Evidence that Jesus had siblings contradicts Church dogma on the virgin birth, and James is also a symbol of Christian teachings that have been obscured. While Peter is traditionally thought of as the leader of the apostles and the “rock” on which Jesus built his church, Jeffrey Bütz shows that it was James who led the disciples after the crucifixion. It was James, not Peter, who guided them through the Church's first major theological crisis--Paul's interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Using the canonical Gospels, writings of the Church Fathers, and apocryphal texts, Bütz argues that James is the most overlooked figure in the history of the Church. He shows how the core teachings of Jesus are firmly rooted in Hebraic tradition; reveals the bitter battles between James and Paul for ideological supremacy in the early Church; and explains how Paul's interpretations, which became the foundation of the Church, are in many ways its betrayal. Bütz reveals a picture of Christianity and the true meaning of Christ's message that are sometimes at odds with established Christian doctrine and concludes that James can serve as a desperately needed missing link between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to heal the wounds of centuries of enmity.

    More impressively, he is almost unparalleled in his creativity. The Sacred Canopy brings together all of these virtues and is easily his most important book. Indeed, I think it’s the most important contribution to the sociology of religion since Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” —Jeffery K. Hadden, Commonweal “This is a brilliant analysis that gives evidence of a sociology of religion that is able to clarify the often ironic interaction of religion and society.” —A. Theodore Kachel, Union Seminary Quarterly ReviewThis important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society.  Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.

    The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.

    The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

    For in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Yale historian John Boswell, one of our most respected authorities on the Middle Ages, produces extensive evidence that at one time the Catholic and eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex but sanctified them—in ceremonies that bear striking resemblance to the heterosexual marriage ceremonies.

    Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures & drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible & compelling the religious expressions & activities of a wide variety of archaic & "primitive" religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the "archaic" is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human.

    But such a picture of Jesus is far from accurate, according to John Howard Yoder. This watershed work in New Testament ethics leads us to a Savior who was deeply concerned with the agenda of politics and the related issues of power, status, and right relations. By canvassing Luke's Gospel, Yoder argues convincingly that the true impact of Jesus' life and ministry on his disciples' social behavior points to a specific kind of Christian pacifism in which "the cross of Christ is the model of Christian social efficacy." This second edition of The Politics of Jesus provides up-to-date interaction with recent publications that touch on Yoder's timely topic. Following most of the chapters are new "epilogues" summarizing research conducted during the last two decades - research that continues to support the outstanding insights set forth in Yoder's original work.

    She focuses particularly on those in academia, where the pressure to succeed and the desire to find space for creative thinking and alternative worlds bump up against the harsh conditions of a ruthlessly competitive job market, the shrinking power of the humanities, and the corporatization of the university. In her candid memoir, Cvetkovich describes what it was like to move through the days as she finished her dissertation, started a job, and then completed a book for tenure. Turning to critical essay, she seeks to create new forms of writing and knowledge that don’t necessarily follow the usual methods of cultural critique but instead come from affective experience, ordinary life, and alternative archives. Across its different sections, including the memoir, the book crafts – and it’s no accident that crafting is one of its topics -- a cultural analysis that can adequately represent depression not as medical pathology but as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry onto discussions not only about theory and contemporary culture but about how to live.Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, also published by Duke University Press, and Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies."Like all my favorite bands, Ann Cvetkovich disregards trends in favor of fearlessness. While tackling the tough issues of today, she still gives us a book that feels totally timeless. Depression: A Public Feeling fills a gap that has morphed into a crater. The book is as invaluable as it is enjoyable. I found myself sighing throughout, thinking 'Phew, someone finally said that!'"—Kathleen Hanna, of the bands Le Tigre, Bikini Kill, and the Julie Ruin"A provocative addition to Ann Cvetkovich's eloquent writings on the archives of public feelings, this book takes depression out of the space of the private into the complex politics of our time. Weaving together memoir, cultural and medical history, and literary and theoretical discussion, Cvetkovich experiments with and reflects on unconventional ways of writing about embodiment, cognition, and affect. Along the way, she offers myriad prescriptions, small and large, on how to cope with the daily effects of depression and how to heal the world."—Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust

    Today's young Muslims will be tomorrow's leaders, and yet too many are vulnerable to extremist propaganda that seems omnipresent in our technological age. The burning question, Ghobash argues, is how moderate Muslims can unite to find a voice that is true to Islam while actively and productively engaging in the modern world. What does it mean to be a good Muslim?What is the concept of a good life? And is it acceptable to stand up and openly condemn those who take the Islamic faith and twist it to suit their own misguided political agendas? In taking a hard look at these seemingly simple questions, Ghobash encourages his sons to face issues others insist are not relevant, not applicable, or may even be Islamophobic. These letters serve as a clear-eyed inspiration for the next generation of Muslims to understand how to be faithful to their religion and still navigate through the complexities of today's world. They also reveal an intimate glimpse into a world many are unfamiliar with and offer to provide an understanding of the everyday struggles Muslims face around the globe."

    Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to tap into humanity’s wealth of knowledge about the wonders of the universe.

    "Important and innovative."--Feminist Bookstore News

    In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

    Jack Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. He presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don t Cry, Halberstam turns his attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. He examines the transgender gaze, as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. He then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place."

    Bataille brilliantly defines religion as so many different attempts to respond to the universe's relentless generosity. Framed within his original theory of generalized economics and based on his masterly reading of archaic religious activity, Theory of Religion constitutes, along with The Accursed Share, the most important articulation of Bataille's work.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), founder of the French review Critique, wrote fiction and essays on a wide range of topics. His books in English translation include Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, Literature and Evil, Manet and Erotism. Robert Hurley is the translator of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and co-translator of Anti Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Distributed for Zone Books.

    Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review