This book examines recent forms of secularisation to demonstrate that we are now witnessing a “fourth secularisation”: the autonomy of lifestyles. After introducing two initial secularising movements, from mythos to Logos and from Logos to Christianity, the book sets out how from Max Weber...

An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries

In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, John Parker explores...

Nationalism is on the rise across the Western world, serving as a rallying cry for voters angry at the unacknowledged failures of globalization that has dominated politics and economics since the end of the Cold War. In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman trains a sympathetic but skeptical eye on the trend, highlighting the deep...

The dawn of the modern age posed challenges to all of the world's religions and since then, religions have countered with challenges to modernity. In Religious Responses to Modernity, seven leading scholars from Germany and Israel explore specific instances of the face-off between religious thought and modernity, in Christianity,...

This book is an exploration of the ideals and values of the ascetic and monastic life, as expressed through clothes. Clothes are often seen as an extension of us as humans, a determinant of who we are and how we experience and interact with the world. In this way, they can play a significant role in the embodied and...