Religious Writings

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans, and torn apart by the Civil War.

Many Christians are familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's famous book written from a prison cell, which portrays the Christian life as one traveling from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. During Bunyan's life, however, he produced nearly sixty books and tracts. Roger Duke and Phil Newton, with Drew Harris, trace the significant events that shaped Bunyan's life and thought in a biographical introduction and, in thirty-one excerpts from a variety of this great man of faith's writings, give us a glimpse of his piety, which flowed from his desire to venture all for God.

In war zones witnessing widespread conflict, what makes life at all worth living? When chaos becomes a way of life in places where religion and violence intersect, what do people hold on to? If religious belief is, as Christopher Hitchens argues, the cause of wars and genocide, then is faith the cure?

El Ramayana es uno de los textos literarios más importantes de la India. El libro nos narra la vida de Rama, quien es un muchacho con características humanas y divinas perteneciente a una familia real. Durante su recorrido, será instruido en el arte de la guerra, encontrará el amor, vivirá el exilio, y deberá enfrentarse contra demonios, gigantes y héroes para cumplir con su misión divina. En la figura de Rama, las cualidades de un buen gobernante y guerrero, y los valores de la sabiduría, bondad y justicia encuentran un importante lugar de reunión.

Immer mit mir ist mehr als eine Erinnerung an meinen Lehrer. Es ist sowohl eine Darstellung eines spirituellen Weges als auch ein intimer Bericht über einen großen Kabbalisten. Das Buch beschreibt die Entstehung und die Entwicklung der persönlichen Beziehung zwischen einem Lehrer und seinem hingebungsvollen Schüler durch das gemeinsame Studium. Ich spreche aus Erfahrung, da ich zwölf Jahre Seite an Seite mit meinem Lehrer Rabash verbrachte. Alles, was ich weiß, verdanke ich Rabash.

Always with Me is more than a memoir about my teacher. It is both an exposition of a spiritual path and an intimate account of a great kabbalist; it details the formation and evolution of the relationship and joint study of a teacher and his devoted disciple. Through a profound bond, conflicts, assistance, and rejections, devotion, protests, ascents, and descents, the teacher imbued in me the wisdom of Kabbalah. Rabash was the standard-bearer, the last in a line of spiritual giants dedicated to conveying the secret wisdom to humankind.

Some people believe questioning the Bible, the direction God is going, or even God himself, is blasphemy. Some think it’s a sign of disbelief. Daniel Thornton is one such man. He believes his son, Rusty Thornton, is lost without God and takes him to a faraway place in the early 1950s near Spicewood, Texas, where he would never come in contact with people. He has an old King James Version of the Bible and began to try and cure his son’s affliction of skepticism.

Biographies will only take you so far. It's impossible to truly understand Francis of Assisi without hearing his own words. A scholar and lover of Francis, Sweeney has added six writings to his best-selling compilation, additional texts that we're most certain came from Francis himself. Now, short writings such as The Form of Life He Wished for Clare, The Sermon to the Birds, and The Source of True Joy combine with Francis's rules, letters, messages, songs, praises, canticles, and final spiritual testament in a most ideal introduction to the saint.

Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer, a devoted husband and father, and a devout Catholic, was executed in 1943 as a result of his refusal to serve in the Nazi army. Before taking this stand Jägerstätter consulted both his pastor and his local bishop, who instructed him to do his duty to the fatherland and to obey the law, an instruction that violated his conscience.

This is only one of the many revelations in Eugenia Price’s intimate account of the many months she spent sorting through voluminous historical research and writing Margaret’s Story, the third novel in her Florida trilogy. Published as a companion to the novel, this journal offers a fascinating view of the author at work as the novel developed week by week.