ABRIDGED EDITION If I die, the truth will be lost for ever . . . I must pass on the secret. History professor Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call while on business in France: the curator of the Louvre in Paris has been brutally murdered inside the museum. Alongside the body, police have found a series of baffling codes and need Langdon's help to decipher them. When Langdon and a French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, begin to sort through the bizarre riddles, they find a trail that leads to the works of the famous artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci. As the clues unfold, Langdon and Neveu must decipher the code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle before a stunning historical truth is lost forever . . .

Get the facts behind the sensational fiction! Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code, has stormed the bestseller charts and both the book and upcoming film claim to be based on truth- a truth shocking enough to rock the foundations of Christianity. What is the truth? Could you defend your faith if challenged by those who believe Brown's fiction? Use this brief, practical book as a tool to begin conversations, to explain your beliefs, or to get the facts straight.

Many who have read the New York Times bestseller The Da Vinci Code have questions that arise from seven codes-expressed or implied-in Dan Brown's book. In Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone's Asking, Darrell Bock, Ph.D., responds to the novelist's claims using central ancient texts and answers the following questions: Who was Mary Magdalene? Was Jesus Married? Would Jesus Being Single be Un-Jewish? Do the So-Called Secret Gnostic Gospels Help Us Understand Jesus? What Is the Remaining Relevance of The Da Vinci Code? Darrell Bock's research uncovers the origins of these codes by focusing on the 325 years immediately following the birth of Christ, for the claims of The Da Vinci Code rise or fall on the basis of things emerging from this period. Breaking the Da Vinci Code, now available in trade paper, distinguishes fictitious entertainment from historical elements of the Christian faith. For by seeing these differences, one can break the Da Vinci code.

Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS’s rise in 2014, Egypt’s Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia, The Political Lives of Saints journeys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state. Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying political ends. With an ethnographer’s eye for traces of antiquity, she deciphers how long-cherished imaginaries of holiness broker bonds of revolutionary sacrifice, reconfigure national sites of sacred territory, and pose sectarian threats to security and order. A study of tradition and nationhood at their limits, The Political Lives of Saints shows that Coptic Orthodoxy is a core domain of minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule, powerfully reversing the recurrent thesis of its impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.

Were the first scientists hermetic philosophers? What do these occult origins of modern science tell us about the universe today? The Forbidden Universe reveals the secret brotherhood that defined the world, and perhaps discovered the mind of God. All the pioneers of science, from Copernicus to Newton via Galileo, were inspired by Hermeticism. Men such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Bacon, Kepler, Tycho Brahe - even Shakespeare - owed much of their achievements to basically occult beliefs - the hermetica. In this fascinating study, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince go in search of the Hermetic origins of modern science and prove that not everything is as it seems and that over the past 400 years there has been a secret agenda behind our search for truth. From the age of Leonardo da Vinci, the influence of hermetic thinking upon the greatest minds in history has been hidden, a secret held by a forbidden brotherhood in search of the mind of God. Yet this search does not end in history but can be found in the present day - in the contemporary debates of leading evolutionists and thinkers. The significance of this hidden school can hardly be over-emphasised. Not only did it provide a spiritual and philosophical background to the rise of modern science, but its worldview is also relevant to those hungry for all sorts of knowledge even in the twenty-first century. And it may even show the way to reconciling the apparently irreconcilable divide between the scientific and the spiritual. Picknett and Prince go in search of this true foundation of modern rational thought and reveal a story that overturns 400 years of received wisdom.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, ICADL 2007, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in December 2007. The 41 revised full papers, 15 revised short papers, and extended abstracts of 10 poster papers presented together with three keynote and three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 154 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

Selling Rights has firmly established itself as the leading guide to all aspects of rights sales and co-publications throughout the world. The seventh edition is substantially updated to illustrate the changes in rights in relation to new technologies and legal developments in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. This fully revised and updated edition includes: coverage of the full range of potential rights from English-language territorial rights through to serial rights, permissions, rights for the reading-impaired, translation rights, dramatization and documentary rights, electronic and multimedia rights More detailed coverage of Creative Commons and Open Access The aftermath of the Digital Economy Act 2010, the Hooper Report and new UK Statutory Instruments affecting copyright Updated coverage of book fairs The implications of adding e-book rights to print licences A separate chapter on collective licensing via Reproduction Rights Organizations The impact of new electronic hardware (e-readers, tablets, mobile phones) – the distinction between sales and licences the rights implications of acquisitions, mergers and disposals updates on serial rights, including online New appendices listing territories normally sought as exclusive by UK publishers and a glossary of rights specific terms. Selling Rights is an essential reference tool and an accessible and illuminating guide to current and future issues for rights professionals and students of publishing.

This book investigates the contemporary relevance of the Belgic Confession. The book groups the 37 articles of the Belgic Confession together to cover the confession in 12 chapters (alongside an introductory chapter). The emphasis of the publication falls on two aspects: (1) providing a scope of contemporary theological, ethical and general issues and possible controversies regarding the content of the Belgic Confession, and (2) formulating ethical perspectives and guidelines from the Belgic Confession that may assist in the building of societies. Where applicable, chapters also discuss the history of the text of the Belgic Confession, the organic unity between the articles of the Belgic Confession, a dogma-historical perspective on the development of the doctrine/content of the Belgic Confession and the relationship between the Belgic Confession and other confessions.