Jerusalem/Zion's metaphoric investiture/divestiture of dress is a central force to create new perspectives on reality and of a nation's selfhood in contexts of suffering and destruction, making dress in prophetic metaphors a crucial means of communication and perception management.

"Violence disturbs. And violent depictions, when encountered in the biblical texts, are all the more disconcerting. Isaiah 63:1-6 is an illustrative instance. The prophetic text presents the "Arriving One" in gory details ('trampling down people'; 'pouring out their lifeblood' v.6). Further, the introductory note that the Arriving One is "coming from Edom" (cf. v.1) may suggest Israel's unrelenting animosity towards Edom. These two themes: the "gory depiction" and "coming from Edom" are addressed in this book. Irudayaraj uses a social identity reading to show how Edom is consistently pictured as Israel's proximate and yet 'othered entity. Approaching Edom as such thus helps situate the animosity within a larger prophetic vision of identity construction in the postexilic Third Isaian context. By adopting an iconographic reading of Isaiah 63:1-6, Irudayaraj shows how the prophetic portrayal of the 'Arriving One' in descriptions where it is clear that the 'Arriving One' is a marginalised identity correlates with the experiences of the "stooped" exiles (cf 51:14). He also demonstrates that the text leaves behind emphatic affirmations ('mighty' and 'splendidly robed' cf. v.1; "alone" cf. v.3), by which the relegated voice of the divine reasserts itself. It is in this divine reassertion that the hope of the Isaian community's reclamation of its own identity rests."--Bloomsbury Publishing

"The church must be distinct from the world to reach the world." - From Chapter 1 "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God's] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9, ESV). Holy and dedicated to declaring the excellencies of God-this is the church, or is it? Can we really call the church holy? A minority of those who claim to be born again say they believe in moral absolutes (Source: Barna Research). One third of evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 35 have no problem with unmarried men and women living together (Source: Evangelical Alliance). Evangelical Christianity is becoming increasingly worldly. Materialism, hedonism, violence, sexual misconduct, pluralism, and divorce are becoming as common within the church as without. As a result the church is losing its distinct identity as a people set apart to reach the world. In this book, R. Kent Hughes builds a case for godliness in the church-a case that echoes the biblical call to holiness. The church can reach the world only if it keeps itself from being ensnared by the world. Hughes is not simply urging Christians to say no to worldliness-he is calling the church to say yes to Christ and to his call to reach our lost world.

A reinterpretation of thinkers from Benjamin and Rosenzweig to Simone Weil and Derrida Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ‘other’ of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

In Early Christians Adapting to the Roman Empire: Mutual Recognition Niko Huttunen challenges the interpretation of early Christian texts as anti-imperial documents. He presents examples of the positive relationship between early Christians and the Roman society. With the concept of “recognition” Huttunen describes a situation in which the parties can come to terms with each other without full agreement. Huttunen provides examples of non-Christian philosophers recognizing early Christians. He claims that recognition was a response to Christians who presented themselves as philosophers. Huttunen reads Romans 13 as a part of the ancient tradition of the law of the stronger. His pioneering study on early Christian soldiers uncovers the practical dimension of recognizing the empire.

Jacob and Esau is a profound new account of two millennia of Jewish European history that, for the first time, integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with that of traditional Jews and Jewish culture. Malachi Haim Hacohen uses the biblical story of the rival twins, Jacob and Esau, and its subsequent retelling by Christians and Jews throughout the ages as a lens through which to illuminate changing Jewish-Christian relations and the opening and closing of opportunities for Jewish life in Europe. Jacob and Esau tells a new history of a people accustomed for over two-and-a-half millennia to forming relationships, real and imagined, with successive empires but eagerly adapting, in modernity, to the nation-state, and experimenting with both assimilation and Jewish nationalism. In rewriting this history via Jacob and Esau, the book charts two divergent but intersecting Jewish histories that together represent the plurality of Jewish European cultures.

This user-friendly introduction to the Old Testament provides readers with an engaging and lively excursion through the biblical text in its literary, cultural and theological contexts. With a fully searchable CD-Rom, featuring Libronix software, the reader can also enjoy the full text on screen.

When she was three, Alena's activist mother died. She's been raised by her half-brother and his boyfriend in East London, which is being targeted by a lone bomber. Alena desperately wants to know about her mother, but her brother won't tell her anything. Alena's played by the rules all her life, but that's over. When she starts digging up information herself and does something that costs her brother his job and puts the family in jeopardy, Alena discovers she can be a troublemaker—just like her mother. Now she must figure out what sort of trouble she's willing to get into to find out the truth.

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.