Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. It is young people at the forefront of navigating the complexities of cultural and ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to …
American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility—social, economic, geographic—in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of »domestic«, referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the "American" century. Juxtaposing canoni…
This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice. Just as interest in the neurosciences and related fields has burgeoned in contemporary society, interest in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive studies is also growing within the religious studies academy, and reflection on these shifts is well overd…
In Native Americans and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith advances social movement theory beyond simplistic understandings of social-justice activism as either right-wing or left-wing and urges a more open-minded approach to the role of religion in social movements. In examining the interplay of biblical scripture, gender, and nationalism in Christian Right and Native American activism, Smith r…
Winner of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History. Through close study of Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, this book shows how traditional Islamic education among the people of Tsarist Russia's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) helped to Islamize the area's Tu…
Uzi Leibner aims to provide the most accurate picture possible of the nature and history of the rural settlement in the Lower Galilee during Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods when this region played an important role in the development of both Judaism and Christianity. In an attempt to draw a historical reconstruction based on systematic data, a test case area in the »heart« of ancient…
The Calvin year 2009 began on October 31, 2008 with a conference organized by the Institute for Reformation Research (Apeldoorn) on the topic »Calvin: Saint or Sinner?« A number of scholars dealt with the question of whether and how Calvin brought a renewal to theology, the church and society. This volume contains the papers held at this conference, which demonstrate the detailed and growing …
The studies comprising this volume, most of them appearing for the first time in English, deal with some of the main topics in Maimonides' philosophy and that of his followers in Provence. At the heart of these topics lies the issue of whether they adopted a completely naturalistic picture of the workings of the world order, or left room for the volitional activity of God in history. These topi…
Religions of foreign origin have shaped Chinese cultural history much stronger than generally assumed and continue to have impact on Chinese society in varying regional degrees. The essays collected in the present volume put a special emphasis on these “foreign” and less familiar aspects of Chinese religion. Apart from an introductory article on Daoism (the prototypical autochthonous religi…
Jewish Religion After Theology ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift and its various manifestations. The central figure of this new examination is Isaiah Leibowitz, whose thoughts encapsulate more than any other…