The author traveled to South Africa to interview surviving members of Murray's family in order to produce this biography of the 19th-century missionary statesman, revivalist, evangelist, pastor, and one of the best-loved and most widely read writers on faith and spirit-filled living.

Love and Liberation reads the autobiographical and biographical writings of one of the few Tibetan Buddhist women to record the story of her life. Sera Khandro Kunzang Dekyong Chonyi Wangmo (also called Dewe Dorje, 1892-1940) was extraordinary not only for achieving religious mastery as a Tibetan Buddhist visionary and guru to many lamas, monastics, and laity in the Golok region of eastern Tibet, but also for her candor. This book listens to Sera Khandro's conversations with land deities, dakinis, bodhisattvas, lamas, and fellow religious community members whose voices interweave with her own to narrate what is a story of both love between Sera Khandro and her guru, Drime Ozer, and spiritual liberation. Sarah H. Jacoby's analysis focuses on the status of the female body in Sera Khandro's texts, the virtue of celibacy versus the expediency of sexuality for religious purposes, and the difference between profane lust and sacred love between male and female tantric partners. Her findings add new dimensions to our understanding of Tibetan Buddhist consort practices, complicating standard scriptural presentations of male subject and female aide. Sera Khandro depicts herself and Drime Ozer as inseparable embodiments of insight and method that together form the Vajrayana Buddhist vision of complete buddhahood. By advancing this complementary sacred partnership, Sera Khandro carved a place for herself as a female virtuoso in the male-dominated sphere of early twentieth-century Tibetan religion.

Author Annette Adams shares the remarkable story of Aileen Coleman, an Australian missionary to the Arab world. Known by many names including the Desert Rat, Angel of the Desert, Blood Brother to the Bedouin, Aileen has been honored by queen Noorah of Jordan and Queen Elizabeth of England and celebrated by the princely and noble as well as the lowly and oppressed.

Franklin Graham of Samaritan's Purse, asks: "How in the world could a lady from the Outback of Australia turn ... the Arab world upside down?"

Rabble-Rouser for Peace is the first book to tell the full story of how a boy from South Africa's poverty-stricken black townships became one of the world's best-known religious figures, a moral icon to those who work for peace and justice everywhere. Drawn from 30 years of the author's first-hand contact with Desmond Tutu, this is not only a vivid character study of a public figure with a unique capacity to communicate warmth, humour and compassion; it is also a rich account of his dynamic place in history. The story of Desmond Tutu's life tells a crucial part of South Africa's history and its movement from Apartheid towards peace, but it also follows the growth of one of the best loved and globally most recognised men of our time.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was America's most famous pastor and scholar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. People today generally associate him with the infamous Salem witch trials, but that picture has mostly come down to us from one unreliable, antagonistic source. This biography by Rick Kennedy, based largely on new research by an international team of scholars, corrects misconceptions of Cotton Mather and focuses on the way he tried to promote, socially and intellectually, a biblical lifestyle. As older Puritan hopes in New England were giving way to a broader and shallower Protestantism, Mather led a populist, Bible-oriented movement that embraced the new century -- the beginning of a dynamic evangelical tradition that eventually became a major force in American culture.

Milarepa (1052-1135), a major figure in the history of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism and known as one of Tibet's greatest lamas and poets, continues to inspire Buddhist practitioners worldwide to the present day. This title explores the history and spirituality of the Kagyu lineage in relationship to the narratives and teachings attributed to Milarepa by studying some of the earliest versions of these materials.

A revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to assert the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Dissident Rabbi tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who alone challenged Sabbetai Zevi's improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers. Yaacob Dweck's absorbing and richly detailed biography brings to life the tumultuous century in which Sasportas lived, an age torn apart by war, migration, and famine. He describes the messianic frenzy that gripped the Jewish Diaspora, and Sasportas's attempts to make sense of a world that Sabbetai Zevi claimed was ending. As Jews danced in the streets, Sasportas compiled The Fading Flower of the Zevi, a meticulous and eloquent record of Sabbatianism as it happened. In 1666, barely a year after Sabbetai Zevi heralded the redemption, the Messiah converted to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman sultan, and Sasportas's book slipped into obscurity. Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty, and a revealing examination of how his life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.

During a period of vocational indecision and deep depression, young William James embarked on a circuitous journey, trying out natural history field work, completing medical school, and studying ancient cultures before teaching physiological psychology on his way to becoming a philosopher. A century after his death, Young William James Thinking examines the private thoughts James detailed in his personal correspondence, archival notes, and his first publications to create a compelling portrait of his growth as both man and thinker. By going to the sources, Paul J. Croce's cultural biography challenges the conventional contrast commentators have drawn between James's youthful troubles and his mature achievements. Inverting James's reputation for inconsistency, Croce shows how he integrated his interests and his struggles into sophisticated thought. His ambivalence became the motivating core of his philosophizing, the heart of his enduring legacy. Readers can follow James in science classes and in personal "speculations," studying medicine and exploring both mainstream and sectarian practices, in museums reflecting on the fate of humanity since ancient times, in love and with heart broken, and in periodic crises of confidence that sometimes even spurred thoughts of suicide. A case study in coming of age, this book follows the famous American philosopher's vocational work and avocational interests, his education and his frustrations-young James between childhood and fame. Anecdotes placed in the contexts of his choices shed new light on the core commitments within his enormous contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religious studies. James's hard-won insights, starting with his mediation of science and religion, led to his appreciation of body and mind in relation. Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.

The creative force behind Blackberry Farm, Tennessee's award-winning farm-to-table resort, reveals how she found herself only after losing everything in this powerful memoir of resilience. Born with 'the gift of hospitality', Kreis Beall helped create one of the South's most enchanting destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the entertaining world and on the glossy pages of popular home and design magazines. But beautiful exteriors and glowing accolades papered over deep inner pain. At the pinnacle of her success, a brain injury left her with devastating hearing loss. That was followed by the collapse of her thirty-six-year marriage to her best friend and business partner, Sandy Beall--and a few years later, the tragic death of her son Sam, the proprietor of Blackberry Farm, at age thirty-nine. Alone and desolate as her marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey, to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her exterior life and work, now she must begin the hardest undertaking of all: to reclaim her interior life and soul. Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into an unassuming, 300-square foot shed with peeling paint on the exterior walls 'where I met myself for the first time.' Out of brokenness has come reflection, re-examination, and bit by bit, healing and meaning. By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, and warm, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who has ever searched to find genuine beauty among their own flaws and scars.

By 388 C.E., Augustine had broken with the Manichaeism of his early adulthood and wholeheartedly embraced Nicene Christianity as the tradition with which he would identify and within which he would find meaning. Yet conversion rarely, if ever, represents a clean and total break from the past. As Augustine defined and became a "Catholic" self, he also intently engaged with Manichaeism as a rival religious system. This second volume of Jason David BeDuhn's detailed reconsideration of Augustine's life and letters explores the significance of the fact that these two processes unfolded together.BeDuhn identifies the Manichaean subtext to be found in nearly every work written by Augustine between 388 and 401 and demonstrates Augustine's concern with refuting his former beliefs without alienating the Manichaeans he wished to win over. To achieve these ends, Augustine modified and developed his received Nicene Christian faith, strengthening it where it was vulnerable to Manichaean critique and taking it in new directions where he found room within an orthodox frame of reference to accommodate Manichaean perspectives and concerns. Against this background, BeDuhn is able to shed new light on the complex circumstances and purposes of Augustine's most famous work, "The Confessions," as well as his distinctive reading of Paul and his revolutionary concept of grace. "Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 2" demonstrates the close interplay between Augustine's efforts to work out his own "Catholic" persona and the theological positions associated with his name, between the sometimes dramatic twists and turns of his own personal life and his theoretical thinking.

This historical investigation into the real John the Baptist brings to light one of the most influential figures in Christianity and western civilization, who is also a revered figure in Islam and other religions. Two thousand years later his life and example are still an influence for millions. John the Baptist's importance is such that he appears in all four Gospels, together with the writings of Josephus, and is inextricably linked to the life of Jesus. John was a friend, inspiration and forerunner for Jesus - and a respected figure in his own lifetime - yet the historical facts of his life are unknown to most. Josephine Wilkinson assembles the evidence to show us the man whose views led him to be sentenced to death and beheaded by Herod. Based on the ancient sources, the author gets as close as it is possible to get to a biography of John, including an account of his relationship with Jesus.

Fethullah Gulen is an enlightened person who knows well many issues related to literature, art, philosophy and science, he is a man of action who has not wasted his life, but struggled to serve humanity.