An interesting and exciting journey through four hundred fifty two pages of firstly, eighteen short stories, followed by a novel about a young boy, captured and taken as a slave, who then escaped and went on to be a great warrior and war chief. This story was set in the middle ages. Some of the short stories have aboriginal content set in the outback country of Australia, one of which was about two aboriginal women, one of whom was raped and held prisoner by five opal miners and rescued by the other, who was chasing a big red kangaroo with a giant opal between his toes. This suspense thriller is about rape, murder and revenge. The closing pages of the book consist of philosophies and poetries written by the author who demonstrates his amazing versatility as a writer.

Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.

Winner of the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical! Follow the footsteps of the father of American horror fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe’s legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe’s homes, examining artifacts from his life—locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed—and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him. Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions—actors, museum managers, collectors, historians—who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet who invented detective fiction, advanced the emerging genre of science fiction, and elevated the horror genre with a mastery over the macabre that is arguably still unrivaled today.

Martin Luther was the subject of a religious controversy that never really came to an end. The Reformation was a controversy about him.

Written more than half a century before Sir Philip Sidney's well-known Apology for Poetry, Erasmus' Ratio or 'System' is an almost lost masterpiece of Renaissance literary theory and interpretive practice, now available for the first time in English in a convenient student edition.

This collection of fifteen essays presents a comprehensive discussion of the main aspects of Australian intellectual life and social and political inquiry in this century. The contributors focus on such areas as the place of the intellectual in contemporary Australian life and society; the historical role of the intellectual; the significance of particular groups, including feminists, Catholics, conservatives, and liberals; and intellectual traditions in such disciplines as science and literature.

For far too long the Bible has been studied as just one among many historical and cultural documents from ancient history. That it is a foundational text for Western civilization is clear. What is too often forgotten or ignored in academic discussions, however, is that the Bible has also inspired the lives of countless saints throughout history; men and women who sought to love God and love neighbor to the point of offering heroic sacrifices, sometimes giving up their very lives. Much of biblical scholarship over the past two centuries, however, has reduced the Bible to a dead historical document with little-to-no relevance for today, beyond intellectual curiosity. This, in part, lies at the root of the tragic separation of theology from biblical studies. That theology and biblical exegesis are at an impasse has become a commonplace in academic discourse. Liturgy and Sacrament, Mystagogy and Martyrdom is an attempt to bridge the gap between theology and exegesis. It seeks to develop a theological interpretation of Scripture relying upon the best of traditional Christian exegesis and modern biblical scholarship, so that the Bible can serve, once again, as the wellspring of Christian life.