Our new Religion catalog includes a timely defense of religious diversity and its centrality to American identity; a biography of the New Testament’s most mystifying and incendiary book; and a comprehensive history of the changing, complex, and contradictory visions of Muhammad in Western history.
If you’re attending the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Denver this weekend, stop by Booth 630 to browse our full range of religion titles!
America is the most religiously devout country in the Western world and the most religiously diverse nation on the planet. In today’s volatile climate of religious conflict, prejudice, and distrust, how do we affirm the principle that the American promise is deeply intertwined with how each of us engages with people of different faiths and beliefs? In Out of Many Faiths, Eboo Patel, former faith adviser to Barack Obama, shows how America’s promise is the guarantee of equal rights and dignity for all, and how that promise is the foundation of America’s unrivaled strength as a nation.
Few biblical books have been as revered and reviled as Revelation. Many hail it as the pinnacle of prophetic vision, the cornerstone of the biblical canon, and, for those with eyes to see, the key to understanding the past, present, and future. Others denounce it as the work of a disturbed individual whose horrific dreams of inhumane violence should never have been allowed into the Bible. Timothy Beal provides a concise cultural history of Revelation and the apocalyptic imaginations it has fueled. The Book of Revelation traces how Revelation continues to inspire new diagrams of history, new fantasies of rapture, and new nightmares of being left behind.
In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.