Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Graham Priest
Buddhist metaphysics and modern symbolic logic might seem strange bedfellows. Indeed they are. The thinkers who developed the systems of Buddhist metaphysics knew nothing of modern logic; and the logicians who developed the panoply of techniques which are modern logic knew nothing–for the most part–of Buddhism.
By Alyssa Bender
Pope Francis hasn’t been the Pope for even a year, and he has been selected as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. How well do you know this news-making Pope? Take our quiz to test your knowledge.
By William D. Romanowski
The 4th of December marks the 90th anniversary of the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923). A silent film, this was the first in a trilogy by the famed director that established the conventions for Bible-themed movies: religion, sex, violence, and cinematic spectacle (and not necessarily in that order).
By Philip H. Pfatteicher
The Christian Church, at its best, is remarkably honest. That characteristic is especially clear in the season of Advent, which calls Christians to look ahead toward the second coming of Christ the Lord of glory (what the New Testament calls his Appearing). In this expectation, the Church identifies with John the Baptist, who prepared the way for the first coming.
Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His award-winning fiction has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over 30 languages.
We had a great time in Baltimore this past weekend at the 2013 American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference. In addition to searching for the best crab cake in Baltimore, one of our favorite parts was seeing our authors and having them show off their books.
By Norman Solomon
It started innocently enough at a lunch-time event with some friends at the Randolph Hotel in the centre of Oxford. ‘The trouble with Islam …’ began some self-opinioned pundit, and I knew where he was going.
To celebrate National Bible Week, we sat down with our long-time Bibles editor, Don Kraus, to find out more about his experience with publishing bibles at Oxford University Press.
C.S. Lewis, the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia among other books, died 50 years ago today. Overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Aldous Huxley, his death went largely unnoticed in the media, but his work continues to be debated.
By Laura Davis
I’ve spent a lot of time in churches throughout my life. I was baptized in the Episcopal Church, raised Methodist, and am a converted Catholic. I’ve worked in Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches and spent a summer in Eastern Europe singing in a Romanian Orthodox church.
By Alyssa Bender
With a little over one week until American Academy of Religion/Society for Biblical Literature 2013, a lot of us at the Oxford University Press office are getting excited to head to Baltimore. As to what we’re all looking forward to, that varies, from new products, to meeting authors, to food we can’t wait to try.
By Steven Heine
Like a number of other traditional East Asian cultural phenomenon, such as kabuki, kimono, kimchee, and kung fu—just sticking to terms that start with the letter “k”—the koan as the main form of literature in Zen Buddhist monastic training has been widely disseminated and popularized in modern American society.
After meeting this summer, the OUP Blog suggested Miles Hollingworth, author of Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, catch up with fellow Augustinian scholar Todd Breyfogle about the timeliness and relevance of Augustine in order to celebrate the saint’s birthday, 1,659 years to the day later.
Michael S. A. Graziano
Each one of us has an inner feeling, an experience that is private. Consciousness, awareness, qualia, mind, call it what you will, it is the subtle distinction between merely computing information and feeling.
By Kelly Besecke
The relationship between reason and spirituality has been part of our cultural conversation since the advent of modernity. In recent times, we’ve seen this conversation play out in public debates over creationism and arguments between religious leaders and representatives of a “new atheism.”
By Kandice Rawlings
Saint Francis of Assisi died on this day in 1226, and when he was canonized just two years later, the fourth of October became his feast day. Even before his sainthood was official, St Francis was a popular figure among the faithful, and the religious order he had founded already had chapters throughout Europe.