Following in the fashion of Stephen Jay Gould and Peter Medawar, one of the world's leading scientists examines how "pure science" is in fact shaped and guided by social and political needs and assumptions.

Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

The new Annotated is a complete revision of Oxford's classic study Bible, and the first such resource to incorporate the full text of the acclaimed New Revised Standard Version Bible. The features of this enhanced resource include: expanded notes and essays compiled by top scholars, including seven new essays on major subdivisions, a new introductory essay by Bruce Metzger on how to use the new Annotated in reading and study, and a better organized book design. Also included is a 36-page indexed map section featuring Oxford's world famous Bible maps. The new Annotated is sensitive to inclusive language. It is an invaluable resource for students, scholars, religious educators, and pastors for personal and group study. The new Annotated is available in editions with and without the Apocrypha, and in fine leather bindings.

From the editors of the bestselling The Five Gospels, The Complete Gospels presents for the first time anywhere all twenty of the known gospels from the early Christian era, offering a fuller and more fascinating picture of early Christian origins than found in the four canonical gospels alone — or in any other source. Each of these gospels records offers fresh glimpses into the world of Jesus and his followers, including:

Gospel of Thomas reveals that Jesus, contrary to the popular image of him as an apocalyptic preacher of damnation and salvation, was actually a wisdom teacher who taught about the true origins of humankind.

Gospels of Mary suggests that women held prominent role in early church, and provides a startling look at what may have been the first attempts to supress their leadership.

Sayings Gospels Q, the controversial reconstruction of the first gospel used by Jesus' original followers, contains only Jesus' sayings and none of the dramatic stories about his life later told in the New Testament gospels.

Signs Gospel is almost entirely a catalog of Jesus' miracles, intended to demonstrate that he was the Jewish Messiah, the Anointed.

Secret Book of James relates that immediately prior to his ascension, Jesus imparted a private revelation to James and Peter, which James presents here as a letter. Gospel of Peter contains what may have been the original passion narrative later adapted in the New Testament synoptic gospels' accounts.

Four new pieces have been added to this third expanded edition: the three Jewish-Christian gospels and the Greek fragment of the Gospels of Thomas.

Each gospel is translated into lively, contemporary English, recapturing the spirit of the original. Exciting both to read and to hear, this Scholars Version (SV) translation has — as one reader put it — "a vitality that jumps off the page." The editor and contributors to this volume are members of the Jesus Seminar founded by Robert W. Funk, based at the Westar Institute in Sonama, California.

What most readers want are the interesting and colourful facts and historical settings of these lives, and they would like these given without solemnity and subjective reflections. It is mainly for this public that the present work has been written. Biographies and not homilies will be found in it. This is not because the admiration and respectful friendship due to the saints is denied them here; but on the sole occasion when the author meets them, he has chosen to speak of them rather than of anything else; he has preferred to show them at work, tell about their lives, and record their words...from the Preface to the English edition

Christians must pass through essential passages in their progressive understanding of the divine and this text meditates on the meaning of the elements that make up baptism and confirmation: water, fire and oil.

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. Karen Armstrong's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest.

Islam: A Short History begins with the flight of Muhammad and his family from Medina in the seventh century and the subsequent founding of the first mosques. It recounts the origins of the split between Shii and Sunni Muslims, and the emergence of Sufi mysticism; the spread of Islam throughout North Africa, the Levant, and Asia; the shattering effect on the Muslim world of the Crusades; the flowering of imperial Islam in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries into the world's greatest and most sophisticated power; and the origins and impact of revolutionary Islam. It concludes with an assessment of Islam today and its challenges.

With this brilliant book, Karen Armstrong issues a forceful challenge to those who hold the view that the West and Islam are civilizations set on a collision course. It is also a model of authority, elegance, and economy.

In this timely, provocative, and uplifting journey, the bestselling author of Walking the Bible searches for the man at the heart of the world's three monotheistic religions — and today's deadliest conflicts.

At a moment when the world is asking, “Can the religions get along?” one figure stands out as the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One man holds the key to our deepest fears — and our possible reconciliation. Abraham.

Bruce Feiler set out on a personal quest to better understand our common patriarch. Traveling in war zones, climbing through caves and ancient shrines, and sitting down with the world's leading religious minds, Feiler uncovers fascinating, little-known details of the man who defines faith for half the world.

Both immediate and timeless, Abraham is a powerful, universal story, the first-ever interfaith portrait of the man God chose to be his partner. Thoughtful and inspiring, it offers a rare vision of hope that will redefine what we think about our neighbors, our future, and ourselves.

"Extraordinarily entertaining...Learned, witty...Wilson [is] a gifted novelist and diligent biographer."
NEW YORK NEWSDAY
Sifting through 2,000 years of myth, miracle, sacred and profane texts, Biblical commentary, and archeological scholarship, A.N. Wilson overturns long-cherished legends about every aspect of Jesus' life. What emerges is a vivid, gripping narrative that combines impeccable scholarship with the dazzling intuitions of a brilliant literary mind. In JESUS: A LIFE, we discover anew the true beauty and wrenching drama of the life of the central figure in Western civilization.

Composed nearly fifteen hundred years ago by the father of Western monasticism, The Rule of St. Benedict has for centuries been the guide of religious communities. St. Benedict's rules of obedience, humility, and contemplation are not only prerequisites for formal religious societies, they also provide an invaluable model for anyone desiring to live more simply. While they presuppose a certain detachment from the world, they provide guidance and inspiration for anyone seeking peace and fulfillment in their home and work communities. As prepared by the Benedictine monk and priest Timothy Fry, this translation of The Rule of St. Benedict can be a life-transforming book. With a new Preface by Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul.

"God is our home but many of us have strayed from our native land. The venerable authors of these Spiritual Classics are expert guides—may we follow their directions home."
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting faiths and world views. His Confessions, written when he was in his forties, recount how, slowly and painfully, he came to turn away from his youthful ideas and licentious lifestyle, to become instead a staunch advocate of Christianity and one of its most influential thinkers. A remarkably honest and revealing spiritual autobiography, the Confessions also address fundamental issues of Christian doctrine, and many of the prayers and meditations it includes are still an integral part of the practice of Christianity today.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A decade after he published his famous first novel, A Long and Happy Life, Reynolds Price began a serious study of the Hebrew and Greek narratives which combine to form that crucial document of Western civilization we call the Bible. Since early childhood, Price had known Bible stories of patriarchs, kings, prophets, and the boldly assertive women of Ancient Israel, as well as the four-fold gospel story of the life of Jesus — another Jew whose career has exerted immense fascination on subsequent history.

In Price's early middle age, however, he felt compelled to go further than simple reading; he began to investigate the rudiments of the Bible stories as deeply as possible. He focused on the Hebrew and Greek originals that are unquestionably the most discussed and annotated texts with the close assistance of other literal versions and of numerous scholarly commentaries, old and modern. He was likewise encouraged and helped by frequent discussions with distinguished scholar-colleagues at Duke University, where he has taught since 1958.

As the work continued over several years, Price expanded his translation attempts into the Greek New Testament. And soon he had begun an informal navigation of the shoals of Koine Greek — that common Mediterranean dialect in which a good deal of the business of the Roman empire was conducted and in which the gospels and all other books of the New Testament were written. Gradually, his translations of separate incidents from the four gospels evolved into a literal translation of the whole of the oldest gospel, Mark. His first version of Mark appeared, along with other translations from the Old and New Testaments, in A Palpable God (Atheneum, 1978). The book met with a wide and favorable reception from scholars, writers, and critics.

Price's studies have expanded steadily in the intervening decades; and in recent years he has worked at both a revised version of his early translation of Mark and an entirely new literal version of the Gospel of John (John is the last published gospel and almost surely the one that comes, at its core, from an eyewitness of the life of Jesus). To his new translations, Price has added extensive prefaces, which he hopes will be of interest to scholars and casual readers alike. The prefaces are the result not only of his own work as a translator and his discussions with New Testament scholars of more than twenty years reading in textual exegesis, in the life of the first-century Roman world (including the immensely complicated realities of Roman Palestine), but also in consideration of the widespread and ongoing attempt to reconsider the historical bases of our knowledge of Jesus.

Finally, after twice teaching a semester-long seminar on the gospels of Mark and John at Duke University, Price has written a gospel of his own. The new gospel, which he calls "apocryphal" in a non-canonical sense, makes a fresh attempt at a compact narrative of the life and work of Jesus. Yet it is an attempt grounded meticulously in the earliest available historic, biographical, and theological evidence. In a third and final preface, Price describes the motive for writing a gospel of his own. In brief, his new gospel (like the whole of Three Gospels) aims to render the highest possible contemporary justice to a life lived two thousand years ago, a life presented in — and, to a startling extent, still recoverable from — documents that have proved the most influential in Western history.

When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus "What is truth?" he received no answer. In this provocative, vastly learned, and elegantly argued book, a historian of international reputation asks the same question of the Bible, with triumphant results.

The Unauthorized Version discusses the two incompatible creation stories in Genesis and the historical errors in the Gospels' accounts of the Nativity. It introduces us to a Bible that came late to monotheism, propounded a jumble of conflicting laws, and whose authors wrote under assumed names. Far from debunking the scriptures, though, Robin Lane Fox locates their core of truth: his book is a bold and original contribution both to the history of religion and the literature of belief.

Does God Exist and Does He Care?

In April 1997 Reynolds Price received an eloquent letter from a reader of his cancer memoir A Whole New Life. The correspondent, a young medical student diagnosed with cancer himself and facing his own mortality, asked the difficult questions above. The two began a long-distance correspondence, culminating in Price's thoughtful response, originally delivered as the Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary, and now expanded onto the printed page as Letter to a Man in the Fire.

Harvesting a variety of sources — diverse religious traditions, classical and modern texts, and a lifetime of personal experiences, interactions, and spiritual encounters — Price meditates on God's participation in our fate. He explores the inexplicable and the inconsistent: the phenomenon of God's seeming desertions and absences in the face of human suffering and, conversely, examples of healing, restoration, and beauty against insurmountable odds. With candor and sympathy, Reynolds Price — for nearly five decades a serious student of religion in general and the Gospels in particular — offers the reader such a rich variety of tools to explore these questions as to place this work in the company of other great testaments of faith from St. Augustine to C. S. Lewis.

Letter to a Man in the Fire moves as much as it educates. It is a rare combination of deep erudition, vivid prose, and profound humanity.