Wrestling with the question, Is God to blame?, Gregory A. Boyd offers a hopeful picture of a sovereign God who is relentlessly opposed to evil, who knows our sufferings and who can be trusted to bring us through them to renewed life.

Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Academic Paper from the year 2014 in the subject African Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: This paper attempts reading Ola Rotimi’s "The Gods are not to blame" against the backdrop of the Nigerian dilemma in the contemporary times. The play first performed in the year 1968, in the heat of the Nigerian civil war is still relevant today. Many scholars viewed the work as a transplantation of Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex and underplay its powerful political message to the nascent Nigerian political class then and now. The paper examined the role of Odewale in the shaping of the Destiny of his society and how albeit with stint of tyranny champions the welfare of the state, taking blames for the decadence and the breakdown of law and cosmic order when found culpable. On the other hand, the contemporary Nigerian leaders are antithetical of Odewale, blame-games and outright refusal to be accountable, or step-down when found wanting; misappropriation, mismanagement of state and human resources are institutionalized on local and national scale. The paper above all, adumbrated some of the conundrums of Nigeria and proffered a number of useful ways by which the Odewale examples could be integrated into the Nigerian political morality, and the pitfalls to be avoided in a bid to move ahead into the state dreamt of on the 1st of October, 1960.

"A Tom Doherty Associates Book" -- Title page.

With this dazzling modern myth in verse, Kae Tempest became the youngest winner of the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Yes, the gods are on the park bench, the gods are on the bus, / The gods are all here, the gods are in us. / The gods are timeless, fearless, fighting to be bold, / conviction is a heavy hand to hold, / grip it, winged sandals tearing up the pavement -- / you, me, everyone: Brand New Ancients. Kae Tempest's words in Brand New Ancients are written to be read aloud; the book combines poem, rap, and humanist sermon, by turns tender and fierce. Set in Southeast London, Brand New Ancients finds the mythic in the mundane. It is the story of two half-brothers, Thomas and Clive, unknown to each other -- Thomas the result of an affair between his mother and Clive's father. Tempest, with wide-ranging empathy, takes us inside the passionless marriage of Jane and Kevin -- the man who suspects Thomas is not his son, but loves him just the same -- and the neighboring home of Mary and Brian, where betrayal has not been so placidly accepted. The sons of these two households -- quiet, creative Thomas and angry, destructive Clive -- will cross paths in adolescence, their fates converging with mortal fury. These characters' loves, their infidelities, their disappointments and their small comforts -- these, Tempest argues, are timeless. Our lives and our choices are no less important than those of history and myth. Awarded the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, Brand New Ancients insists on our importance as individuals -- and asserts Kae Tempest's importance as a talent impossible to ignore.

Postcolonial and contemporary African literatures have always been marked by an acute sensitivity to the politics of language, an attentiveness inscribed in the linguistic fabric of their own modes of expression. It is curious however, that despite the prevalence of a much-touted 'linguistic turn' in twentieth century theory and cultural production, language has frequently been neglected by literary studies in general. Even more curiously, postcolonial literary studies, an erstwhile emergent and now established discipline which has from the outset contained important elements of linguistic critique, has eschewed any sustained engagement with this topic. This absence is salient in the study of African literatures, despite, for instance, the prominence of orature in the African literary tradition right up to the present day, and sporadic meditations on the part of such luminaries as Achebe and Ngũgĩ. Beyond this, however, there has been little scholarly work attuned to the multifarious aspects of language and linguistic politics in the study of African literature. The present volume aims to rectify such lacunae by making a substantial interdisciplinary and transcultural contribution to the gradual reinstatement of the 'linguistic turn' in African literary studies. The volume focuses variously on postcolonial and transcultural African literatures, areas of literary production where the confluence of several languages, whether indigenous and (post)colonial in the first case, and local and global in the second case, appears to be a central and decisive factor in the formation and transformation of the continent and its peoples' cultural identities.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century's most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic Summer for the Gods -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History -- is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. An afterword assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.

This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas, explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage to the next dimension, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist. Dark plots, demonic cults, murderous jungles, quantum mayhem, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality.