The genre of this book may be difficult to define, but any effort to do so can be a celebration of God’s grace, rewarding for those who may thirst for a better way to define their relationship with a living and personal God. For some, it will appear autobiographical, steeped in references to personal struggles, lost direction, forgotten dreams. For others, it may be only a confessional narrative journaling the need every man has, a silent urging to escape the pain and burdens inflicted by a twisted allegiance to some sin, an onerous darkness that has enslaved. For still others, it can be a book of sermons outing a familiar text from which truth might be gleaned. The truth is, Gift Revisited chronicles a journey “back to Bethel,” an experience many believers are destined to take. We people of faith often lose our way, whether defined by spiritual exhaustion or the weight of some misstep we have taken. A “revisit” to the places of a genuine encounter with God can result in a renewed sense of hope and a rewarding promise for the future.

In China, at a time when few girls are taught to read or write, Ruby dreams of going to the university with her brothers and male cousins.

A pioneering look at the implications of Christian faith for foreign language education. It has become clear in recent years that reflection on foreign language education involves more than questioning which methods work best. This new volume carries current discussions of the value-laden nature of foreign language teaching into new territory by exploring its spiritual and moral dimensions. David Smith and Barbara Carvill show how the Christian faith sheds light on the history, aims, content, and methods of foreign language education. They also propose a new approach to the field based on the Christian understanding of hospitality.

How far did Paul stray from the view of salvation handed down to him in the Jewish tradition? Following a hunch from E.P. Sanders's seminal book Paul and Palestinian Judaism,Preston Sprinkle finds buried in the Old Testament's Deuteronomic and prophetic perspectives a key that starts to turn the rusted lock on Paul's critique of Judaism.

When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The clothed and adorned body has been at the forefront of Nili S. Fox's scholarship. In her hallmark approach, she draws on theoretical models from anthropology and archaeology, and locates the text within its native cultural environment in conversation with ancient Near Eastern literary and iconographic sources. This volume is a tribute to her, a collection of essays on dress and the body with original research by Fox's students. With the field of dress now garnering the attention of biblical and Ancient Near Eastern scholars alike, this book adds to the growing literature on the topic, demonstrating ways in which both dress and the body communicate cultural and religious beliefs and practices. The body's lived experience is the topic of section one, the body lived. The body and the social construction of identity is discussed in section two, the body cultured, while section three, the body adorned, analyzes the performative nature of dress in the biblical text.