Medievalists have much to gain from a thoroughgoing contemplation of place. If landscapes are windows onto human activity, they connect us with medieval people, enabling us to ask questions about their senses of space and place. In A Place to Believe In Clare Lees and Gillian Overing bring together scholars of medieval literature, archaeology, history, religion, art history, and environmental studies to explore the idea of place in medieval religious culture. The essays in A Place to Believe In reveal places real and imagined, ancient and modern: Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (home of Whitby and Bede&’s monastery of Jarrow), Cistercian monasteries of late medieval Britain, pilgrimages of mind and soul in Margery Kempe, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1940, and representations of the sacred landscape in today&’s Pacific Northwest. A strength of the collection is its awareness of the fact that medieval and modern viewpoints converge in an experience of place and frame a newly created space where the literary, the historical, and the cultural are in ongoing negotiation with the geographical, the personal, and the material. Featuring a distinguished array of scholars, A Place to Believe In will be of great interest to scholars across medieval fields interested in the interplay between medieval and modern ideas of place. Contributors are Kenneth Addison, Sarah Beckwith, Stephanie Hollis, Stacy S. Klein, Fred Orton, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Diane Watt, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, Ulrike Wiethaus, and Ian Wood.

What or where is the place of faith? Is it a physical location? No, it is where we are when we step out into the unknown in blind yet obedient faith because that is all that is we have left. Our Christian vocabulary is filled with ideas, quotes, and even promises from God that are meant for our comfort and reassurance. As real as God's Word is, what happens when all has been recalled and rehearsed and we still find ourselves alone at the place of faith?

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

In Why Believe? (Continuum) Professor John Cottingham argued that every human being possesses impulses and aspirations for which religious belief offers a home. His new book, How to Believe is concerned not so much with why we should believe as with what leads a person to become a believer. Cottingham challenges believers and non-believers alike to think afresh about the need to change their lives and about what such change might involve. Many people are deeply interested in the spiritual aspects of human existence but hold back from religious commitment because of doubts about the evidence for God. In this lucid and emotionally engaged study, John Cottingham charts a rational pathway towards religious belief by showing how it requires all the responses of the human mind. Intellectual analysis has its place, but to grasp all the relevant evidence we also need emotional openness and imaginative sensitivity. Drawing on a rich array of literary, scriptural and poetic resources, the author locates religious belief in a transformative framework of meaning and value.

Informal, revealing, unexpected, this book is a captivating and thought-provoking meditation how faith, in all its facets, remains profoundly relevant for and in our culture. “When the Italian writer Antonio Monda sat down to talk religion with American cultural leaders... he went straight for the big questions.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Some of the most well-known and well-respected cultural figures of our time enter into intimate and illuminating conversation about their personal beliefs, about belief itself, about religion, and about God. Antonio Monda is a disarming, rigorous interviewer, asking the most difficult questions (he often begins an interview point blank: “Do you believe in God?”) that lead to the most wide-ranging conversations. An ardent believer himself, Monda talks both with atheists (asked what she feels when she meets a believer, Grace Paley replies: “I respect his thinking and his beliefs, but at the same time I think he’s deluded”) and other believers, their discussion ranging from personal images of God (Michael Cunningham sees God as a black woman, Derek Walcott as a wise old white man with a beard) to religion’s place in American culture, from the afterlife to the concepts of good and evil, from fundamentalism to the Bible. And almost without fail, the conversations turn to questions of art and literature. Toni Morrison discusses Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, Richard Ford invokes Wallace Stevens, and David Lynch draws attention to the religious aspects of Bu–uel, Fellini...and Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day.

Drawing on family history and his own story, noted theologian and pastoral leader Fr. Louis J. Cameli takes readers on an archaeological exploration into the faith passed down across time and place. Beginning in his ancestral home in Italy and tracing the story through the centuries, Cameli unearths layers of faith to lead readers to a clearer understanding of their own faith as a legacy from the community of the Church. In The Archaeology of Faith, Fr. Louis Cameli digs into his ancestry to uncover the source of his own faith and invites believers and seekers alike to examine their own faith in the context of history and within the community of the Church. Tracing the evolution of faith from pre-Christian times in his ancestral village of Grottamare on Italy’s Adriatic coast, Cameli discovered how faith intersects with the most basic predicaments of life. While studying the rise of monasticism, he learned that faith is lived in community. As he looked at the medieval raids of Saracen pirates, Cameli found a sense of living with vulnerability. Finally, he realized that trust in God was modeled for him by the relatives who farm the same land today as their ancestors did. As Cameli studied the rich complexity of faith in his family history, he reflected on his own life, his vocation, and the personal challenges that his beliefs pose. Cameli is a highly respected priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where he has served as the Cardinal’s delegate for formation and mission and is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops.