In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims' ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age. Zareena Grewal is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University and Director for the Center for the Study of American Muslims at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

This book explores how to utilize Buddhism in psychotherapy and how Buddhism itself acts as a form of psychotherapy, using Buddhism practices as a lens for universal truth and wisdom rather than as aspects of a religion. Based on the author's over 30 years of study and practice with early Buddhism and his experiences of Buddhism with his patients, the book outlines a new form of psychotherapy incorporating three Buddhist principles: the properties of the body and mind, the principle of world's movement, and living with wisdom. This technique provides a unique perspective on mental health and offers new approaches for clinicians and researchers to effectively addressing mental health and well-being.

The 7 chakras located along your spine up to the crown of your head may be the biggest secret Western conventional health care is keeping from you. Bonus: Exclusive Gift Inside! In this book you'll discover How to Clear your Energetic Blockages, Radiate Energy and Finally heal yourself. What if I told you that your body had the ability to heal itself through the use of chakras -- unseen spinning wheels of energy that are found at crucial areas along your spine? If you've never heard of chakras before you may be a bit skeptical about their existence, let alone the health and natural influence they offer your body. This book will not only introduce you to these potent vortices of health and wholeness, but it'll also reveal the secrets that make rebalancing and awakening them seem like child's play.

This is a book about the body and its amazing contribution to the moral mind. The author focuses on the important roles the body plays in moral cognition. What happens to us when we observe moral violations, make moral judgments and engage in moral actions? How does the body affect our moral decisions and shape our moral dispositions? Can embodied moral psychology be consistently pursued as a viable alternative to disembodied traditions of moral philosophy? Is there any school of philosophy where the body is discussed as the underlying foundation of moral judgment and action? To answer these questions, the author analyzes Confucian philosophy as an intriguing and insightful example of embodied moral psychology.

This book encourages insurance companies and regulators to explore offering Islamic insurance to boost the insurance industry in India. The distinctive features of Takaful also make it appealing even to non-Muslims. According to the 2012 World Takaful Report, India has immense potential for Takaful is based on the size of its Muslim population and the growth of its economy. However, it is surprising that Takaful has yet to be introduced in India since it has been offered in non-majority Muslim countries, such as Singapore, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. When the concept and practice of Takaful are examined, it is free from interest, uncertainty, and gambling. These are the main elements prohibited in Islam. However, it has been evidenced that these elements are also banned in teaching other religions believed by the Indians. Given this landscape, this book fills the gap in research on the viability of Takaful in India, focusing on its empirical aspects by examining the perception of Indian insurance operators toward Takaful.

What can we know about ourselves and the world through the sense of touch and what are the epistemic limits of touch? Scepticism claims that there is always something that slips through the epistemologist's grasp. A Touch of Doubt explores the significance of touch for the history of philosophical scepticism as well as for scepticism as an embodied form of subversive political, religious, and artistic practice. Drawing on the tradition of scepticism within nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume discusses how the sense of touch uncovers contradictions within our knowledge of ourselves and the world. It questions 1) what we can know through touch, 2) what we can know about touch itself, and 3) how our experience of touching the other and ourselves throws us into a state of doubt. This volume is intended for students and scholars who wish to reconsider the experience of touching in intersections of philosophy, religion, art, and social and political practice.

Margarete Susman was among the great Jewish women philosophers of the twentieth century, and largely unknown to many today. This book presents, for the first time in English, six of her important essays along with an introduction about her life and work. Carefully selected and edited by Elisa Klapheck, these essays give the English-speaking reader a taste of Susman's religious-political mode of thought, her originality, and her importance as Jewish thinker. Susman's writing on exile, return, and the revolutionary impact of Judaism on humanity, illuminate enhance our understanding of other Jewish philosophers of her time: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch (all of them her friends). Her work is in particularly fitting company when read alongside Jewish religious-political and political thinkers such as Bertha Pappenheim, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Gertrud Stein. Initially a poet, Susman became a follower of the Jewish Renaissance movement, secular Messianism, and the German Revolution of 1918. This collection of essays shows how Susman's work speaks not only to her own time between the two World Wars but to the present day.

For centuries, Jews have been known as the "people of the book." It is commonly thought that Judaism in the first several centuries CE found meaning exclusively in textual sources. But there is another approach to meaning to be found in ancient Judaism, one that sees it in the natural world and derives it from visual clues rather than textual ones. According to this conception, God embedded hidden signs in the world that could be read by human beings and interpreted according to complex systems. In exploring the diverse functions of signs outside of the realm of the written word, Swartz introduces unfamiliar sources and motifs from the formative age of Judaism, including magical and divination texts and new interpretations of legends and midrashim from classical rabbinic literature. He shows us how ancient Jews perceived these signs and read them, elaborating on their use of divination, symbolic interpretation of physical features and dress, and interpretations of historical events. As we learn how these ancient people read the world, we begin to see how ancient people found meaning in unexpected ways.

This is an insightful guide to the history, development and beliefs of this ancient religion, and its continuation as a lived religion today. The history of the development of Zoroastrianism spans over 3000 years, beginning in prehistory as an oral tradition, with roots in a common Indo-Iranian mythology. It then became established as part of an imperial Iranian ideology within an Ancient Near Eastern setting, and eventually emerged in variant forms in Iran, Central Asia and India in late antiquity. Zoroastrianism continues as a living faith for an estimated 150,000 adherents in the world today. Most Zoroastrians, if asked the question, 'In a nutshell, what do Zoroastrians believe?' would begin their answer with 'Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds'. "Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed" takes this foundational trifold ethic to form the framework for discussing the ideological complexities and ethical underpinning of the religion; the current discussion concerning text and 'author'; and, the practical outworking and historical impact of the religion. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

The Statue of Liberty holds a special place in the hearts of Americans, the people of France, and freedom lovers throughout the world. But up until now, the full story behind its origins has not been told.

Author Richard N. Rhoades peels back the mystery surrounding the icon, explaining how French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi looked to a Roman goddess to serve as the model for the statue. On Oct. 28, 1886, at the unveiling ceremony, President Grover Cleveland praised Bartholdi's goddess statue as "greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song."

But Rhoades goes beyond the historical data and examines the statue's pagan origins by analyzing Scripture. He establishes that the most revealing chroniclers of the Statue of Liberty were the Hebrew prophets who predicted the building and setting of an image of the Great Goddess of the ancient world on her own pedestal in a latter day country codenamed "the land of Shinar."

Discover the real origins of the Statue of Liberty, its adoption by the American people as a national icon and its historical and biblical signifi cance in "Lady Liberty: The Ancient Goddess of America."