The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy combines new scholarship with hands-on science to bring readers into direct contact with the work of ancient astronomers. While tracing ideas from ancient Babylon to sixteenth-century Europe, the book places its greatest emphasis on the Greek period, when astronomers developed the geometric and philosophical ideas that have determined the subsequent character of Western astronomy. The author approaches this history through the concrete details of ancient astronomical practice. Carefully organized and generously illustrated, the book can teach...

Wisdom, health, honor, hope-these revered ideals are now jeopardized, James Evans claims, by the towering social problems of North American society, nowhere more achingly and emblematically than in African American life. Evans here creates a practical theology by working at the intersection of religious understandings in the African American community and its most pressing social problems. He skillfully probes to their deepest cultural and religious roots. There the moral distortions of racism, poverty, shame, disease, dysfunctional families, and even problematic elements in religious life...