Michael Allen Williams is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, and is currently chair of the Department of Near East Languages and Civilization. He is also the author of The Immovable Race: A Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity and co-editor, with Collett Cox and Martin Jaffee, of Innovation in Religious Traditions: Essays in the Interpretation of Religious Change. Most anyone interested...

Was religious practice in ancient Rome cultic and hostile to individual expression? Or was there, rather, considerable latitude for individual initiative and creativity? Jörg Rüpke, one of the world's leading authorities on Roman religion, demonstrates in his new book that it was a lived religion with individual appropriations evident at the heart of such rituals as praying, dedicating, making vows, and reading. On Roman Religion definitively dismantles...

A fascinating look at the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians by renowned Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist E. A. Wallis Budge, who worked for the world famous British Museum.

Joseph M. Kitagawa is Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School and of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations there: he is also a former Dean of the Divinity School. Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential...

"A short, provocative book on religion from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In his new book, acclaimed scholar Jack Miles poses a question: How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity-a religion inextricably bound to Western thought-Miles reveals how we in the West have come to isolate religion as an object of study,...

The author compares Celtic mythology and religion with the beliefs of early Scandinavian society. Vikings and Norsemen who raided British shores ruled parts of Britain for centuries. The religion of the Scandinavians was the same as the religious beliefs and practices of their fellow Teutonic and Germanic tribes, and their chief deities and religious rituals were like those of Teutonic people anywhere.

The individual and cultural upheavals of early colonial New France were experienced differently by French explorers and settlers, and by Native traditionalists and Catholic converts. However, European invaders and indigenous people alike learned to negotiate the complexities of cross-cultural encounters by reimagining the meaning of kinship. Part micro-history, part biography, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France explores the lives...

Beginning with Greece's earliest rites, this volume traces the development of the classic religion of the Olympian gods and discusses the religion of the philosophic schools of the fourth century BC. It portrays the emergence of Christianity and concludes with an account of the efforts of Julian the Apostate to restore a new variety of paganism.

Can religious beliefs survive in the scientific age? Are they resoundingly outdated? Or, is there something in them of great importance, even if the way they are expressed will have to change given new scientific context? These questions are among those at the core of the science-religion dialogue. In The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward, an Anglican priest who was once an atheist, offers compelling insights into the often contentious...

From the publisher. Connelly gives us the first comprehensive cultural history of priestesses in the ancient Greek world. She presents the fullest and most vivid picture yet of how priestesses lived and worked, from the most famous and sacred of them--the Delphic Oracle and the priestess of Athena Polias--to basket bearers and handmaidens. Along the way, she challenges long-held beliefs to show that priestesses played far more significant public roles...