Author(s): Edited by Shawkat Toorawa
Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume...
Author(s): Co-edited with Kyle Smith and Emanuel Fiano
Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, Duke University, 26-29 June 2011
The Sixth North American Syriac Symposium brought together scholars from across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and India. Syriac Encounters offers twenty-five papers that were originally delivered at the Symposium, a, nd represents a cross-section of both the Symposium and the current...
Author(s): Edited by Shawkat Toorawa
An eclectic collection of poems about New York City.
“New York, the city that never sleeps, contains more light than all the myriad heavens conceived of by its denizens of every possible race, religion, culture, color, and creed combined. All poets are besotted with light: it is the most...
Author(s): Christine Hayes
In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What’s Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of...
Author(s): Andrew McGowan
This introduction to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the importance of ancient Christian worship practices for contemporary Christianity. Andrew McGowan, a leading scholar of early Christian liturgy, takes a fresh approach to understanding how Christians came to worship in the...
Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or “Childhood Deeds” of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only...
Failure of Empire is the first comprehensive biography of the Roman emperor Valens and his troubled reign (A.D. 364-78). Valens will always be remembered for his spectacular defeat and death at the hands of the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople. This singular misfortune won him a front-row seat...
These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they actually were part of a ‘Jewish-Christian...
Author(s): Christine Hayes
Jewish Law Association Studies
Author(s): co-edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim
Modern Spiritual Masters
Thomas Berry (1914-2009), a Passionist priest, was a “geologian,” historian of religion, philosopher, and the single most important Catholic voice on the link between faith, reverence for all life, and the environmental crisis. Particularly well-known for his work in popularizing the “universe...