New Books: Religion & Philosophy

The Book of All Books is a narration that moves through the Bible as if through a forest, where every branch--every verse--may offer some revelation. Where a man named Saul becomes the first king of a people because his father sent him off to search for some donkeys that had gone astray. Where a man named Abraham hears these words from a divine voice: "Go away from your land, from your country and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you"--words that reverberate throughout the Bible, a story about a separation and a promise followed by many other separations and promises.

Have America's professional service members been uniquely exploited insofar as they have disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's collective war-fighting decisions since the inception of the all-volunteer force post-Vietnam and particularly since 9/11? By offering their original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'; the notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and exposure to 'dirty hands', Robillard and Strawser make the case that such a state of affairs indeed describes America's present relationship with her military.

What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entries topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing.

Churches remain racially segregated and are largely ineffective in addressing complex racial challenges. In The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby takes us back to the root of this injustice in the American church, highlighting the cultural and institutional tables we have to flip in order to bring about progress between Black and white people. The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.

The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in contemporary mystical studies: an overview of the basic ways to approach mystical experiences and mysticism. Types of mystical experiences, enlightened states, paths, and doctrines are discussed, as is the relation of mystical experiences and mysticism to religions and cultures. The approaches of constructivism, contextualism, essentialism, and perennialism are presented. Also discussed are basic philosophical issues related to whether mystical experiences are veridical and mystical claims valid.

Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, first published in 1953, is a highly significant work by a towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy. The volume is known for its incisive analysis of the Western understanding of Being, its original interpretations of Greek philosophy and poetry, and its vehement political statements. This new edition features a revised and expanded translators' introduction and an updated translation, as well as the first English versions of Heidegger's draft of a portion of the text and of his later critique of his own lectures.

Before the American Civil War, in Boston and its environs, a group of writers and thinkers belonging primarily to the Unitarian Church and its cultural milieu began to think and write in a new manner. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are still well known today, but there were many others who created the context for their thought, and are scarcely known outside of scholarly circles: Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Frederic Henry Hedge, Orestes A. Brownson, George Ripley, Jones Very. This is the first and only anthology to collect the works of these lesser-known lights and offer them to the wider public.

Born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rachel Jeffs was raised in a strict patriarchal culture defined by subordinate sister wives and men they must obey. No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader Warren Jeffs--Rachel's father. In Breaking Free, Rachel offers a harrowing look at her life with Warren Jeffs, and the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered. But Breaking Free is not only her story--Rachel's experiences illuminate those of her family and the countless others who remain trapped in the strange world she left behind.

One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values. Yet why is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? Ritchie Robertson goes back into the "long eighteenth century," from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era's original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness in this world rather than the next by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument.

This book addresses why secularism is defined in so many ways and why it so ignites people's passions. In so doing, it explores the following important questions: What does secularism mean? Why should we care about this idea? What are the different types of secularism and what are their histories? What are the basic principles of political secularisms? Why are secularism and Atheism often confused? What is the relationship between secularism and LGBTQ rights? What opposition are secularisms up against? What does the future hold for a concept millennia in the making, but only really operationalized in the twentieth century?