Sociology Religion

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the 19th century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile.

In Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over, the authors craft Lalich’s original and groundbreaking research into an accessible and engaging book. The authors explore fundamental questions about human nature, human development, group dynamics, abuse and control, and triumphs of the human spirit.

In March 1997, 39 people in Rancho Santa Fe, California, ritually terminated their lives. To outsiders, it was a mass suicide. To insiders, it was a graduation. Benjamin Zeller not only explores the question of why the members of Heaven's Gate committed ritual suicides, but interrogates the origin and evolution of the religion, its appeal, and its practices. By tracking the development of the history, social structure, and worldview of Heaven's Gate, Zeller shows that the movement was both a reflection and a microcosm of larger American culture.

Physician Ed Wheat has helped thousands of couples improve their love lives and build happier marriages. In Love Life for Every Married Couple, he'll help you improve your marriage through sharing, touching, appreciating, and focusing healing attention on your mate. Answering physical, psychological, and stress-related questions in a Christian context, Dr. Wheat demonstrates how to bring your feelings of love back to life.

Religious involvement has been declining in the West for decades—and, though men have historically outnumbered women among the disaffiliated in the U.S., a greater share of the young adults leaving religion today are women. A young, secular Kelsey Osgood would have been surprised to hear that she would be among those moving in the opposite direction. And yet, after the conversion to Orthodox Judaism that transformed her life, she began to wonder about the other contemporary women who, like her, had been startled to find a home in organized religion.

In this groundbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author and Hollywood producer DeVon Franklin dishes the real truth about men by making the compelling case that men aren’t dogs, but all men share the same struggle. He uses the metaphor of a dog that needs training as a way to explore why behavior persists in men that can lead them to act against their vows, their integrity, and even their character.

A survey of the various ways--often unrecognized and overlooked--whereby Christianity has impacted the world, making the world a better place and enriching our everyday living.

A teenage girl named Thecla is sitting at her bedroom window listening to a man share stories nearby. Her mother and fiancé order her to stop. But Thecla, trapped in a world that expects her to marry and have children, refuses. This man, Paul, is talking about a world she wants to believe in: an inner world of freedom to define her own life. And he’s talking about a kind of love she hasn’t known before—a love that asks her to be true to who she is within.

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.

At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times.

If the Oceans Were Ink is Carla Power's eye-opening story of how she and her longtime friend, Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Their friendship - between a secular American and a madrasa-trained sheikh - had always seemed unlikely, but now they were frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names.

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals plays a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.

Here are the devastating revelations that triggered a crisis within the Catholic Church. Here is the truth about the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior church officials who covered up their crimes. Here is the trail of "hush money" that the Catholic Church secretly paid to buy victims' silence - deeds that left millions of the faithful in the US and around the world shocked, angry, and confused.

Lords of Chaos focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993.

Death. It happens to everyone, yet most of us don't want to talk about this final chapter of existence. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde intimately understands this reticence and fear. The son of an undertaker, he hesitated to embrace the legacy of running his family's business. Yet he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones profoundly changed his faith and his perspective on death - and life itself.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

Written in a warm, personal style, Weber presents the characteristics of tender warriors - including learning to speak the language of women, watching out for what lies ahead, and keeping commitments - in an upfront, straightforward style that challenges readers to realize God's plan for men.

The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invoked to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions.

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.

Is it possible to disagree politically and love unconditionally? The reaction of evangelicals to political and cultural shifts in recent years revealed what they value most. Lurking beneath our Bible-laced rhetoric, faith claims, books, and sermons is a relentless drive to WIN! But the church is not here to win. By every human measure, our Savior lost. On purpose. With a purpose. And we are his body. We are not in it to win anything. We are in it for something else entirely. That something else is what this book is about.