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In Agents of God, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin describes his year and a half spent in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area. At first, these four schools could not seem more different, yet they are linked by much: these are all schools with conservative thoughts on gender and sexuality, with a hostility to the theory of evolution, and with a deep suspicion of secularism. And they are all also hopeful that America will be a place where their children can excel, even as they also fear the nation’s many temptations might lead their children astray. Guhin shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the outside world, both in school and online. Within these boundaries, these communities have developed “external authorities” like Science, Scripture, and Prayer, each of which is felt and experienced as a real power with the ability to make commands and coerce action. For example, people can describe Science itself as showing something or the Bible itself as making a command. By offloading coercion to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to religious studies, sociology, and education.

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.

Why did dreams matter to Jews, Byzantine Christians, and Muslims in the first millennium? This book shows how the ability to interpret dreams universally attracted power and influence in the first millennium. In a time when prophetic dreams were viewed as God’s intervention in human history, male and female prophets wielded unparalleled power in imperial courts, military camps, and religious gatherings. The three faiths drew on the ancient Near Eastern tradition of dream key manuals, which offer readers a rare insight into the hopes and fears of ordinary people. They melded pagan dream divination with their own scriptural traditions to produce a novel and rich culture of dream interpretation. Prophetic dreams enabled communities to understand their past and present circumstances as divinely ordained and helped to bolster the spiritual authority of dreamers and those who had the gift of interpreting their dreams. The book takes a gendered approach to the analysis of the common culture of dream interpretation across late antique Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic sources to 1000 CE, in order to expose the ways in which dreams offered women a unique opportunity to exercise influence. The epilogue reveals why dreams still matter today to many men and women of the monotheist traditions.

This book is the second of two volumes collecting together the most substantial work in analytic theology that I have done between 2003 and 2018. The first volume contains essays focused, broadly speaking, on the nature of God; this second volume contains essays focused more on doctrines about humanity, the human condition, and how human beings relate to God. The essays in the first part deal with the doctrines of the incarnation, original sin, and atonement; the essays in the second part discuss the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a theological problem that arises in connection with the idea God not only tolerates but validates a response of angry protest in the face of these problems.

This book is the first of two volumes collecting together the most substantial work in analytic theology that I have done between 2003 and 2018. The essays in this volume focus on the nature of God, whereas the essays in the companion volume focus on humanity and the human condition. The essays in the first part of this volume deal with issues in the philosophy of theology having to do with discourse about God and the authority of scripture; the essays in the second part focus on divine attributes; and the essays in the third part discuss the doctrine of the trinity and related issues. The book includes one new essay, another essay that was previously published only in German translation, and new postscripts to two of the essays.

This book examines the distinctive account of desire developed in the writings of the Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar John of the Cross (1542–1591), and locates its vital significance for modern depictions of Christian life and the transformation of the self. It contends that John’s delineation of the changes that are undergone by the ‘soul’ in the spiritual ascent is rooted in a distinctive, systematic, and neglected theological vision. A rich notion of desire animates his poetry and prose works and draws with creativity and novelty on biblical, Platonic, and Christian sources. This book traces the crucial role played by this underlying erotic driver of the spiritual ascent, and suggests that it represents a unique working out of the scholastic narrative of the graced transformation of the sensory appetites and the faculties of intellect, memory, and will. This is a neglected vision of the transformation of the self through the progressive purification of desire, which has the potential to significantly enrich current theological interest in desire and the self.

For 50 years, Margaret Mead told Americans how cultures worked, and Americans listened. While serving as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, she published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, scholarly and popular, on topics ranging from adolescence to atomic energy, Polynesian kinship networks to kindergarten, national morale to marijuana. At her death in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world and one of the best-known women in America. She had amply achieved her goal, as she described it to an interviewer in 1975, “To have lived long enough to be of some use.” As befits her prominence, Mead has had many biographers, but there is a curious hole at the center of these accounts: Mead’s faith. Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith introduces a side of its famous subject that few people know. It re-narrates her life and reinterprets her work, highlighting religious concerns. Following Mead’s lead, it ranges across areas that are often kept academically distinct: anthropology, gender studies, intellectual history, church history, and theology. It is a portrait of a mind at work, pursuing a unique vision of the good of the world.