When the author started writing this book, it was to be about living amongst the cannibals of the Kukukuku people of Papua New Guinea. Nevertheless, the longer he worked in that country, he began to realize that there were many types of cannibals there. For instance, there were those people who ate other people, then there were people who dug up their dead and ate them, then there were people who only ate the brains of their leaders and so on. Many of these people would be horrified by the practices of other types of cannibals and many of them had different reasons for doing what they did. As the story emerged, the author then realized that other people around the world, practised cannibalism in a symbolic way, or their actions might be described as all consuming or cannibalistic. In all, as a result of his research, he came up with 11 different types of cannibals, and that throughout his life; he had actually encountered and suffered from these types of cannibals. His twelve years of living amongst the people of Papua New Guinea; his university qualifi cations, including a BA Hon., Dip. Ed., MA., and a PhD, plus 20 years in university teaching and research, make him more than adequately qualifi ed to write this book.

When the author started writing this book, it was to be about living amongst the cannibals of the Kukukuku people of Papua New Guinea. Nevertheless, the longer he worked in that country, he began to realize that there were many types of cannibals there. For instance, there were those people who ate other people, then there were people who dug up their dead and ate them, then there were people who only ate the brains of their leaders and so on. Many of these people would be horrified by the practices of other types of cannibals and many of them had different reasons for doing what they did. As the story emerged, the author then realized that other people around the world, practised cannibalism in a symbolic way, or their actions might be described as all consuming or cannibalistic. In all, as a result of his research, he came up with 11 different types of cannibals, and that throughout his life; he had actually encountered and suffered from these types of cannibals. His twelve years of living amongst the people of Papua New Guinea; his university qualifi cations, including a BA Hon., Dip. Ed., MA., and a PhD, plus 20 years in university teaching and research, make him more than adequately qualifi ed to write this book.

Doubt and disbelief in God's existence and his plan of redemption for lost humankind is becoming increasingly evident in today's hedonistic, self-directed world. Many Christian believers even, choose to listen to, and to acknowledge a “feel-good-now” Gospel, notwithstanding its deviation from Biblical truth and its possible damning implications. Conversely, many people are wont to deny the existence of a devil and the reality of a place of unceasing torment and/or destruction called hell. A good God cannot be so cruel, they opine. Jesus commissioned his followers to take his Gospel to the far reaches of the Earth, and the Holy Scriptures encourage Christians in Jude 1: 3, “...to earnestly contend for the faith.” More than at any other time in history, believers must defend the Christian Gospel and advocate its timeless truths everywhere so that all of humankind may hear about Christ's offer of eternal life in a place named Paradise. The miscellany of contemplative inquiries and arguments presented in CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH purposes to do just that – endorse and advance the Gospel of Christ and help establish Biblical truth! Much too much is at stake for not spreading...or not listening to Christ’s entreaty!

In this volume, the authors attempt to speak freely about the potential in religions both for violence and peace. I am confident that many impulses from this work will also impact the direction of churches and other religious communities, such that religions, all together, will try to mobilize the members of their communities to actively contribute to world peace. In this way, religions will be perceived as part of the solution for world peace, enabling them to move beyond the stigma of their damaged reputations.

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern "civilized" lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before. Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes: "Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism." This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.