investigations, bringing forward new evidence, new ideas and reconsiderations of old theories to present an up-to-date and exciting expansion and revision of what was arguably the single most influential contribution to date on the history of Chinese Buddhism. Contributors are Tim Barrett, Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Funayama Toru, Barend ter Haar, Liu Shufen, Minku Kim, Jan Nattier, Antonello Palumbo, and Nicolas Standaert.

This richly illustrated volume offers the most comprehensive and updated survey on about sixteen thousand Hebrew manuscript fragments reused as book-bindings and preserved in hundreds of libraries and archives in Italy. Contributions by the leading scholars in the field elucidate specific collections and genres no less than individual fragments, bringing to new life a forgotten library of medieval Jewish books, as almost 160 Talmudic codices, which include the Mishna, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud and, for the most part, the Babylonian one, and several hitherto unknown texts. The contribution of these fragments to the ongoing research on the "European Genizah", as the Books within Books Project, and to Jewish Studies in general cannot be overestimated.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.