Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of this original hisotry is on the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country.

Use on Women's History courses Good list of contributors

The issue of wealth and poverty and its relationship to Christian faith is as ancient as the New Testament and reaches even further back to the Hebrew Scriptures. From the beginnings of the Christian movement, the issue of how to deal with riches and care for the poor formed an important aspect of Christian discipleship. This careful study shows how early Christians adopted, appropriated, and transformed the Jewish and Greco-Roman moral teachings and practices of giving and patronage. As Helen Rhee illuminates the early Christian understanding of wealth and poverty, she shows how it impacted the formation of Christian identity. She also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of early Christian thought and practice for the contemporary church.

This book greatly enhances our knowledge of the interrelationship of Greek religion & culture and the Ancient Near East by offering important analyses of Greek myths, divinities and terms like a ~magica (TM) and 'paradise', but also of the Greek contribution to the Christian notion of atonement.

"Second century apocryphal Christian texts are Christian fiction: they draw on the motifs of contemporary pagan stories of romance, travel and adventure to entertain their readers, but also to explore what it means to be Christian. The Thecla episodein the Apocryphal Acts of Paul recounts the conversion of a young pagan woman, her rejection of marriage, her narrow escapes from martyrdom and the end of her story as an independent, ascetic evangelist. In Thecla's Devotion, J.D. McLarty reads the Thecla episode against a paradigm pagan romance, Callirhoe: for both texts the passions are key to the unfolding of the plot - how are unruly emotions to be managed and controlled? The pagan would answer, 'through reason'. This study uses the portrayal of emotion within character and plot to explore the response of the Thecla episode to this key question for Christian identity formation."

A preeminent classical scholar on the emergence of one of our most familiar social divisions.

“Prayer is real religion,” said Auguste Sabatier. If so, the academic study of prayer allows scholars to examine the very heart of religious practices, beliefs, and convictions. Since prayers exist in a wide variety of content, contexts, forms, and practices, a comprehensive approach to the study of prayer is required. Therefore, this volume includes scholars from a wide range of disciplines, in order to discover the breadth of “real religion” from the first to the fifteenth centuries. This volume especially focuses upon the history of Christianity and monasticism, where prayer was the school of hope, faith, and critical thought, awakening the faithful to every aspect of religious and daily life. Contributors are L. Edward Phillips, Karlfried Froehlich, Michael Joseph Brown, David W. Fagerberg, Columba Stewart, Benedicta Ward, Susan Boynton, Corey Barnes, Johannes Heil, Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Roger S. Wieck, Paul W. Robinson and Roy Hammerling.