Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution--how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee--and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White--an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paloanthropology.An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

    It was the unlikely start to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in many ways has revolutionized our sense of what it means to lead a Jewish life. In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.

    But the further he studied the Bible, the more he found himself confronted by questions that could neither be answered within the rigid framework of his religious instruction or accepted among the conservative evangelical community.Rejecting the increasingly complicated intellectual games used by conservative Christians to “protect” the Bible, Enns was conflicted. Is this what God really requires? How could God’s plan for divine inspiration mean ignoring what is really written in the Bible? These questions eventually cost Enns his job—but they also opened a new spiritual path for him to follow.The Bible Tells Me So chronicles Enns’s spiritual odyssey, how he came to see beyond restrictive doctrine and learned to embrace God’s Word as it is actually written. As he explores questions progressive evangelical readers of Scripture commonly face yet fear voicing, Enns reveals that they are the very questions that God wants us to consider—the essence of our spiritual study.

    Each story is accompanied by scripture, prayer, and discussion exercises designed to remind readers of Mary of Medjugorje's intercession on their behalf and God's personal love for them. Watkins gives nationwide talks and workshops and works as a spiritual director in the Bay Area, in addition to maintaining an active website and e-mail newsletter.

    Bergsma once considered obstacles to ever becoming Catholic himself. Over an eighteen-month spiritual journey, Bergsma was stunned again and again by the biblical support he found for even the stickiest teachings of the Catholic Church.Weaving his personal story into clear explanations of Catholic teachings as found in Scripture, Dr. Bergsma explores seven key Catholic doctrines, including: The Pope Devotion to Mary Confession The Eucharist The priesthood Belief in the Bible alone Salvation by faith alone theologies Stunned by Scripture will help Catholics understand, defend, and explain the biblical basis for the Faith and show them how the Bible solidly supports even the most frequently misunderstood Catholic teachings.

    Topics covered include: were there ancient contacts between Europe and America?; could Atlantis have existed?; the true age of the great pyramid; was there a worldwide catastrophe around 10,000 BC?

    Willow Wilson—already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven—leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.

    This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum.A pharaoh's forgotten decree, cut in granite in three scripts--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek--the Rosetta Stone promised to unlock the door to the language of ancient Egypt and its 3,000 years of civilization, if only it could be deciphered. Capturing the drama of the race to decode this key to the ancient past, John Ray traces the paths pursued by the British polymath Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology" ultimately credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. He shows how Champollion "broke the code" and explains more generally how such deciphering is done, as well as its critical role in the history of Egyptology. Concluding with a chapter on the political and cultural controversy surrounding the Stone, the book also includes an appendix with a full translation of the Stone's text.Rich in anecdote and curious lore, "The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt" is a brilliant and frequently amusing guide to one of history's great mysteries and marvels.

    In the gospels she finances Jesus’ mission in Galilee and is the only person with Jesus at his crucifixion, burial and resurrection—the critical moments that define his purpose and give rise to a new religion.Yet in the sixth century Mary Magdalene fell foul of a profound argument in which the established, ritualized and hierarchical Church required that God be worshipped through itself, whereas everything about Mary Magdalene suggests a more immediate and personal experience of the divine. Pope Gregory reduced Mary Magdalene from an independent visionary to a sinner and a prostitute while making Jesus’ mother Mary, who is a nonentity in the gospels, into a creature of the Church, hailing her as the epitome of all things feminine and holy.In The Quest for Mary Magdalene, historian Michael Haag presents Mary Magdalene as the woman at the center of Jesus’s life, a visionary and a radically independent woman. He explores how she has been used and abused and reinterpreted in every age, and he examines what she reveals about men and women, Jesus and God.

    International controversy has erupted over the lack of access to the unpublished scrolls, while a renewed effort has been made to finish the large task of editing the remaining texts from the fourth cave—the richest repository of writings—in which 15,000 fragments have been found representing more than 500 texts. These events have unleashed a flurry of discussion and new theories about the scrolls. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Today preeminent scroll researcher James C. VanderKam offers an up-to-date guide to all the scrolls—published and still unpublished—discussing what they tell us about the community associated with them and what importance they hold for biblical studies. The book s chapters cover in scrupulous fashion the major subjects of scroll studies: the discoveries of the manuscripts and nearby archaeological remains during the 1940s and 1950s and the methods used to date the scrolls and ruins; the content and character of the texts themselves; the identity, history, and beliefs of the people who lived in the area of Qumran and collected, wrote, and copied scrolls; and the contributions the scrolls have made to the study of the Old and New Testaments. Main features of the book include the following: a unique introduction dealing with all of the evidence, including that which has only recently become available analyses of recently proposed theories about the scrolls documentation of arguments by quotations from the scroll texts text written with a diverse audience in mind, from scholars in related fields to the general, interested reader interesting pictures supplementing the text. "