Not Just Books Books

Book SynopsisChurch planting is a highly visible expression of contemporary American evangelical Christianity. But fundamental questions about the history and theology of this practice remain largely unexamined. Why did church planting become so popular in late twentieth-century America? What exactly do American church planters understand themselves to be planting? How has the practice of planting churches impacted common, operant beliefs about church and mission? Planting the Word addresses these questions, complementing existing qualitative studies of congregations while exploringfor the first timeelements of a shared religious culture at work across a range of planted American churches. Erin Crider locates the growing interest in church planting within key threads of mid-century missiological debates and major features of the culture and history of the United States. She then argues that American church-planting movements enacted specific shared beliefs: all churches are called to participate in the missio Dei, and ecclesial mission means creating spaces for contextualized gospel proclamation. Consequently, church planters fostered a growing popular interest in missional ministries, but unintentionally weakened the functional ecclesiology in many congregations. Some church plants even adopted practices related to the pastoral office, gathered worship services, and targeted demographic outreach that subtly undermined their sincere commitment to be missional churches. With an eye to increasingly post-Christian, twenty-first century American communities, Planting the Word offers theological and practical resources to those who hope to understand, evaluate, and/or plant sustainable missional churches. Crider's careful study thus begins an important academic conversation, inviting Christians in the United States to think theologically and contextually about contemporary church-planting ministries.

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Book SynopsisAt a time of global border fortification and rising nationalisms, Unbounding Europe analyzes the potential of Mediterranean borderlands to offer alternative models of belonging. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, Ilaria Giglioli writes about relations between Sicilians and Tunisians and how they negotiate relationships of proximity and difference in multiple arenas of life. She argues that histories of marginalization within the nation-state do not automatically make borderlands inclusive for migrants. Understanding the interplay of different degrees of marginality is key to identify how solidarity movements can emerge and be effective. Giglioli argues that depoliticized celebrations of cross-Mediterranean coexistence ignore longstanding inequalities and reinforce symbolic hierarchies between Sicilians and Tunisians. She stresses that recognizing and addressing these inequalities is key to developing a transformative politics of solidarity. Rather than idealize intermediate border spaces or subjects, Unbounding Europe asserts that it is more effective to reconstruct histories of material and symbolic boundary drawing to demonstrate the contingency and mutability of borders.

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Book SynopsisThe Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing. William Rhodes brings together a rich poetic archive with agrarian husbandry manuals, prose polemics, and imperial tracts to connect conflicts over land and labor on the English manor to those of Tudor Ireland, offering a new eco-Marxist literary history of ecological transformation across the medieval-modern divide. In the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that Piers Plowman established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, The Work of Reform reveals that the Piers Plowman tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.

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Book SynopsisThe Medium Is Still the Message presents Marshall McLuhan, history's foremost philosopher of media, as the indispensable guide for understanding the impact of technologies. McLuhan (19111980) shows that media are not simply tools of communication: they create new environments with transformational effects on politics, economics, culture, identity, religion, and nature. Grant N. Havers argues that McLuhan's key insight"the medium is the message"is even more relevant today as humanity grapples with the unintended effects of new media. As McLuhan demonstrated, a lack of understanding about the power of media technologies allows these entities to become idols that enslave their makers. At the same time, they encourage human beings to act like gods who can reinvent reality itself, all the while leading to the decline of literacy, the weakening of democracy, the resurgence of tribalism within the global village, and the elusive search for identity in cyberspace. The Medium Is Still the Message ultimately offers good news: using McLuhan's insights, human beings can escape the technological cave that they have fashioned for themselves.

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Book SynopsisChurch planting is a highly visible expression of contemporary American evangelical Christianity. But fundamental questions about the history and theology of this practice remain largely unexamined. Why did church planting become so popular in late twentieth-century America? What exactly do American church planters understand themselves to be planting? How has the practice of planting churches impacted common, operant beliefs about church and mission? Planting the Word addresses these questions, complementing existing qualitative studies of congregations while exploringfor the first timeelements of a shared religious culture at work across a range of planted American churches. Erin Crider locates the growing interest in church planting within key threads of mid-century missiological debates and major features of the culture and history of the United States. She then argues that American church-planting movements enacted specific shared beliefs: all churches are called to participate in the missio Dei, and ecclesial mission means creating spaces for contextualized gospel proclamation. Consequently, church planters fostered a growing popular interest in missional ministries, but unintentionally weakened the functional ecclesiology in many congregations. Some church plants even adopted practices related to the pastoral office, gathered worship services, and targeted demographic outreach that subtly undermined their sincere commitment to be missional churches. With an eye to increasingly post-Christian, twenty-first century American communities, Planting the Word offers theological and practical resources to those who hope to understand, evaluate, and/or plant sustainable missional churches. Crider's careful study thus begins an important academic conversation, inviting Christians in the United States to think theologically and contextually about contemporary church-planting ministries.

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Book SynopsisPreaching is typically considered to be a practice confined to ministry within the institutional church. Studies of preaching are often filtered through the lens of the pulpit, with Black women rarely positioned as central figures in this discourse. Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit lifts up Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer as crucial sources for homiletic theory. Chelsea Yarborough introduces a methodology for preaching arising from the witness and practices of these three Black women non-pulpit preachers, expanding our understanding of proclamation beyond traditional notions of its nature and purpose. This shift away from the limitations of the pulpit into the public sphere and beyond has deep roots in the preaching legacy of Black women. Often denied places of authority in the church, Black women have carved out spheres for their proclamation, teaching us that the essence and purpose of preaching is less about place and more about impact and practice. By centering the lives and ministries of three historical Black women preachers who preached beyond the pulpit, Yarborough highlights a lineage of expansive homiletical possibilities and offers valuable insights for preachers across diverse platforms.

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Book SynopsisIn 1949, the year of the Berlin airlift and the founding of the two post-war German states, Elisabeth Kusian (nurse, black marketeer, morphine and methamphetamine addict, and pathological liar) garroted and dismembered two people in a mini crime spree. Her actions both fascinated and terrified the public – how could this woman, a nurse, commit such a violent act?West Berlin detectives attempted to run an efficient investigation under new democratic rules. Their East Berlin counterparts, newly structured along Soviet lines, employed their restricted resources to solve the case and prove the advantages of their socialist system. Both tried to use the investigation to demonstrate their distance from the Third Reich and build a brighter future. Based on the true story of Elisabeth Kusian, Death in the Rubble explores shifting identities, evolving gender expectations, post-fascist politics and norms, and the violence lurking beneath a city struggling to redefine itself.

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Book SynopsisIn the context of authoritarian rule, torture has repeatedly emerged as a tool of social control. When we ask why and how through a comparative lens, patterns become visible. The right-wing military regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile exemplify how militarized masculinity served to enforce political repression and instill fear.Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile proposes that, until we connect the dots between masculinity, militarism, and violence, we cannot fully comprehend the causes and consequences of dictatorial brutality. Lisa DiGiovanni provides an in-depth examination of how literature and film illuminate these often-overlooked relationships, bridging historical and cultural contexts.The book presents a comprehensive exploration of militarized masculinity as it pertains to these interconnected regimes, revealing the intersections between gender constructs and state violence. By analyzing representations in various

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Book SynopsisSince the earliest days of human memory, countless generations have turned their eyes to the skies in wonder, drawing patterns, understanding the stars’ connection to cycles and events, and carrying their stories and teachings forward to subsequent generations. The Song of the Stars offers a unique journey through the skies, linking us to generations of ancestors who marvelled at the same stars we still gaze upon today. The book brings together Anishinaabe cultural teachings about the cosmos and the Anishinaabemowin language with scientific insights to demonstrate how both viewpoints can help us foster deeper and more meaningful relationships to the Earth and the cosmos. Robert Animikii Horton, Anishinaabemowin educator, proves that this dual perspective can be a source of awe and wonder, inspiring in us a love of both language and science. Demonstrating how Anishinaabe cultural teachings and scientific insights can complement one another and need not be irreconcilable opposites, The Song of the Stars provides a combination of perspectives that cultivates a deeper understanding of the vast mystery surrounding our place in the universe.

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