T homas Merton, the American intellectual turned Trappist monk, recounts in The Seven Storey Mountain that his conversion to Catholicism was triggered by reading an account of a sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that draws from Joyce’s own departure from the faith. Merton fully recognizes the oddness and paradox of such a reading, but there was something, ...

Hafez Shirazi was a distinguished Persian poet. His poetry collection, Divan, is regarded as a literary work of profound significance. Iranians view this collection as something much more than poetry because it is also used for bibliomantic purposes. After studying Hafez in his social context and exploring distinctive qualities of his Divan, particularly its application as a divination tool, th...