Biography & Autobiography : Religious

This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the social, religious, and political issues of his time. more...

Price: $31.95

A man of unswerving faith, rooted in his own Lutheran tradition yet deeply committed to helping enrich a pluralist society, Martin Marty brings to powerful life the devout Reformation figure whose despair for a perilous world, felt anew in our own times, drove him to a ceaseless search for assurance of God's love. more...

Price: $14.00

A Recipe for an Emperor, a Classic of Everyday Philosophy. A Recipe for an Emperor, a Classic of Everyday Philosophy. So live as indifferent to the world and all worldly objects, as one who liveth by himself alone upon some desert hill... Let them behold and see a man... living according to the true nature of man. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, emperor of Rome, was an intensely private man with intensely public obligations. His notes on the proper way to conduct one's life, for either an ordinary man or a ruler of the civilized world, were in large part written during Rome's campaign against the barbarian Quadi in Germania, shortly before his death. more...

Price: $4.99

The 1993 event at Mt. Carmel shocked all of America and has since spawned a plethora of books regarding the “truth” about the Branch Davidians. Memories of the Branch Davidians is the story told from the inside. The oral history of Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of Vernon Howell (David Koresh), it offers an intimate, first-hand account of how a boy named Vernon Howell became David Koresh. Haldeman paints a picture of Koresh that could only be told by one who knew both his greatest strengths and his deepest faults. more...

Price: $29.95

"We have just elected a female pope.". —Cardinal Alessandro Bichi, 1644. Today's Roman Catholic Church firmly states that women must be excluded from church leadership positions, but they neglect to mention that for over a decade in the seventeenth century a woman unofficially, but openly, ran the Vatican. Now, Eleanor Herman, author of Sex with the Queen, exposes one of the church's deepest secrets, laying bare facts that have been concealed for 350 years. Beginning in 1644 and for eleven years after, Olimpia Maidalchini, sister-in-law and reputed mistress of the indecisive Pope Innocent X, directed Vatican business, appointed cardinals, negotiated with foreign ambassadors, and helped herself to a heaping portion of the Papal State's treasury. Unlike the ninth century's Pope Joan, whose life is shrouded in mystery, Olimpia's story is documented in thousands of letters, news sheets, and diplomatic dispatches. Knowing of Pope Innocent's absolute dependence on his sister-in-law, Cardinal Alessandro Bichi angrily declared on the day of Innocent's election, "We have just elected a female pope." Mischievous Romans hung banners in churches calling her Pope Olimpia I. Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino bewailed the "monstrous power of a woman in the Vatican." One contemporary wrote that women might as well become priests, since one of them was already pope. Born in modest circumstances, Olimpia was almost forced into a convent at the age of fifteen due to the lack of a dowry. She used deceit to escape, and vowed never to be poor and powerless again. Throughout her life, Olimpia exacted excruciating vengeance on anyone who tried to lock her up or curb her power. But her grisly revenge on the pope who loved her would be reserved for after his death. . . . Seventeenth-century Rome boasted the world's most glorious art and glittering pageants but also suffered from famine, floods, swarms of locusts, and bubonic plague more...

Price: $19.95