Religion & Spirituality

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The Mandaeans were a gnostic sect that arose in the Middle East around the same time as Christianity. This text examines the lives and religion of contemporary Mandaeans and provides an introduction to the religion, showing how its ancient texts inform the living religion, and vice versa.

In this bold work, Thomas Habinek offers an entirely new theoretical perspective on Roman cultural history. Although English words such as literature and religion have their origins in Latin, the Romans had no such specific concepts. Rather, much of the sense of these words was captured in the Latin word carmen, usually translated into English as song. Habinek argues that for the Romans, song encompassed a wide range of ritualized speech, including elements of poetry, storytelling, and even the casting of spells. Habinek begins with the fraternal societies, or sodalitates, which predated the Republic and endured into the Imperial era, and whose rites, although adapted over time to different deities and cults, were from the beginning centered on song (perhaps most notably in the ancient Carmen Saliare). He goes on to show how this early use of song became a paradigm for cultural reproduction throughout Roman history. Ritual mastery of the chaos of everyday life, embodied and enacted in song, produced and transmitted the beliefs on which Roman culture was founded and by which Roman communities were sustained. By the emergence of the Empire, song, in all of its senses, served in particular to reproduce the power of the state, organizing relations of power at every level of society. --Johns Hopkins University Press.

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"The only edition that contains in one place all of the writings that Dr. Helen Schucman, its Scribe, authorized to be printed"--P. [4] of cover.

Daniel Deleanu continues in Wor(l)d Religions the logosophistic adventure started in Principles of Logosophism, The Logoarchetype and Logosophistic Investigations. Unlike the other three books from the logosophistic series, Wor(l)d Religions appeals to a wider array of readers. Daniel Deleanu chooses a rational methodology, namely that exposed by Immanuel Kant in his essay Fundamental Principals of the Metaphysic of Morals. By this approach, the creator of logosophism does not intend to reduce the study of religion to a strict framework of empirical determinism, but, on the contrary, he wishes to prove that the analytical study religion should have all the attributes of science. By eliminating most of the subjective properties of world religions, which are due to the nature of the observer rather than the religions themselves, the author traces a common path of all major beliefs, leading to the most important archetype of humankind, the Word (the logoarchetype), which is associated with the Divinity in every spiritual tradition.

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A History of Arabic Astronomy is a comprehensive survey of Arabic planetary theories from the eleventh century to the fifteenth century based on recent manuscript discoveries. George Saliba argues that the medieval period, often called a period of decline in Islamic intellectual history, was scientifically speaking, a very productive period in which astronomical theories of the highest order were produced. Based on the most recent manuscript discoveries, this book broadly surveys developments in Arabic planetary theories from the eleventh century to the fifteenth. Taken together, the primary texts and essays assembled in this book reverse traditional beliefs about the rise and fall of Arabic science, demonstrating how the traditional “age of decline” in Arabic science was indeed a “Golden Age” as far as astronomy was concerned. Some of the techniques and mathematical theorems developed during this period were identical to those which were employed by Copernicus in developing his own non-Ptolemaic astronomy. Significantly, this volume will shed much-needed light on the conditions under which such theories were developed in medieval Islam. It clearly demonstrates the distinction that was drawn between astronomical activities and astrological ones, and reveals, contrary to common perceptions about medieval Islam, the accommodation that was obviously reached between religion and astronomy, and the degree to which astronomical planetary theories were supported, and at times even financed, by the religious community itself. This in stark contrast to the systematic attacks leveled by the same religious community against astrology. To students of European intellectual history, the book reveals the technical relationship between the astronomy of the Arabs and that of Copernicus. Saliba’s definitive work will be of particular interest to historians of Arabic science as well as to historians of medieval and Renaissance European science.