A beautiful telling of the Christmas nativity story through the eyes of the women who may have come to help Mary give birth to Jesus.

As St. Patrick’s Day nears, a retired FBI agent must solve a sinful crime near a small-town convent: “[An] engrossing murder case . . . enjoyable” (Publishers Weekly). Her childhood friends wanted careers, but Brigit Ann Reilly spent her youth looking forward to her wedding—her wedding to God. When she finally gets to don the habit, her new order sends her to Maryville, where a former sister is poised to become Rome’s first Irish-American saint. Brigit has no time to worry about Vatican politics. She’s about to become a martyr herself. Brigit is found dead in the basement of her local library, her corpse swarming with ten poisonous water moccasins. When ex-FBI investigator Gregor Demarkian hears of her death, he is puzzled by two things: Water moccasins are not native to upstate New York, and Brigit died of hemlock poisoning, not the snakes’ venom. As Maryville whips itself into a pious frenzy in search of evidence for its hometown hero’s sainthood, Demarkian will attempt his own miracle by finding justice for the murdered young nun.

'Theology in Language, Rhetoric, and Beyond' places before a broad audience of students and general readers theological essays on both the Old and New Testaments. Theology is seen to derive from a number of sources: the biblical language, biblical rhetoric and composition, academic disciplines other than philosophy, and above all a careful exegesis of the biblical text. The essay on Psalm 23 makes use of anthropology and human-development theory; the essay on Deuteronomy incorporates Wisdom themes; the essay called Jeremiah and the Created Order looks at ideas not only about God and creation but also about the seldom-considered idea of God and a return to chaos; and the essay on the Confessions of Jeremiah examines, not the words thatthis extraordinary prophet was given by God to preach, but what he himself felt and experienced in the office to which he was called. One essay on Biblical and theological themes includes a translation into the African language of Lingala, which weaves together the story of early Christianity with the more recent founding of churches in Africa and Asia. Jack R. Lundbom argues eloquently through these essays that theology is rooted in biblical words, in themselves, in rhetoric and their different contexts.