The powerful, dramatic story of how a successful Hollywood set designer whose identity was deeply rooted in his homosexuality came to be suddenly and utterly transformed by the power of the gospel. When Becket Cook moved from Dallas to Los Angeles after college, he discovered a socially progressive, liberal town that embraced not only his creative side but also his homosexuality. He devoted his time to growing his career as a successful set designer and to finding "the one" man who would fill his heart. As a gay man in the entertainment industry, Cook centered his life around celebrity-filled Hollywood parties and traveled to society hot-spots around the world--until a chance encounter with a pastor at an LA coffee shop one morning changed everything. In A Change of Affection, Becket Cook shares his testimony as someone who was transformed by the power of the gospel. Cook's dramatic conversion to Christianity and subsequent seminary training inform his views on homosexuality--personally, biblically, theologically, and culturally--and in his new book he educates Christians on how to better understand this complex and controversial issue while revealing how to lovingly engage with those who disagree. A Change of Affection is a timely and indispensable resource for anyone who desires to understand more fully one of the most common and difficult stumbling blocks to faithfully following Christ today.

Voicing Subjects traces the relation between public speech and notions of personal interiority in Kathmandu. It explores two seemingly distinct formations of voice that have emerged in the midst of the country’s recent political and economic upheavals: a political voice associated with civic empowerment and collective agency, and an intimate voice associated with emotional proximity and authentic feeling. Both are produced and circulated through the media, especially through interactive technologies. The author argues that these two formations of voice are mutually constitutive and aligned with modern ideologies of democracy and neoliberal economic projects. This ethnography is set during an extraordinary period in Nepal’s history that has seen a relatively peaceful 1990 revolution that re-established democracy, a Maoist civil war, and the massacre of the royal family. These dramatic changes have been accompanied by the proliferation of intimate and political discourse in the expanding public sphere, making the figure of voice ever more critical to an understanding of emerging subjectivity, structural change and cultural mediation.

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book’s pages – human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible – collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript’s material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.