Religion

A Novel Narration of Religious Conversion

Craig Harline knows that history can be boring. He regrets the way in which many historians, himself included, often “write only for each other, in our special language” or “choose to write about subjects that are not exactly obvious in their relevance.” Accordingly, Harline’s Conversions: Two Family Stories from the

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Leila Ahmed on the History of the Veil

Leila Ahmed is best known as the first professor of women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School. In 1992, Yale University Press published her seminal book, Women and Gender in Islam, establishing the discourse for contemporary gender analysis in the historical and social contexts of Islam. Her latest book, A Quiet

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Harold Bloom’s Brave Appreciation of the King James Bible

There is no doubt that Harold Bloom is a brave man. Indeed, only a brave man can acknowledge in his most recent book that “disputes concerning the Bible have been murderous,” and then declare in an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle published a few months later that, “There is

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October Theme: Religion

Yale University Press is known for its extensive publications on Religious Studies. On one side of our list, there is the prestigious Anchor Yale Bible Series, but every season, there is a wealth of new titles that engage our spiritual and existential minds: whether dealing directly with divinity and scripture,

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An Even More Complicated Dalí—Yes, Really

Most people are unlikely to associate science and religion with a man who is best known for painting melting clocks, who threw buckets of paint on nude models, and who kept detailed records of his dreams. Yet for the bulk of his career, those two subjects influenced much of Salvador

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Why Evil Became Glamorous: Terry Eagleton’s On Evil

Google famously used “Don’t be evil” as their (informal) corporate slogan during the last decade. Recently though, the company has faced more and more accusations that it mimics any other giant, greedy corporation, from its making privacy difficult on Google+ to preventing customers from using competitive operating systems. Whether or

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Hank Greenberg: Always an Accidental Hero

The Detroit Tigers could really use Hank Greenberg right about now. The Cleveland Indians win on August 9 added up to an unlucky 13th straight loss for the Tigers against the team. Of course, wishing for a star player from half a decade ago would probably only contribute to the

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How Love Replaced God

If you Google the phrase “movies with the word ‘love’ in the title,” you could spend an amazingly long time reading list after list of endless films. Hollywood knows that the word “love” is like pouring gasoline on your marketing campaign’s fire—it could go very badly, but it is going

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Rembrandt’s Revolutionary Jesus

How could a man who lived a millennium and a half after Jesus have drawn him from life? Because Rembrandt was the first artist to use a live model for Christ, the origins of his portraits remained a mystery for a long time. Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, edited by Lloyd DeWitt, discusses these paintings and drawings from an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

An Interview with Janet Malcolm on Iphigenia in Forest Hills

An interview with Janet Malcolm is a rare thing. Malcolm’s latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, recounts the sensational murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a young physician in Queens convicted in 2009 for arranging the public assassination of her husband in front of their four year-old daughter. We sat down with the author for special insight into her experiences observing the court drama and writing this fascinating account.