Renovaré, a community of Christians promoting personal and spiritual renewal, put together a prestigious editorial board including Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Phyllis Tickle, and Richard Rohr, resulting in this wonderful resource for exploring the richness of the Christian tradition.

    Alter takes the old yet simple step of reading the Bible as a literary creation.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    In The Shadow Of The Vampire offers a close up view of her devotees and disciples, fangs and all. Over 100 photographs from Anne Rice's Memnoch Ball in New Orleans as well as other events serve as a portrait of this growing subculture. The photographs illustrate the themes the readers relate to in their fantasies and everyday lives and the extremes to which they will go to be close to their mentor. The subjects of the photographs, the fans themselves, explain in accompanying interviews their spiritual relationships to romance, eroticism, loneliness, bloodlust or outsider status of the characters in the book. From the people who sleep in coffins to the teenage Goth-rockers to the HIV-positive man who found a deep allegorical comfort in the vampire Lestat, their responses range from the burlesque to the sublime.

    Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings—his Bible is their "book of strange new things." But Peter is rattled when Bea's letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea's faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter. Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us. Marked by the same bravura storytelling and precise language that made The Crimson Petal and the White such an international success, The Book of Strange New Things is extraordinary, mesmerizing, and replete with emotional complexity and genuine pathos.

    In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

    That night he is shot. Five years later, burnt-out Silicon Valley software engineer Nick Aubrey boards a "red-eye" flight to Boston and winds up seated next to a very disturbed man who claims to know the secret of Gulf War Syndrome. Over Utah Nick's chance companion meets a dramatic demise, and the police accuse Nick of murder. Soon the police are the least of Nick's worries. On the run from the CIA and paranoid cybermilitias, tracked down by billionaire venture capitalists and exotic foreign beauties, Nick must solve the Gulf War enigma or spend the rest of his life on the lam. All clues lead to a pharmaceutical laboratory in Basel Switzerland, where scientists are working on submicrosopic machines to rearrange human DNA. But Nick can't find the solution without Todd's help, and Todd's been in a coma for nearly half a dozen years.

    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

    What the animals did not know was that they were the Keepers of Wyrm, monster of evil long imprisoned beneath the earth ... and Wyrm, sub terra, was breaking free.

    He loves music of all kinds - jazz, classical, folk, rock - and has more than six thousand records at home. And when he writes, his words have a music all their own, much of it learned from jazz. Jay Rubin, a self-confessed fan, has written a book for other fans who want to know more about this reclusive writer. He reveals the autobiographical elements in Murakami's fiction, and explains how he developed a distinctive new style in Japanese writing. In tracing Murakami's career, he uses interviews he conducted with the author between 1993 and 2001, and draws on insights and observations gathered from over ten years of collaborating with Murakami on translations of his works.

    'Not all those who wander are lost, ' 'Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens, ' and 'Never laugh at live dragons' are all poetic, wise, and convincingly real-sounding, but they are also a lens, through which more can be seen. These proverbs belong to entirely invented wisdom traditions and reflect the culture, the philosophical worldview, and the history of those who use them.In The Proverbs of Middle-earth, David Rowe discovers and investigates the degree to which the 'soul' of each of these fictional civilizations can be understood through the lens of their proverbs. What is revealed enriches the reader's experience of and delight in Middle-earth, as well as illuminating the astounding depth and detail of creativity behind it. Arrows dipped in honey abound!

    These include pre-flood times though the first Coming of Jesus and into the Middle Ages. The heart of this book is the 53 prophecies fulfilled between 1948 and 2008. The last 11 prophecies between 2008 and the Tribulation are also given. All these are documented and interpreted from the Ancient Church Fathers. The Ancient Church Fathers, including disciples of the 12 apostles, were firmly premelinnial, pretribulational, and very Pro-Israel

    Survey of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, including books that may have influenced Burroughs and the writers influenced by Burroughs.

    It defines the grounds on which textual interpretation can claim to establish objective knowledge, defends that claim against such skeptical attitudes as historicism and psychologism, and shows that many confusions can be avoided if the distinctions between meaning and significance, interpretation and criticism are correctly understood. It provides perhaps the first genuinely comprehensive account of hermeneutic theory to appear in English and the first systematic presentation of the principles of valid interpretation in any language.Mr. Hirsch, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Wordsworth and Schelling and Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake.“Here is a book that brings logic to the most unruly of disciplines, literary interpretation. Viewing this subject within the tradition of hermeneutics, Mr. Hirsch is able to trace its origins and development with brilliant insight.  The result is a lucidly systemic and authoritative account of the premises and procedures applicable to the interpretation of a literary text.  Mr. Hirsch has performed a monumental service thereby that of reinstating the credentials of objectivism and defining the limits of the aesthetics of truth.  This study is a necessary took for anyone who wants to talk sense about literature.”—Virginia Quarterly Review“Professor Hirsch demonstrates convincingly that objectivity is attainable in humane studies, and that it is not identified with the subject but with the evidence. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one, but one which is more probably than any other on the basis of existing evidence.  He makes a subtle and important distinction between a text’s ‘meaning’ (which does not change) and its ‘significance’ (which does), and brilliantly relates meaning to understanding (the necessary preliminary to interpretation) and interpretation to explanation…” In short, this is a work which future students of literary theory cannot afford to neglect.”—Notes and Queries

    The end result of this conversation, Dark hopes, will be a better understanding that there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures to which we belong, the reality of the kingdom of God.