Three recent books survey ancient Near Eastern treaty texts and discuss their relevance to biblical covenants. Kitchen Lawrence present the most extensive anthology now available. Altman tends concentrate on Hittite diplomacy, while Charpin highlights evidence from Old Babylonian city-states. Taken together, they demonstrate that scholars should bear in mind flexibility of these political instr...

when muslim arabs conquered transoxiana, the eastern turkistan and semirchie remained unoccupied for two centuries by qarluqs resistance. but islamic teachings were gradually propagated in their area and in the second half of  the fourth century a.h islam became the dominant religion among them. on the basis of  a descriptive-analytic method, this article is to clarify the process of propagatio...

Although religion deals with humankind’s ultimate concerns, such as universal compassion or the quest for divine peace and perfection, to some people the psychological study of religion and spirituality may seem only marginally relevant to positive psychology. In part, this could be because of the negative stances that many theorists have taken toward religion. For instance, Freud (1927/1953) c...