Congratulations to PUP author Mark Valeri, whose book “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America” has been awarded the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. The prize recognizes “the best book published in the two previous calendar years, originating in the North American scholarly community, which presents original research on [...]

We have jumped into the high tech world of apps twice now. This is our first offering, based on the best-selling PUP version of The I Ching or Book of Changes. You can read more about the app here, purchase a copy here, or watch the video below to learn more about how to use the app.

“This Scientology watcher is beside himself with joy,” writes Tony Ortega at the Village Voice web site. What is the cause of such celebration, you might ask? Well, Ortega explains that, “in the past couple of days, we’ve received not one but TWO new advance copies of new books on Scientology.”

And one of them is a PUP title! The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Hugh B. Urban will be available in bookstores in August and the timing couldn’t be better as there is a new expose publishing this summer called Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman. While the two books will likely be quite different in style and tone, they are a perfect pair for anyone who wants to learn more about Scientology and perhaps herald an era of increased study of Scientology.

Maybe you were lucky enough to be there, or perhaps you caught it live on C-Span, but Martin Marty was interviewed at the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Lit Fest over the weekend. You can watch the program here: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/Dietr&showFullAbstract=1.

Marty was on hand to discuss the new series The Lives of Great Religious Books and specifically his new book in that series, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has steadily gained prominence through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but his most famous book — Letters and Papers from Prison — was never really conceived of as a book. It is, as the title suggests, a collection of letters and papers smuggled out of prison, addressed to loved ones and intellectual colleagues. These papers were hidden away and only collected into their current form posthumously–a process Martin E. Marty describes in this article at Berfrois:

“Only a zealous and informed scavenger could have found and assembled scribbled fragments which eventually became the published prison letters by the best-remembered German cleric who gave his life in the anti-Nazi cause,” writes Marty. “There was no manuscript of the book which later appeared in many languages around the world. The gallows took its author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he had a chance to shape a book.”

Marty notes that merely possessing one of the letters could have been a crime or have lead Nazis to conspirators, so, how did these letters survive?

According to Marty, they were secreted “in various hard-to-find locales, including in gas-mask canisters hidden in the garden of Dietrich’s mother; while others were tucked into scattered books and files.”

Fortunately, Eberhard Bethge, a friend of Bonhoeffer’s, “was farseeing enough to recognize that though his friend was writing sometimes casual notes, there were also more formal little treatises which might be cherished by scholars and others who were left behind….So Bethge saved all that he could, even though he had to report regretfully in the book he edited that…in order to protect some people mentioned in the letters, he had no choice but in haste to burn some of them. So the trail of letters ended abruptly, a fact that contributed further to the apparently random character of the book.”

Read the rest of Marty’s article here: http://www.berfrois.com/2011/05/martin-e-marty-on-bonhoeffer/

Religion Dispatches Magazine Online’s Lauri Lebo has a good suggestion for what to do this coming Saturday when, according to Harold Camping, true believers will ascend to heaven while the rest of the Earth heads towards destruction: throw a party!

Apparently many atheists (and believers who don’t think the Rapture is coming in two days) have decided to ring in the purported end of the world with a celebration.  Lebo has a few tips for a successful judgement day bash, including appropriate drinks to serve (such as the “Death in the Afternoon,” a Hemingway favorite) and what time to start your festivities (6 p.m. is allegedly when the Rapture will begin).

Interestingly enough, the reported information about the rapture includes not just a specific start time, but a prophesy that there will be “a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth.” If this sounds familiar, it may be because historically earthquakes have figured into the apocalyptic predictions of many civilizations. Read Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur with Dawn Burgess to find out more!

(And please, be careful with that absinthe!)

Tune in to Between the Covers to hear John Miller interview Garry Wills on his new book Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography.

“[Augustine] doesn’t really talk about the things you expect in an autobiography. He doesn’t talk about his sister, his brother. He talks about his mother just briefly, when she dies…He was the court orator for the emperor in Milan. Never mentions his activities there, except to say ‘I was paid to tell lies’…He’s not interested in all that. He’s interested in internal spiritual growth and struggles,” says Wills in this fascinating interview.

Listen to more here and then go pick up this week’s New Statesman to read a terrific excerpt from the book.

Our new series, the Lives of Great Religious Books is based on the idea that books, like people, are born and live fascinating lives worthy of biographical treatment. Now to get truly meta — can we then extend it out to say that series are like books are like people in the same way?

That is one way to look at this Q&A between religion editor Fred Appel and Ruth Braunstein at The Immanent Frame in which Fred reveals how the idea behind the series was actually born of a discussion with Avishai Margalit many years ago in a faculty lounge at NYU Law School.

If we accept that series are like books are like people — perhaps this closing paragraph in which Fred reveals his “wish list” of future biographical subjects can be viewed as the series version of a personal ad (“Established series seeks unattached authors for fun and stimulating conversation, must like dogs.“).

I would love to commission an accessible, lively biography of the Daodejing, and I’m also looking for a biography of the Talmud. I’ve been talking to one or two people about that. It is a tremendously important book in the Jewish tradition, and one that has had a fascinating history, not just within Jewish communities in Europe, in the Sephardic world, and in this country, but also in the Christian and Islamic worlds. I would love to commission a biography of Exodus as well. The liberationist story has been so very important. Michael Walzer, as I mentioned, wrote an important book about Exodus from the perspective of political theory and the history of political thought, but I think it’s time for a new book, and perhaps one written from a different perspective. The Koran is of course something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as well. There are a lot of fine Koranic scholars out there, but the state of that field, or subfield, is such that most people are writing in very specialized modes, for other specialists. So finding someone who can write engagingly and accessibly for the general educated public is something of a challenge. But that’s what keeps me busy, and that’s what makes it fun.

Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz

Visit the Berfrois web site to read Donald S. Lopez, Jr.”s explanation of why this photograph and the book these two men created aren’t quite what they seem.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus seems to entail multiple layers of dissimulation, beginning with the photograph of its translator and editor, and extending back to the ancient Tibetan text—how ancient remains a question—that lies buried under the prefaces, notes, and appendices of the American Theosophist Walter Evans-Wentz. And yet, it has been reprinted many times since 1927 and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The Tibetan text itself has been retranslated repeatedly, most recently in 2005 in “the first complete translation”, with various Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama himself, offering their commentary.

More from the article here.

And read the first chapter of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

If you haven’t read it already, be sure to have a look at Martin E. Marty’s op-ed piece, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Feb. 4, 1906 — April 9, 1945” on Living Lutheran’s website. Here’s a sneak peak:

Visitors today can still imagine something of what it must have been like for a captive to squirm or pace in the 10-foot by 7-foot floor space of a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel.

All the senses can come into play during such imagining. For instance, the odor of the whole third floor in which this cell stood, the prisoner’s pen for a year and a half, was barely endurable.

From that cramped space designed to kill creativity and bury hope, however, there issued letters and papers that became the substance of one of the great testimonial books of the 20th century.

Since there is so little to observe in the shadowed picture of this room, we are left other reminders and, later, his words written there, to fill it in with a human portrait, that of the author.

Read on…

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Acclaimed writer and scholar Donald Lopez writes, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death. It is about rebirth: the rebirth of souls and the resurrection of texts….The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remarkable case of what can happen when American Spiritualism goes abroad.”

The Tibetan Book of the Dead:
A Biography
By Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

In this compelling book, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered–and so misunderstood–in the West.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His many books include The Story of Buddhism (HarperOne) and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. He has also edited a number of books by the Dalai Lama.

We invite you to read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

Also now available in the Lives of Great Religious Books series:

Augustine’s Confessions:
A Biography
By Garry Wills

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison:
A Biography
By Martin E. Marty

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Publishers Weekly’s Religion Bookline has a great feature about our new book series The Lives of Great Religious Books.

Calling the series ambitious, G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes “If it’s true that a book takes on a life of its own, then each has a life story waiting to be told. So let the telling begin–starting with books that have sought the divine and rocked history, one soul at a time.”

He continues to praise Princeton University Press for aiming “to fill a void on the publishing landscape.”

MacDonald is not the only person praising the ambitiousness of this project. In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s PageView blog last week, Carlin Romano noted:

With three marquee scholar-experts like [Wills, Marty, and Lopez], it’s clear that Princeton isn’t fooling around, isn’t simply launching a series of low-profile secondary works. Forthcoming volumes are also impressive in conception, including Annping Chin and Jonathan Spence on The Analects of Confucius, and John J. Collins on The Dead Sea Scrolls. Someone up in New Jersey plainly wants to launch a distinctive, powerful genre.

And with that, Romano’s hit the nail on the head. This new series is the brain-child of religion editor Fred Appel who tells me that this series is designed around the idea of exploring why religious books exert such power on culture and history.

“What we need to know—and what a book of reasonable length could realistically impart to us—is how and why countless numbers of our fellows have been inspired, moved, galvanized, driven to despair or ecstasy by religious books,” concludes Appel.

Learn more about the Lives of Great Religious Books series here and become a fan of the series on Facebook to receive updates about current and forthcoming titles and authors in the series.