The "Upanishads" are the sacred writings of Hinduism. They are perhaps the greatest of all the books in the history of world religions. Their origins predate recorded history, being revealed to the Rishis of the Vedic civilization some 5000 to 10,000 years ago. Many see them as the kernel of the mystical, philosophical truths that are the basis of the Higher World religion of Hinduism, their cradle, of which Buddhism is a successor and Judaism is an offshoot. With Islam and Christianity being offshoots of Judaism, this makes them the foundational documents for understanding and practising religion today. Much of the original text of the "Upanishads" is archaic and occasionally corrupted, but it does convey a moral and ethical thrust that is abundantly clear. Alan Jacobs uses modern free verse to convey the essential meaning and part of the original text. He omits Sanskrit words as far as possible and the commentary provided is contemporary rather than ancient.

A collection of more than 50 talks on the vast range of inspiring and universal truths that have captivated millions in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. Readers will find these talks alive with the unique blend of all-embracing wisdom, encouragement, and love for humanity that have made the author one of our era's most revered and trusted guides to the spiritual life.

In this book, author Helene Thiesen recounts her experience of being removed from her family in Greenland as a young Inuk child, to be 're-educated' in Denmark and an orphanage in Greenland. The practice of forcible assimilation of Indigenous children into colonial societies through 'education' has echoes in North America and Australasia, and the painful legacy of these practices remains under-acknowledged. In this poignant book, Helene recounts in detail the process of being taken from her family in 1951, aged seven, along with twenty-one other children, in the attempt to re-make them into 'model Danish citizens', in a social 'experiment' led by the Danish government and Save the Children Denmark. When the children returned to Greenland a year and a half later, they were sent to live in a Danish Red Cross orphanage, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages, and were compelled to adopt Danish language, culture and customs. With a detailed introductory analysis from Dr Stephen James Minton, who also provides the translation, Helene's account serves as a compelling and powerful testimony of a devastating colonial experiment. Richly illustrated with forty photos to help to situate the reader, this book provides an invaluable case study for researchers and students in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Critical Pedagogy and Education, Psychology, European History, and Cultural Studies.

The first book-length comparative and interdisciplinary treatment of divine envy and vengeance in the biblical and classical worlds.

A first and coherent enquiry on vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia and critically questioning why they have been frequently alienated in the elitist discourse of mainstream Indic religions.

Originating in India, Mahayana Buddhism spread across Asia, becoming the prevalent form of Buddhism in Tibet and East Asia. Over the last twenty-five years Western interest in Mahayana has increased considerably, reflected both in the quantity of scholarly material produced and in the attraction of Westerners towards Tibetan Buddhism and Zen.

Paul Williams Mahayana Buddhism is widely regarded as the standard introduction to the field, used internationally for teaching and research and has been translated into several European and Asian languages. This new edition has been fully revised throughout in the light of the wealth of new studies and focuses on the religion 's diversity and richness. It includes much more material on China and Japan, with appropriate reference to Nepal, and for students who wish to carry their study further there is a much-expanded bibliography and extensive footnotes and cross-referencing. Everyone studying this important tradition will find Williams book the ideal companion to their studies.

Four hundred million people call themselves Buddhists today. Yet most Westerners know little about this powerful, Eastern-spawned faith. How did it begin? What do its adherents believe? Why are so many Westerners drawn to it?
Essential Buddhism responds to these questions and many more, offering an accessible, global perspective on the religion's past, present, and future. It identifies how the principal concepts and practices originated and evolved through diverse cultural adaptations into three basic formats:

* Theraveda (including Vipassana, brought from Vietnam in the 1960s and including such practitioners as Jack Kornfield and Jon Kapat-Zinn)

* Mahayana (including Zen Buddhism, originally brought to America by Japanese teachers after World War II and popularized by Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton)

* Vajrayana (including Tibetan Buddhism, from the teachers who fled the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s as well as the Dalai Lama, and embraced by Allen Ginsberg, Richard Gere, and countless others)

Essential Buddhism is the single best resource for the novice and the expert alike, exploring the depths of Buddhism's popularity and illuminating its tenets and sensible approach to living. Written in the lucid prose of a longtime professional storyteller, and full of Buddhist tales, scriptural quotes, ancient stories, and contemporary insights, Essential Buddhism is the first complete guide to the faith and the phenomenon.

In the attempts to unify divided peoples on the basis of a shared past, both historical and mythical, this book illumines aspects of cultural nationalism common since the Middle Ages. As an edited work, the Bible includes texts mostly depicting long-gone historical eras extending over several centuries. Following on from Aberbach's previous work National Poetry, Empires, and War, this book argues that works of this nature - notably the Mujo-Halil songs in Albania, the Irish stories of Cuchulain, the songs of the Nibelungen in Germany, or the Finnish legends collected in The Kalevala - have an ancient precedent in the Hebrew Bible (to which national literatures often allude and refer), a subject largely neglected in biblical studies. The self-critical element in the Hebrew Bible, common in later national literature, is examined as the basis of later anti-Semitism, as the Bible was not confined to Jews but was adopted in translation by many other national groups. With several dozen original translations from the Hebrew, this book highlights how the Bible influenced and was distorted by later national cultures. Written without jargon, this book is intended for the general reader, but is also an important contribution to the study of the Bible, nationalism, and Jewish history.

- the first edition consistently sells 50-100 copies each year - presents complex arguments clearly and accessibly

Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint focuses on the presence and contemporaneity of Shirdi Sai Baba (d.1918), who has a vast following in postcolonial South Asia and an ever-growing global diaspora. Essays consider the saint's influence on everyday life and how visual, narrative, textual, sensorial, performative, political, social, and spatial practices interpenetrate to produce multiple terrains of devotion. Contributions by twelve scholars of several academic disciplines explore eruptions and circulations of sacred materials, spatialities of devotional practices, visual and digital imaginaries, transcultural narrativizations, and material affects and effects of Sai Baba. The presentation transcends routine scholarly discussions about sainthood, cultures of worship, religious objects, Hinduism and Islam. Shirdi Sai Baba's presence conveys inspiration and healing energies and he accepted the entreaties of people of all castes and creeds, offering an alternative to communal ideologies of his time - and the present. Considerations of Shirdi Sai Baba's milieux of devotional praxis situate and localize debates about the meaning of nation and religion, past and present, urbanization, and class identity in transitions from colonial to postcolonial/global South Asia. The book expands the boundaries of the study of Shirdi Sai Baba and makes important contributions to South Asia Studies, Anthropology, Religious Studies, Global Studies, Urban Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Inter-Asian Studies, Visual and Media Studies, and Cultural Geography.

Written at an accessible level for undergraduate students, this is the first introduction to the complex relationship between religion and genocide for use on related courses. Steven Leonard Jacobs is a leading scholar in the field and covers a complex and controversial topic in an engaging and accessible style, using real world case studies throughout. Religion and Genocide is an outstanding contribution to the fields of Judaic studies and Holocaust and Genocide studies.

A comprehensive and authoritative collection containing sixty-one original chapters from a team of international contributors. The Quaker World contains substantial thematic articles on a variety of topics on the living experience of the global Quaker community. An outstanding and accessible reference source on all topics of relevance, concern and interest to students of world religions, Christianity, comparative religions and religious studies.

In this book, author Helene Thiesen recounts her experience of being removed from her family in Greenland as a young Inuk child, to be 're-educated' in Denmark and an orphanage in Greenland. The practice of forcible assimilation of Indigenous children into colonial societies through 'education' has echoes in North America and Australasia, and the painful legacy of these practices remains under-acknowledged. In this poignant book, Helene recounts in detail the process of being taken from her family in 1951, aged seven, along with twenty-one other children, in the attempt to re-make them into 'model Danish citizens', in a social 'experiment' led by the Danish government and Save the Children Denmark. When the children returned to Greenland a year and a half later, they were sent to live in a Danish Red Cross orphanage, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages, and were compelled to adopt Danish language, culture and customs. With a detailed introductory analysis from Dr Stephen James Minton, who also provides the translation, Helene's account serves as a compelling and powerful testimony of a devastating colonial experiment. Richly illustrated with forty photos to help to situate the reader, this book provides an invaluable case study for researchers and students in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Critical Pedagogy and Education, Psychology, European History, and Cultural Studies.

First published in 2004, The Jewish Study Bible is a landmark, one-volume resource tailored especially for the needs of students of the Hebrew Bible. It has won acclaim from readers in all religious traditions.
The Jewish Study Bible combines the entire Hebrew Bible--in the celebrated Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation--with explanatory notes, introductory materials, and essays by leading biblical scholars on virtually every aspect of the text, the world in which it was written, its interpretation, and its role in Jewish life. The quality of scholarship, easy-to-navigate format, and vibrant supplementary features bring the ancient text to life.
This second edition includes revised annotations for nearly the entire Bible, as well as forty new and updated essays on many of the issues in Jewish interpretation, Jewish worship in the biblical and post-biblical periods, and the growing influence of the Hebrew Bible in the ancient world.
The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, is an essential resource for anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible.

This work is a translation and study of a ninth- through fifteenth-century manuscript, a selection from a medieval book, "Kitab al-Hadaya wa al-Tuhaf" (Book of Gifts and Rarities), edited by M. Hamidullah. The manuscript furnishes a wealth of varied information offering insights into the period immediately preceding Islam and extending through the first four centuries of Islamic rule. The book provides valuable information on "gifts" exchanged on various occasions between Islamic rulers and their foreign counterparts. "Rarities" form a part of the gifts; some of them are marvels, others are mythical.

The manuscript is an invaluable source of information in many fields. It abounds with technical references and details in various areas of Islamic art, which renders it unique as a reference. The extensive detailed treatment, in the context of the overall material culture, provides a particularly rich source of information for those working both in the specific field of Islamic art and in that of Islamic culture as a whole.

Who was Pandora and what was in her famous box? How did Achilles get his Achilles heel? What exactly is a Titan? And why is one computer virus known as a Trojan horse? The myths of ancient Greece and Rome can seem bewilderingly complex, yet they are so much a part of modern life and discourse that most of us know fragments of them. This comprehensive companion takes these fragments and weaves them into an accessible and enjoyable narrative, guiding the reader through the basic stories of classical myth. Philip Matyszak explains the sequences of events and introduces the major plots and characters, from the origins of the world and the labors of Hercules to the Trojan War and the voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas. He brings to life an exotic cast of heroes and monsters, wronged women and frighteningly arbitrary yet powerful gods. He also shows how the stories have survived and greatly influenced later art and culture, from Renaissance painting and sculpture to modern opera, literature, movies, and everyday products.

This book explores the kinds of Christian service or diaconia that develop in non-institutionalized practices for supporting survivors of indigenous ritual servitude or Trokosi in Africa. Drawing on empirical research from Ghana, it examines the possibilities of freedom, equality, and dignity for liberated Trokosi and the manner in which these women's experiences constitute a repudiation of dominant patriarchal family systems. With close attention to the work of indigenous parachurches - which function outside of institutionalized churches - in challenging the contemporary practice of ritual slavery and offering its survivors a lived space in which they need not remain "hidden" as they seek restoration and integration into wider society, Ritual Servitudes and Christian Social Practices in Ghana will appeal to scholars of sociology, theology, and religion with interests in gender, contemporary ministries and African religion.

This book expands the current axiology of theism literature by assessing the axiological status of alternative conceptions of God and the divine. To date, most of the literature on the axiology of theism focuses almost exclusively on the axiological status of theism and atheism. Specifically, it focuses almost entirely on monotheism, typically Judeo-Christian conceptions of God, and atheism, usually construed as ontological naturalism. This volume features essays from prominent philosophers of religion, ethicists, and metaphysicians addressing the value impact of alternative views such as ultimism, polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, and idealism. Additionally, it reflects a wider trend in analytic philosophy of religion to broaden its scope beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition. Value Beyond Monotheism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of religion, ethics, and metaphysics.

"John Stratton Hawley miraculously manages to braid the charged erotic and divine qualities of Krishna, the many-named god, while introducing us-with subtle occasional rhyme-to a vividly particularized world of prayers and crocodile earrings, spiritual longing and love-struck bees." -Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry An award-winning translation of Hindi verses composed by one of India's treasured poets. The blind poet Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas's popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known collectively as the Sursagar. This award-winning translation reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas's verse-the poems that were known to the singers of Surdas's own time as his. Here Surdas stands out with a clarity never before achieved.

This book is concerned with the rationality and plausibility of the Muslim faith and the Qur'an, and in particular how they can be interrogated and understood through Western analytical philosophy. It also explores how Islam can successfully engage with the challenges posed by secular thinking.

The Quran and the Secular Mind will be of interest to students and scholars of Islamic philosophy, philosophy of religion, Middle East studies, and political Islam.