"delightful, readable, and scholarly. The volume is profusely and well illustrated, each art example is clearly labelled and dated, and superb supplementary references for illustrations and supplementary suggestions for further reading are added to complete the study." Choice

Jerome I. Gellman observes that the mystic experience of God's presence, a sense of having direct contact with the divine, often compels belief in God's existence. On the basis of widely accepted principles connecting appearance with reality, Gellman contends, the claims people make of having experienced God show that belief in God is strongly rational, meaning that such claims are sufficient in number and variety to support a line of reasoning making it rational to believe that God exists and irrational to deny God's existence. Gellman considers challenges to his thinking based on epistemological grounds and challenges growing out of the diversity of religious experiences across the range of world religions. He thoroughly evaluates reductionist explanations of apparent experiences of God and finds them incapable of invalidating his view. Finally, he directs his attention to the two most compelling arguments against the existence of God: the charge that the idea of a perfect being is logically incoherent, and the threat to theism based on the existence of evil, in both its logical and probabilistic forms. Until and unless stronger objections come along, he concludes, personal experiences of God constitute sufficient evidence of God's existence.

The authors have produced the first "on the ground" study (not just clinical or chemical) of MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), or "ecstasy" as it is frequently designated. A psychoactive substance related to both the amphetamines and mescaline, MDMA has become popular in recent years as one of the new "designer" drugs. First used in therapeutic treatment, its recreational or street use has increased in recent years. The authors track the efforts (with psychiatrists and researchers in opposition) of the DEA to ban the drug.

As a scholar, writer and ascetic, Jerome was a major intellectual force in the early Church and influenced the ideals of Christian chastity and poverty for many generations after his death. This book assembles a representative selection of his voluminous output. It will help readers to a balanced portrait of a complex and brilliant, but not always likeable man.

"A young boy expresses his love for his friend Jerome"--

In life Jerome's authority was frequently questioned, yet following his death he was venerated as a saint. Andrew Cain systematically examines Jerome's idealized self-presentation across the extant epistolary corpus, exploring how and why Jerome used letter writing as a means to bid for status as an expert on the Bible and ascetic spirituality.

The Strange follows an unnamed, undocumented immigrant who tries to forge a new life in a Western country where he doesn’t speak the language. Jérôme Ruillier’s story is deftly told through myriad viewpoints, as each narrator recounts a situation in which they crossed paths with the newly-arrived foreigner. Many of the people he meets are suspicious of his unfamiliar background, or of the unusual language they do not understand. By employing this third-person narrative structure, Ruillier masterfully portrays the complex plight of immigrants and the vulnerability of being undocumented. The Strange shows one person’s struggle to adapt while dealing with the often brutal and unforgiving attitudes of the employers, neighbors, and strangers who populate this new land. Ruillier employs a bold visual approach of colored pencil drawings complemented by a stark, limited palette of red, orange and green backgrounds. Its beautiful simplicity represents the almost child-like hope and promise that is often associated with new beginnings. But as Ruillier implicitly suggests, it’s a promise that can shatter at a moment’s notice when the threat of being deported is a daily and terrifying reality. The Strange has been translated from the French by Helge Dascher. Dascher has been translating graphic novels from French and German to English for over twenty years. A contributor to Drawn & Quarterly since the early days, her translations include acclaimed titles such as the Aya series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, Hostage by Guy Delisle, and Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët. With a background in art history and history, she also translates books and exhibitions for museums in North America and Europe. She lives in Montreal.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

This volume offers a full analysis of one of the more intriguing works by a figure who is central to our understanding of Late Antiquity and early Christianity: the translator, exegete, and controversialist Jerome (c.347-419/20AD). The neglected text of the Vita Malchi - or, to use Jerome's title, the Captive Monk - recounts the experiences of Malchus, a monk abducted by nomadic Saracens on the Eastern fringe of the fourth-century Roman Empire, in what today is the border region between southern Turkey and Syria. Most of this short, vivid, and fast-paced narrative is recounted by Malchus in the first person. The volume's introduction provides background information on the author, Jerome, and the historical and linguistic context of the Life, as well as detailed discussion of the work's style and its reception of earlier Christian and classical literature, ranging from its relationship with comedy, epic, and the ancient novel to the Apocryphal Apostolic Acts and martyr narratives. An exposition of the manuscript evidence is then followed by a new edition of the Latin text with an English translation, and a comprehensive commentary. The commentary explores the complex intertextuality of the work and provides readers with an understanding of its background, originality, and significance; it elucidates not only literary and philological questions but also points of ethnography and topography, and intellectual and social history.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline renaissance of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators?