A vacation on New Elysium, a luxury resort located on an asteroid in the Diaspora, goes horribly wrong as the facilities malfunction and the guests and staff turn violent. The heroes must protect themselves and aid those who have remained sane, including a wealthy android tech entrepreneur who might have some information about the cause of this madness--if he can be rescured from the old mining tunnels below the resort. The heroes must find a way to stop the growing delirium, even if it means going through the guests--including a celebrated champion of the vicious sport of brutaris--who have been transformed into hideous abominations! "The Diaspora Strain" is a Starfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for four 7th-level characters. The adventure begins the Signal of Screams Adventure Path, a 3-part, monthly campaign in which players must race to find the source of a mystical signal that warps both minds and bodies. It also includes a way to model forms of corruption that can taint a character's soul, advice on running horror campaigns in the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, and a selection of creepy new monsters. Each monthly full-color softcover Starfinder Adventure Path volume contains a new installment of a series of interconnected science-fantasy quests that together create a fully developed plot of sweeping scale and epic challenges. Each 64-page volume of the Starfinder Adventure Path also contains in-depth articles that detail and expand the Starfinder campaign setting and provide new rules, a host of exciting new monsters and alien races, a new planet to explore and starship to pilot, and more!

What was life like for Jews settled throughout the Mediterranean world of Classical antiquity--and what place did Jewish communities have in the diverse civilization dominated by Greeks and Romans? In a probing account of the Jewish diaspora in the four centuries from Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East to the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E., Erich Gruen reaches often surprising conclusions. By the first century of our era, Jews living abroad far outnumbered those living in Palestine and had done so for generations. Substantial Jewish communities were found throughout the Greek mainland and Aegean islands, Asia Minor, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Egypt, and Italy. Focusing especially on Alexandria, Greek cities in Asia Minor, and Rome, Gruen explores the lives of these Jews: the obstacles they encountered, the institutions they established, and their strategies for adjustment. He also delves into Jewish writing in this period, teasing out how Jews in the diaspora saw themselves. There emerges a picture of a Jewish minority that was at home in Greco-Roman cities: subject to only sporadic harassment; its intellectuals immersed in Greco-Roman culture while refashioning it for their own purposes; exhibiting little sign of insecurity in an alien society; and demonstrating both a respect for the Holy Land and a commitment to the local community and Gentile government. Gruen's innovative analysis of the historical and literary record alters our understanding of the way this vibrant minority culture engaged with the dominant Classical civilization.

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Asians make up the largest and most dispersed peoples of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering (diaspora) and the gathering (ekklesia) of Asian Christians around the world. This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

The news of their arrival was a very pleasant surprise for Charles who longed to be reunited with his childhood neighbors. The family landed at Lansing airport in two Northwest Airlines planes between 7:00 and 9:00 P.M. a far distance from Port-au-Prince. The winter season was fast approaching that presented an enormous challenge for the Garderes to acclimate themselves to the cold weather with the exception of the eldest Ketly who had attended college on a scholarship to Harvard. She was a brilliant student who exemplified the character of this immigrant family. Upon graduation in 1965 Ketly had returned to her native land to marry her teenage sweetheart.She, her husband and three children would join the entire family in 1975. These ambitious members of the Diaspora would make their mark in the years to come.

Hired to transport supplies to a new Pact Worlds colony in the Vast, the heroes discover that the Azlanti Star Empire has invaded and occupied the colony with a small military force. The heroes must liberate the colony from its merciless oppressors, only to learn that the Azlanti have taken both an experimental starship drive and one of the colonists--an old friend of the heroes--back to the Star Empire! "The Reach of Empire" is a Starfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for four 1st-level characters. The adventure begins the Against the Aeon Throne Adventure Path, a 3-part, monthly campaign in which players visit and explore some of the worlds of the sinister Azlanti Star Empire. It also includes a gazetteer of the Pact Worlds colony of Nakondis, a collection of new starships and starship options used by the Imperial Fleet of the Azlanti Star Empire, and a selection of new monsters from alien worlds. Each monthly full-color softcover Starfinder Adventure Path volume contains a new installment of a series of interconnected science-fantasy quests that together create a fully developed plot of sweeping scale and epic challenges. Each 64-page volume of the Starfinder Adventure Path also contains in-depth articles that detail and expand the Starfinder campaign setting and provide new rules, a host of exciting new monsters and alien races, a new planet to explore and starship to pilot, and more!

What is the relationship between syncretism and diaspora? Caodaism is a large but almost unknown new religion that provides answers to this question. Born in Vietnam during the struggles of decolonization, shattered and spatially dispersed by cold war conflicts, it is now reshaping the goals of its four million followers. Colorful and strikingly eclectic, its “outrageous syncretism” incorporates Chinese, Buddhist, and Western religions as well as world figures like Victor Hugo, Jeanne d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the USA) Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The book looks at the connections between “the age of revelations” (1925-1934) in French Indochina and the “age of diaspora” (1975-present) when many Caodai leaders and followers went into exile. Structured in paired biographies to trace relations between masters and disciples, now separated by oceans, it focuses on five members of the founding generation and their followers or descendants in California, showing the continuing obligation to honor those who forged the initial vision to “bring the gods of the East and West together.” Diasporic congregations in California have interacted with New Age ideas and stereotypes of a “Walt Disney fantasia of the East,” at the same time that temples in Vietnam have re-opened their doors after decades of severe restrictions. Caodaism forces us to reconsider how anthropologists study religious mixtures in postcolonial settings. Its dynamics challenge the unconscious Eurocentrism of our notions of how religions are bounded and conceptualized.