Latter-day Saints have a paradoxical relationship to the past; even as they invest their own history with sacred meaning, celebrating the restoration of ancient truths and the fulfillment of biblical prophecies, they repudiate the eighteen centuries of Christianity preceding the founding of their church as apostate distortions of the truth. Since the early days of Mormonism, Latter-day Saints (LDS) have used the paradigm of apostasy and restoration in their narratives about the origin of their church. This has generated a powerful and enduring binary of categorization that has profoundly impacted Mormon self-perception and relations with others. Standing Apart explores how the idea of apostasy has functioned as a category to mark, define, and set apart "the other" in Mormon historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon narrative identity. The volume's fifteen contributors trace the development of LDS narratives of apostasy within the context of both Mormon history and American Protestant historiography. They suggest ways in which these narratives might be reformulated to engage with the past, as well as offering new models for interfaith relations. This volume provides a novel approach for understanding and resolving some of the challenges the LDS church faces in the twenty-first century.

These lrish tales all are reprinted from nineteenth-century sources, but they date back to a centuries-old oral tradition of storytelling that had yet to be committed to the printed page. They were passed down through the ages virtually unaltered and feature a wide variety of fantastic beings. This edition has an exquisitely designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging and a silk-ribbon bookmark.

It is now generally accepted that the nature of human thought has much to do with the structure and function of the human body. In Spirituality in the Flesh, Robert C. Fuller investigates how our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and neural structures shape religious phenomena. Why is it that some religious traditions assign spiritual currency to pain? How do neurochemically-driven emotions such as fear shape our religious actions? What is the relationship between chemically altered states of consciousness and religious innovation? The body has recently become a subject of investigation among scholars of religion. Many such studies focus on the concept of the body as a cultural construct. Whereas these treatments helpfully demonstrate how cultures construct ideas about the body, Fuller asks how the body itself influences religious concepts. Seeking to establish a middle ground between purely materialistic or humanistic arguments, he skillfully pairs scientific findings with religious truths. Both perspectives could learn from the other: Fuller takes scientific interpreters to task for failing to understand the inherently cultural aspects of embodied experience even as he chides most religion scholars for ignoring new knowledge about the biological substrates of human behavior. Comfortable with the language of scientific analysis and sympathetic to the inherently subjective aspects of religious events, Fuller introduces the biological study of religion by joining our unprecedented understanding of bodily states with an experts knowledge of religious phenomena. Culling insights from scientific observations, historical allusions, and literary references, Spirituality in the Flesh provides fresh understandings that promise to enrich our appreciation of the embodied religious experience.

Serena Fass has attempted to illustrate Jesus' Great Commission: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved." (Mark 16: 15 - 16) and has presented a balance between the many different strands of the Christian faith, for each century, from the earliest Christians in Pompeii until today, and criss-crossing the globe from North to South: from Norway to Mozambique - and West to East: from Peru to Australia. Categories include architecture, painting, sculpture, ivories, textiles, metalwork, jewellery and portraits of people wearing crosses, as well as examples of the cross in nature.

A powerfully poignant tale of one of the most turbulent moments in Scotland's history: the North Berwick Witch Trials. IT'S THE 4TH OF DECEMBER 1591. On this, the last night of her life, in a prison cell several floors below Edinburgh's High Street, convicted witch Geillis Duncan receives a mysterious visitor - Iris, who says she comes from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe. As the hours pass and dawn approaches, Geillis recounts the circumstances of her arrest, brutal torture, confession and trial, while Iris offers support, solace - and the tantalising prospect of escape. Hex is a visceral depiction of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition, exploring how the terrible force of a king's violent crusade against ordinary women can still be felt, right up to the present day. 'This series has already produced two works of note and distinction. It raises the question - if a country cannot re-tell its history, will it be stuck forever in aspic and condemned to be nothing more than a shortbread tin illustration? Hex and Rizzio are showing the way towards a reckoning, and about time too' - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

From one of America's most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer-and the reason we make other people suffer-is that we don't see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. In this "sublime" (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life-how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright's landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world's most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is "provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding" (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.

In this volume von Balthasar turns to the works of the lay theologians, the poets and the philosopher theologians who have kept alive the Grand Tradition of Christian theology in writings formally very different from the works of the Fathers and the great Scholastics. This volume contains studies of Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Hamann, Soloviev, Hopkins and Peguy.

The Buddhist philosophical tradition is vast, internally diverse, and comprises texts written in a variety of canonical languages. It is hence often difficult for those with training in Western philosophy who wish to approach this tradition for the first time to know where to start, and difficult for those who wish to introduce and teach courses in Buddhist philosophy to find suitable textbooks that adequately represent the diversity of the tradition, expose students to important primary texts in reliable translations, that contextualize those texts, and that foreground specifically philosophical issues.
Buddhist Philosophy fills that lacuna. It collects important philosophical texts from each major Buddhist tradition. Each text is translated and introduced by a recognized authority in Buddhist studies. Each introduction sets the text in context and introduces the philosophical issues it addresses and arguments it presents, providing a useful and authoritative guide to reading and to teaching the text. The volume is organized into topical sections that reflect the way that Western philosophers think about the structure of the discipline, and each section is introduced by an essay explaining Buddhist approaches to that subject matter, and the place of the texts collected in that section in the enterprise.
This volume is an ideal single text for an intermediate or advanced course in Buddhist philosophy, and makes this tradition immediately accessible to the philosopher or student versed in Western philosophy coming to Buddhism for the first time. It is also ideal for the scholar or student of Buddhist studies who is interested specifically in the philosophical dimensions of the Buddhist tradition.