As a young boy, Christian Levro witnessed the brutal murder of his parents. The lingering shadow of that event, and its deeper implications, would haunt him for the rest of his life. The latest genetic link in a chain going back to a time of religious upheaval and persecution, Christian is a part of the Cathar movement: an ancient Christian sect believed to have been wiped out in 1326, following a Holy Crusade launched in 1209 by Pope Innocent III and King Phillipe Auguste of France. Unbeknownst to the papacy, the sect survived, dispersed in small communities around the world, and the Levro family have always held the key to their continuity and salvation. As such, they are guarded by a secret order of protectors, their importance hidden and defended from any who might seek them harm. And those dangers are starting to close in. While on the surface, things may have changed, zealots still working in secret within the Roman Catholic Church have sworn to carry on the holy crusade they know is not complete. They will stop at nothing to ensure that the heretics are wiped from the face of the earth once and for all. When tragedy strikes the Levro family once again, Christian’s young son, Sacha, is determined to unravel the mysteries surrounding his family’s history. He sets out on a quest fraught with intrigue, betrayal, lost relics, and secret texts, determined to finally get out from under the burden his family has carried for generations, and put an end to the persecution of his people. The Yellow Cross of Redemption is book one in a duology, which will conclude with The Sacred Quest.

The Yellow Cross is a harrowing tale of a desperate people in a small corner of France who defied the kings of Europe and the Pope. The Cathars, whose religion was based on the Gospels but contradicted the tenets set forth by Rome, found themselves the focus of ruthless repression. In systematic waves of brutal persecution, thousands of Cathars were captured, summarily tried, and burned at the stake as heretics. Yet so ardent was their faith that during the years 1290 to 1329, the Cathars rose up one last time. René Weis tells the dramatic and moving story of these thirty years, offering a rich medieval tale of faith, adventure, sex, and courage. Having spent years exploring a rich trove of untouched information, including trial records and interrogation transcripts, Weis creates a remarkably detailed portrait of the last great gasp of the movement and the day-to-day life of the individual Cathars in their villages. This is an exceptionally vivid re-creation of a fascinating, and otherwise lost, world.

Red Dead Redemption is a Western epic, set at the turn of the 20th century when the lawless and chaotic badlands began to give way to the expanding reach of government and the spread of the Industrial Age. A follow up to the 2004 hit Red Dead Revolver, this game tells the story of former outlaw John Marston, taking players on a great adventure across the American frontier. Inside the guide: - Complete guide to every mission in the storyline. - A complete breakdown of what you need to do to earn that coveted 100% completion rate. - All of the cheats. - Essential multiplayer tips and advice. - Mini-Game Strategies and more.

In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.

This book presents a unique effort to create a new understanding of the Christian sign of the cross. At its core, it traces the conscious and unconscious influence of this visual symbol through time. What began as the crucifixion of a Jewish troublemaker in Roman-occupied Judea in the first century eventually gave rise to a broad spectrum of readings of the instrument used to accomplish such a punishment, a cross. The author argues that Jesus was a provocative, grandiose masochist whose suffering and death initially signified redemption for believers. This idea gradually morphed into a Christian sense of freedom to persecute and wage war against non-believers, however, as can be seen in the Crusades ("wars of the cross"). Many believers even construed the murder of their savior as a crime perpetrated by "the Jews," and this paranoid notion culminated in the mass murder of European Jews under the sign of the Nazi hooked cross (Hakenkreuz). Rancour-Laferriere's book is expertly written and argued; it will be readable to a large audience because it touches on many areas of controversy, interest, and scholarship. The work is critical, but not unfair; it employs psychoanalysis, art history (the study of the symbol of the cross in works of art), religion and religious texts, and world history generally. The interweaving of these various themes is what gives this work its ability to draw in readers-and will ultimately be what keeps the reader interested through the conclusion.

"Examines the problems facing the American literary scene, including creative writing programs, sports writing, Southern literature, publishing, and poetry, with references to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, T. S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway"--Provided by publisher.

Bringing together thirteen leading art historians, Beyond the Yellow Badge seeks to reframe the relationship between European visual culture and the many changing aspects of the Christian majority’s negative conceptions of Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages and early modern periods.

In nearly 1500 entries, many of them strikingly and often surprisingly illustrated, J. C. Cooper has documented the history and evolution of symbols from prehistory to our own day. With over 200 illustrations and lively, informative and often ironic texts, she discusses and explains an enormous variety of symbols extending from the Arctic to Dahomey, from the Iroquois to Oceana, and coming from systems as diverse as Tao, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Tantra, the cult of Cybele and the Great Goddess, the Pre-Columbian religions of the Western Hemisphere and the Voodoo cults of Brazil and West Africa.

Vol. for 1867 includes Illustrated catalogue of the Paris Universal Exhibition.