Columbia Press: 2357 books
Nature in Fragments
The Legacy of Sprawl
Language: English
Release Date: October 5, 2005
This new collection focuses on the impact of sprawl on biodiversity and the measures that can be taken to alleviate it. Leading biological and social scientists, conservationists, and land-use professionals examine how sprawl affects species and alters natural communities, ecosystems, and natural...
Live All You Can
Alexander Joy Cartwright and the Invention of Modern Baseball
Language: English
Release Date: July 9, 2009
Laying waste to the notion that Abner Doubleday established the modern game of baseball, acclaimed biographer Jay Martin makes a bold case for A. J. Cartwright (1820-1892), an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and avid ballplayer whose keen perception and restless spirit codified the rules of the sport...
The Other Catholics
Remaking America's Largest Religion
Language: English
Release Date: May 24, 2016
Independent Catholics are not formally connected to the pope in Rome. They practice apostolic succession, seven sacraments, and devotion to the saints. But without a pope, they can change quickly and experiment freely, with some affirming communion for the divorced, women's ordination, clerical marriage,...
Junk DNA
A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome
Language: English
Release Date: April 14, 2015
For decades after the identification of the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98 percent of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose....
Crowded Orbits
Conflict and Cooperation in Space
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2014
Space has become increasingly crowded since the end of the Cold War, with new countries, companies, and even private citizens operating satellites and becoming spacefarers. This book offers general readers a valuable primer on space policy from an international perspective. It examines the competing...
Pope Francis Among the Wolves
The Inside Story of a Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2015
Marco Politi takes us deep inside the power struggle roiling the Roman Curia and the Catholic Church worldwide, beginning with Benedict XVI, the pope who famously resigned in 2013, and intensifying with the contested and unexpected election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, now...
Women in the Mosque
A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2014
Juxtaposing Muslim scholars' debates over women's attendance in mosques with historical descriptions of women's activities within Middle Eastern and North African mosques, Marion Holmes Katz shows how over the centuries legal scholars' arguments have often reacted to rather than dictated Muslim women's...
by Bill Leonard
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2005
Baptists are a study in contrasts. From Little Dove Old Regular Baptist Church, up a hollow in the Appalachian Mountains, with its 25-member congregation, to the 18,000-strong Saddleback Valley Church in Orange County, California, where hymns appear on wide-screen projectors; from Jerry Falwell, Jesse...
by Thomas Hamm
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 2003
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 2003
The Quakers in America is a multifaceted history of the Religious Society of Friends and a fascinating study of its culture and controversies today. Lively vignettes of Conservative, Evangelical, Friends General Conference, and Friends United meetings illuminate basic Quaker theology and reflect the...
Teresa, My Love
An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2014
Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting...
To the End of the Earth
A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
Language: English
Release Date: August 30, 2005
In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from...
Food of Sinful Demons
Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2017
Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet historically most Tibetans—both monastic and lay—have made meat a regular...
The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China
A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2015
A major new work in modern Tibetan history, this book follows the evolution of Tibetan Buddhism's trülku (reincarnation) tradition from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, along with the Emperor of China's efforts to control its development. By illuminating the political aspects of the trülku...
The Garden and the Fire
Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture
Language: English
Release Date: November 19, 2008
Islamic conceptions of heaven and hell began in the seventh century as an early doctrinal innovation, but by the twelfth century, these notions had evolved into a highly formalized ideal of perfection. In tracking this transformation, Nerina Rustomji reveals the distinct material culture and aesthetic...