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.

This book is designed to initiate the reader into a deep, living relationship with God. Written by an acknowledged spiritual master, the book moves beyond "discursive meditation and particular acts to the intuitive level of contemplation." Keating gives an overview of the history of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition, and step-by-step guidance in the method of centering prayer. Special attention is paid to the role of the Sacred Word, Christian growth and transformation, and active prayer. The book ends with an explicit treatment of the contemplative dimension of the gospel. Open Mind, Open Heart will take readers into a world where God can do anything, into a realm of the greatest adventure—"Where one is open to the Infinite and hence to infinite possibilities.">

This complete, yet compact edition of the King James Version of the combined Old and New Testaments is a perfect addition to your religious or secular library. For reference, prayer, meditation, or study, this edition of The Holy Bible is easy-to-read and practical for any use.

Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld's surface.

Ringworld: the most stunning artifact in known space, an articficial world with three million times Earth's surface area. Who built it? And where are they? In this stunning sequel to Larry Niven's Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, Louis Wu (now a near-hopeless lirehead hooked on electrical ecstasy), the aged Kzin warrior, Speaker-to-Animals, and the Hindmost, puppeteer mate of mad Nessus, return to Ringworld. Their aim is to prevent cataclysm. IN the process, they find themselves learning Ringworld's incredible secrets...