Excerpt from History of Woodstock, Vermont More than twenty years ago I prepared and published in the Vermont Standard a sketch of the first meeting-house erected in Woodstock, called The Old Log meeting-house. This sketch was followed by others of similar character, till at length a large amount of matter of some local interest had been collected. About this time, my old friend and schoolmate, F red erick Billings, urged that the material thus collected should be utilized, and, with other material relating to the history of Woodstock, be embodied in a book. To his earnest solicitations it is due that the volume here presented to the public was pre pared; and it is proper to add that Mr. Billings has been at the whole expense of its publication. Born in the village of Woodstock in 1823, I have passed all my life in this place, excepting about eight years next after my graduation at Dartmouth College in 1849, which were spent at the South in teaching. Many of the incidents and characters, if not the greater part, mentioned in the following pages, are there fore familiar to me from personal recollection; and, from this fact, the narrative may embrace many things of more interest to me than they can be to the general reader. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Jonathan Garb's A History of Kabbalah: From the Early Modern Period to the Present Day is a lucid and sophisticated account of the multifaceted nature of Jewish mysticism, focusing on its development from the spiritual revolution that took place in Safed in the sixteenth century until the present. Opening the secrets of the kabbalah to a wider audience, Garb judiciously argued that how important the mystical and esoteric tradition has been in Jewish history and in the cultural and intellectual life of Europe more generally. One of the more methodologically innovative aspects of Garb's book is his contention that kabbalah became a major factor in the religious life of Jews in the modern age due to print and others forms of rapid communication, a process that has magnified significantly in recent years due to the digital revolution. Informative and provocative, A History of Kabbalah will surely be of interest to a wide readership.

The grand claim of the Christian religion is that it alone has the answer to the human “plight,” which is that all people are born into a state of “lostness,” and are estranged from God. If they die outside of God’s grace and salvation, they will enter an eternal state of separation from God. The solution to this terrible plight is the saving death of Jesus. But does the Christian doctrine of salvation make sense? Curiously, most believers assert that faith isn’t supposed to make sense in a human, rational way. It is God’s revealed truth, the “mystery of faith,” and it can only be understood through faith. That response, however, has long ceased to be acceptable to most thinking people. The more the theologians explain their view of salvation, the deeper the hole of incomprehensibility they dig. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our perception of the “truth” that is shaking the foundations of our inherited religious traditions.

Religious Studies and Rabbinics have overlapping yet distinct interests, subject matter, and methods. Religious Studies is committed to the study of religion writ large. It develops theories and methods intended to apply across religious traditions. Rabbinics, by contrast, is dedicated to a defined set of texts produced by the rabbinic movement of late antiquity. Religious Studies and Rabbinics represents the first sustained effort to create a conversation between these two academic fields. In one trajectory of argument, the book shows what is gained when each field sees how the other engages the same questions: When did the concept of "religion" arise? How should a scholar’s normative commitments interact with their scholarship? The book argues that if scholars from Religious Studies and Rabbinics do not realize they are addressing the same problems, they will not benefit from each other’s solutions. A second line of argument brings research methods, theoretical claims, and data associated with one field into contact with those of the other. When Religious Studies categories such as "ritual" or "the sacred" are applied to data from Rabbinics and, conversely, when text-reading strategies distinctive to Rabbinics are employed for texts from other traditions, both Religious Studies and Rabbinics enlarge their scope. The chapters range across such themes as ritual failure; rabbinic conceptions of scripture, ethics, food, time, and everyday life; problems of definition and normativity in the study of religion; J.Z. Smith’s writings; and the preaching of the African-American Christian evangelical social justice activist John Perkins. With chapters written by world-class theorists of Religious Studies and prominent text scholars of Rabbinics, the book provides a unique opportunity to expand the conceptual reach and scholarly audience of both Religious Studies and Jewish Studies.

The crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies focusing on the intersections of class, culture and crime--each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race and politics. The ten new essays herein raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is "class" understood in detective fiction, other than as a socioeconomic marker? Can we distinguish between major British and American class concerns as they relate to crime? How politically informed is popular detective fiction in responding to economic crises in Scotland, Ireland, England and the United States? When issues of race and gender intersect with concerns of class and culture, does the crime writer privilege one or another factor? Do values and preoccupations of a primarily middle-class readership get reflected in popular detective fiction?

If interreligious dialogue is to bear fruit of mutual understanding, respect, and peace, it needs to be rooted in the specific spiritual space of each religious tradition. For Christians, that milieu is Jesus space, shaped by faith in the paschal mysteries and nurtured by prayer, study, and love. With this as his starting point Benot Standaert invites us to join him as he visits different religious spacesthose of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and agnosticsto show how we can live in peace with those who dwell in a spiritual space that is different from our own.

This comprehensive guide to James Ellroy's work and life is arranged as an encyclopedia covering his entire career, from his first private-eye novel, Brown's Requiem, to his 2012 e-book Shakedown. It introduces new readers to his characters and plots, and provides experienced Ellroy fans and scholars with detailed analyses of the themes, motifs and stylistic innovations of his books. The work is a tour of Ellroy's dark underworld, highlighting the controversies and unsettling questions that characterize his work, as well as assessing Ellroy's place in the annals of American literature.