Search results

Think Mother Jones meets Mother Teresa, in Mogadishu. Amid a volatile mix of disease, war, and religious fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa, what difference could one woman make? Annalena Tonelli left behind career, family, and homeland anyway, moving to a remote Muslim village in northern Kenya to live among its outcasts - desert nomads dying of tuberculosis, history's deadliest disease. "I am nobody," she always insisted. Yet by the time she was killed for her work three decades later she...

The Knights of the Temple of Solomon were a military and religious order founded in Jerusalem by two French Knights after the First Crusade. Its original purpose was to protect pilgrims from infidel attack as they journeyed to the Holy Land. St Bernard of Clairvaux drew up the order's rules, which included fighting the enemies of God under vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. The Templars had no difficulty in finding recruits. The promise of salvation through a life of action and adventu...

"Watching the Door" is the memoir of an ordinary young man who drifted into a war zone, made it his home and, somehow, emerged unscathed.After Kevin Myers graduated from university in 1969, a chance job application landed him a position as a journalist in Belfast, reporting on the Troubles. There, he was absorbed quickly into the local community. Soon he became privy to the secrets of Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries alike. In his darkly funny account of life on the streets, Myers evokes w...

'This is Irish history seen anew, from below, bristling with practical lessons for working-class struggle today' - Eamonn McCann The 32 counties of Ireland were divided through imperial terror and gerrymandering. Partition was borne from a Tory strategy to defend the British Empire and has spawned a ‘carnival of reaction’ in Irish politics ever since. Over the last 100 years, conservative forces have dominated both states offering religious identity as a diversion from economic failures and ine...

This revealing, disturbing, and thoroughly researched book exposes a dark side of faith that most Americans do not know exists or have ignored for a long time-religious child maltreatment. After speaking with dozens of victims, perpetrators, and experts, and reviewing a myriad of court cases and studies, the author explains how religious child maltreatment happens. She then takes an in-depth look at the many forms of child maltreatment found in religious contexts, including biblically-prescribed...

In early modern England, the practice of ritual or ceremonial magic - the attempted communication with angels and demons - both reinforced and subverted existing concepts of gender. The majority of male magicians acted from a position of control and command commensurate with their social position in a patriarchal society; other men, however, used the notion of magic to subvert gender ideals while still aiming to attain hegemony. Whilst women who claimed to perform magic were usually more submiss...

Through sections containing overview essays and reference entries related to particular religions, this resource explores the rise of religious violence, hate crime, and persecution around the world. Religious violence and persecution have been growing steadily both within the United States and around the world. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of scholars, this current and comprehensive reference helps readers understand the persecution of members of particular faiths as well as violen...

With respect to the countries of the world, this work addresses two basic questions: "How does religion affect politics in this country?" and "How does politics affect religion in this country?" Although there are many books on the topics of religion and politics, reference works that consider the two together are few, with those that do exist primarily addressing theory rather than trends. The present work does the latter, contextualizing them within regional and national boundaries. In so doi...

This enlightening edited collection shows how migration shapes the lives of faith communities - and vice versa - through diverse prisms including diaspora, generational change, cultural conflict, conceptions of 'ministry' and artistic response. The contributors comprise writers, poets and artists from the three largest Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and beyond. They show how issues of migration are addressed through a variety of different media such as theological debate and sha...

This book analyses the power that religion wields upon the minds of individuals and communities and explores the predominance of language in the actual practice of religion. Through an investigation of the diverse forms of religious language available — oral traditions, sacred texts, evangelical prose, and national rhetoric used by ‘faith-insiders’ such as missionaries, priests, or religious leaders who play the communicator’s role between the sacred and the secular — the chapters in the volume...