Black Freethinkers is the first study to offer a comprehensive historical treatment of African American freethought (including atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism) from the nineteenth century to the present.
Kantian Transpositions presents an important new reading of Jacques Derrida’s writings on religion and ethics. Eddis Miller argues that Derrida’s late texts on religion constitute an interrogation of the meaning and possibility of a “philosophy of religion.” It is the first book to fully engage Derrida’s claim, in “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” to be transposing the Kantian gesture of thinking religion “within the limits of reason alone.”
Christ's Subversive Body is a fascinating work of comparative literature that examines six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Examples include works by Epiphanius, Lavater, Dostoevsky, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and from the theoconservative discourse in the United States.
In Privately Empowered Shirin Edwin responds to the lack of adequate attention paid to Islam in Africa in comparison to Islam in the Middle East and the Arab world.
In The Revelation of Imagination, William Franke attempts to focus on what is enduring and perennial rather than on what is accommodated to the agenda of the moment. Franke’s book offers re-actualized readings of representative texts from the Bible, Homer, and Virgil to Augustine and Dante. The selections are linked together in such a way as to propose a general interpretation of knowledge.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an avid letter writer, and more than seven thousand of his letters have survived. The best-known collection today is Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Two other letter collections appeared around the same time and gained high acclaim among readers yet are virtually unknown today. They are Letters to a Young Woman (1930) and Letters on God (1933).
Nation and World, Church and God gathers original critical reflections by leading writers and scholars on Garry Wills’s life work. Organized around the themes of “Classics,” “Civil War,” “War and Peace,” and “Theology, Church, and the Arts,” the book reflects the cultural acumen, fine-grained political analysis, ethical candor, and theological wisdom of one of America’s most prolific writers.
The 1970s and 1980s were times of political and religious turmoil in Nigeria, characterized by governmental upheaval, and aggressive confrontations between the Sufi brotherhoods and the Izala movement. In Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria, Roman Loimeier explores the intermeshing of religion in the struggle for political influence and preservation of the interests of Nigerian Muslims.
An Islamic Alliance uses non-European sources to portray the defense, by devoutly Islamic leaders, of some of the last parts of the African continent to be conquered during the imperial European "scramble for Africa" that ended with the First World War. These surviving pieces of diplomatic correspondence concentrate on the alliance between Ali Dinar, prince of the sultanate of Dar Fur in the western Sudan, and the leaders of the Sanusi brotherhood then based in southern Libya. In contrast to the European view of the alliance as ephemeral, the documents indicate a sincere, passionate attempt to join--despite immense physical difficulties--an ancient monarchist tradition to a more modern, trade-based sociopolitical organization.
