Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the cult of the saints was the dominant form of religion in Christian Europe. In this elegantly written work, Peter Brown explores the role of tombs, shrines, relics, and pilgrimages connected with the sacred bodies of the saints. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the merciful ...(展开全部)

The central actors in this book are some reclusive forest-dwelling ascetic meditation masters who have been acclaimed as 'saints' in contemporary Thailand. These saints originally pursued their salvation quest among the isolated villages of the country's periphery, but once recognized as holy men endowed with charisma, they became the radiating centres of a country-wide cult of...(展开全部)

In the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the Naqshbandi Sufi dynasty vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. In the 1750s, the collapse of the Junghar Mongol state gave one branch of this family an opportunity to assert their independence in the oasis cities of Kashgar and Yarkand. Others sided with the armies of the Qing dynasty, whi...(展开全部)

In 1695 John Locke published The Reasonableness of Christianity, an enquiry into the foundations of Christian belief. He did so anonymously, to avoid public involvement in the fiercely partisan religious controversies of the day. In the Reasonableness Locke considered what it was to which all Christians must assent in faith; he argued that the answer could be found by anyone fo...(展开全部)

Raymond Callahan's lively study exposes the alarming lengths to which school administrators went, particularly in the period from 1910 to 1930, in sacrificing educational goals to the demands of business procedures. He suggests that even today the question still asked is: "How can we operate our schools?" Society has not yet learned to ask: "How can we provide an excellent educ...(展开全部)

Alister E. McGrath envisions a pivotal role for evangelicalism in shaping the future of Christianity.

In 1900 international trade reached unprecedented levels and the world's economies were more open to one another than ever before. Then as now, many people considered globalization to be inevitable and irreversible. Yet the entire edifice collapsed in a few months in 1914. Globalization is a choice, not a fact. It is a result of policy decisions and the politics that shape them...(展开全部)