Showing results for "Digital Media" in History

Once in a generation, a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read or heard - a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Breathtaking in ambition, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith.

The Koran: It may be the most controversial book in the world. Some see it as a paean to peace, others call it a violent mandate for worldwide Islamic supremacy. How can one book lead to such dramatically different conclusions?

Over the course of twenty-five centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northern India to become a global tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and richness. Donald S. Lopez Jr. draws on the latest scholarship to construct a detailed and innovative history of Buddhism—not just as a chronology through the centuries or as geographic movement, but as a dense matrix of interconnections.

This very short introduction offers listeners a superb overview of the teachings of the Buddha, as well as a succinct guide to the integration of Buddhism into daily life.

Saladin remains one of the most iconic figures of his age. As the man who united the Arabs and saved Islam from Christian crusaders in the twelfth century, he is the Islamic world's preeminent hero. A ruthless defender of his faith and leader, he possessed qualities that won admiration from his Christian foes.

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East.

This iconoclastic study was one of the most widely debated books of 2000. Finkelstein indicts with vigor and honesty those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political and financial gain. This new edition includes updated material discussing the initial reception to the book's publication. In a controversial new study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in American culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust compensation agreements.

The foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is one of the oldest and greatest classics of Western spirituality. Until now, the available translations have treated these writings as historical curiosities that have little relevance to our contemporary situations. This new version approaches the Book of the Dead as a profound spiritual text capable of speaking to us today. Devoted like an Egyptian scribe to the principle of "effective utterance," Normandi Ellis has produced a prose translation that unfolds like pure diaphanous verse

Zionism: An Emotional State expertly demonstrates how the energy propelling the Zionist project originates from bundles of feeling whose elements have varied in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time.

Eminent biblical scholar Michael D. Coogan offers here a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the Old Testament, illuminating its importance as history, literature, and sacred text.

In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.

Antisemitism, an American Tradition investigates the depths of this fraught history and its recent manifestations. At a time when prejudice, discrimination, and hate against Jews is flaring across the country, Antisemitism, an American Tradition argues that we must understand the past. This momentous work reveals how antisemitism—and resistance to that hatred—endures, representing not a rupture from America's history, but a centuries-old legacy.

We hear the voices of the early Church Fathers even today. Their teachings, their guidance, their insights, and their sacrifice shaped the Catholic Church. They defined the canon of Scripture. They developed our creeds and forms of worship. They defined Christianity's distinctive moral sense. But who were they? What can we learn from their ancient teachings? What can the Fathers teach the twenty-first century—about holiness, culture, faith, and the Gospel.

The understandable, deeply authoritative and bestselling book on the Orthodox Church, in a fully updated and revised Third Edition.

Saying No to Hate grounds listeners contextually in the history of antisemitism in America by emphasizing the legal, political, educational, communal, and other strategies American Jews have used through the centuries to address high-profile threats.

The first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. Recalling such bestsellers as David McCullough's John Adams and Walter Isaacson's Einstein, Maimonides is a biography on a grand scale, brilliantly explicating one man's life against the background of his time.

In Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War Friedman takes the listener on a personal journey to understand the history of the Cohens. At the center of the story is a sensitive young man pulled between love and duty, a close-knit family straining under moral and political conflicts, and a city coming into its own.

In this book, Mustafa Akyol, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and opinion writer for The New York Times, both diagnoses “the crisis of Islam” in the modern world and offers a way forward. Diving deep into Islamic theology, and also sharing lessons from his own life story, he reveals how Muslims lost the universalism that made them a great civilization in their earlier centuries.