Vietnam veteran Jesse Pasadoble, now a defense attorney living in San Francisco, the battle still rages: in his memories; in the gang wars erupting on... Potrero Hill; and in the recent slaying of two women-one black, one Vietnamese. In seeking justice for the young man accused of the brutal double murder, Jesse must walk with the men who died on another hill...men who were his comrades and friends in a war that crossed racial divides. Finding the truth means confronting the ghosts of Vietnam--and the possibility of his own redemption. A novel that makes mesmerizing leaps of imagination as it moves seamlessly between past and present, Gods Go Begging tells an unforgettable story of war and peace, guilt and innocence, suffering and love.

"Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into... startling new configurations." --Cynthia OzickGod's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood-a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son?a "marginal error"?finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.

C.W. Ceram visualized archeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship, and this book, a chronicle of man's... search for his past, reads like a dramatic narrative. We travel with Heinrich Schliemann as, defying the ridicule of the learned world, he actually unearths the remains of the ancient city of Troy. We share the excitement of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter as they first glimpse the riches of Tutankhamen's tomb, of George Smith when he found the ancient clay tablets that contained the records of the Biblical Flood. We rediscover the ruined splendors of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient wold; of Chichen Itza, the abandoned pyramids of the Maya: and the legendary Labyrinth of tile Minotaur in Crete. Here is much of the history of civilization and the stories of the men who rediscovered it.

In God's Gym, the celebrated author John Edgar Wideman offers stories that pulse with emotional electricity. The ten pieces here explore strength, both... physical and spiritual. The collection opens with a man paying tribute to the quiet fortitude of his mother, a woman who "should wear a T-shirt: God's Gym." In the stories that follow, Wideman delivers powerful riffs on family and fate, basketball and belief. His mesmerizing prose features guest appearances by cultural luminaries as diverse as the Harlem Globetrotters, Frantz Fanon, Thelonious Monk, and Marilyn Monroe. As always, Wideman astounds with writing that moves from the intimate to the political, from shock to transcendence.

Since 2000, America’s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the... nation’s capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. And God’s Harvard grooms these students to be the elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, to wage the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following the students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image.

In this timely and compelling account of the contribution to immigrant rights made by religious activists in post-1965 and post-9/11 America, Pierrette... Hondagneu-Sotelo provides a comprehensive, close-up view of how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups are working to counter xenophobia. Against the hysteria prevalent in today's media, in which immigrants are often painted as a drain on the public coffers, inherently unassimilable, or an outright threat to national security, Hondagneu-Sotelo finds the intersection between migration and religion and calls attention to quieter voices, those dedicated to securing the human dignity of newcomers. Based on years of fieldwork conducted in California's major centers as well as in Chicago, this book considers Muslim Americans defending their civil liberties after 9/11, Christian activists responding to death and violence at the U.S-Mexico border, and Christian and Jewish clergy defending the labor rights of Latino immigrants. At a time when much attention has been given to religious fundamentalism and its capacity to incite violent conflict, God's Heart Has No Borders revises our understanding of the role of religion in social movements and demonstrates the nonviolent power of religious groups to address social injustices.

The Adventures that Shaped the Western World First published in 1934, Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece has become one of the most popular,... enduring--and captivating--retellings of the ancient myths for modern readers. Recognizing the sheer entertainment value of these timeless adventures, world renowned classical scholar W.H.D. Rouse delighted his students at the Perse School in Cambridge, England, with a conversational style and childlike wonder that made the legends come alive--a rare storytelling gift that continues to engage young and old alike. Many of the characters in this book are familiar to us--Helen of Troy, Icarus, Zeus, Athena, to name just a few--but rarely have their stories of war and adventure, bravery and romance, been so simply and thrillingly told. From the strong-arm heroics of Heracles, to the trickery of the Trojan Horse, from the seductions of Circe the sorceress, to the terrors of the Cyclops and Minotaur, these legends have outlived the culture that bore them. But while the ancient Greeks may be long gone, their fables and morals, their heroes and heroines, live on today…

The title of this volume, God's Holy Fire, is taken from William Butler Yeats' poem, 'Sailing to Byzantium.' This poem speaks of a yearning for a place... of truth and beauty that is beyond our daily routines. Like the poet, we desire to live in such a place. The image of fire also evokes the words of Jeremiah 20:9, 'Is not my word like fire?' Fire has the power to consume and renew life. Jeremiah speaks of a 'fire in [his] bones' so overpowering that he can no longer hold it within himself (20:9). The image indicates that the Bible contains potent words for any age. - from the Introduction

In this challenging and enlightening companion volume to the bestselling Goddesses in Everywoman, Jean Shinoda Bolen turns her attention to the powerful... inner patterns--or archetypes--that shape men's personalities, careers, and personal relationships. Viewing these archtypes as the inner counterparts of the outer world of cultural stereotypes, she demonstrates how men an women can gain an nvaluable sense of wholeness and integration when what they do is consistent with who they are. Dr. Bolen introduces these patterns in the guise of eight archetypal gods, or personality types, with whom the reader will identify. From the authoritarian power-seeking gods (Zeus, Poseidon) to the gods of creativity (Apollo, Hephaestus) to the sensual Dionysus, Dr. Bolen shows men how to identify their ruling gods, how to decide which to cultivate and which to overcome, and how to tap thepwer of these enduring archetypes in order to enrich and strengthen their lives. She also stresses the importance of understanding which gods you are attracted to and which are compatible with your expectations, uncovers the origins of the often-difficult father-son relationship, and explores society's deep conflict between nurturing behavior and the need to foster masculinity.In Gods in Everyman Dr. Bolen presents us with a compassionate and lucid male psychology that will help all men and women to better understand themselves and their relationships with their fathers, their sons, their brothers, and their lovers.

Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as “calendar art” or “bazaar art,” the color-saturated,... mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features.Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies—of art, commerce, religion, and desire—within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India’s postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.

Gods in the Desert explores the fascinating religious cultures of the ancient Near East. From the mysterious pyramids, tombs, and temples of Egypt to... the powerful heroes, gods, and legends of Mesopotamia, Glenn Holland guides readers through the early religions that are the root of many of today's major faiths. Holland compares the religions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine, including Israel and Judah, from the Neolithic era through the conquest of Alexander the Great. He provides a historical survey of each region, then discusses the gods, the rulers, the afterlife, and the worship rituals. This accessible overview makes clear how these religions converged and diverged, and are intimately connected to many of the religions we recognize today, sometimes in surprising ways.

In an era plagued by religious conflict, the Third Edition of Gods in the Global Village directly responds to issues of social problems prevalent in the... world today. Using an engaging, thought-provoking style, author Lester R. Kurtz focuses on the relationship among the major faith traditions that inform the thinking and ethical standards of most people in the emerging global social order.This book focuses on a central aspect of that common crisis. A major assumption of this book is that all knowledge is shaped by the social context of the knower; therefore, both religious traditions and our studies of them are shaped by the context in which we construct them. The author argues that religious pluralism will be a necessary precondition of the global village for the foreseeable future. The question that faces us as a human community is not “Which religious tradition is true?” or even “Is any religious tradition true?” but rather “How can we enable the various religious and secular traditions to coexist peacefully on the planet?” The text supports the belief that the sociology of religion-itself a pluralistic discipline-can provide invaluable insight into the most pressing problems of our time.

This book examines the relationship between the theologies of atonement and penal strategies. Christian theology was potent in Western society until the... nineteenth century, and the so-called "satisfaction theory" of the atonement interacted and reacted with penal practice. Gorringe argues that atonement theology created a structure of affect that favored retributive policies. He reviews theory and practice in the twentieth century, and makes concrete proposals for both theology and criminal and societal violence.

Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do... not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. Roberts' intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. God's Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families.