This description of the Americanization of a European institution, the Puritan ministry as it was transported to the New England colonies in the seventeenth century, offers a host of new insights into American religious history. By focusing on such areas as the ministers’ authority, church membership, and ecclesiastical organization, David D. Hall shows that, although the effects of the American experience might be considered liberalizing or democratizing in the first years of settlement, during the entire course of the seventeenth century the New World environment produced an institutional development that returned the churches to forms and doctrines that existed before the emigration from Europe.

The Faithful Shepherd not only sustains a bold thesis about Americanization but also affords the reader one of the freshest and most comprehensive histories of the seventeenth-century New England mind and society. This new printing contains a new introduction reflecting on how our understanding of seventeenth-century New England has developed since the book was first published.

Shem-Tov Falaquera (c. 1225–1295) was a student of the writings of Maimonides and a leading expositor of the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophical traditions. His Epistle of the Debate (Iggeret ha-Vikkuah) is a delightful dialogue between two Jews, one learned in philosophy and the other not, about the permissibility and desirability of philosophical investigation by Jews.

It is perhaps the most important medieval text devoted to the theme of the relationship between reason and religion by a Jewish thinker, and it is an excellent introduction to Jewish philosophy. This volume contains the first critical edition of the Hebrew text of the Epistle of the Debate and an annotated English translation, the first into a modern language. The volume also includes essays on the sources of the Epistle and on Falaquera's position on the relation between reason and religion.

A New Scientist Best Book of the Year

Beautiful photographs of stunning shells from London's Natural History Museum, home to one of the most significant and comprehensive collections in the world.

Collected and treasured for their beauty, used in religious rituals, or even traded as currency, shells have fascinated humans for millennia. Ancient and enchanting, dazzling in form and variety, these beautiful objects come from mollusks, one of the most diverse groups in the animal kingdom, including snails, oysters, cuttlefish, and chitons. Soft-bodied, these creatures rely on shells for protection from enemies and their environments, from snowy mountains to arid deserts, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the jungles of the tropics, on rocky shores, and in coral reefs.

In this book, mollusk expert Andreia Salvador profiles some of the world’s most beautiful and quirky shells, each selected from the more than eight million specimens held in the collection at London’s Natural History Museum. We lock eyes with the hundred-eyed cowry, named after "the all-seeing one," the giant Argus Panoptes of Greek mythology. We see how shells' appearances translate into defense strategies, as with the zigzag nerite, which varies its patterning to deceive and confuse predators. And we meet shell inhabitants, such as the amber snail, which eats earthworms by sucking them up like spaghetti. Reproduced in full color and striking detail, these shells have much to reveal about the history of collecting, the science of taxonomy, and the human desire to understand the natural world.

The Fifth Prapāṭhaka of the Vādhūla Śrautasūtra includes a critical edition, followed by a translation and a commentary, of the fifth chapter (prapāṭhaka) of the Vādhūla Śrautasūtra. This chapter is dedicated to the description of the so-called “independent” animal sacrifice (nirūḍhapaśubandha) in Vedic ritual. This series of short monographs relates to particular aspects of the animal sacrifice described in the Veda and to problems of exegesis of Vedic texts.

The first part of this edition presents the translation and commentary, while the critical edition makes up the second part. The commentary highlights the peculiarities of the Vādhūla version of the nirūḍhapaśubandha. In the conclusion of the first part, the ancientness of the Vādhūla school is discussed, as well as its place within the corpus of Taittirīya texts.

From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.