Today more than ever literature and the other arts make use of urban structures - it is in the city that the global and universal joins the local and individual. Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature draws a map of the concept of the city in literature and represents the major issues involved. Contributions to the volume revisit cities such as the London of Wordsworth, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf or Rilke's Paris, but also travel to the politics of power in Renaissance theatre at Ferrara and to deliberate urban erasures in post-apartheid South Africa. The texts represented range from Renaissance plays to contemporary novels and to poetry from various periods, with references to the visual arts, including film. The role of memory in contemplating the city and also specific urban metaphors developed in literature, such as boxing - the square ring - and jazz are also discussed. The transformation of cities by legislation on cemeteries, by lighting or by projects of urban renewal are the subject of articles, while others reflect on images of the city in worlds specifically forged by writers like William Blake and James Thomson. The contributors themselves live and work in many varied cities, thus representing a dynamic and real variety of critical approaches, and introducing a strong theoretical and comparative element.

`The expression of human experience it embodies ... includes all personal history'. Saul Bellow's view of the city is far from that of classic geographical descriptions which look at growth or decline, demographic patterns, traffic flows and economic potential: these empirically conceived models of urban geography fail to accommodate the crucial human aspect of city life. Located at the interface of geography and literature, Writing the City visualizes the city through the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pains of international novelists and creative writers. From Manchester, Montreal and Sydney to Osaka, Varanasi amd Odessa, cities become more than their built environment, more than a set of class or economic relationships: they are also an experience to be lived, suffered and undergone. Thus cities are seen in terms of the innocence of an Eden now lost, a threat of sinful Babylon and the promise of a New Jerusalem.

Winner of a 2006 Christianity Today Book Award! Honored as one of the "Fifteen Outstanding Books of 2005 for Mission Studies" by International Bulletin of Missionary Research From Cairo to Calcutta, from Cochabamba to Columbus, Christians are engaged in a conversation about how to speak and live the gospel in today's traditional, modern and emergent cultures. The technical term for their efforts is contextualization. Missionary theorists have pondered and written on it at length. More and more, those who do theology in the West are also trying to discover new ways of communicating and embodying the gospel for an emerging postmodern culture. But few have considered in depth how the early church contextualized the gospel. And yet the New Testament provides numerous examples. As both a crosscultural missionary and a New Testament scholar, Dean Flemming is well equipped to examine how the early church contextualized the gospel and to draw out lessons for today. By carefully sifting the New Testament evidence, Flemming uncovers the patterns and parameters of a Paul or Mark or John as they spoke the Word on target, and he brings these to bear on our contemporary missiological task. Rich in insights and conversant with frontline thinking, this is a book that will revitalize the conversation and refresh our speaking and living the gospel in today's cultures, whether in traditional, modern or emergent contexts.

The Learning Church series offers a range of brief and accessible introductions to the key themes of Christian discipleship and theology. Conversations with the New Testament introduces the major themes and critical issues of the New Testament in a way that relates them to current experience, context and culture. The starting point is the reader's own experience and engagement with Scripture in a variety of different contexts.

While Christianity appears to be in decline in the West it is growing robustly in the global South. What does this mean for the Christianity that was once considered to be the religion of the West? The new contexts and trajectories require innovative responses and relevant theological reflection in the church. This volume addresses these changes through identifying and analyzing global shifts, highlighting practical innovations in the church that attempt to deal with new trajectories, and proposing theological positions intended to help face the issues and challenges of the twenty-first century. Contributors to this volume include Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom, The New Faces of Christianity, God's Continent), Steven M. Studebaker, Gordon L. Heath, Bradley K. Broadhead, Christof Sauer, Lee Beach, Michael P. Knowles, Peter Althouse, Michael Wilkinson, John H. Issak, David K. Taurus, and Seongho Kang.