Religion & Belief

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that.

Today, headlines from France depict the country’s Muslims and Jews as ever, inevitably in conflict. Numerous commentators suggest Muslim attacks against Jews are the newest chapter in an age-old anti-Jewish...

This book is, first and foremost, a reflection on the human condition and on the manner in which we attempt to explain the world and make meaning of our lives....

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

The first page starts with my encounter as an 18-year old college student with the Gospel of Thomas and its unconventional Jesus––an encounter that was utterly transforming for me. It...

Princeton University Press has started a new series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books,” and my book is one of the three inaugural volumes. The idea behind the series is that...

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Max Weber, the German sociologist, and his wife Marianne weren’t impressed with Manhattan’s spirituality when they visited New York City during their 1904 trip to the United States. They probed...

The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation,...

The Italian Renaissance has always been understood as the foundation of European art. The entire artistic tradition through Picasso stems from the extraordinary achievements of early 16th century artists. Traditionally, this...

The Unintended Reformation is a wide-ranging revisionist history that concerns the present as much as the past. It argues that in central respects, North American and European life in the...

Many studies of religious liberty follow one of two paths. One essentially involves a study of ideas, and tries to explain how great thinkers, like St. Augustine, either justified the...

Among the contemporary debates to which this book seeks to contribute, African historiography and cosmopolitanism are paramount. In his Philosophy of History lectures, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel claimed...

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

Unfortunately, we are all suckers for a good story—a narrative that strings events into a plot with characters driven by motives. If information doesn’t come in story form, we have...

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil...

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

This is my third book on the spiritual journey of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. I began with an overview of his life, Van Gogh and God, then focused on...

This is an ambitious book that grew out of a rather simple question. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two Hindu leaders on either side of the subcontinent created...

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

New World A-Coming examines a set of religious movements founded in the early twentieth-century urban north whose members refused the racial category of Negro and rejected Christianity in favor of...

Under the Hammer begins by looking outward to non-Western practice, but very quickly turns inward to my own culture. I begin with the experience of horror the world shared as the...

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict,...

This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam....

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them. How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

The book is based upon four scientific principles. The first is the principle of human evolution. It was Darwin, in fact, who first suggested that a belief in gods might be a result of “structure of brain heredity.” The book uses modern neuroscience

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...

Most people think of atheism as one big negative. But there is much more to atheism than knockdown arguments that there is no God. There is the whole rest of the...

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...

This book examines the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood—the world’s most important Islamist movement—and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East over the last century—the...

My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...

Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...

The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis. This crisis, I argue, is rooted...

The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists. The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...

The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major religious, cultural, and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as...

At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle

My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe....

Religion and the belief in God have made a major comeback. From the fundamentalist turn in predominantly Islamic polities to the spread of Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global south,...

I do not think I can privilege one part of the book over another, but the Preface would be sufficient to draw the reader into the book, since it gives...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

The “Introduction” is a paean, a song in praise of comparative philosophy. Some think that studying ancient wisdom traditions involves anachronism and ethnocentrism. One talks across too much time and one...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

I myself wanted to discover what Blake was driving at. I live in South London, near where he and his wife, Catherine, lived for a decade of their long marriage...

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

Field Notes lends itself to browsing, starting and stopping here and there. One of the interesting things about early responses to the book is that people’s interests and concerns draw...

A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today. Writing in May, 1670, the...

Protestants won in Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The narrative produced by the winners was and largely remains triumphalist: Protestantism won because it foreshadowed the liberal order....

Moderation is not, as some secularist firebrands would have us believe, just a watered down version of more committed beliefs. Rather, it is a way of believing that is different...

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

This book is about three philosophers – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Antoine Arnauld, and Nicolas Malebranche – who happened to be together in Paris in the 1670s and their great debate...

For a quick zoom, I refer the reader to Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph and to the passages where he recounts this strange visitation in his memoirs, The Personal Experiences...

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that.

Today, headlines from France depict the country’s Muslims and Jews as ever, inevitably in conflict. Numerous commentators suggest Muslim attacks against Jews are the newest chapter in an age-old anti-Jewish...

This book is, first and foremost, a reflection on the human condition and on the manner in which we attempt to explain the world and make meaning of our lives....

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

The first page starts with my encounter as an 18-year old college student with the Gospel of Thomas and its unconventional Jesus––an encounter that was utterly transforming for me. It...

Princeton University Press has started a new series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books,” and my book is one of the three inaugural volumes. The idea behind the series is that...

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Max Weber, the German sociologist, and his wife Marianne weren’t impressed with Manhattan’s spirituality when they visited New York City during their 1904 trip to the United States. They probed...

The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation,...

The Italian Renaissance has always been understood as the foundation of European art. The entire artistic tradition through Picasso stems from the extraordinary achievements of early 16th century artists. Traditionally, this...

The Unintended Reformation is a wide-ranging revisionist history that concerns the present as much as the past. It argues that in central respects, North American and European life in the...

Many studies of religious liberty follow one of two paths. One essentially involves a study of ideas, and tries to explain how great thinkers, like St. Augustine, either justified the...

Among the contemporary debates to which this book seeks to contribute, African historiography and cosmopolitanism are paramount. In his Philosophy of History lectures, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel claimed...

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

Unfortunately, we are all suckers for a good story—a narrative that strings events into a plot with characters driven by motives. If information doesn’t come in story form, we have...

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil...

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

This is my third book on the spiritual journey of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. I began with an overview of his life, Van Gogh and God, then focused on...

This is an ambitious book that grew out of a rather simple question. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two Hindu leaders on either side of the subcontinent created...

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

New World A-Coming examines a set of religious movements founded in the early twentieth-century urban north whose members refused the racial category of Negro and rejected Christianity in favor of...

Under the Hammer begins by looking outward to non-Western practice, but very quickly turns inward to my own culture. I begin with the experience of horror the world shared as the...

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict,...

This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam....

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them. How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

The book is based upon four scientific principles. The first is the principle of human evolution. It was Darwin, in fact, who first suggested that a belief in gods might be a result of “structure of brain heredity.” The book uses modern neuroscience

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...

Most people think of atheism as one big negative. But there is much more to atheism than knockdown arguments that there is no God. There is the whole rest of the...

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...

This book examines the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood—the world’s most important Islamist movement—and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East over the last century—the...

My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...

Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...

The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis. This crisis, I argue, is rooted...

The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists. The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...

The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major religious, cultural, and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as...

At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle

My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe....

Religion and the belief in God have made a major comeback. From the fundamentalist turn in predominantly Islamic polities to the spread of Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global south,...

I do not think I can privilege one part of the book over another, but the Preface would be sufficient to draw the reader into the book, since it gives...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

The “Introduction” is a paean, a song in praise of comparative philosophy. Some think that studying ancient wisdom traditions involves anachronism and ethnocentrism. One talks across too much time and one...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

I myself wanted to discover what Blake was driving at. I live in South London, near where he and his wife, Catherine, lived for a decade of their long marriage...

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

Field Notes lends itself to browsing, starting and stopping here and there. One of the interesting things about early responses to the book is that people’s interests and concerns draw...

A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today. Writing in May, 1670, the...

Protestants won in Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The narrative produced by the winners was and largely remains triumphalist: Protestantism won because it foreshadowed the liberal order....

Moderation is not, as some secularist firebrands would have us believe, just a watered down version of more committed beliefs. Rather, it is a way of believing that is different...

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

This book is about three philosophers – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Antoine Arnauld, and Nicolas Malebranche – who happened to be together in Paris in the 1670s and their great debate...

For a quick zoom, I refer the reader to Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph and to the passages where he recounts this strange visitation in his memoirs, The Personal Experiences...

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...