Features essays that employ Marx, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, feminist, and African American criticism to investigate topics ranging from cultural encounters at the time of the European conquest of the Americas to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

Difference can enrich us or tear us apart. Difference can make our lives stronger, fuller, and richer or it can destroy them. Therefore, how we engage difference matters. Conflicts between different peoples around the world, the movement of refugees from nation to nation, tensions over immigration, and growing diversity within our society bring difference to our doorstep daily. We can engage people who are different constructively and compassionately, or we can allow the fear of difference to distance us from others and to demonize them. At a time when racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious differences have created heightened tensions, we need more than ever to find our bearings. We need to re-examine what we think about difference. Author Theodore “Ted” Hiebert re-examines the Bible’s stories explaining difference and its beginnings in the book of Genesis, exposing the inclination to interpret these stories as a negative view of difference. These stories recognize difference as God’s intention for the world, providing us with constructive resources of living with difference today. Hiebert starts with the story of “The Tower of Babel” and moves beyond it to examine how Genesis’s writers saw their unique identity and role in the world not as separate from all others but as members of the human family of which they were a part. He presents how biblical characters lived with difference and how the first Christians embraced difference. Finally, he invites the reader into new conversations about our biblical traditions that reveal a respect for difference, a generosity toward others, a desire to include rather than exclude, and a continuing interest in negotiating difference in ways that build relationships rather than destroy them.

Welcoming the disabled in our church and our theology. From the gospels it would appear that the disabled have a special claim on Jesus' love and attention. And from the doctrine of the Trinity we learn that God is an inclusive community of love. Yet are these truths reflected in the life of the church? Drawing on scripture, theology, and the personal experience of their daughter's severe disability, the authors explore the theological meaning of disability and the special insights it affords into the mystery of God's Trinitarian being. They call on the church to become a truly inclusive community, marked by a special welcome and embrace for those whom the world identifies as broken, disabled, or somehow defective.

It is impossible to grow to spiritual maturity by yourself. You must be connected to the other parts of the Body. This wonderful little book explains the power of belonging to a church family.

Delve deeper into the dark fantasy world of the Diablo universe as Deckard Cain shares history and lore in this fictional illustrated journal. In Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo® and Diablo II, the recurring character of Deckard Cain delivered quests, accompanied the brave adventurer, and, as the last of the Horadrim, provided a link to the greater history of the world of Sanctuary. Ever mysterious during these appearances, Cain hinted at a larger story, providing snippets of it in his notebook. Diablo III: Book of Cain is Cain’s formal record of this greater tale—a dissertation on the lore of the Diablo universe, told by one who has witnessed and participated in some of the epic events that make up the eternal conflict between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. Designed as an “in-world” artifact from the Diablo universe, Diablo III: Book of Cain includes Cain’s revealing meditations, as well as dozens of sketches and color artworks depicting the angelic and demonic beings who wage constant war with one another.

This text has two objectives: to describe the leading ideas and concepts of modern astronomy; and to indicate how astronomy in particular and physical science in general developed, what its methods are, its goals and its limitations.

This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations

In Against Empire, Zillah Eisenstein extends her critique of neoliberal globalization and its capture of democratic possibilities. Faced with an aggressive American empire hostage to ideological extremism and violently promoting the narrowest of its interests around the globe, Eisenstein urgently looks to a global anti-war movement to counter U.S. power. Looking beyond the distortions of mainstream history, Eisenstein detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Against Empire insists that 'the' so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. 'The' West and western feminisms do not monopolize authorship; there is a need for plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, 'polyversally', human. Professor Eisenstein offers a rich picture of women's activism across the globe today. If there is to be hope of a more peaceful, more just and happier world, it lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.

A genetic basis for homosexuality has been all but proved, yet Darwinism, the most widely accepted evolutionary theory, emphasises successful reproduction. How do we explain a lifetime preference for non-reproductive sex? Whilst social constructionism offers explanations in terms of social learning and cultural preferences, the body of evidence for a genetic predisposition to homosexuality grows. Social learning argues that homosexual sex is merely misdirected and therefore futile, but far from dying out it continues through the ages and is found in different cultures. What if there was an evolutionary advantage to homosexuality? Straight Science? Homosexuality, Evolution and Adaptation dares to ask such questions.