This introduction focuses on how issues involving race, class, and gender influence our understanding of the Bible. Describing how "standard" readings of the Bible are not always acceptable to people or groups on the "margins," this book afters valuable new insights into biblical texts today.

Margin is the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. Today we use margin just to get by. This book is for anyone who yearns for relief from the pressure of overload. Reevaluate your priorities, determine the value of rest and simplicity in your life, and see where your identity really comes from. The benefits can be good health, financial stability, fulfilling relationships, and availability for God’s purpose.

These essays challenge the positivist, patriarchal assumptions of earlier approaches to textual criticism.

Investigates the art of reading by examining each aspect of reading, problems encountered, and tells how to combat them.

How should Augustine, Aquinas, Bonhoeffer, Kant, Nietzsche, and Plato be read today, in light of postcolonial theory and twenty-first-century understandings? This book offers a reader-friendly introduction to Christian liberationist ethics by having scholars "from the margins" explore how questions of race and gender should be brought to bear on twenty-four classic ethicists and philosophers. Each short chapter gives historical background for the thinker, describes that thinker's most important contributions, then raises issues of concern for women and persons of color. Contributors include George (Tink) Tinker, Asante U. Todd, Traci West, Darryl Trimiew, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, and many others.

A young apprentice learns to tap his own wellspring of creativity with the help of the magical margins of an illuminated manuscript in this story about patience, talent, and imagination. Full color.

Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.

The ancient book of Ruth speaks into today's world with astonishing relevance. In four short episodes, readers encounter refugees, undocumented immigrants, poverty, hunger, women's rights, male power and privilege, discrimination, and injustice. In Finding God in the Margins, Carolyn Custis James reveals how the book of Ruth is about God, the questions that surface when life falls apart, and how God reaches into the margins and chooses two totally marginalized women who, in the eyes of the patriarchal culture, are zeros. Against the backdrop of disturbing issues in today's world, this bracing narrative puts on display a radical gospel way of living together as human beings that shouts the Kingdom of God, foreshadows Jesus' gospel, and raises the bar for men and women, then and now.

A controversial take on the Gospel of Matthew applies the text to history and discusses its implications for political power and spirituality. Original.

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.