Mani, the founder of the spiritual movement which has come to be known as Manichaeism, established an influential teaching that spread swiftly across Asia, Africa and parts of Europe but was later brutally suppressed. Little was known about this 'Gnostic religion' until archaeological findings in the twentieth century revealed important aspects of Mani's biography and philosophical thought. Many years before these physical discoveries, Rudolf Steiner provided key esoteric insights, based on his personal spiritual-scientific research, into Mani's life and work. Richard Seddon assembles pieces of the academic and esoteric puzzle, offering a lively and colourful picture of Mani and Manichaeism. He gives a succinct outline of Mani's life, the fundamental aspects of his teachings, and a description of Manichaeism's future spiritual role. Seddon creates an image of a mighty Christian initiate leading a movement with the critical task of transforming, and ultimately redeeming, evil.

"If we read Steiner's] lectures with an open and attentive inner eye, we may be able to see the Christ mystery, not as a collection of dogmas or facts, but as a spiritual impulse that stretches far beyond the limits of Christ's own time and even of the lifespan of Christianity itself. We may even catch a glimpse of the high powers that govern the life of civilizations and of the great entity known as the human race." -Richard Smoley (from the introduction) For centuries people have been baffled by the varying accounts of Christ's life as presented in the four Gospels and have struggled to reconcile them. In these profound and stimulating lectures, Steiner addresses this conundrum. He shows how each of the Gospels presents a different lens onto Christ's life and message. Here Steiner reveals the Gospel of Matthew as the one that emphasizes Christ's humanity. But he does not stop there; his visionary perspective traces Christ's life and message to spiritual impulses that go back centuries, even millennia, to the legendary civilization of Atlantis, to the mysterious Zarathustra, and to the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. An introduction by Richard Smoley, author of Inner Christianity, puts Steiner's vision into perspective for modern readers. Once you have experienced Steiner's powerful exploration of Matthew, you will never see the Gospels in the same way again.

All Religion Is Inter-Religion analyses the ways inter-religious relations have contributed both historically and philosophically to the constructions of the category of "religion" as a distinct subject of study. Regarded as contemporary classics, Steven M. Wasserstrom's Religion after Religion (1999) and Between Muslim and Jew (1995) provided a theoretical reorientation for the study of religion away from hierophanies and ultimacy, and toward lived history and deep pluralism. This book distills and systematizes this reorientation into nine theses on the study of religion. Drawing on these theses--and Wasserstrom's opus more generally--a distinguished group of his colleagues and former students demonstrate that religions can, and must, be understood through encounters in real time and space, through the complex relations they create and maintain between people, and between people and their pasts. The book also features an afterword by Wasserstrom himself, which poses nine riddles to students of religion based on his personal experiences working on religion at the turn of the twenty-first century.