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Mind over Matter is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring how spirituality changes lives in a variety of ways. Unlike much philosophically rooted literature on spirituality, it encourages an understanding of what can be achieved through faith, belief, and self-confidence, without reliance on specific (or, necessarily, any) religious doctrines or views. From theistic, non-theistic, or atheistic perspectives each chapter addresses a distinctive phenomenon, for example, spirituality and healing, spirituality and art, spirituality and running, and spirituality as a response to disaster. Not only do they integrate the results of scientific research and other intellectual investigations to illuminate accomplishments, and sometimes possible sources of failure, but they are also written by academics with practical experience in relevant areas, or at least informed by ideas of practitioners.
Nature, Order and the Divine
Volume Editors: and
This volume explores important aspects of the life and writings of Anselm of Canterbury. His is a world in which the created order with its hierarchies of natures and roles manifests a divine order that proceeds from the divine nature.
Individual chapters examine Anselm’s understanding of rectitude, truth, justice and redemption, the relationship of free will and grace and of faith and reason, whether and how we can speak of or reject the divine, Anselm’s approach to death, his understanding of the superiority of monasticism in the social and spiritual order, and the role that angels play in his metaphysical and theological arguments.
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Abū Yazīd al-Basṭāmī (d. ca 234/848), popularly known as “Bāyazīd”, remains one of the most celebrated yet controversial figures in the history of Islamic mysticism. This in-depth study of his life and teachings is based on the earliest available sources. The book sets out in detail what is known of Bāyazīd’s family, his education, his disciples and associates. It explores the distinctive rhetoric that has made some of his sayings so memorable, and shows how his mode of expression adds a sense of urgency, often drama, to quite conventional doctrines of Sufism.

Through the varied corpus of his sayings, this study traces Bāyazīd’s teachings concerning many aspects of the mystical path, as well as his reflections on God, the Prophet, heaven and hell. Having considered his role as spiritual master, his favourable view of women and his place in the wider community, the study then turns to the controversial side of Bāyazīd: his apparently blasphemous utterances, and his so-called miʿrāj. The book goes on to explore how the two seemingly contradictory sides to Bāyazīd might be reconciled, and finally, provides a brief survey of the extent of his influence on later Sufism and its literature.
A Dialectical Inquiry into the Rationality of Religion
The Devil’s Advocate versus God’s Honest Truth is a scholarly monograph exploring the rationality of religion, particularly the tenability of theism, through a dialectical analysis of plausible arguments for the existence of God versus reasonable grounds for suspicion. It offers a comprehensive and balanced coverage of the issues, inviting readers to reflect and ponder the subject in its full scope. The book does not, however, compromise on delivering the objectivity required in an area so dominated by sectarian scholarship and polarized beyond reconciliation.
There is no religion lest there are two religions. Therefore, it is only possible to examine the history of religions by taking the crucial situations of contact into account. Contact needs concepts. Not only scholars but also participants in situations of contact are forced to conceptualize themselves and the other. Taking its point of departure from the contact-based approach to the study of religion, the present volume examines and reassesses a selection of concepts and models (attraction, dynamics and stability, tradition, transcendence/immanence, senses, secret, space) used to come to terms with the phenomenon of contact as the dynamizing element of the history of religions.
Light of the Nations is a philosophical work written by the Jewish intellectual and eminent biblical commentator Obadiah Sforno (ca. 1475–1550). His treatise, an apology for both Jewish and universal monotheistic beliefs, was published in Hebrew in 1537 under the title Or ‘Ammim and was translated by the author into Latin as Lumen Gentium in 1548. Written in the style of a classical medieval Scholastic summa, the treatise’s multilingual and multicultural dimensions reveal key humanist ideas that prevailed in the cities of northern Italy during the early modern period, while also speaking to its author’s abiding exegetical rationality.