In Divine Might Natalie Haynes, author of the bestselling Pandora''s Jar, returns to the world of Greek myth and this time she examines the role of the goddesses.
We meet Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father''s head: goddess of war and wisdom, guardian of Athens. We run with Artemis, goddess of hunting and protector of young girls (apart from those she decides she wants as a sacrifice). Here is Aphrodite, goddess of sex and desire - there is no deity more determined and able to make you miserable if you annoy her. And then there''s the queen of all the Olympian gods: Hera, Zeus''s long-suffering wife, whose jealousy of his dalliances with mortals, nymphs and goddesses lead her to wreak elaborate, vicious revenge on those who have wronged her.
We also meet Demeter, goddess of agriculture and mother of the kidnapped Persephone, we sing the immortal song of the Muses and we warm ourselves with Hestia, goddess of the hearth and sacrificial fire. The Furies carry flames of another kind - black fires of vengeance for those who incur their wrath.
These goddesses are as mighty, revered and destructive as their male counterparts. Isn''t it time we looked beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within?
''Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!'' - Margaret Atwood The Greek myths are among the world''s most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories. Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from the Trojan War to Jason and the Argonauts. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women''s stories. And when they do, those women are often painted as monstrous, vengeful or just plain evil. But Pandora - the first woman, who according to legend unloosed chaos upon the world - was not a villain, and even Medea and Phaedra have more nuanced stories than generations of retellings might indicate. Now, in Pandora''s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths , Natalie Haynes - broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist - redresses this imbalance. Taking Pandora and her jar (the box came later) as the starting point, she puts the women of the Greek myths on equal footing with the menfolk. After millennia of stories telling of gods and men, be they Zeus or Agamemnon, Paris or Odysseus, Oedipus or Jason, the voices that sing from these pages are those of Hera, Athena and Artemis, and of Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Eurydice and Penelope.
Fascinated by the myth of Cupid and Psyche throughout his life, C. S. Lewis reimagines their story from the perspective of Psyche''s sister, Orual. ''I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer . . . Why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?'' Till We Have Facesis a brilliant examination of envy, betrayal, loss, blame, grief, guilt, and conversion. In this, his final - and most mature and masterful - novel, Lewis reminds us of our own fallibility and the role of a higher power in our lives.
Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.
'A deeply researched history of the interplay between the two ways of understanding the world.' ECONOMIST, BEST BOOKS OF 2023
The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it's about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say - a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.
From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via medieval Europe, nineteenth-century India and Soviet Russia, Magisteria sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.
''The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this.''
This is the key statement of ''Miracles'', in which C. S. Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in his creation.
Using his characteristic lucidity and wit to develop his argument, Lewis challenges the rationalists, agnostics and deists on their own grounds and provides a poetic and joyous affirmation that miracles really do occur in our everyday lives.
''His cornucopia of tellers and tales is a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that revels in its own hybridity and the imaginative riches produced by the crossing of cultural and literary borders'' Financial Times ''Like a child after the Pied Piper I pursued Jubber into a world both human and full of magic. A carnival of a book , rigorously researched and jostling with life '' Amy Jeffs, author of Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain '' Magical tales about magical tales and tellers. Jubber, congenially and fascinatingly, explores the land from which the great fairy stories seeped, making the stories more resonant, powerful and important than ever '' Charles Foster, author of Being a Human and Being a Beast The surprising origins and people behind the world''s most influential magical tales: the people who told and re-shaped them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them and were in turn formed by them. Who were the Fairy Tellers? In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as ''Cinderella'', ''Hansel and Gretel'', ''Beauty and the Beast'' and ''Baba Yaga''. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children''s literature, they include a German apothecary''s daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, we travel from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. In the process, we discover a fresh perspective on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.
One of the most popular and beloved introductions to the concept of faith ever written, ''Mere Christianity'' has sold millions of copies worldwide.
The book brings together C.S. Lewis''s legendary radio broadcasts during the war years, in which he set out simply to ''explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times''.
Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity''s many denominations, ''Mere Christianity'' provides an unequalled opportunity for believers and nonbelievers alike to absorb a powerful, rational case for the Christian faith.
A collection of Greek and Roman myths arranged in sections on the gods and early heroes, love and adventure stories, the Trojan War, and a brief section on Norse mythology.
A milestone in the history of popular theology, ''The Screwtape Letters'' is an iconic classic on spiritual warfare and the power of the devil.
This profound and striking narrative takes the form of a series of letters from Screwtape, a devil high in the Infernal Civil Service, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior colleague engaged in his first mission on earth trying to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. Although the young man initially looks to be a willing victim, he changes his ways and is ''lost'' to the young devil. Dedicated to Lewis''s friend and colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, ''The Screwtape Letters'' is a timeless classic on spiritual conflict and the invisible realities which are part of our religious experience.
C.S. Lewis''s dazzling allegory about heaven and hell - and the chasm fixed between them - is one of his most brilliantly imaginative tales, as he takes issue with the ideas in William Blake''s ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''.
In a dream, the narrator boards a bus on a drizzly afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell. He meets a host of supernatural beings far removed from his expectations, from the disgruntled, ghostly inhabitants of Hell to the angels and souls who dwell on the plains of Heaven.
This powerful, exquisitely written fantasy is one of C.S. Lewis''s most enduring works of fiction and a profound meditation on good and evil.
One of C. S. Lewis'' works of fiction, or more specifically allegory, this book is clearly modelled upon Bunyan''s Pilgrim''s Progress, as Lewis cleverly satirizes different sections of the Church. Written within a year of Lewis'' conversion, it characterises the various theological and temperamental leanings of the time. This brilliant and biting allegory has lost none of its freshness and theological profundity, as the pilgrims pass the City of Claptrap, the tableland of the High Anglicans and the far-off marsh of the Theosophists. As ever, Lewis says memorably in brief what would otherwise have demanded a full-length philosophy of religion.
Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.
Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first truly global history of Christianity.
This Very Short Introduction presents Martin Luther as historians now see him. Instead of singling him out as a modern hero, the book emphasizes the context in which Luther worked, the colleagues who supported him, and the opponents who adamantly opposed his agenda for change.
A rare, intimate account of a world-renowned Buddhist monk''s near-death experience and the life-changing wisdom he gained as a result. ''One of the most generous, beautiful, and essential books I''ve ever read - thoroughly engaging, so clear, so honest, so courageous and full of wisdom.'' George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo ''This book makes me think enlightenment is possible and necessary.'' Russell Brand Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche''s experience begins the night he has chosen to embark on a four-year wandering retreat, slipping past the monastery gates. Alone for the first time in his life, he sets out into the unknown. His initial motivation is to step away from his life of privilege and to explore the deepest, most hidden aspects of his being, but what he discovers throughout his retreat - about himself and about the world around us - comes to define his meditation practice and teaching. Just three weeks into his retreat, Rinpoche becomes deathly ill and his journey begins in earnest through this near-death experience. Moving, beautiful and suffused with local colour, In Love with the World is the story of two different kinds of death: that of the body and that of the ego, and how we can bridge these two experiences to live a better and more fulfilling life. Rinpoche''s skilful and intimate account of his search for the self is a demonstration of how we can transform our dread of dying into joyful living.
For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography.
''In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.'' Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion.
''Surprised by Joy'' reveals both that crisis and its momentous conclusion that would determine the shape of Lewis''s entire life.
C.S. Lewis''s famous work on the nature of love divides love into four categories: Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. The first three are loves which come naturally to the human race.
Charity, however, the Gift-love of God, is divine in its source and expression, and without the sweetening grace of this supernatural love, the natural loves become distorted and even dangerous.
For centuries people have been tormented by one question above all - 'If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?' And what of the suffering of animals, who neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it? The greatest Christian thinker of our time sets out to disentangle this knotty issue. With his signature wealth of compassion and insight, C.S. Lewis offers answers to these crucial questions and shares his hope and wisdom to help heal a world hungry for a true understanding of human nature.
