This Element explores the disputed relationship between Islam and suicide attacks. Drawing from primary source material as well as existing scholarship from fields such as terrorism studies and religious studies, it argues that Islam as a generic category is not an explanatory factor in suicide attacks. Rather, it claims that we need to study how organisations and individuals in their particular contexts draw tools such as Islamic martyrdom traditions, ritual practices and perceptions on honour and purity from their cultural repertoire to shape, justify and give meaning to the bloodshed.

Lorna Byrne says we all see angels when we are young children, but are gradually conditioned to screen them out. Here for the first time she has written stories, based on real life, of six children whose lives were transformed and made better by their interaction with angels. There is a story of a little girl called Megan, paralysed from birth and unable to play with other children. Angels play with her and bring her great happiness. In a another story a little girl called Emma is mean to her classmates and gets her little brothers into trouble at home. Her guardian angel gradually prompts her towards a more harmonious and happy life. Tommy feels he is an outsider because he is no good at football. Then with his guardian angel's loving help and attention, Tommy scores a brilliant goal! Lorna began telling stories to her daughter Aideen at an age when, like all children, she was beginning to focus far more on the material world and less on spiritual influences. These stories are written to show children the ways in which they can ask for a help they can rely on and how perhaps they may even see their guardian angels.

Daily Inspirational Prayers and Meditations for Self-Reflection and Gratitude New Beginnings is a spiritual guidebook for changing your life featuring meditations, affirmations, prayers, and blessings for each day of the year. Pray every day. In her latest gem, bestselling author Becca Anderson offers inspirational words for each day of the year to those exploring new horizons or rebooting their directions in life. New Beginnings is a must-have for those seeking both guidance and companionship as they move in new, positive directions. Find a new spiritual way. Having the ability to draw inward and speculate is a fundamental skill if one wishes to grow and achieve an unlimited number of goals. If you are looking for a change in your life or seeking a new path with a vision of starting afresh, New Beginnings just might be the perfect book for you. Join Becca Anderson, a woman's studies scholar, and the author of the bestselling The Book of Awesome Women, as she shares daily meditations, affirmations, prayers, and blessings. Anderson draws from a diverse pool of religions, practices, and spiritualties to bring you the perfect message for each day of the year. Use New Beginnings as a powerful instrument for self-reflection and gratitude: Gain clarity into your purpose in life Maintain hope about the future Develop a better sense of self Build mental energy and momentum Improve your attitude and mindset If you enjoyed spiritual guidebooks like Live in Grace, Walk in Love, Unshakeable, or Prayers for Difficult Times Women's Edition, then New Beginnings will help bring a greater sense of peace, inner peace, and peace of mind.

A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the living Dust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

One of the First Books to Demonstrate the Power of Positive Thoughts

Fresh with contemporary relevance, this classic of positive thinking from one of the world's greatest motivational writers offers stirring insights on self-transformation. Based on Emmet Fox's simple message that "thoughts are things" and all potential rests in their creative and constructive use, these thirty-one inspiring essays show how to have it all--health, success, happiness, and a liberated spirit--through the power of constructive thought. First published in 1940, "Power Through Constructive Thinking" has been a never-failing source of strength and renewal for generations of readers.

The first book to give an account of the major pilgrimage traditions of all the great religions of the world. Pilgrimage, the journey to a distant sacred goal, is found in all the great religions of the world. It is a journey both outwards to hallowed places and inwards to spiritual improvement; it can express penance for past evils, or the search for future good; the pilgrim may pursue spiritual ecstasy in the sacred sites of a particular faith, or seek a miracle through the medium of god or saint. Throughout the world, pilgrims move invisibly in huge numbers among the tourists of today, indistinguishable from them except in purpose. In England each year 000 pilgrims make the journey to Canterbury cathedral and the shrine of Thomas Becket; the great festival at Prayaga on the Ganges attracts over fifteen million men and women. This is the first book to offer a survey of the great pilgrimage traditions. It outlines the history of different customs and brings together some of the common themes, revealing in the process surprising similarities in practice among pilgrims of widely differing beliefs and times. RICHARD BARBER's interests range widely over the middle ages. He is the author of The Knight and Chivalry and the Penguin Guide to Medieval Europe;he has also written biographies of the Henry II and the Black Prince, and a history, The Pastons: A Family in the Wars of the Roses, as well as two classic Arthurian books, Arthurian Legends and King Arthur: Hero and Legend.Cover illustration: The scallop shell symbol of pilgrims to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela. This scallop shell, still showing simple colouring, was found inthe grave of a young man buried in Keynsham Abbey in the 12th century; the holes in the beak, for attaching the shell to the pilgrim's scrip, are clearly visible.

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greeks, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. It explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist within a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflects upon wider, contemporary debates about food ethics.

An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism, third edition, offers a comprehensive study of a contemporary form of Hinduism. Begun as a revival and reform movement in India 200 years ago, it has now become one of the fastest growing and most prominent forms of Hinduism. The Swaminarayan Hindu transnational network of temples and institutions is expanding in India, East Africa, the UK, USA, Australasia, and in other African and Asian cities. The devotion, rituals, and discipline taught by its founder, Sahajanand Swami (1781-1830) and elaborated by current leaders in major festivals, diverse media, and over the Internet, help preserve ethnic and religious identity in many modern cultural and political contexts. Swaminarayan Hinduism, here described through its history, divisions, leaders, theology and practices, provides valuable case studies of contemporary Hinduism, religion, migrants, and transnationalism. This new edition includes up-to-date information about growth, geographic expansion, leadership transitions, and impact of Swaminarayan institutions in India and abroad.

This illuminating account of contemporary American Buddhism shows the remarkable ways the tradition has changed over the past generation The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. In this fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape, Ann Gleig illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period she identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. She observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism, such as ethics and community, that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.

Sacrifice is not simply an expression of religious beliefs. Its highly symbolic nature lends itself to various kinds of manipulation by those carrying it out, who may use the ritual in maintaining and negotiating power and identity in carefully staged 'performances'. This Element will examine some of the many different types of sacrifice and ritual killing of human beings through history, from Bronze Age China and the Near East to Mesoamerica to Northern Europe. The focus is on the archaeology of human sacrifice, but where available, textual and iconographic sources provide valuable complements to the interpretation of the material.

Ritualized violence is by definition not haphazard or random, but seemingly intentional and often ceremonial. It has a long history in religious practice, as attested in texts and artifacts from the earliest civilizations. It is equally evident in the behaviors of some contemporary religious activists and within initiatory practices ongoing in many regions of the world. Given its longevity and cultural expanse, ritualized violence presumably exerts a pull deeply into the sociology, psychology, anthropology, theology, perhaps even ontology of its practitioners, but this is not transparent. This short volume will sketch the subject of ritualized violence, that is, it will summarize some established theories about ritual and about violence, and will ponder a handful of striking instantiations of their link.

The interpretation of animal sacrifice, now considered the most important ancient Greek and Roman religious ritual, has long been dominated by the views of Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne. No penetrating and general critique of their views has appeared and, in particular, no critique of the application of these views to Roman religion. Nor has any critique dealt with the use of literary and visual sources by these writers. This book, a collection of essays by leading scholars, incorporates all these subjects and provides a theoretical background for the study of animal sacrifice in an ancient context.

Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious texts, the role of Brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in the transmission of divine truths, and the cultural and moral importance of epics such as the Ramayana. In this second edition Knott considers the impact of changes in technology and the flourishing of social media on Hinduism, and looks at the presence of Hinduism in popular culture, considering pieces such as Sita Sings the Blues. She also analyses recent developments in India, and the impact issues such as Hindu nationalism and the politicization of Hinduism have on Hindus worldwide. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this book, Masooda Bano presents an in-depth analysis of a new movement that is transforming the way that young Muslims engage with their religion. Led by a network of Islamic scholars in the West, this movement seeks to revive the tradition of Islamic rationalism. Bano explains how, during the period of colonial rule, the exit of Muslim elites from madrasas, the Islamic scholarly establishments, resulted in a stagnation of Islamic scholarship. This trend is now being reversed. Exploring the threefold focus on logic, metaphysics, and deep mysticism, Bano shows how Islamic rationalism is consistent with Sunni orthodoxy and why it is so popular among young, elite, educated Muslims, who are now engaging with classical Islamic texts. One of the most tangible results of this revival is that Islamic rationalism - rather than jihadism - is emerging as one of the most influential movements in the contemporary Muslim world.

This is the first book-length study of the emergence of Medina, in modern Saudi Arabia, as a widely venerated sacred space and holy city over the course of the first three Islamic centuries (the seventh to ninth centuries CE). This was a dynamic period that witnessed the evolution of many Islamic political, religious and legal doctrines, and the book situates Medina's emerging sanctity within the appropriate historical contexts. The book focuses on the roles played by the Prophet Mu ammad, by the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphs and by Muslim legal scholars. It shows that Medina's emergence as a holy city, alongside Mecca and Jerusalem, as well as the development of many of the doctrines associated with its sanctity, was the result of gradual and contested processes and was intimately linked with important contemporary developments concerning the legitimation of political, religious and legal authority in the Islamic world."

Back by popular demand, the classic JPS holiday anthologies remain essential and relevant in our digital age. Unequaled in-depth compilations of classic and contemporary writings, they have long guided rabbis, cantors, educators, and other readers seeking the origins, meanings, and varied celebrations of the Jewish festivals. The Rosh Hashanah Anthology is designed to make the commemoration of the Jewish New Year meaningful as both a solemn and a festive day. Its religious impact, significance, history, and messages are embodied in the great treasures of Jewish classical writings-the Bible, Talmud, midrashim, medieval theological and philosophical works, codes of law and liturgy-and all are featured in this volume. In addition, modern works by S. Y. Agnon, Franz Rosenzweig, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elie Wiesel accompany liturgical selections with commentaries, depictions of Rosh Hashanah observances in many lands, detailed programming suggestions, illustrations, and an extensive bibliography.

Back by popular demand, the classic JPS holiday anthologies remain essential and relevant in our digital age. Unequaled in-depth compilations of classic and contemporary writings, they have long guided rabbis, cantors, educators, and other readers seeking the origins, meanings, and varied celebrations of the Jewish festivals. The Purim Anthology recounts the origins of the first Purim, then examines festival observances in different eras throughout the world, laws and rites, and finally provides plays and poems, stories and songs. This treasury includes "The Origin of Purim" by Solomon Grayzel, "The Esther Story in Art" by Rachel Wischnitzer, "Purim in Music" by A. W. Binder (including an extensive compilation of Purim songs), "The History of Purim Plays" by Jacob Shatzky, Purim celebrations in Tel Aviv by Mortimer J. Cohen, and Purim in humor by Israel Davidson-all together a thoughtful and fun-filled literary feast.

"Miracle Prayer" proposes a systematic approach to creating intention and formulating prayers that get results, based on the premise that your thoughts create your destiny. Using a prescribed prayer format that will heal and transform your mind, you will learn how to accept with full faith that the desired goal can be achieved. It presents the powerful, field-proven system, which draws on the work of Ernest Holmes and the Religious Science tradition, and has produced miracles in the lives of millions of people worldwide.