This collection of stories marks Singapore’s first book on creation care. Each story captures how ordinary Christians from different walks of life have humbly put their faith into radical action, and integrated the biblical ethos of creation care into the everyday. The writers reflect on creation care as an organic part of the path of discipleship and missional living, rather than an imposed or burdensome duty. The book presents a refreshing local perspective on the distinctiveness of Christian environmental ethics, seeks to encourage fellow Christians on this creation care journey, and inspire those who have yet to begin. Ultimately, it is an invitation to followers of Christ to care for God’s marvellous creation as an act of worship and love.

From the Booker Prize–winning author of Oryx and Crake, the first book in the MaddAddam Trilogy, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Internationally acclaimed as ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by, amongst others, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice In a world driven by shadowy, corrupt corporations and the uncontrolled development of new, gene-spliced life forms, a man-made pandemic occurs, obliterating human life. Two people find they have unexpectedly survived: Ren, a young dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails (the cleanest dirty girls in town), and Toby, solitary and determined, who has barricaded herself inside a luxurious spa, watching and waiting. The women have to decide on their next move—they can’t stay hidden forever. But is anyone else out there?

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.

Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

God will meet you personally in your garden . . . and in his. Throughout the Scriptures God has revealed spiritual truth in the language of growing things. This Bible will take you into a deeper relationship with God through the contemplation of soil and soul. The NIV God’s Word for Gardeners Bible will inspire you to seek God in a personal way through informative essays, devotional readings and prayers that explore the nature of the gardener’s work, the rewards of gardening, the influence of seasons and weather, and the joy of the harvest. In this Bible you will also find botanical-themed pages containing horticultural information for the prominent plants noted in Scripture and landscape-themed pages highlighting the main gardens and regions in which the events in the Bible took place. Draw near to the One whose garden is planted with delight—in you! Features: 260 daily devotions and 52 weekend readings arranged in weekly themes and placed near relevant passages in the text to explore the biblical metaphors of gardens and gardening Topical Index (for 52 weeks) Special sections on the Garden of Eden, the garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus the Vine.

This volume discusses the question of presence and/or absence from a transdisciplinary perspective, and intends to provide insights into how a wide range of disciplines addresses this issue which has been at the centre of philosophical, theoretical and critical debates in the past decades. As the essays in the volume prove, apparently diverse areas can have a lot in common and talk to each other in sometimes surprising ways. The topics discussed include modals in various languages and black slave funeral sermons, pragmatic markers and the Australian Stolen Generation, the transcendental in poems by Ann Bradstreet, Arthur Symons and Philip Larkin, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, generic presences in Virginia Woolf and contemporary journalism, haunting presences in fin-de-siècle ghost stories and in a contemporary horror film, mythical structures in John Cowper Powys and Margaret Atwood, and gender politics in Pat Barker and Sarah Waters. The analyses, as they talk to each other, create multiple dialogues without imposing closures and ultimate interpretations on the plethora of possible meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays. This transdisciplinary volume, written in an erudite but reader-friendly language, will be of great interest to both the academic world, as well as a broader readership interested in how linguistic phenomena in general, cultural myths of all kinds, various cinematic, literary and journalistic genres from diverse periods can be approached and opened up to new readings and meanings from the perspective of presences and absences.

In an candid and informative account, two French jounralists set out to conduct an objective and unbiased study of the Baha'i Faith, an emerging world religion. Through a series of frank and lively interviews, interspersed with personal observations, they examine who the Baha'i's are and what they believe.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions.

This book explores ways in which Western literature has engaged with themes found within the field of science and religion, both historically and in the present day. It focuses on works of the imagination as important locations at which human arguments, hopes and fears may be played out. The chapters examine a variety of instances where scientific and religious ideas are engaged by novelists, poets and dramatists, casting new light upon those ideas and suggesting constructive ways in which science and religion may interact. The contributors cover a rich variety of authors, including Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, R. S. Thomas, Philip Pullman and Margaret Atwood. Together they form a fascinating set of reflections on some of the significant issues encountered within the discourse of science and religion, indicating ways in which the insights of creative artists can make a valuable and important contribution to that discourse.