An investigation of Jesus' messianic contemporaries and the reasons for Christianity's success. From the author of the highly regarded The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Cla... read more
Yes, this is a book on how to read the first Book of the Bible - from one of the world's truly luminous novelists, the Calvinist author of Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack.
His last book Time of the Magicians was a group biography of Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Cassirer. Here, he looks at four women who created new ways of thinking in the aftermath of... read more
Although never the language of a state or ethnic group, Syriac remains widely used across the globe and is regarded as the third language of Christianity. It even reached China, thanks to th... read more
Translation and interpretation are not straightforward, and never were... With matchless scholarship and sensitivity, Dr Barton compares multiple readings to reveal their ambiguities and int... read more
A selection of the Venerable Blythe's columns, with contributions by Rowan Williams, Richard Mabey, Julia Blackburn, Ian Collins et al. Inquisitive, gentle and modest, but surprising and fun... read more
Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot: they got to know one another as Oxford students during WW2, and went on to have huge influence on subsequent decades.
While some parish churches still form the centre of their communities, many others are in terminal decline. RM, who grew up in a parsonage before becoming an archeologist, combines personal ... read more
A marvellous history of pilgrimage around the world. Sacred landscapes, geographical hotspots where cultures, religions and trade routes meet, the remote and the metropolitan - and humanity'... read more
The C10th synthesis of Greek thought in Central Asi. Starr's magnificent book is a cultural and intellectual history of the Islamic Enlightenment and its two chief proponents - Ibn Sina and ... read more
A new translation of the fundamental text of Daoism, much more dynamic than the comfortably gnomic ones of the past. Ziporyn restores its strangeness and philosophical challenges.