- New features orient students into the Luther's life, context, and Reformation history- Additional readings allow teachers to explore further dimensions of Luther's thought

    Hume's brilliant and dispassionate essay "Of Miracles" has been added in this expanded edition of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which also includes "Of the Immortality of the Soul", "Of Suicide", and Richard Popkin's illuminating Introduction.

    Raymond E. Brown's "An Introduction to the New Testament" is the most trustworthy and authoritative guidebook for a generation seeking to understand the Christian Bible. Universally acknowledged as the dean of New Testament scholarship, Father Brown is a master of his discipline at the pinnacle of his career. Who else could cover the entire scope of the New Testament with such ease and clarity? This gifted communicator conveys the heartfelt concern of a beloved teacher for his students, as he walks the reader through the basic content and issues of the New Testament. While the book contains a wealth of information, its most impressive features are how the author boils down a life time of scholarship into basic summaries of each book, provides a historical overview of the ancient Greco-Roman world, engages in discussions of theological issues, and presents supplementary material for deeper understanding, such as tables, maps, bibliographies, and appendixes. Those opening to the New Testament for the first time and those seeking deeper insights could not ask for more in a primer to the Christian Bible.

    "The Drama of Scripture" is an introduction to the basic story line and theology of the Bible. In considering the biblical story, the authors emphasize the unity of the whole, viewing the Bible as a drama in six acts--creation, sin, Israel, Christ, church, and new creation. Two overarching themes tie the biblical story together--covenant in the Old Testament and kingdom in the New Testament. Throughout, the authors suggest, God is revealed through the story and calls us to participate in his drama.

    It is a strident critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.(From Wikipedia)

    In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Root explores how this secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor, obscuring his or her core vocation: to call and assist others into the experience of ministry.Using examples of pastors throughout history--from Augustine and Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nadia Bolz-Weber--Root shows how pastors have both perpetuated and responded to our secular age. Root turns to Old Testament texts and to the theology of Robert Jenson to explain how pastors can regain the important role of attending to people's experiences of divine action, offering a new vision for pastoral ministry today.

    True religion consists in practice of simple piety, independent of philosophical speculation.

    In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

    He covers every book of the Old Testament in the order in which it appears in the Hebrew Bible and treats the most important issues and methods in contemporary interpretation of the Old Testament--literary, historical, and theological.

    New features include: a new chapter on queer theory; every chapter has been revised with new introductions with appropriate new critical vocabulary, critical terms, further readings sections, and web sites; new student essays; structuralism and deconstruction have been combined into one section to make the material clearer and more streamlined; and the addition of Plotinus, Giovanni Boccaccio, Joseph Addison, Percy Pysshe Shelley, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

    As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance—of any scale. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht’s revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

    Within this structure, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, including New Criticism, formlaism, structuralism and phenomenology, but also offers views of the modifications to these theroies. While presenting an analysis of the system governing all fictional narratives, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem, she also suggests how individual narratives can be studied against the background of this general system. A broad range of literary examples illustrate key aspects of the study.This edition is brought fully up-to-date with an invaluable new chapter, reflecting on recent developments in narratology. Readers are also directed to key recent works in the field. These additions to a classic text ensure that Narrative Fiction will remain the ideal starting point for anyone new to narrative theory.

    Readers looking for an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the Bible's thorniest texts will find a thought-provoking and indispensible resource in The Human Faces of God. --Christians can ignore the facts that Stark brings into the light of day only if they want to be wrong.-- --Dale C. Allison, Jr. author of Constructing Jesus --The Human Faces of God is one of the most challenging and well-argued cases against the doctrine of biblical inerrancy I have ever read.-- --Greg A. Boyd author of The Myth of a Christian Nation --I learned so much from this book that I can strongly encourage anyone who is seeking to move from simplistic proof-texting to a comprehensive understanding of the Bible to read this book carefully.-- --Tony Campolo author of Red Letter Christians --This is must reading for Christians who have agonized over their own private doubts about Scripture--and for others who have given up hope that evangelical Christians can practice intelligent, moral interpretation of the Bible.-- --Neil Elliot author of Liberating Paul --[W]ith the help of this book, we may discover that the Bible--when we read it in all its diversity and vulnerability--does bring healing words to those who keep listening.-- --Ted Grimsrud author of Embodying the Way of Jesus --Stark's book effectively demonstrates how the Bible, in practice, is the most dangerous enemy of fundamentalists.-- --James F. McGrath author of The Only True God --Stark provides a model for theology that is committed to hearing the voice of the victims of history, especially the victims of our own religious traditions.-- --Michael J. Iafrate PhD Cadidate, University of Toronto --This book is the most powerful antidote to fundamentalism that I've ever read.-- --Frank Schaeffer author of Crazy for God Thom Stark was a Fig Tree and Ledbetter scholar at Emmanuel School of Religion. His academic interests include second temple apocalyptic Judaism and Christian origins, as well as modern Christian and Islamic theologies of liberation.

    A vast array of scholars contributed to the large, developing complex of ideas and trends that now serves as the foundation of contemporary discussions on interpretation. In A Brief History of Old Testament Criticism, Mark Gignilliat brings representative figures—such as Baruch Spinoza, W.M.L. de Wette, Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, and others—and their theories together to serve as windows into the critical trends of Old Testament interpretation in the modern period. This concise overview is ideal for classroom use. It lays a foundation and provides a working knowledge of the major critical interpreters of the Old Testament, their approaches to the Bible, and the philosophical background of their positions. Each chapter concludes with a section For Further Reading, directing students to additional resources on specific theologians and theories.

    Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and—by implication—within the human world. Written for the general reader, in a style which combines the rigour of science with the subtlety of literature, The Origin of Species remains one of the founding documents of the modern age.