In Religion and World History, distinguished authors John C. Super and Briane K. Turley examine the value of religion for interpreting the human experience in the past and present. They explore the elements of religion which best connect it to the cultural and political dynamics that have influenced history.

This book's aim is to enrich and deepen our psychological understanding of biblical concepts and personalities. Such understanding is relevant for theology as well as for psychology and psychiatry. It may help theologians to contextualize their discipline by bringing it into contact with contemporary psychological and existential issues and tensions, both at an individual and a societal level. It also encourages psychologists and psychiatrists to develop and refine their vocabularies when they try to comprehend the existential meaning of what is transmitted to them by their clients.

Self Love and Christian Ethics explicates and defends right self love by casting it as a problem of proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. This book argues that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person’s concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, it calls ethics to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts.

One of the most unusual contributions to the crusading era was the idea of the leper knight - a response to the scourge of leprosy and the shortage of fighting men which beset the Latin kingdom in the twelfth century. This book explores the important contribution of the English branch of the order, which by 1300 managed a considerable estate from its chief preceptory at Burton Lazars in Leicestershire. The book uses both documentary and archaeological evidence to provide the first ever account of this little-understood crusading order.

Written by two eminent historians, Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord examines the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida from the beginning of Reconstruction to the institution of Jim Crow segregation, a period when the AME Church played a crucial role in the religious, cultural, and political lives of black Floridians. The book begins with an overview of slave religion and the first stirrings of African Methodism before 1865 and culminates with the formidable challenges that faced the church by 1895.

This work offers a detailed analysis of Puritan iconoclasm in England during the 1640s, looking at the reasons for the resurgence of image-breaking a hundred years after the break with Rome, and the extent of the phenomenon. Initially a reaction to the emphasis on ceremony and the 'beauty of holiness' under Archbishop Laud, the attack on 'innovations', such as communion rails, images and stained glass windows, developed into a major campaign driven forward by the Long Parliament as part of its religious reformation.

The issue of religious liberty has gained ever-increasing attention among policy makers and the public at large. Whereas politicians have long championed the idea of religious freedom and tolerance, the actual achievement of these goals has been an arduous battle for religious minorities. What motivates political leaders to create laws providing for greater religious liberty?

Will Mormonism be the next world faith, one that will rival Catholicism, Islam, and other major religions in terms of numbers and global appeal? This was the question Rodney Stark addressed in his much-discussed and much-debated article, "The Rise of a New World Faith" (1984), one of several essays on Mormonism included in this new collection.

This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that you are not only what you eat, but also how, when, where and with whom you eat. This book begins at the beginning - with the Torah - and then follows the history of Jewish eating until the modern age, and even into our own day.