From Eve's rebellious taste of wisdom to the righteous anger of Job's wife, Judaic scholar Vanessa Ochs' vivid collection of stories breathes new life into biblical matriarchs. Intimate, familiar, and wise, the heroines in "Sarah Laughed" are revealed to be inspiring role models for women today. 0-07-140290-X$24.95 / McGraw Hill Professional

Vanessa Ochs retells well known stories of Biblical women in terms that will inspire women today. Beginning with Eve, she adds a reflection on the lesson each story has to offer, then offers a ritual for each.

When Sarah Laughed is a picture book for children from 4 years to 9 years old. The story is a playful adaptation of an Abraham and Sarah story from the Old Testament. It begins with God noticing that something is missing on his Beautiful Earth. The watching how Abraham and Sarah express their gratitude in their everyday lives leads to a discovery of what is missing and brings an unexpected gift to Sarah and Abraham.

Sarah’s Laughter provides a reflection on suffering that is deeply personal and both theologically and philosophically astute. Vinoth Ramachandra draws on his distinctive positioning as a Sri Lankan Christian theologian – one who has lived and ministered in contexts shaped by the destruction of natural disasters and the violence of human evil – to confront the intellectual, moral, and political challenges posed to faith in the increasingly broken world of the twenty-first century. Yet far from being an abstract discussion of theodicy, this book is intimate and vulnerable, embracing the biblical practice of lament and inviting an authentic response to grief – one that makes space for serious doubt and profound questioning. Sharing his own ongoing journey with suffering and a questing faith, Ramachandra reminds us that lament and joy, faith and protest, clarity and ambiguity, belong together in faithful Christian discipleship. It is not in bypassing the darkness of the world, but in embracing it – in imitation of the incarnate God – that we may glimpse the new creation.

The elderly Sarah laughs in delight when she overhears three strangers tell her husband Abraham that he will soon become a father, so when a son is born to her a year later, she names him Isaac, which means "laughter." Simultaneous.

The laughter of delight has gone unheard in the Western tradition. This work brings new light to the notion, and has a consistent leitmotif: the delighted laughter of the matriarch Sarah in the book of Genesis, when she gives birth to her son Isaac. This laughter is "heard" through biblical commentaries and twentieth-century theorists of laughter.

Tells the stories of some of the women in the Old Testament of the Bible, including Sarah and Hagar, Samson's wife Delilah, Ruth and Naomi, Bathsheba, Queen Esther, and others.