Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned for seventeen years in the fourteenth century B.C.E, is one of the most intriguing rulers of ancient Egypt. His odd appearance and his preoccupation with worshiping the sun disc Aten have stimulated academic discussion and controversy for more than…
"The meeting was unique in that it brought together scholars who were engaged in various disciplines of research, and though all were involved in the geographical area of the ancient Near East, everyone brought a different expertise to the question of how to approach the concept…
Ideas about God, argues Rodney Stark, have shaped the history & culture of the West. He examines the Reformation, the rise of science, witch-hunts & the abolition of slavery to demonstrate his case.
Ideas about God, argues Rodney Stark, have shaped the history & culture of the West. He examines the Reformation, the rise of science, witch-hunts & the abolition of slavery to demonstrate his case.
"Tracing a dialectical path, The Maturing of Monotheism emphasises the plausibility of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and kindred forms of monotheism and responds to anti-theistic challenges of our day. These include materialism, determinism, the denial of objective value, the perva…
Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms--Yhwh, God, or Allah--by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.…
Do things happen for a reason? Is God watching over the course of events? Does the scientific discovery of widespread randomness in nature rule out any role for God? In Abraham's Dice, major scholars explore these questions from multiple perspectives.
This work examines the life and work of one of the most important of the Qing Chinese Muslim literati, Liu Zhi (ca. 1660-ca. 1730), and places his writings in their historical, cultural, social, and religio-philosophical context. His Tianfang danli (Ritual law of Islam) represen…
Islam first arrived in China over 1,200 years ago, but for more than a millennium it was perceived as a foreign presence. The restoration of native Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). after nearly a century of Mongol domination, helped transform Chinese intellectual di…