The compelling, insightful, and challenging memoir of a Christian woman's exploration of her faith while living in community with strictly Orthodox Jews. As Maria Johnson explains: "I knew that Christianity is rooted deep in Judaism, but living in daily contact with a vital and vibrant Jewish life has been fascinating and transforming. I am and will remain a Christian, but I am a rather different Christian than I was before."

From 9/11 to Israel-Palestine to ISIS, the fear of the religious stranger is palpable. Conservative talk show hosts and liberal public intellectuals are united in blaming religion, usually Islam, for the world's instability. If religion is part of the problem, it can and should be part of the solution. Strangers, Neighbors, Friends--co-authored by a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew--aims to inform and inspire Abraham's children that God calls us to extend our love beyond family and fellow believer to the stranger.

Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike. During the colonial period population growth, immigration, economic development, war, and religious revival transformed the nature and context of official and economic relations in Connecticut. Towns lost the insularity and homogeneity that made them the embodiment of community. Debt litigation was transformed from a communal model of disputing in which procedures were based on the individual disagreements to a system of mechanical rules that homogenized law. Pleading grew more technical, and the civil jury faded from predominance to comparative insignificance. Arbitration and church disciplinary proceedings, the usual alternatives to legal process, became more formal and legalistic and, ultimately, less communal. Using a computer-assisted analysis of court records and insights drawn from anthropology and sociology, Mann concludes that changes in the law and its applications were tied to the growing commercialization of the economy. They also can be attributed to the fledgling legal profession's approach to law as an autonomous system rather than as a communal process. These changes marked the advent of a legal system that valued predictability and uniformity of legal relations more than responsiveness to individual communities. Mann shows that by the eve of the Revolution colonial law had become less identified with community and more closely associated with society.

This book explores social cohesion in rural settlements in western Europe from 700–1050, asking to what extent settlements, or districts, constituted units of social organisation. It focuses on the interactions, interconnections and networks of people who lived side by side – neighbours. Drawing evidence from most of the current western European countries, the book plots and interrogates the very different practices of this wide range of regions in a systematically comparative framework. It considers the variety of local responses to the supra-local agents of landlords and rulers and the impact, such as it was, of those agents on the small-scale residential group. It also assesses the impact on local societies of the values, instructions and demands of the wider literate world of Christianity, as delivered by local priests.

This book examines alleged “superhuman” powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy—concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused “witch” figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author’s long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.

Much has been written about the relationship between blacks and Jews in America. Some texts highlight the mutual struggle for social jusitce, whilst others depict mutual accusations of racism. This text portrays the full complexity of black and Jewish relations in the US, over the past 300 years.

NEIGHBORS, STRANGERS AND EVERYONE ELSE is a unique book and collection of insightful and inspiring words on topics of co-existence from Rev. Fr. John-Brian Paprock. Fr. John-Brian is an Orthodox priest serving a multi-ethnic mission parish in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the founder of Interfaith Awareness Week, since 1998, and has been active in local ecumenical and interfaith activities since 1988. He has received several awards for his community and volunteer efforts over the years, including Middleton's "Good Neighbor Award" in 2008.