Life Configurations focuses on the analysis and reflection on the various forms in which human beings imagine, design, conjecture, and plan their ? becoming, that is to say their lives. Case studies written by an interdisciplinary circle of well-known academics explore how the capacity of designing life, the concept of free will, and the methods to calculate the future have been changed and adopted in different societies and in different ages."

Experiencing the dimension that lies beyond our empirical grasp of the world has always been a challenge for human beings, for it can expose the limitations of our agency. Such experience, while potentially terrifying, can also furnish a basis for religious faith or hope of a better future. The intercultural essays in this volume analyze ways of dealing with the beyond, including magic, religion, myth, and all-promising utopias.

The central question of the book is as follows: To what extent does the community present a challenge in the life of the individual? Well-known international Philosophers, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, theologians and sociologists attempted to find explications by intercultural comparison.

The body is at the same time a place where we express duration and/or discontinuity in history, a witness of radical social changes, and a factor of stabilization, but also of the transformation of human life - and therefore an eminent challenge for every human being. This book will contribute in a decisively interdisciplinary and cross-cultural way to a better understanding of the place, role, and connection of the body within social, political, and cultural shifts.

This book surveys the full panorama of ten centuries of Christian monastic life. It moves from the deserts of Egypt and the Frankish monasteries of early medieval Europe to the religious ruptures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the reforms of the later Middle Ages. Throughout that story the book balances a rich sense of detail with a broader synthetic view. It presents the history of religious life and its orders as a complex braid woven from multiple strands: individual and community, spirit and institution, rule and custom, church and world. The result is a synthesis that places religious life at the center of European history and presents its institutions as key catalysts of Europe's move toward modernity.