In this daring and original examination of the Church, authors Roberta Pughe and Paula Sohl endeavor to decriminalize Eve, reimagining her as a modern-day mythic mentor. They explore Eve's bold, self-directed, and inquisitive nature as a model for women today who have been negatively affected by oppressive and hierarchical fundamentalist dogma. Roberta and Paula find Eve's spirit in the teachings of Jesus and his vision of God's domination-free order. Like Jesus, Eve was willing to break the rules in her quest for consciousness, discovering in the process the fullness of both her humanity and her divinity. Jesus' respect for women, his use of story, and his honoring of children and childlikeness were key elements in his ministry of healing resurrection. Filled with profound theological reflections and moving stories of women embracing their spiritual power, Resurrecting Eve offers women a new perspective on gender roles within Christianity. The authors also introduce dance and healing ritual ideas as well as a form of Christian chakras.

During the late second and early third centuries C.E. the resurrection became a central question for intellectual commentary, with increasingly tense divisions between those who interpreted the resurrection as a bodily experience and those who did not. The relationship between the resurrected person and their mortal flesh was also a key point of discussion, especially in regards to sexual desires, body parts, and practices. Early Christians struggled to articulate how and why these bodily features related to the imagined resurrected self. The problems posed by the resurrection thus provoked theological analysis of the mortal body, sexual desire and gender. Resurrecting Parts is the first study to examine the place of gender and sexuality in early Christian debates on the nature of resurrection, investigating how the resurrected body has been interpreted by writers of this period in order to address the nature of sexuality and sexual difference. In particular, Petrey considers the instability of early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness. Bodily parts commonly signified sexual difference, yet it was widely thought that future resurrected bodies would not experience desire or reproduction. In the absence of sexuality, this insistence on difference became difficult to maintain. To achieve a common, shared identity and status for the resurrected body that nevertheless preserved sexual difference, treatises on the resurrection found it necessary to explain how and in what way these parts would be transformed in the resurrection, shedding all associations with sexual desires, acts, and reproduction. Exploring a range of early Christian sources, from the Greek and Latin fathers to the authors of the Nag Hammadi writings, Resurrecting Parts is a fascinating resource for scholars interested in gender and sexuality in classical antiquity, early Christianity, asceticism, and, of course, the resurrection and the body.

In Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve, Juliana Geran Pilon argues for a return to an egalitarian view of men and women, found in the original Genesis narrative, as reflected through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In each of these Abrahamic traditions, it was understood that man and woman were created to be soulmates in God's image-equal despite their different functions within society. Pilon writes that this original message has gradually been distorted, with disastrous effect. Any hope for an ennobling human community begins by resurrecting Eve as an equal partner to Adam. The work examines the Biblical creation narrative, comparing it to Greek and other ancient mythologies. Pilon explains how the disturbing association of woman with sin and death led to Eve's demise as Adam's equal. The final section of the work deals with the Goddess myth, love and marriage in early religious narratives, and modern man's search for his soul no less than for a soulmate. The book, at its core, is a meditation on the relationship between men and women but also among human beings. The resurrection of Eve is indispensable to attaining a true appreciation of love and faith. Pilon uses religious texts, expert commentary, and various works of fiction, poetry, and psychology to make her argument come alive. The work is strengthened by the writing style, alternately poetic and humorous, and a clear and illuminating progression of ideas. Its emphasis on reconciliation and understanding, and its post-feminist outlook will find a receptive audience.

The swooning Victorian ladies and the 1950s housewives genuinely needed to be liberated. That much is indisputable. So, First-Wave feminists held rallies for women's suffrage. Second-Wave feminists marched for Prohibition, jobs, and abortion. Today, Third-Wave feminists stand firmly for nobody's quite sure what. But modern women--who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history--need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Eve in Exile sets aside all stereotypes of mid-century housewives, of China-doll femininity, of Victorians fainting, of women not allowed to think for themselves or talk to the men about anything interesting or important. It dismisses the pencil-skirted and stiletto-heeled executives of TV, the outspoken feminists freed from all that hinders them, the brave career women in charge of their own destinies. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way--whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun--Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?

RE-INTERPRETING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AWAKE The Hidden Revelation, a previously unpublished manuscript of Ingo’s, was discovered by Nick Cook in 2016 in a nondescript folder tucked inconspicuously among some of Ingo’s notes. Now, together with Beyond the Gods’ Devices, another undiscovered manuscript, it is published for the first time as Resurrecting The Mysterious, a posthumous compilation that delivers what we (that is Nick and Swann-Ryder Productions, LLC) offer here as Ingo’s ‘grand unified theory’ of the human experience (and, in part, of consciousness itself). This asserts that paranormality is part of an ‘expanded reality-set’ rooted in the relationship between quantum theory, us the observer and something infinitely more profound, even, that is fully described in Beyond the Gods’ Devices. The Hidden Revelation is more concerned with us, the immanent experience, the inward journey; Beyond the Gods’ Devices with that world, whatever that world truly is, that binds and connects us to ‘the numinous’ -- that, which, at present, science is unable to describe. For many, it may also make the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness just that little bit easier to comprehend. We certainly hope so …

Popular speaker and New York Times bestselling author of Woman Evolve, Sarah Jakes Roberts shows women they are not disqualified by their pain and failures and offers encouragement and strength to believe God’s best is still possible. Everyone has experiences in their lives that stop them in their tracks and become burdens they carry with them everywhere they go. No one knows this better than Sarah Jakes Roberts. Pregnant at fourteen, married by nineteen, divorced by twenty-two, and all while under the intense spotlight of being Bishop T.D. Jakes’s daughter, Sarah knows what it is to feel buried by failure and aching pain. But when her journey brought her to faith’s fork in the road, Sarah found she had to choose between staying in the comfort of the pain she knew or daring to make new wounds and move forward. Now Sarah shares the numerous life lessons she’s learned along the way with other women also struggling to believe they’re not disqualified by their pain and past mistakes. She delves into topics such as allowing the past to empower the present, choosing to step forward while still being afraid, facing struggles in the midst of community, finding intimacy with God outside of preconceived notions of what it should look like, and learning to focus on others. In Don’t Settle for Safe, Sarah will help you: View your history with positivity Demolish destructive patterns Connect with true intimacy Repurpose your passion into to your purpose Realize your true calling With deeply personal stories of her own, Sarah helps readers find their way to the right perspective and the confidence to walk toward the best God has for them.

Just as Henry Thoreau, Charlie Johnson finds himself an alien to his contemporaries. On a quiet lake he finds solitude—some would suspect a place to heal or hide—and a purpose. But his predictable world is shattered when Sheriff Bodeman requires his tracking expertise. The object of the Sheriff’s search, a suspected serial killer known as The Skinner, carries a secret of immense importance. The search sets off a chain of events that quickly challenge not only Johnson’s survival skills, but also casts him into an unlikely alliance with a corporate executive and a young, out spoken woman deputy. He immediately trusts Jerry Koler, but his relationship with Lora Whitney gets complicated. He owes her his life, but her loyalties are unclear. Johnson has no idea something is missing from his life until he suddenly becomes the hunted, and is forced to come to terms with his own past. A critical turning point in his life becomes the focal point of all past events, even the death of an ancient mammoth. Two months earlier he knew Lora Whitney only by sight, and Jerry Koler, Chris Colby, and Maclin Ethek not at all…

Who is Alex Carruthers? That is the question Wicked fans have been asking for nearly six years. Spellbound, the fourth and seemingly final book in the Wicked series, originally published in 2003, left readers on the edge of their seats with a classic cliffhanger ending. But now, as new fans of the bind-up editions of the series begin to ask the same question, the true and final conclusion to the Wicked series will emerge. And all their questions will be answered in this heart-stopping, magical adventure about witches, destiny, and the beyond.

Jan A. Sigvartsen seeks to examine the immense interest in life after death, and speculation about the fates awaiting both the righteous and the wicked, that proliferated in the Second Temple period. In this volume Sigvartsen analyses the texts of the Pseudepigrapha, identifies the numerous afterlife and resurrection beliefs they contain, and presents an analysis of these beliefs and how they functioned in the Second Temple period. A careful reading of these diverse resurrection passages – from testaments to wisdom, philosophical literature, and prayers – reveals that most of these distinct life-after-death views, regardless of their complexity, show little evidence of systematic development relational to one another, and are often supported by several key passages or shared motifs from texts that later became a part of the TaNaKh. This volume examines testaments from Adam to the Twelve Patriarchs, expansions of stories and legends such as Joseph and Aseneth and the ladder of Jacob, and texts such as 4 Maccabees, before finally considering the posthumous body, the nature of the soul, and anthropological implications. Sigvartsen's study provides a deeper understanding of how texts that later became a part of the TaNaKh were read by different communities during this important period, and the role they played in the development of the resurrection belief – a central article of faith in both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. This volume is a companion to Sigvartsen's work on afterlife and resurrection in the Apocrypha and the apocalyptic literature of the Pseudepigrapha.

In this four-color illustrated journey that is part travelogue and part theological investigation, bestselling author and acclaimed Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah painstakingly travel throughout the ancient Eastern church, documenting through text and image a completely different model for understanding Easter’s resurrection story, one that provides promise and hope for us today. Traveling the world, the Crossans noticed a surprising difference in how the Eastern Church considers Jesus’ resurrection—an event not described in the Bible. At Saint Barbara’s Church in Cairo, they found a painting in which the risen Jesus grasps the hands of other figures around him. Unlike the Western image of a solitary Jesus rising from an empty tomb that he viewed across Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Crossans saw images of the resurrection depicting a Jesus grasping the hands of figures around him, or lifting Adam and Eve to heaven from Hades or hell, or carrying the old and sick to the afterlife. They discovered that the standard image for the Resurrection in Eastern Christianity is communal and collective, something unique from the solitary depiction of the resurrection in Western Christianity. Fifteen years in the making, Resurrecting Easter reflects on this divide in how the Western and Eastern churches depict the resurrection and its implications. The Crossans argue that the West has gutted the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the resurrection by rejecting that once-common communal iconography in favor of an individualistic vision. As they examine the ubiquitous Eastern imagery of Jesus freeing Eve from Hades while ascending to heaven, the Crossans suggest that this iconography raises profound questions about Christian morality and forgiveness. A fundamentally different way of understand the story of Jesus’ rebirth illustrated with 130 images, Resurrecting Easter introduces an inclusive, traditional community-based ideal that offers renewed hope and possibilities for our fractured modern society.