Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Psychology of Religion

For four years, Jessica Stern interviewed extremist members of three religions around the world: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traveling extensively--to refugee camps in Lebanon, to religious schools in Pakistan, to prisons in Amman, Asqelon, and Pensacola--she discovered that the Islamic jihadi in the mountains of Pakistan and the Christian fundamentalist bomber in Oklahoma have much in common.

Based on her vast research, Stern lucidly explains how terrorist organizations are formed by opportunistic leaders who--using religion as both motivation and justification--recruit the...

Praise for the first edition:
" This] ambitious and courageous book is a] benchmark of theology by which questions about the meaningful history of the Peoples Temple may be measured." --Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester's pathbreaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world. For Chidester, Jonestown recalls the American religious commitment to redemptive sacrifice, which for Jim Jones...

In Seeking Ezekiel, David J. Halperin argues that the biblical Book of Ezekiel provides substantial information about its author's psychology and reveals his personality in considerable depth. Psychoanalytic investigation of the book yields a coherent portrait of its author: a marvelously gifted yet profoundly disturbed man, tormented by inner conflicts over his sexual longings and fears.

Ezekiel, Halperin argues, was dominated by a pathological dread and loathing of female sexuality. He expresses this emotional stance in the symbolic language of dreams (his vision of a...

The first full-fledged application of the sacrificial model to fiction from the Middle Ages to the modern era.

Cesareo Bandera contends that we badly misjudge our own historical situation if we believe that the sacred is something that can be left behind or ignored as utterly irrelevant. The Sacred Game argues that the sacred is all around us and its most characteristic manifestation is precisely the "allergic" reaction and subsequent barrier it produces in our "secular" sensitivity as soon as we come in contact with it.

The Sacred Game examines the...

The subject of competition between religion and television has, if only indirectly, received considerable attention, particularly from religionists disturbed by the threat posed by television programming to traditional religious beliefs, values, and attitudes. This detailed study considers the competing cultural forces of television and religion from a wider and more theoretical perspective. Newman examines the major forms of competition and the various motives and strategies of the people and groups involved. His philosophical approach allows us to see that the most important aspect of...

Does religion encourage altruism on behalf of those who do not belong? Are the very religious more likely to be altruistic toward outsiders than those who are less religious? In this book Pearl M. Oliner examines data on Christian rescuers and nonrescuers of Jews during the Holocaust to shed light on these important questions.

Drawing on interviews with more than five hundred Christians--Protestant and Catholic, very religious, irreligious, and moderately religious rescuers and nonrescuers living in Nazi-occupied Europe, Oliner offers a sociological perspective on the values and...