Musings of a Persecuted Soul is a story about spiritual catharsis, a search for answers to questions often avoided by Christians and rarely discussed from church pulpits. The author presents his lifelong quest to find spiritual equilibrium between his Christian beliefs and his secular education and personal observations in the natural world. Grounded in the Berean example of Acts 17:11, "to search the scriptures for truth," the author will take you on a thought-provoking journey, investigating topics guaranteed to provoke spiritual debate. Whether you are a strict traditionalist or a scriptural freethinker, Musings of a Persecuted Soul will challenge your established beliefs and breathe new spiritual life into your soul.

The anthology is a collection of articles written by renowned mathematicians of the twentieth century. The articles span roughly a century in time and a wide range in subject. They are by mathematicians acknowledged by their peers as outstanding creators whose work has added richly to the discipline.

Internet readers of the Daily Reflections with Fr. Don Talafous have long urged the author to publish selections in book form. Here is such a collection offering hope and encouragement in the face of the sadness and suffering of our world. While they come from the mind, heart, and PC of a Catholic Benedictine, the topics of these reflections appeal to church-going Christians, readers of a skeptical bent, and even those of no or minimal relation to any organized religion.

This book addresses provides a series of in-depth portraits of men and women who have been labelled ‘terrorists’, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Bridging historical methodologies and theoretical approaches to terrorism studies, it seeks to contribute to the developing historicising of terrorism studies. This is achieved principally through a prosopographical approach. In the preponderance of detailed statistical and quantitative data on the practice of terrorism and political violence, the individuals who participate in terrorist acts are often obscured. While ideologies and organisations have attracted much scholarly interest, less is known of the personal trajectories into political violence, particularly from a historical perspective. The focus on a relatively narrow cast of high-profile terrorist ‘villains’, to a large part driven by popular and media attention, results in a somewhat skewed picture; of equal value, arguably, is a more sustained reflection on the lives of lesser-known individuals. The book sits at the juncture between terrorism studies, historical biography and ethnography. It comprises case studies of ten individuals who have engaged in political violence in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a number of locations and with a variety of ideological motivations, from Russian-inflected anarchism to Islamist extremism. Through detailed empirical research, crucial themes in the study of terrorism and political violence are explored: the diverse individual radicalisation pathways, the question of disengagement and re-engagement, various counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency strategies adopted by governments and security forces, and the changing nature and perception of terrorism over time. Although not explicitly comparative, a number of themes resonate between the case studies, which will be drawn together in the conclusion to this book. These include the role of migration in radicalisation, the influence of radical family heritages, the experience of imprisonment and the narratives which individuals construct to tell their own terrorist life-stories. It also provides an historically grounded answer to one of the most contentious and heated debates in recent literature on terrorism studies: ‘what leads a person to turn to political violence?’ In examining the life-narratives of a diverse range of men and women who at some point embraced violence, this book seeks to contribute to a growing understanding of the entire arc of a terrorist lifespan, from radicalisation to mobilisation, to disengagement and beyond. This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, terrorism studies, security studies and politics in general.

S¿ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) stood apart from the other philosophers of his day. He was less concerned with debates over abstract concepts of philosophy than with the working out of how one should live one's daily life. He believed that living Christianly should not be a matter of whether one holds the correct beliefs or dogma; Christianity is an experience, something which we must choose to live each day. Kierkegaard's thoughts and ideas apply directly to our fractured society today, explains Michael Stark. As the modern world has become smaller, it has become more divisive and argumentative. It seems that the more information we have access to, the more fearful we--Christian communities included--are becoming. Through an examination of topics such as truth, faith, selfhood, and love, Stark introduces us to the teaching of Kierkegaard and demonstrates how this prophetic voice from the past can help us navigate the hostile and combative climate of today.

Unlike other humanistic disciplines, the academic study of religion must contend with a phenomenon that touches every dimension of human experience. For scholars so engaged, the study of religion often becomes a cross-cultural as well as a necessarily interdisciplinary endeavor. In this collection of original essays, Jon R. Stone has brought together the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen senior scholars - all with national or international reputations in their respective fields - each of whom reflects upon his or her own theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches to the study of religion. Taken together, these essays represent the variety of research methods and interpretive rigor mature scholars bring to the task of examining religious phenomena, religious actions, religious movements, and religious ideas.

In today’s pluralistic world, many cultures feel a shift in the relationship of people with religious traditions. A corresponding movement is a resurgence of interest in human spirituality. This Handbook presents the views of education scholars who engage these concepts every day, in a collection of essays reflecting the international state of the discipline. Out of these rises a vision for the emergence of a just and peaceful world.