When her brother is murdered, Veronica Tremaine tries to uncover who is killing genetics professors and encounters three more would-be victims in her brother's co-worker Bryce Johnson, research assistant Rebecca Armely, and Rebecca's young son. By the authors of Dark Inheritance. Reprint.

Raising Abel is a theological exploration of a huge change of mind: the change which the apostolic group underwent as a result of the Resurrection-and how that paradigm can transform the world today. Making use of the thought of Rene Girard, the author shows how the God revealed by Jesus subverted the violent expectations of the early Christians.

Raising Abel assumes that the Bible would not bother telling us about a cunning serpent, a murderous brother, or a resinous gopher tree, if they didnt have something to do with the deeper topic of faith. After all, isnt the Bible the authority on faith? Raising Abel explores the most familiar chapters of Genesis, not as a collection of stories of the beginning of time, but as our first and best guide to the subject of faith. The author, as a physician, explains faith within the framework of wellness, dividing the Genesis stories into four parts that answer four questions. The Premise: What does healthy faith look like? (Genesis 12) The Problem: What can cause this healthy state to become diseased? (Genesis 35) The Prescription: What medicine is needed to restore us to a healthy faith? (Genesis 69:17) The Practice: What must we do to maintain this healthy faith? (Genesis 9:1811) Raising Abel reassures us that there is something greater than a perfectly good world; it is an imperfect world plus faith. In a perfect world there would be no need of faith. Get ready to experience faith in a whole new light!

Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

A Human Catechism is a theopoetic journey. It is the integration of personal experience, theological reflection, and contextual analysis. This book proposes a radical way of discipleship in which we are invited to run the risk of positively imitating one another through the imitation of Christ. If violence happens through the imitation of one another, maybe good things do too. As the reader embarks on a contextually self-reflective journey, this book invites us to take the chance of believing in a God in whom there is no violence. A Human Catechism will be a journey from what seemed impossible, to what became second nature, all the way to becoming responsible for modeling a way of being otherwise to those around us.

In September 2012, the feature-length documentary Hellbound? was released in theaters across North America. Joining a growing chorus of voices that were questioning the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, the film asked a handful of “burning” questions. Does hell exist? If so, who goes there, and why? More importantly, what do our views about hell say about us and our understanding of God? And how do our beliefs about these issues affect the kind of world we create, the kind of people we become? Five years later, the debate over hell is far from settled, but the landscape in which such questions are being asked has changed radically. Hence, filmmaker Kevin Miller decided it was time to go back to some of the people who appear in Hellbound? and others he met along the way to get their input on how the debate has shifted and how it’s remained the same. The result is a plethora of voices offering all sorts of perspectives, some highly academic, some polemic, some intensely personal, and all bound to impact how readers think and feel about this issue.

The reality and nature of religious faith raises difficult questions for the modern world; questions that re-present themselves when faith has grown under the most challenging circumstances. In East Timor widespread Christian faith emerged when suffering and violence were inflicted on the people by the state. This book seeks a deeper understanding of faith and violence, exploring how Christian faith and solidarity affected the hope and resistance of the East Timorese under Indonesian occupation in their response to state-sanctioned violence. Joel Hodge argues for an understanding of Christian faith as a relational phenomenon that provides personal and collective tools to resist violence. Grounded in the work of mimetic theorist René Girard, Hodge contends that the experience of victimisation in East Timor led to an important identification with Jesus Christ as self-giving victim and formed a distinctive communal and ecclesial solidarity. The Catholic Church opened spaces of resistance and communion that allowed the Timorese to imagine and live beyond the violence and death perpetrated by the Indonesian regime. Presenting the East Timorese stories under occupation and Girard's insights in dialogue, this book offers fresh perspectives on the Christian Church's ecclesiology and mission.

All the Sweeter tells the stories of families who have adopted one or more children from the US foster care system. Each of the twelve families interviewed has a dedicated chapter in which at least one representative tells their family’s adoption story. Woven through these stories are topical chapters that explore the common challenges these families face, including the complications that accompany transracial adoptions, helping children understand adoption, relationships with birth parents, and raising a traumatized child. Each year, over 50,000 children are adopted from the US Foster Care System. Informative and diverse in scope, All the Sweeter provides a resource to families considering adoption, families in the process of adoption, and families who have already adopted children from foster care—with the ultimate goal of facilitating a better life for the children they bring into their lives.

A theological study on the Gospel of John that is strongly determined by contemporary biblical scholarship.