Comparative History

A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests, and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.

In the book of Genesis, God bestows a new name upon Abram - Abraham, a father of many nations. With this name and his covenant, Abraham would become the patriarch of three of the world's major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Connected by their mutual - if differentiated - veneration of the one God proclaimed by Abraham, these traditions share much beyond their origins in the ancient Israel of the Old Testament. This Very Short Introduction audiobook explores the intertwined histories of these monotheistic religions.

A verse paraphrase of the biblical book entitled "The Wisdom of Solomon" from the Apocrypha.

The Bahá'í faith is a recognized independent world religion attracting increasing attention--and followers--in the U.S. and around the globe as people from all walks of life search for practical spiritual direction and meaning in these deeply troubled times. Founded nearly 160 years ago, the Bahá'í Faith is today among the fastest-growing of world religions.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Would You Like To Know About The Best Kept Secret? The world is spiraling out of control at an accelerated rate. Look at our planet. Is it in trouble? Yes, it is. Look at people’s lives. Problems abound and are getting worse by the minute: health issues, financial challenges, interpersonal problems, mental strain, marital stress, and the list goes on. What is happening to the earth and each of us? Is it the new norm? Will it keep getting worse? Why is there so much suffering? Can anyone really see any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel? I’m not sure they can. What if a solution ...

In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time—climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people—the nations of the world seem paralyzed.

The problems are too big, too interdependent, too divisive for the nation-state. Is the nation-state, once democracy's best hope, today democratically dysfunctional? Obsolete? The answer, says Benjamin Barber in this highly provocative and original book, is yes.

The world is a very religious place. Wherever you look, people are worshipping, praying, believing, following, even dying for their faith. But what does it mean to be religious? Are all religions the same? Do they all call on the same God simply using different names? Are their beliefs and practices simply cultural expressions of the same spiritual longings? This audiobook presents each of the world's five major systems of faith, carefully outlining the history, doctrines, beliefs, and spiritual practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In this fully updated fourth edition, Pinder and Usherwood cover the migrant crisis and the UK's decision to leave the Union, set in the context of a body that is now involved in most areas of public policy. Discussing how the EU continues to draw in new members, they conclude by considering the future of the Union and the choices and challenges that may lie ahead.

Is Christianity obsolete? Can an intelligent, educated person really believe the Bible? Or do the atheists have it right? In his new book, best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza ( What's So Great about America) investigates both Christianity and atheism and their influences on culture to show why there is, indeed, something great about Christianity.

Huston Smith, the man who brought the world's religions to the West, was born almost a century ago to missionary parents in China during the perilous rise of the Communist Party. Smith's lifelong spiritual journey brought him face-to-face with many of the people who shaped the 20th century. His extraordinary travels around the globe have taken him to the world's holiest places, where he has practiced religion with many of the great spiritual leaders of our time.

Embark on a worldwide journey with renowned scholar of comparative religion, Jacob Needleman, as he gathers together ancient texts and writings of the modern practitioners of essential Christianity. Needleman demonstrates that a more effective, contemplative tradition existed in the early church and continues today in the lives of extraordinary people whose stories he retells in the course of his own personal explorations into the realms of the spirit.

A sacred text to Ethiopian Christians and Jamaican Rastafarians, The Kebra Nagast tells of the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and their son, Menyelik, who hid the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. This edition of the Ethiopian text is edited by Gerald Hausman, with an introduction by Ziggy Marley.

3 Enoch, also called The Third Book of Enoch, The Hebrew Book of Enoch, and The Book of the Palaces, purports to have been written in the second century A.D. by a Rabbi, who became a 'high priest' after he had visions of an ascension to Heaven, 90 AD - 135 A.D. The book is part of the Merkabah tradition, which are writings with the theme of ascension into heaven. The name is derived from a Hebrew word meaning chariot, referring to Ezekiel's vision beginning in Ezekiel 1:4.

From classics such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid to fifth-century Christian apocrypha, narratives that described guided tours of the afterlife played a major role in shaping ancient notions of morality and ethics. In this new account, acclaimed author Bart Ehrman contextualizes early Christian narratives of heaven and hell within the broader intellectual and cultural worlds from which they emerged.

The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination.

We Are Not One People is a bold, pathbreaking, and far-reaching account of disunionists from 1776 to the present who wanted, as phrased in the Declaration of Independence, "to dissolve the political bands" connecting them to other Americans.

The Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles - throughout history the Prince of Darkness, the Western world's most powerful symbol of evil, has taken many names and shapes. Jeffrey Burton Russell here chronicles the remarkable story of the Devil from antiquity to the present. While recounting how past generations have personified evil, he deepens our understanding of the ways in which people have dealt with the enduring problem of radical evil. Russell uncovers the origins of the concept of the Devil in various early cultures and then traces its evolution in Western thought from the time of the ancient Hebrews through the first centuries of the Christian era. Next he turns to the medieval view of the Devil, focusing on images found in folklore, scholastic thought, art, literature, mysticism, and witchcraft.

Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s - populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."